BOOKS.

THE LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY.*

• The Life and Lettere of Lord Macaulay. By his Nephew, George Otto Trove!- yin, M.P. 2 vols. London : Longman..

[FIRST NOTICE.]

Mn. TREVELYAN has produced, from very rich and attractive materials, a very delightful book, and no one who knows how- difficult it is to make out of very rich and attractive materials a book at all as good as the materials, will fail to rate highly the judgment, the spirit, the self-control which are implied in the condensed and graphic narrative before us. In many respects, Lord Macaulay has always appeared to us the happiest man of his age. His fortunes were of his own making, and he had therefore all the enjoyment which personal achievement brings, as well as the keen zest which a great and favourable change of fortune has for every healthy and enjoying mind. Then, again, the means by which he achieved his great position were even more delightful to himself than the result. It was by feats of memory, tasks of reading, and exercises of imagination, almost all of which were to him full of the most refined pleasure, that he attained the great literary and political position which he so well earned and so greatly enjoyed. Many, probably most, successful men, though they enjoy more or less that consciousness of power which attenda the exercise of their great abilities, find that they have to grope their way more or less painfully through the great tasks by which they mature and demonstrate their powers. But this, if true at all, $ was true in a very small degree indeed of Macaulay. Literary labour was generally to him as delightful as its consequences. He seldom had to shape and mould his materials painfully in mere hope of an effective result. The anticipation of a great and telling effect was almost always with him the stimulus to labour. His knowledge was so large, the probable yield of his materials was so well discounted in his mind before he began to examine them accurately for his particular task, his mode of conceiving things was so full of definite current, that be hardly ever perhaps sat down to a task without that vivid impression of what he was going to do which

takes all the sense of doubt and fatigue out of literary effort.

And again, he was, if we may judge by his writings, and by this book, for a literary man, singularly free from those cares and toils of thought—the pangs of attempting to solve insoluble or only partially-soluble problems—which take half the elasticity out of the lot of many literary men. As far as we read Lord Macaulay, the passion expressed in such a verse as the following—a verse of Mr. Clough's—was quite foreign to his literary life, ample and rich as that was :—

"Come back, come back,—and whither and for what ?

To finger idly some old Gordian knot, Unskilled to sunder and too weak to cleave, And with much toil attain to half-believe,— Come back, come back !"

For a man whose true life was in literature, who could see as he saw the apparently unprogressive character of religious con- troversy, who could command as he commanded, all the course of the bitter ecclesiastical controversies of many centuries, it was certainly a rare fate to reap as he did all the enjoyment of historic studies, without apparently suffering from the despondency which they are so apt to cause.

And Macaulay was happy also in the popular set and drift of his historic and literary judgments. Ile was not, like so many in- vestigators of recent times, an " upsetting " writer. He did not tarn the familiar story upside down till no one knew it again. His conclusions only put popular verdicts into far more graphic and vigorous shape. He was sure to find an audience prepared for his most elaborate judgments. Indeed, though his domestic affections were deep and personal, and though his humour

was buoyant, Macaulay's intelleci always seems to us to work more like the intellect of a class or a party than that of an indi-

vidual. It crystallises according to given laws. The brilliant periods roll themselves out like the periods of a public manifesto.

There is always something in his modes of exposition and in the illustrations and arguments he employs, which reminds you that you are not dealing so much with the opinion of an individual as with the mode of thought of a set. The points are very apt to be avoided or even ignored which it would occur only to an individual to determine,—it is only the larger points which draw on the loyalty of a party or of a class of thinkers on which we find the decision so luminous and striking. And it is the same even in relation to the imaginative illustration, which is one of the most attractive elements of Macaulay's style. Look closely into the bril- liant pictures which he draws,—always constructed out of so rich a store of accurate information, that ordinary writers would parade it at full length, instead of packing it into an allusion or a pictorial touch,—and you will find that the picture is not painted as a painter would paint it, with any marked individual centre to its interest and all the accessories more or less vague, but as a vivid classifier of the most important effects would conceive it, and as a political class, therefore, would desire to recollect it. His finest passages are passages full of imaginative colouring, but when he is not writing of what he personally saw, it is of the imaginative colouring of types that they are full, rather than of that which dis- tinguishes individuals. His most lively pictures are pictures of characteristics rather than of persons,—illustrations of the days of "servitude without loyalty and sensuality without love," of the days of" the fierce domination of sects and factions ambitious of ascendency and burning for revenge ;" and even in relation to individuals, his portraits are rather illustrations of the more general qualities of their character than of the features from which you could restore most adequately their individuality of manner. Compare Macaulay with Carlyle, and you will find in the one a painter of general characteristics, with individual illustrations which make the characteristics seem for a moment like what the eye sees, while you find in the other what the eye sees, together with hints of general characteristics which seem for a moment far more generally instructive than on close examination you find them to be. Macaulay bodies forth a lesson or an in- structive commentary on events in brilliant colours, Carlyle paints a scene which may sometimes be exceedingly different from the truth, but which is indelibly printed on the memory in its minutest details. It is curious, too, that this class-intellect of Macaulay's—this rapid faculty of observation for all the charac- teristics which go to make up the impressions of large masses

