MAOAULAY 129 tary services recognized and rewarded by elevation to the peerage. The distinction came just not too late. Macaulay s health, which had begun to give way in 1852, was every year visibly failing; in May 1858 he went to Cambridge for the purpose of being sworn in as high steward of the borough, to which office he had been elected on the death of Earl Fitzwilliam. When his health was given at a public breakfast in the town-hall, he was obliged to excuse himself from speaking on the ground of inability. His nephew, who was in attendance upon him on the occasion, records that " it was already apparent that a journey across Clare Bridge and along the edge of the great lawn at King s, performed at the rate of mile in the hour, was an exertion too severe for his feeble frame." In the Upper House he never spoke. Absorbed in the prosecution of his historical work, he had grown indifferent to the party politics of his own day. Gradually he had to acquiesce in the conviction that, though his intellectual powers remained to him unimpaired, his physical energies would not carry him through the reign of Anne ; and, though he brought down the narrative to the death of William III., the last half volume wants the finish and completeness of the earlier portions. The winter of 1859 was very severe, and hastened the end. He died on 28th December, and on 9th January 1860 was buried in Westminster Abbey, in Poet s Corner, near the statue of Addison. Lord Macaulay was never married. A man of warm domestic affections, he found their satisfaction in the attachment and close sympathy of his sister Hannah, the wife of Sir Charles Trevelyan. Her children were to him as his own. Macaulay was a steadfast friend, and a generous enemy. No act inconsistent with the strictest honour and integrity has ever been imputed to him. When a poor man, and when salary was of consequence to him, he twice resigned office rather than make compliances for making which he would not have been severely blamed. In 1847, when his seat in parliament was at stake, he would not be persuaded to humour, to temporize, even to conciliate. He took a lofty tone, and haughtily rebuked the Edinburgh constituency for their bigotry. He had a keen relish for the good things of life, and desired fortune as the means of obtaining them ; but there was nothing mercenary or selfish in his nature. When he had raised himself to opulence, he gave away with an open hand, not seldom rashly. His very last act was to write a letter to a poor curate, enclosing a cheque for 25. The purity of his morals was not associated, as it not unfrequently is, with a tendency to cant, or parade of religious phrases. The lives of men of letters are often records of sorrow or suffering. The life of Macaulay was eminently happy. Till the closing years 1857-59, when his malady had begun to tell upon his strength, he enjoyed life with the full zest of healthy -faculty, happy in social intercourse, happy in the solitude of his study, and equally divided between the two. For the last fifteen years of his life he lived for literature, as none of our eminent men since Gibbon have done. His writings were remunerative to him far beyond the ordinary measure, yet he never wrote as the professional author writes. He lived in his historical researches ; his whole heart and interest were unreservedly given to the men and the times of whom he read and wrote. His command of literature was imperial. Beginning with a good classical foundation, he made himself familiar with the imaginative, and then with the historical, remains of Greece and Rome. He went on to add the literature of his own country, of France, of Italy, of Spain. He learnt Dutch enough for the pur poses of his history. He read German, but for the literature of the northern nations he had no taste, and of the erudite labours of the Germans he had little knowledge and formed an inadequate esti mate. The range of his survey of human things had other limit ations more considerable still. All philosophical speculation was alien to his mind ; nor does he seem aware of the degree in which such speculation has influenced the progress of humanity. A large the largest part of ecclesiastical history lay outside his historical view. Of art he confessed himself ignorant, and even refused a request which had been made him to furnish a critique on Swift s poetry to the Edinburgh lleview. Lessing s Laocoon, or Goethe s criticism on Hamlet, "filled" him "with wonder and despair." Of the marvellous discoveries of science which were succeeding each other day by day he took no note; his pages contain no refer ence to them. It has been told already how he recoiled from the mathematical studies of his university. These deductions made, the circuit of his knowledge still remains very wide, as extensive per haps as any human brain is competent to embrace. His literary outfit was as complete as has ever been possessed