In the early years of this century two men were born in England, destined to exercise no common influence on the literature of their country and the opinions of their own age, and possibly of all future time. Both of them were devoted by natural gifts, by education, and by taste to the cultivation and the love of letters, and as men of letters they will be judged by posterity. The power they wielded, and sought to wield, was that most enduring of all dominions, the dominion of the pen. Statesmen, warriors, orators, judges, inventors cross the stage of life, but the great writers remain upon it. The influence of a Homer, a Thucydides, or a Bacon is not only untouched, but it is extended, by time. Countless generations will feel it, as past generations have felt it, as we feel it now. These are the fixed stars of human history; they shine with the pure lustre of thought; their constellation never sets; whatever is most abiding in the fitful destiny of man, abides in them.
To attain to some share in this influence was the object to which the two lives we have now in view were directed. From infancy they followed it with unconscious passion, for at an age when children are commonly engrossed by their toys or their grammars, these boys revelled in the works of great thinkers, poets, and historians. Their amazing powers of memory retained all these impressions with a vivacity and reality seldom acquired by the most laborious study. Like beings endowed with another sense, they only perceived by later observation that their fellow-creatures achieved by infinite drudgery what came to them by nature and intuition. The infancy and boyhood of John Stuart Mill and Thomas Babington Macaulay were marvellous, and, what is not less amazing, they both fulfilled the promise of their earliest years.
But here the parallel must cease, or rather the parallel becomes a contrast. We shall not again retrace the effects on Mill of the dogmatism of unbelief, of the excessive strain on the reasoning faculties, of a sensitive nature bound in an iron philosophical creed, of the absence of all tender domestic influences, of a passion rebellious to the laws of the world if not of morals, and of a morbid dislike to society, which soured his views of life and left him in doubt of all things. Invert every one of these propositions, and you have a Macaulay. He was, we readily concede it, inferior to Mill as a powerful and original thinker—less as a logician, less as an abstract philosopher. But he carried with him through life the most intense enjoyment of it; he was blest with affections for those nearly allied to him as warm and tender as ever touched the heart of man; he was harassed by no bitter or lawless passions; his sense of his own powers never swelled into vanity or affectation; everything amused and delighted him which set in motion the aerial shapes of his imagination; his conversation was the most brilliant and varied that had been heard for a century—if indeed anything like it was ever heard at all; and he held fast to manly, liberal, and enlightened principles, with a passionate earnestness which left no room for scepticism or despondency. These qualities may be traced in his writings, and they contributed largely to the charm with which he grouped the personages of history in the most picturesque and dramatic forms, giving to everything he touched the freshness of life. He has been accused of heightening the colours and exaggerating the attitudes he threw upon the canvas; but this was no more than the result of his own exuberant nature. He saw all things in strong light and shape, because there was sunshine on them all. Nothing was hazy or indistinct; nothing overcast with doubt or gloom.
This, however, is not the time or the place to expatiate in needless criticism or panegyric on Lord Macaulay's writings. They enjoy a popularity beyond the range of fiction, and they have merits which will fascinate the world when the most popular fictions of the day have ceased to please. Our business to-day is to trace, what his nephew well calls "the joyous and shining
- ↑ The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. By George Otto Trevelyan, Esq., M.P. 2 vols. 8vo. London; 1876.