of men—belonged to him from almost his earliest youth. Mr. Trevelyan shows us how marked was his anticipation n early youth of his mature estimate of the character of Wil- liam III.,—probably the most characteristic of all his studies. In a prize essay written while still at college is contained the-

germ of the central picture in his latest work. And it was not so

in relation only to historical impressions. It was just the same with his opinions. No man ever had in early youth opinions ao

mature, so exactly resembling the firm and consistent opinions of his manhood, as Macaulay. It is even amusing to observe the calmness and self-possession with which he de- fends himself against his father's criticisms, while still a boy of little more than eighteen. He appears to feel indeed that he is

speaking for a world wider than any which his father knew,—as be really was. Zachary Macaulay, with the moral zeal of the Evangelical coterie to which he belonged, was evidently rather shocked to observe the zest with which his son's mind ap- plied itself to all sorts of studies, without any relation to their moral or spiritual aspect ; and in criticising a poem of his which. was written to compete for the Chancellor's prize at Cambridge, on the destruction of Pompeii, Zachary Macaulay had objected that the poem was without a moral. His son replies :— " Is it the real fact that no literary employment is estimable or laud- able which does not lead to the spread of moral truth or the excitement of virtuous feeling ? Books of amusement tend to polish the mind, to improve the style, to give variety to conversation, and to lend a grace to more important accomplishments. He who can effect this has surely done something. Is no useful end served by that writer whoso works have soothed weeks of languor and sickness, have relieved the mind exhausted from the pressure of employment by an amusement which delights without enervating, which relaxes the tension of the powers- without rendering them unfit for future exercise ? I should not be surprised to see these observations refuted ; and I shall not be sorry if they are so. I feel personally little interest in the question. If my life be a life of literature, it shall certainly be one of literature directed to moral ends."

That is written with all the indifference of a man who, while he felt that he had an enormous advantage in the complete sympathy of the world, yet was prevented by the very consciousness of that advantage from pursuing his point too far, or being too anxious about it. A moderate school of Whig opinions,—Whig in rela-

tion not only to their political, but their literary estimates of what is useful and what injurious,—seemed to spring full-grown into

existence 'with young Macaulay, and it is really very difficult to find any evidence of change in the quality of his mind between his entrance at college and his death. There seems to have been no stage of conflict, or difficulty, or doubt, or fermentation of any sort, through which his mind passed at any point in his career._ He gained vastly in knowledge ; he gained much in the power of exposition ; he gained something, no doubt, in the self-confidence

both of his intellect and his feelings, though his earliest expressions- of deep personal feeling are,—what is very rare with boys,—almost

as frank and manly as his tone on similar subjects in later life, but as far as we can see, he gained little in either calmness of judgment, or in the number of the specific interests to which that judgment was applied.

It would be hopeless as well as useless to attempt even to give a list of the topics on which Macaulay writes in the charming letters to his sisters and friends which furnish the chief illustrations of Mr. Trcvelyan's story. Everything seen with his own eyes be describes so vividly,—from the interior of a Bankruptcy Commissioner's room to the interior of the House of Commons on an exciting, division,—that we enjoy probably even more than the pleasure of • seeing the same scenes with our own eyes. Take this, to his.

siste:r, for example :—

" Court of Commissioners, Basinghall Street, May 31, 1831.

"Mr DEAR Sisrait,—How delighted I am that you like my letters, and how obliged by yours ! But I have little more than my thanks to give for your last. I have nothing to tell about great people to-day. I heard no fine music yesterday, saw nobody above the rank of a baronet, and was shut up in my own room reading and writing all the morning. This day seems likely to pass in much the same way, except that I have some bankruptcy business to do, and a couple of sovereigns to receive. So here I am, with three of the ugliest attorneys that ever deserved to be transported sitting opposite to me ; a disconsolate-look- ing bankrupt, his hands in his empty pockets, standing behind ; lady scolding for her money, and refusing to be comforted because it is not ; and a Burly, butcher-like-looking creditor, growling like a. house-dog, and saying, as plain as looks can say, 'If I sign your certi- ficate, blow me, that's all.' Among these fair and interesting forms, on a piece of official paper, with a pen and with ink found at the expense of the public, am I writing to Nancy But the noise all round- me is becoming louder, and the baker in a white coat is bellowing for the book to prove a debt of nine pounds fourteen shillings and four- pence. So I must finish my letter and fall to business.—Ever yours,

T. B. M."

Or this charming nonsense, in the very next letter, on a visit to Holland House :—

"London, June 1, 1831.

