ZACHARY MACAULAY.*
LADY KNUTSFORD has undertaken in a spirit of filial loyalty a task which a bold man might well shrink from, and she has carried it through with a praiseworthy sympathy. The elder Macaulay's was as drab and austere a figure as his son's was a brilliant. He was himself dogmatic, staid, and eminently respectable, and he was the centre of a circle which had all • lAft and Lettns of Zachary 3fataulay. By his Grawkiauzhter, viscount...~ gsnogorc : S trIald. [16s.)
the virtues and scarcely a hint of the graces. In the irre- proachable letters Humanity scarcely manages to show herself through the broadcloth and starched linen of the Clapham brotherhood. And yet he was a notable and, in his way, a heroic person, he had a love affair and could at times be very angry and sardonic towards his opponents, and, as his Life shows, he was bitterly hated and exceedingly loved and admired. All this Lady Knutsford has managed to con- vey by her judicious commentary, and she has the merit of a real sympathy with the varied enthusiasms which her grand- father stood for. We could wish at times that the editing had been a little more severe Many of the Sierra Leone letters, for example, could well have been spared, there are some obvious slips which might have been corrected, and many obscure things which deserved a note. But on the whole the work is well done, and the Clapham circle has found another historian of its homely merits.
What the characteristics of that circle were appears very clearly in Zachary Macaulay. Take a group of serious men and women, utterly out of sympathy with the smart society of the day, with a puritanical horror of vice and a consciousness of great and crying evils in the world ; make them instant in season and out of season ; and by incessant harping upon great moral truths they are bound to acquire a priggish and intolerant air which disguises their real honesty of heart. Such were the leaders, and very strenuous fighters they were in any good cause. The weaker brethren, as in most strong creeds, were apt to be very weak, and the circle of admiring women around a Wilberforce and a Macaulay was a little dreary. In this book the household of the Mores comes much into view, and it is difficult to find a more unattractive picture. Wholly estimable, sordidly innocent, the sisterhood, though " of the Christian faction," was as jealous and irascible a little coterie as any society of femmes :mummies. Miss Patty More all but wrecked Macaulay's love affair out of spite, and the illustrious Hannah, whose style suggests sometimes a schoolmistress and sometimes a sort of elderly pet lamb, flew into a passion at the slightest adverse criticism. When the Christian Observer hinted disapproval of Czelebs, she cried out about the infamy of objecting to a " religious young hero," " a sneer I expect from a Scotch but not from a Christian critic." And yet this was the lady whom Horace Walpole admired, at whom Dr. Johnson " shook a scientific head," and whose acquaintance Wilkes eagerly desired. It is obvious that Miss Hannah had another side than the one she revealed to the circle of Clapham.
Macaulay himself had a stirring career before he settled down to the business of reforming the slave trade. He began life in the West Indies, and he confesses, like Bunyan, John Newton, and other eminent Christians, to a vicious youth, though the recorded sins seem innocent enough. The marriage of his sister to Mr. Babington, of Rothley Temple, introduced him to a new society, and he was sent out to Sierra Leone to manage the settlement. He behaved with great courage and discretion, and what with American slavers, French revolu- tionary sailors, and incompetent missionaries, he had a diffi- cult business of it. The seamen of the Revolution who visited those parts seem to have been a pretty set of scoundrels, but Macaulay had always a touch of the Jacobin, and forgave their misdeeds in his admiration for the French people. He had little of the Quaker in him, unlike some of his fellow- Abolitionists, and at one time he was an enthusiastic Volun- teer. Nor was he a man of one idea, for he had a keen interest in all political questions, a taste for letters, a passion for theology, and many sound theories on education. He did much for the foundation of the University of London, and sat on its first Council along with James Mill, Grote, Brougham, and Lord John Russell. As an example of his literary power, there is on p. 390 a really luminous comparison of Chalmers and Edward Irving. The Macaulay family seem to have been tenacious in all generations of certain characteristics. Zachary's grandfather, Aulay Macaulay, minister of Harris, went seeking Prince Charles in the Isles to get the Govern- ment's reward, a Whig every inch of him and a man of business. The grandson was also a Whig and a business man, and in the matter of an extraordinary memory he anti- cipated one of the chief traits of his distinguished son Towards the end of his life his affairs became involved through no fault of his own, which was one of the chief causes
which sent his son to India; but the elder man bore this mis- fortune, which was peculiarly trying to one of his orderly nature, with great fortitude and patience. Altogether it is a sound and valiant character which Lady Knutsford has revealed to us, ability without a touch of genius, virtue and honour with few of the graces, a solid worth without a hint of romance. Mr. Cotter Morison once classed him with the elder Mirabeau and the elder Carlyle, as men who were probably deeper and greater than their sons, but lacked the gift of expression. But for the matter of that we find little of this tongue-tied profundity in the elder Macaulay. He was explicit enough, almost garrulous, in print ; and letters, editorials, pamphlets, flowed from his pen as easily as from his son's.
The most interesting part of the correspondence is that which deals with the family circle at Clapham, for from the first it was dominated by young Tom. Even Hannah More becomes natural and amusing when writing of the feats of the prodigious child. The cult of " ministering children " under which he grew up could not repress the boy's spirits, but there is one letter on p. 308, written from school, which might have been written by that friend of our childhood, the sage Henry Milner. Macaulay's own love-letters are simple, straightforward epistles, which make pleasant reading. Of the others there are many to and from Hannah More, the Stephens, and Wilberforce. There are some curious mystical letters of Henry Drummond, one courteous note from Byron thanking the editor of the Christian Observer for a review of the " Giaour," and several from Lord Brougham which show that chameleon-like person in his pious vein. But the mass are Macaulay's own, and, considering his strenuous life, they make one respect an age when a business man could find leisure to discuss with his friends on paper so many grave questions of literature and life.
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