ed, was devoted to paying off his father's creditors, with no professional income, and no means of subsistence but his pen, rather than support a measure which he conscientiously disapproved, Macaulay twice tendered his resignation. To the honour of the government it was not accepted, and he was allowed to stand aloof from the West India bill.
In the touching verses he wrote after his defeat at Edinburgh in 1847, the queen of gain, the queen of fashion, and the queen of power pass scornfully by his cradle, and leave the nursling to pursue a nobler and a happier aim,—
The sense of beauty and the thirst for truth.
Nothing could be more sincere. His indifference to gain was only modified by the desire to be generous to others, and he did not reckon the honours or amusements of the world amongst its real enjoyments. But it is singular that in 1833, after the extraordinary success of his earliest literary productions, it should not have occurred to him that he held between his fingers a power which might instantly create and command wealth, if not "beyond the dreams of avarice," yet certainly beyond his own wants. Had he devoted himself at once, and continuously, in 1833 to literary work—had he then commenced his "History," and brought out a volume a year, he might have realized as large a fortune as Sir Walter Scott, and probably far more than he brought back from India. But such was the simplicity of his character that this thought never struck him. It was with difficulty that he was persuaded to consent to the republication of his essays and articles—in themselves a fortune; and he seems to have thought there was something humiliating in degrading literature into a craft or profession.
Literary history is full of the miseries of authors. Macaulay knew every anecdote in existence of their privations and struggles. The affronts Dryden had endured from Tonson, the exigencies Mackintosh submitted to from Lardner. But he only discovered by long and late experience that in these times an author of genius, who manages his affairs with prudence, may realize gains quite equal to the returns of any other profession. It would probably have been to his own advantage, and certainly to the advantage of the world, if he had never been tempted to wander from the paths of literature into the beaten tracks of parliamentary and official life.
The India bill of 1833, which Macaulay had largely contributed to frame and to pass, contained a provision that one of the members of the Supreme Council at Calcutta should be appointed by the crown from among persons not being servants of the company. This office was called the legislative membership of council, and it was to be filled by a lawyer, chiefly with a view to improving and drafting the acts of the government of India. The salary was ten thousand a year, and to Macaulay himself, then in the thirty-fourth year of his life, this splendid post was offered. In an interesting letter to his sisters, which is too long to quote, he weighs the favourable and the adverse reasons. Money and office had in themselves no attraction for him; the most brilliant employment abroad was to him an almost intolerable exile. But he felt that the political prospects of his party were gloomy; he knew that the state of his father's affairs was disastrous; and he desired above all things to lay by a modest competency before he again embarked in public life. On these grounds he resolved to leave England, and he persuaded his sister Hannah to accompany him to Calcutta. Macaulay, to say the truth, knew but little of law and less of India—he had been a few times on the Northern Circuit, and he had sat for a few months at the Board of Control. This appointment gave a new direction to his powers, and studies, before repulsive, acquired a new interest. It is probable that we owe to Macaulay's Indian experience two of the most brilliant essays in the English language, which have brought the marvellous fabric of the British empire in the East visibly before millions of minds that had never thought of it before. But to Macaulay's dramatic genius the career of Clive and Warren Hastings—the triumph and the toil of the great Englishmen in India—was infinitely more captivating and attractive than the prodigious spectacle of India itself with its laws, its religions, its castes, its customs, its languages, dating from times when the British Isles were a swamp and a forest, inhabited by a barbarous race. It is extremely characteristic, that the chosen companions of his voyage to India were Richardson, Voltaire, Gibbon, Sismondi, Hallam, Don Quixote, Homer, and Horace, with a few books on jurisprudence and a couple of Persian and Hindostanee grammars. On the voyage he says, "I devoured Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, and English, folios, quartos, octavos, and duo.