"Mr DEAR SISTER,—My last letter was a dull one. I mean this to be very amusing. My last was about Basingball Street, attorneys, and bankrupts. But for this—take it dramatically in the German style.

Fine morning. Scene, the great entrance of Holland House.

Enter Alicectsy, and Two Foormxii in lively. First Footman.—Sir, may I venture to demand your name? Macaulay.—Macaulay, and thereto I add M.P. And that addition, even in these proud halls,

May Well ensure the bearer some respect.

Second Footman.—And art thou come to breakfast with our Lord ?

.71facatrlay.—I am: for so his hospitable will, And hers—the peerless dame ye serve—bath bade.

First Footman.—Ascend the stair, and thou above shalt find,

On snow-white linen spread, the luscious meal.

(Exit MACAULAY upstairs.)"

And as a specimen of his writing on more exciting scenes, take his account to Mr. Ellis of the division on the Reform Bill of 1831 :—

"When the strangers were cleared out, and the doors locked, we had six hundred and eight Members present,—more by fifty-five than ever were in a division before. The Ayes and Noes were like two volleys of cannon from opposite sides of a field of battle. When the Opposition went out into the lobby, an operation which took up twenty minutes or more, we spread ourselves over the benclKs on both sides of the House, for there were many of us who had not been able to find a seat during the evening. When the doors were shut, we began to speculate on our numbers. Everybody was desponding. 'We have lost it. We are only two hundred and eighty at most. I do not think we are two hundred and fifty. They are three hundred. Alderman Thompson has counted them. He says they are two hundred and ninety-nine.' This was the talk on our benches. I wonder that men who have been long in Parliament do not acquire a better coup d'ceil for numbers. The House, when only the Ayes were in it, looked to me a very fair House,—much fuller than it generally is even on debates of consider- able interest. I had no hope, however, of three hundred. As the -tellers passed along our lowest row on the left-hand side the interest was insupportable,—two hundred and ninety-one,—two hundred and ninety-two,—we were all standing up and stretching forward, telling with the tellers. At three hundred there was a short cry of joy,—at three hundred and two another,—suppressed, however, in a moment, for we did not yet know what the hostile force might be. We knew, however, that we could not be severely beaten. The doors were thrown open, and in they came. Each of them, as they entered, brought some different report of their numbers. It must have been impossible, as you may conceive, in the lobby, crowded as they were, to form any exact estimate. First we heard that they were three hundred and three ; than that number rose to three hundred and ten; then went down to three hundred and seven. Alexander Barry told me that he had counted, and that they were three hundred and four. We were all breathless with anxiety, when Charles Wood, who stood near the door, jumped up on a bench and cried out, They are only three hundred and one.' We sot up a shout that you might have heard to Charing Cross, waving our hats, stamping against the floor, and clapping our hands. The tellers scarcely got through the crowd; for the House was thronged up to the table, and all the floor was fluctuating with heads like the pit of a theatre. But you might have heard a pin drop as Duncannon read the numbers. Then again the shouts broke out, and many of us shed tears. I could scarcely refrain. And the jaw of Peel fell ; and the face of Twiss was as the face of a damned soul; and Herries looked like Judas taking his necktie off for the last operation. We shook hands, and clapped each other on the back, and went out laughing, crying, and huzzaing into the lobby. And no sooner were the outer doors opened than another shout answered that within the House. All the passages and the stairs into the waiting-rooms were thronged by people who had waited till four in the morning to know the issue. We passed through a narrow lane between two thick masses of them ; and all the way down they were shouting and waving their hats, till we got into the open air. 1 oelled a cabriolet, and the first thing the driver asked was, 'Is the Bill carried?'—' Yes,-by one.'—' Thank God for it, Sir.' And away I rode to Gray's Inn,—and so ended a scene which will probably never be equalled till the Reformed Parliament wants reforming ; and that I hope will not be till the days of our grandchildren—till that truly orthodox and apostolieal person Dr. Francis Ellis is an archbishop of eighty."

These are but ordinary specimens of the letters which give the great charm to this book. And as our space is exhausted, we must reserve further illustration of it to another occasion.