manding explanations from the supposed culprit. The stern old gentleman carefully suppressed his keen satisfaction at his son's first oratorical success, and instead of praising him, growled at him for folding his arms in the presence of royalty. Many sons have turned into consummate hypocrites under such paternal discipline, and, as a rule, the system is destructive of anything like mutual confidence. Macaulay seems, in spite of all, to have been on the most cordial terms with his father to the last. Some suppression of his sentiments must indeed have been necessary ; and we cannot avoid tracing certain peculiarities of the son's intellectual career to his having been condemned from an early age to habitual reticence upon the deepest of all subjects of thought.

Macaulay's relations to his sisters are sufficiently revealed in a long series of charming letters, showing, both in their playfulness and in their literary and political discussions, the unreserved respect and confidence which united them. One of them writes upon his death: "We have lost the light of our home, the most tender, loving, generous, unselfish, devoted of friends. What he was to me for fifty years who can tell ? What a world of love he poured out upon me and mine!" Reading these words at the close of the biography, we do not wonder at the glamour of sisterly affection; but admit them to be the natural expression of a perfectly sincere conviction. Can there be higher praise? His relation to children is equally charming. "He was beyond comparison the best of playfellows," writes Mr. Trevelyan; "unrivalled in the invention of games, and never weary of repeating them.” He wrote long letters to his favourites; he addressed pretty little poems to them on their birthdays, and composed long nursery rhymes for their edification; whilst overwhelmed with historical labours, and grudging the demands of society, he would dawdle away whole mornings with them, and spend the afternoon in taking them to sights; he would build up a den with newspapers behind the sofa, and act the part of tiger or brigand; he would take them to the Tower, or Madame Tussaud's, or the Zoological Gardens, make puns to enliven the Polytechnic, and tell innumerable anecdotes to animate the statues in the British Museum; he would provide them with sumptuous feasts, invariably accompanied by some inappropriate delicacy, in order to amuse himself at its contemptuous rejection; nor, as they grew older, did he neglect the more dignified duty of inoculating them with the literary tastes which had been the consolation of his life. Obviously he was the ideal uncle-the uncle of optimistic fiction, but with qualifications for his task such as few fictitious uncles can possess. It need hardly be added, that Macaulay was a man of noble liberality in money matters, that he helped his family when they were in difficulties, and was beloved by the servants who depended upon him. In his domestic relations he had, according to his nephew, only one serious fault-he did not appreciate canine excellence; but no man is perfect.

The thorough kindliness of the man reconciles us even to his good fortune. He was an infant phenomenon; the best boy at school; in his

college days, "ladies, artists, politicians, and diners-out" at Bowood, formed a circle to hear him talk, from breakfast to dinner-time; he was famous as an author at twenty-five; accepted as a great parliamentary orator at thirty; and as a natural consequence caressed with effusion by editors, politicians, Whig magnates, and the clique of Holland House; by thirty-three he had become a man of mark in society, literature, and politics, and had secured his fortune by gaining a seat in the Indian Council. His later career was a series of triumphs. He had been the main support of the greatest literary organ of his party, and the " Essays" republished from its pages became at once a standard work. The Lays of Ancient Rome sold like Scott's most popular poetry; the "History" caused an excitement almost unparalleled in literary annals. Not only was the first sale enormous, but it has gone on ever since increasing. The popular author was equally popular in Parliament. The benches were crammed to listen to the rare treat of his eloquence; and he had the far rarer glory of more than once turning the settled opinion of the House by a single speech. It is a more vulgar but a striking testimony to his success that he made 20,000l. in one year by literature. Other authors have had their heads turned by less triumphant careers; they have descended to lower ambition, and wasted their lives in spasmodic straining to gain worthless applause. Macaulay remained faithful to his calling. He worked his hardest to the last, and became a more unsparing critic of his own performances as time went on. We do not feel even a passing symptom of a grudge against his good fortune. Rather we are moved by that kind of sentiment which expresses itself in the schoolboy phrase, "well done our side." We are glad to see the hearty, kindly, truthful man crowned with all appropriate praise, and to think that for once one of our race has got so decidedly the best of it in the hard battle with the temptations and the miseries of life.