by any English writer ; and, if it wants the illumination of philosophy, it has an equivalent resource in a practical acquaintance with affairs, with administration, with the interior of cabinets, and the humour of popular assemblies. Nor was the knowledge merely stored in his memory ; it was always at his command. Whatever his subject, he pours over it his stream of illustration, drawn from the records of all ages and countries. Figures from history, ancient and modern, sacred and secular ; characters from plays and novels, from Plautus down to Walter Scott and Jane Austen ; images and similes from poets of every age and every nation ; shrewd thrusts from satirists, wise saws from sages, pleasantries caustic or pathetic from humorists, all these fill Macaulay s pages with the bustle and variety of some glittering masque and cosmoramic revel of great books and heroical men. His style is before all else the style of great literary knowledge." His Essays are not merely instructive as history ; they are, like Milton s blank verse, freighted with the spoils of all the ages. They are literature as well as history. In their diversified contents the Essays are a library by themselves ; for those who, having little time for study, want one book which may be a substitute for many, we should recommend the Essays in preference to anything else. As an historian Macaulay has not escaped the charge of partisan ship. He was a Whig ; and in writing the history of the rise and triumph of Whig principles in the latter half of the 17th century he identified himself with the cause. But the charge of partiality, as urged against Macaulay, means more than that he wrote the his tory of the Whig revolution from the point of view of those who made it. When he is describing the merits of friends and the faults of enemies, his pen knows no moderation. He has a constant tendency to glaring colours, to strong effects, and will always be striking violent blows. He is not merely exuberant, but excessive. There is an overweening confidence about his tone ; he expresses himself in trenchant phrases, which are like challenges to an oppo nent to stand up and deny them. His propositions have no quali fications. Uninstructed readers like this assurance, as they like a physician who has no doubt about their case. But a sense of distrust grows upon the more circumspect reader as he follows page after page of Macaulay s categorical affirmations about matters which our own experience of life teaches us to be of a contingent nature. We inevitably think of a saying attributed to Lord Melbourne, " I wish I were as cock-sure of any one thing as Macaulay is of everything." Macaulay s was the mind of the advo cate, not of the philosopher ; it was the mind of Bossuet, which admits no doubts or reserves itself and tolerates none in others, and as such was disqualified from that equitable balancing of evidence which is the primary function of the historian. It was a fortunate circumstance that rhetoric so powerful was enlisted in the consti tutional cause, that Macaulay was, as he himself has said of Bishop Burnet, " a strong party man on the right side." Macaulay, the historian no less than the politician, is always on the side of justice, fairness for the weak against the strong, the oppressed against the oppressor. But though a Liberal in practical politics, he had not the reformer s temperament. The world as it is was good enough for him. The glories of wealth, rank, honours, literary fame, the elements of a vulgar happiness, made up his ideal of life. A successful man himself, every personage and every cause is judged by its success. "The brilliant Macaulay," says Emerson, who expresses the tone of the English governing classes of the day, explicitly teaches that good means good to eat, good to wear, material commodity." Macaulay is in accord with the aver age sentiment of orthodox and stereotyped humanity on the relative values of the objects and motives of human endeavour. And this commonplace materialism is one of the secrets of his popularity, and one of the qualities which guarantee that that popularity will be enduring. Macaulay s whole works have been collected by his sister, Lady Charles Trevelyan, in eight volumes. The first four volumes are occupied by the History; the next three contain the Essays, and the Lives which he contributed to the Encyclopaedia ritannica. In vol. viii. are collected his Speeches, the Lays of Ancient Rome, and some miscellaneoi;s pieces. His life has been written by his nephew, George Otto Trevelyan (2 vols., London, 1878), and is one of tha best biographies in the language. His diary remains in MS. in the hands of his family. It is to be hoped that measures will be taken to secure this valuable record from the fate that has overtaken so many private diaries, and thus impoverished the sources of English history. (M. P.)
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