all things; waited on by these two, Scarcity and Confusion. The faces of men are darkened with suspicion; with suspecting, or being suspect. The streets lie unswept ; the ways unmended. Law has shut her Books; speaks little, save impromptu, through the throat of Tinville. Crimes go unpunished: not crimes against the Revolution. "The number of foundling children," as some compute, "is doubled." How silent now sits Royalism; sits all Aristocratism; Respectability that kept its Gig! The honour now, and the safety, is to Poverty, not to Wealth. Your Citizen, who would be fashionable, walks abroad, with his Wife on his arm, in red wool nightcap, black shag spencer, and carmagnole complete. Aristocratism crouches low, in what shelter is still left; submitting to all requisitions, vexations; too happy to escape with life. Ghastly châteaus stare on you by the wayside; disroofed, diswindowed; which the National House-broker is peeling for the lead and ashlar. The old tenants hover disconsolate, over the Rhine with Condé; a spectacle to men. Ci-devant Seigneur, exquisite in palate, will become an exquisite Restaurateur Cook in Hamburg; Ci-devant Madame, exquisite in dress, a successful Marchande des Modes in London. In Newgate Street you meet M. le Marquis, with a rough deal on his shoulder, adze and jack-plane under arm; he has taken to the joiner trade; it being necessary to live (faut vivre).--Higher than all Frenchmen the domestic Stock-jobber flourishes-in a day of Paper-money. The Farmer also flourishes: "Farmer's houses," says Mercier, "have become like Pawn-brokers' shops;" all manner of furniture, apparel, vessels of gold and silver accumulate themselves there bread is precious. The Farmer's rent is Paper-money, and he alone of men has bread Farmer is better than Landlord, and will himself become Landlord. And daily, we say, like a black Spectre, silently through that Life-tumult, passes the Revolution Cart; writing on the walls its MENE, MENE, Thou art weighed, and found wanting! A Spectre with which one has grown familiar. Men have adjusted themselves: complaint issues not from that Death-tumbril. Weak women and ci-devants, their plumage and finery all tarnished, sit there; with a silent gaze, as if looking into the Infinite Black. The once light lip wears a curl of irony, uttering no word; and the Tumbril fares along. They may be guilty before Heaven, or not; they are guilty, we suppose, before the Revolution. Then, does not the Republic "coin money" of them, with its great axe? Red Nightcaps howl dire approval: the rest of Paris looks on; if with a sigh, that is much; Fellow-creatures whom sighing cannot help; whom black Necessity and Tinville have clutched. FROM "PAST AND PRESENT." It is to you, ye Workers, who do already work, and are as grown men, noble and honourable in a sort, that the whole world calls for new work and nobleness. Subdue mutiny, discord, wide-spread despair, by manfulness, justice, mercy and wisdom. Chaos is dark, deep as Hell; let light be, and there is instead a green flowery World. Oh, it is great, and there is no other greatness. To make some nook of God's Creation a little fruitfuller, better, more worthy of God; to make some human hearts a little wiser, manfuler, happier-more blessed, less accursed! It is work for a God. Sooty Hell of mutiny and savagery and despair can, by man's energy, be made a kind of Heaven; cleared of its soot, of its mutiny, of its need to mutiny; the everlasting arch of Heaven's azure overspanning it too, and its cunning mechanisms and tall chimney-steeples, as a birth of Heaven; God and all men looking on it well pleased. Unstained by wasteful deformities, by wasted tears or heart's-blood of men, or any defacement of the Pit, noble fruitful Labour, growing ever nobler, will come forth-the grand sole miracle of Man; whereby Man has risen from the low places of this Earth, very literally, into divine Heavens. Ploughers, Spinners, Builders; Prophets, Poets, Kings; Brindleys and Goethes, Odins and Arkwrights; all martyrs, and noble men, and gods are of one grand Host; immeasurable; marching ever forward since the beginnings of the World. The enormous, all-conquering, flame-crowned Host, noble every soldier in it; sacred, and alone noble. Let him who is not of it hide himself; let him tremble for himself. Stars at every button cannot make him noble; sheaves of Bath-garters, nor bushels VOL. IV. R Macaulay of Georges; nor any other contrivance but manfully enlisting in it, valiantly taking place and step in it. O Heavens, will he not bethink himself; he too is so needed in the Host! It were so blessed, thrice blessed, for himself and for us all! In hope of the Last Partridge, and some Duke of Weinar among our English Dukes, we will be patient yet a while. Born after Carlyle, and dying more than twenty years before him, THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY pressed into a short life, feverishly filled with various activity, as much work as Carlyle achieved in all his length of days. The two writers present a curious parallelism and contrast, and a positive temptation to paradoxical criticism. Their popularity, the subjects they chose, their encyclopædic interest in letters, unite their names, but in all essentials they were absolutely opposed. Carlyle, with whatever faults, was a seer and a philosopher; English literature has seen no great writer more unspiritual than Macaulay, more unimaginative, more demurely satisfied with the phenomenal aspect of life. In Carlyle the appeal is incessant-sursum corda; in Macaulay the absence of mystery, of any recognition of the divine, is remarkable. Macaulay is satisfied with surfaces, he observes them with extraordinary liveliness. He is prepared to be entertaining, instructive, even exhaustive, on almost every legitimate subject of human thought; but the one thing he never reaches is to be suggestive. What he knows he tells in a clear, positive, pleasing way; and he knows so much that often, especially in youth, we desire no other guide. But he is without vision of unseen things; he has no message to the heart; the waters of the soul are never troubled by his copious and admirable flow of sound information. Yet it is a narrow judgment which sweeps Macaulay aside. He has been, and probably will long continue to be, a most valuable factor in the cultivation of the race. His Essays are not merely the best of their kind in existence, but