Certain shortcomings have been set off against these virtues by critics of Macaulay's life. He was, it has been said, too good a hater. At any rate he hated vice, meanness, and charlatanism. It is easier to hate such things too little than too much. But it must be admitted that his likes and dislikes indicate a certain rigidity and narrowness of nature. "In books, as in people and places," says Mr. Trevelyan, "he loved that, and loved that only, to which he had been accustomed from boyhood upwards." The faults of which this significant remark reveals one cause, are marked upon his whole literary character. Macaulay was converted to Whiggism when at college. The advance from Toryism to Whiggism is not such as to involve a very violent wrench of the moral and intellectual nature. Such as it was, it was the only wrench from which Macaulay suffered. What he was as a scholar of Trinity, he was substantially as a peer of the realm. He made, it would seem, few new friends, though he grappled his old ones as "with hooks of steel." The fault is one which belongs to many men of strong natures, and so long as we are considering Macaulay's

life we shall not be much disposed to quarrel with his innate conservatism. Strong affections are so admirable a quality that we can pardon the man who loves well though not widely; and if Macaulay had not a genuine fervour of regard for the little circle of his intimates, there is no man who deserves such praise.

It is when we turn from Macaulay's personal character to attempt an estimate of his literary position, that these faults acquire more importance. His intellectual force was extraordinary within certain limits; beyond those limits the giant became a child. He assimilated a certain set of ideas as a lad, and never acquired a new idea in later life. He accumulated vast stores of knowledge, but they all fitted into the old framework of theory. Whiggism seemed to him to provide a satisfactory solution for all political problems when he was sending his first article to Knight's Magazine and when he was writing the last page of his "History." "I entered public life a Whig," as he said in 1849, "and a Whig I am determined to remain." And what is meant by Whiggism in Macaulay's mouth? It means substantially that creed which registers the experience of the English upper classes. during the four or five generations previous to Macaulay. It represents, not the reasoning, but the instinctive convictions generated by the dogged insistance upon their privileges of a stubborn, high-spirited, and individually shortsighted race. To deduce it as a symmetrical doctrine from abstract propositions would be futile. It is only reasonable so far as a creed, felt out by the collective instinct of a number of more or less stupid people, becomes impressed with a quasi-rational unity, not from their respect for logic, but from the uniformity of the mode of developement. Hatred to pure reason is indeed one of its first principles. A doctrine avowedly founded on logic instead of instinct becomes for that very reason suspect to it. Common sense takes the place of philosophy. At times this mass of sentiment opposes itself under stress of circumstances to the absolute theories of monarchy and then calls itself Whiggism. At other times, it offers an equally dogged resistance to absolute theories of democracy, and then becomes nominally Tory. In 'Macaulay's youth, the weight of opinion had been slowly swinging round from the Toryism generated by dread of revolution, to Whiggism generated by the accumulation of palpable abuses. The growing intelligence and more rapidly growing power of the middle classes gave it at the same time a more popular character than before. Macaulay's "conversion" was simply a process of swinging with the tide. The Clapham Sect, amongst whom he had been brought up, was already more than half Whig, in virtue of its attack upon the sacred institution of slavery by means of popular agitation. Macaulay-the most brilliant of its young men-naturally cast in his lot with the brilliant men, a little older than himself, who fought under the blue and yellow banner of the Edinburgh Review. No great change of sentiment was necessary, though some of the old Clapham doctrines died out in his mind as he was swept into the political current.

Macaulay thus early became a thorough-going Whig. Whiggism seemed to him the ne plus ultra of progress: the pure essence of political wisdom. He was never fully conscious of the vast revolution in thought which was going on all around him. He was saturated with the doctrines of 1832. He stated them with unequalled vigour and clearness. Anybody who disputed them from either side of the question seemed to him to be little better than a fool. Southey and Mr. Gladstone talked arrant nonsense when they disputed the logical or practical value of the doctrines laid down by Locke. James Mill deserved the most contemptuous language for daring to push those doctrines beyond the sacred line. When Macaulay attacks an old Non-juror or a modern Tory, we can only wonder how opinions which, on his showing, are so inconceivably absurd, could ever have been held by any human being. Men are Whigs or not-Whigs, and the not-Whig is less a heretic to be anathematized than a blockhead beneath the reach of argument. All political wisdom centres in Holland House, and the Edinburgh Review is its prophet. There is something in the absolute confidence of Macaulay's political dogmatism which varies between the sublime and the ridiculous. We can hardly avoid laughing at this superlative self-satisfaction, and yet we must admit that it is indicative of a real political force not to be treated with simple contempt. Belief is power, even when belief is most unreasonable.

