128 MACAULAY known before what intellectual enjoyment was." In thirteen months lie read through, some of them twice, a large part of the Greek and Latin classics. The attention ; with which he read is proved by the pencil marks and corrections of press errors which he left on the margin of , the volumes he used. The fascination of these studies produced their inevitable effect upon his view of political life, He began to wonder what strange infatuation leads men who can do something better, to squander their intellect, their health, and energy on such subjects as those which most statesmen are engaged in pursuing. He was already, he says, " more than half j determined to abandon politics and give myself wholly to ! letters, to undertake some great historical work, which may be at once the business and the amusement of my life, and to leave the pleasures of pestiferous rooms, sleep less nights, and diseased stomachs to Roebuck and to Praed." In 1838 Macaulay and his sister Hannah, who had now become Lady Trevelyan, returned to England. He at once j entered parliament as member for Edinburgh. In 1839 | he became secretary at war, with a seat in the cabinet in Lord Melbourne s ministry. His acceptance of office diverted him for a time from prosecuting the plan he had j already formed of a great historical work. But only for a time. In less than two years the Melbourne ministry fell, and Macaulay was liberated from having to support a Government wretchedly weak, and maintaining its struggle for bare existence. He returned to office in 1846, in Lord John Russell s administration. But it was in an office which gave him leisure and quiet rather than salary and power that of paymaster-general. His duties were very light, and the contact with official life and the obligations of parliamen tary attendance were even of benefit to him while he was engaged upon his History. In the sessions of 1846-47 he spoke only five times, and at the general election of July 1847 he lost his seat for Edinburgh upon issues which did not reflect credit upon that constituency. Over and above any political disagreement with the constituency, there was the fact that the balance of Macaulay s faculties had now passed to the side of literature. Lord Cockburn wrote in 1846, "the truth is, Macaulay, with all his knowledge, talent, eloquence, and worth, is not popular. He cares more for his History than for the jobs of con stituents, and answers letters irregularly and with a brevity deemed contemptuous." At an earlier date he had relished crowds and the excitement of ever new faces ; as years went forward and absorption in the work of composition took off the edge of his spirits, he recoiled from publicity. He began to regard the prospect of business as worry, and had no longer the nerve to brace himself to the social efforts required of one who represents a large constituency. Macaulay retired into private life, not only without regret, but with a sense of relief. He gradually withdrew from general society, feeling the bore of big dinners, and country- house visits, but he still enjoyed close and constant inter course with a circle of the most eminent men that London then contained. At that time social breakfasts were in vogue. Macaulay himself preferred this to any other form of entertainment. Of these brilliant reunions nothing has been preserved beyond the names of the men who formed them, Rogers, Hallam, Sydney Smith, Lord Carlisle, Lord Stanhope, Nassau Senior, Charles Greville, Milman, Panizzi, Lewis, Van de Weyer. His biographer thus describes Macaulay s appearance and bearing in conversation : "Sitting bolt upright, his hands resting on the arms of his chair, or folded over the handle of his walking-stick, knitting his eyebrows if the subject was one which had to be thought out as he went along, or brightening from the forehead downwards when a burst of humour was coming, his massive features and honest glance suited well with the manly sagacious sentiments which he set forth in his sonorous voice and in his racy and intelligible language. To get at his meaning people had never the need to think twice, and they certainly had seldom the time." But, great as was his enjoyment of literary society and books, they only formed his recreation. In these years he was working with unflagging industry at the composition of his History. His composition was slow, his corrections both of matter and style endless ; he spared no research to ascertain the facts. He sacrificed to the prosecution of his task a political career, House of Commons fame, the allurements of society. The first two volumes of the History of England appeared in December 1848. The success was in every way complete beyond expectation. The sale of edition after edition, both in England and the United States, was enormous. In 1852, when his party returned to office, he refused a seat in the cabinet, but he could not bring himself to decline accepting ths compliment of a voluntary amende which the city of Edinburgh paid htm in returning him at the head of the poll at the general election in July of that year. He had hardly accepted the summons to return to parliamentary life before he was struck down by the malady which in the end proved fatal. This first betrayed itself in deranged action of the heart ; from this time forward till his death his strength continued steadily to sink. The process carried with it dejection of spirits as its inevitable attendant. The thought oppressed him that the great work to which he had devoted himself would remain a fragment. Once again, in June 1853, he spoke in parliament, and with effect, against the exclusion of the Master of the Rolls from the House of Commons, and at a later date in defence of competition for the Indian civil service. But he was aware that it was a grievous waste of his small stock of force, and that he made these efforts at the cost of more valuable work. In November 1855 vols. iii. and iv. of the History appeared. No work, not being one of amusement, has in our day reached a circulation so vast. During the nine years ending with the 25th June 1857 the publishers (Longmans) sent out more than 30,000 copies of vol. i. ; in the next nine years more than 50,000 copies of the same volume ; and in the nine years ending with June 1875 more than 52,000 copies. Within a generation of its first appearance upwards of 140,000 copies of the History will have been printed and sold in the United Kingdom alone. In the United States no book except the Bible ever had such a sale. On the Continent of Europe, the sale of Tauchnitz editions was very large, a sale which did not prevent six rival translations in German. The History has been published in the Polish, Danish, Swedish, Hungarian, Russian, Bohemian, Italian, French, Dutch, Spanish languages. Flattering marks of respect were heaped upon the author by the foreign Academies. His pecuniary profits were on a scale commensurate with the reputation of the book : the cheque for 20,000 has become a landmark in literary history. In May 1856 he quitted the Albany, in which he had passed fifteen happy years, and went to live at Holly Lodge, then, before it was enlarged, a tiny bachelor s dwelling, but with a lawn whose unbroken slope of verdure gave it the air of a considerable country house. In the following year (1857) he was raised to the peerage by the title of Baron Macaulay of Rothlev. " It was," says Lady Trevelyan, "one of the few things that everybody approved; he en joyed it himself, as he did everything, simply and cordially." It was a novelty in English life to see eminence which was
neither that of territorial opulence nor of political or mili-