they are put together with so much skill that they are permanent types of a certain species of literary architecture. They have not the delicate, palpitating life of the essays of Lamb or of Stevenson, but taken as pieces of constructed art built to a certain measure, fitted up with appropriate intellectual upholstery, and adapted to the highest educational requirements, there is nothing like them elsewhere in literature. The most restive of juvenile minds, if induced to enter one of Macaulay's essays, is almost certain to reappear at the other end of it gratified, and, to an appreciable extent, cultivated. Vast numbers of persons in the middle Victorian period were mainly equipped for serious conversation from the armouries of these delightful volumes. The didactic purpose is concealed in them by so genuine and so constant a flow of animal spirits, the writer is so conspicuously a master of intelligible and appropriate illustration, his tone and manner are so uniformly attractive, and so little strain to the feelings is involved in his oratorical flourishes, that readers are captivated in their thousands, and much to their permanent advantage. Macaulay heightened the art of his work as he progressed; the essays he wrote after his return from India in 1838 are particularly excellent. To study the construction and machinery of the two great Proconsular essays, is to observe literature of the objective and phenomenal order carried almost to its highest possible perfection. In 1828, in the Edinburgh Review, Macaulay laid down a new theory of history. It was to be pictorial and vivid; it was to resemble (this one feels was his idea) the Waverley Novels. To this conception of history he remained faithful throughout his career; he probably owed it, though he never admits the fact, to the reading of Augustin Thierry's Conquête d'Angleterre. Macaulay had been a popular essayist and orator for a quarter of a century, when, in 1849, he achieved a new reputation as an historian, and from this date to 1852, when his health began to give way, he was at the head of living English letters. In his history there meet us the same qualities that we find in his essays. He is copious, brilliant, everlastingly entertaining, but never profound or suggestive. His view of an historical period is always more organic than Carlyle's, because of the uniformity of his detail. His architectonics are excellent; the fabric of the scheme rises slowly before us; to its last pinnacle and moulding there it stands, the master-builder expressing his delight in it by an ebullition of pure animal spirits. For half the pleasure we take in Macaulay's writing arises from the author's sincere and convinced satisfaction with it himself. Of the debated matter of Macaulay's style, once almost superstitiously admired, now unduly depreciated, the truth seems to be that it was as natural as Carlyle's was artificial; it represented the author closely and unaffectedly in his faults and in his merits. Its monotonous regularity of cadence and mechanical balance of periods have the same faculty for alternately captivating and exasperating us that the intellect of the writer has. After all, Macaulay lies a little outside the scope of those who seek an esoteric and mysterious pleasure from style. He loved crowds, and it is to the populace that his life's work is addressed. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron Macaulay (1800-1859), was the eldest child of Zachary Macaulay, the anti-slavery philanthropist, and his wife, Selina Mills. He was born at Rothley Temple, in Leicestershire, on the 25th of October 1800. The home of his parents was at Clapham, and here he attended a day-school. In 1812 he went to school at Little Shelford, near Cambridge, and had already by this time laid the foundation of a prodigious knowledge of literature. The school was moved to Aspenden Hall, Herts; and in October 1818 he matriculated as a commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge. He distinguished himself at once, and his earliest publication, Pompeii, was the prize poem of 1819. At the University he neglected mathematics, but he absorbed all the literature which it had to offer. failed to secure a place in the Tripos, but in 1824 he gained a fellowship at his college, and before this he had begun to write for the magazines in verse and prose. His father, who had entirely neglected his business, now found himself on the verge of ruin, and Macaulay "quietly took up the burden which his father was unable to bear." He made the paternal house in Great Ormond Street his home, sustained the anxieties of all, paid his father's debts, and placed the business once more on a secure basis. He became a student of Lincoln's Inn, and in 1826 was called to the Bar, but he can scarcely be said to have practised. In April 1825 had appeared the first of his famous He articles in the Edinburgh Review, that on "Milton"; he soon became fashionable as a reviewer, and his abilities struck the political no less than the literary world. In 1828 he was made a Commissioner of Bankruptcy, and in 1830 he was elected M.P. for Calne. His first speech, on the Reform Bill, showed that Macaulay was an orator of the first class; never, in the prolonged experience of the then Speaker, had the House been seen "in such a state of excitement." His career in the Opposition was most brilliant, and from 1832 he was acting also as Commissioner and then Secretary of the Thomas Babington Macaulay After the Portrait by Sir Francis Grant Board of Control; meanwhile and sailed for Madras in February 1834. While he was in India he read incessantly, aimlessly, voraciously, and yet his public labours, unremittingly carried out, seemed enough alone to crush an ordinary man. In 1838 he found that he had amassed a small but sufficient fortune, and he returned to England. His first act was to take a prolonged tour in Italy, for he was already beginning his Lays of Ancient Rome, and wished to see the landscape. Early in 1839 he entered Parliament again as M.P. for Edinburgh, and was almost immediately made Secretary for War, and given a seat in the Cabinet, a post which he held until 1841. This was scarcely a happy moment in his history, for his work in connection with the sinking Whig Ministry was not fortunate, and he was shut off from history and poetry just at the moment when he wished to devote himself to both. The Ministry of Lord |