To define a Whig and to define Macaulay is pretty much the same thing. Let us trace some of the qualities which enabled one man to become so completely the type of a vast body of his compatriots.

The first and most obvious, power in which Macaulay excelled his neighbours was his portentous memory. He could assimilate printed pages, says his nephew, more quickly than others could glance over them. Whatever he read was stamped upon his mind instantaneously and permanently, and he read everything. In the midst of severe labours in India, he read enough classical authors to stock the mind of an ordinary professor. At the same time he framed a criminal code and devoured masses of trashy novels. From the works of the ancient Fathers of the Church to English political pamphlets and to modern street ballads, no printed matter came amiss to his omnivorous appetite. All that he had read could be reproduced at a moment's notice. Every fool, he said, can repeat his Archbishops of Canterbury backwards; and he was as familiar with the Cambridge Calendar as the most devoted Protestant with the Bible. He could have re-written Sir Charles Grandison from memory if every copy had been lost. Now it might perhaps be plausibly maintained that the possession of such a memory is unfavourable to a high development of the reasoning powers. The case of Pascal, indeed, who is said never to have forgotten anything, shows that the two powers may co-exist : and other cases might of course be mentioned. But it is true that a powerful memory may enable a man to save himself the trouble of reasoning. It encourages the indolent propensity of deciding difficulties by precedent instead of principles. Macaulay, for example, was once required

to argue the point of political casuistry as to the degree of independent action permissible to members of a Cabinet. An ordinary mind would have to answer by striking a rough balance between the conveniences and inconveniences likely to arise. It would be forced, that is to say, to reason from the nature of the case. But Macaulay had at his fingers' end every instance from the days of Walpole to his own in which Ministers had been allowed to vote against the general policy of the Government. By quoting them, he seemed to decide the point by authority, instead of taking the troublesome and dangerous road of abstract reasoning. Thus to appeal to experience is with him to appeal to the stores of a gigantic memory; and is generally the same thing as to deny the value of all general rules. This is the true Whig doctrine of referring to precedent rather than to theory. Our popular leaders were always glad to quote Hampden and Sidney instead of venturing upon the dangerous ground of abstract rights.

Macaulay's love of deciding all points by an accumulation of appropriate instances is indeed characteristic of his mind. It is connected with a curious defect of analytical power. It appears in his literary criticism as much as in his political speculations. In an interesting letter to Mr. Napier, he states the case himself as an excuse for not writing upon Scott. "Hazlitt used to say, 'I am nothing if not critical.' The case with me," says Macaulay, "is precisely the reverse. I have a strong and acute enjoyment of works of the imagination, but I have never habituated myself to dissect them. Perhaps I enjoy them the more keenly for that very reason. Such books as Lessing's Laocoon, such passages as the criticism on Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister, fill me with wonder and despair." If we take any of Macaulay's criticisms, we shall see how truly he had gauged his own capacity. They are either random discharges of superlatives or vigorous assertions of sound moral principles. He compares Miss Austen to Shakspeare one of the most random applications of the universal superlative ever made-or shows conclusively that Wycherley was a corrupt ribald. But he never makes a fine suggestion as to the secrets of the art whose products he admires or dislikes. His mode, for example, of criticising Bunyan is to give a list of the passages which he remembers, and, of course, he remembers everything. He observes, what was tolerably clear, that Bunyan's allegory is as vivid as a concrete history, though strangely comparing him in this respect to Shelley--the least concrete of poets; and he makes the discovery, which did not require his vast stores of historical knowledge, that "it is impossible to doubt that" Bunyan's trial of Christian and Faithful is meant to satirize the judges of Charles II. That is as plain as that the last cartoon in Punch is meant to satirize Mr. Disraeli. Macaulay can draw a most vivid portrait, so far as that can be done by a picturesque accumulation of characteristic facts, but he never gets below the surface or details the principles whose embodiment he describes from without.

The defect is connected with further peculiarities, in which Macaulay is the genuine representative of the true Whig type. The practical value