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Prtce Twenty-flre C^its. ^^ r ^Af- - 'i'4i % GLADSTONE iK ON MACLEOD AND MACAULAY. ^hi0 fissags. BY THE RIGHT HOJ^. W. E. GLADSTONE, M.P, BELFORD BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, MDCCCLXXVI. PlUNTED BV HlNTER, Ho.SE & To., 25 Wellinj,'t<.n Stioft West, T' IKON TO. i izifio ISrORMi^LlSr MACT^EOD, D.D. iQ.*., % Memoir of Norman Maclkoo, D.I)., by liis Inothcr, tlw Rev. Donald Macle(xl, M.A. Two Volumes. Daklv, Lsbi.stor cV: Co., London. One Volume. Belfoivl Bro.s., Toronto. This is a really o^ood book, and, even in its present shape, a popular l)Ook; which does honour to its suV)ject, and to its author, in their several degrees. It is, however, so good, that we wish it were made better; and this might be accomplished by a process of excision. Biography, and among other descriptions of it ecclesiastical biography, is in dangei' of losing its joint titles to durability ant to his Life; and wc can well believe that tlu're must or may be others of his productions which deserve to lu' leprinted, for his oratorical power appears to have been peculiar in its freshness and its sympathetic energy. Besides all this, we should desn-e a gi'cat contraction, foi* a reason presently to be stated, of those parts of the work which belong to the region of religious experience. All the suggestions now made are ottered in the hope that a Biography of IVIacleod, rendered more compact by a free application of the pruning- knife, might hold a permanent place in the ecclesiastical litera- ture of Scotland. For this is, according to our mind, a really valuable biography, even in its present form. The Anglican position is marked oft* by various lines of doctrine, discipline, and spirit from that of the Scottish Established Church. But there is much in these volumes with which we ought to cherish an entire and cordial synipathy ; and even when differences of opinion and position intervene, there is still material from which we ought to draw some valual)le lessons. The outline of Dr. Macleod's personal career is simple. The son of a Highlander and Scottish minister, whose venerable and nol'le appearance did not belie his high character, he grew up, with a di)'ectness of purpose as complete as if it had been covereil by a vow or a special dedication, for and into the ministry of the Scottish Church. She laid on him, in the phrase of Words worth, " the strong hand of her purity." He did not receive much of the education which is to be had from books, and from the discipline of schools and universities ; and the lack or loss of it he fre- ([uently and ingenuously laments. He was, however, always Lfatherinof the education of society and the world; and in this sense, visiting Germany in early life, he obtained, shall we^say * These caricature sketches were nearly all omitted from the Canadian Edition- '4K^/^ W^^' w H^ 4 ^^^mw .,*f-?r-^ V 4 MKMOIR UF NOUMAN MACLKOD. 5 lie picked up, a varied and rather oxteiisive training. It is plain that, besides other and higher gifts, he was an extremely clever, ready, perceptive and receptive man. None of his experience jiassed hy him idly like the wind ; all had fruit for him ; all left a mark upon his mind and character. He was first placed in the south-western pari.sh of Loudoun, where he found himself among a population made up of archaic covenanting puritans and modern questioning weavers, uniler the shadow of the ri'sidence of the noble family of Hastings. Here (for a time) he lived in loving and active pastoral relations with both high and low. Indeed, the low for him were high ; for in the very spirit of Saiiit Augustine, who saw Christ in the poor, Macleod desired " to see kings and (jueens shining through their poor raiment." It was on this arena that, when he conunenced his energetic visitations, dispensing freely words of comfort and instruction, he entered the cottage of a veritable Mause Headrigg, who happened to be stone-deaf. The old lady, however, was fully l»repared for his onslaught, and proceeded, not to receive, Init to administer catechetical discipline. She motioned to him to sit down by her, planted her trumpet in her ear, and concisely gave him her Charge in the words, " Gang ower the funda- mentals." Here and elsewhere he stood the test ; and he so endeared himself to the parish that it bore, at least at the mo- ment, the shock of the great disruption of 1|K43 almost without seeming to feel it. But the sudden avoidance, at that crisis, of almost all the prominent posts in the Kirk, created an irresistible necessity for the advancement of the most promising among the residuary ministers. Mr. Macleod was accordingly transferred to Dalkeith ; and again, after no long period, to the great parish of the Barony, in Glasgow. He immediately develof)ed, upon this broader stage, the same powers of activity and devoted benevo- lence and zeal which had marked his career from the first ; and there seems to have been no department of ministerial duty, private or public, ecclesiastical or social, which escaped his vigi- lance or exhausted his powers. MKMOlK OF NORMAN MACLEOD. In the lattM- portion of his life, tho wliolo of which did hut niunbcr sixty years, from LSI 2 to 1JS72, calls of a kind wholly extraneous to his parochial work were nia«le upon him, to an extent perhaps without parallel in the history of Ins Church. He became a leader in the business of the Church. He under- took a luissionary toui' to America, and afterwards to India. The whole of this subj».'et had a great attraction for his mind, and occupied nuich of his time. His constant habit of travelling for needful relaxation perhaps promoted his tendency to take a wider cons/xidus of religious interests than is usual in Scotland. Resorting to London, he warmly prouioted the .scheme of the Evangelical Alliance ; until, after some time, he was repelled by what he thought narrowness. He freely lent his aid in the j>ul" pits of the Nonconformists. On account prol>ably of his genial and po}Mjlar qualities, he was sought out by Mr. Strahan, the l»ublisher, and became the editor of Good Words, as well as a frequent contributor to its pages. Amidst all these calls, freely and largely answered, he became, some years before the death of the Prince (\jnsort, a Court ])reacher and Court favourite. It would appear that to no ])erson in the profession of a clergyman or pastor has Her Majesty accorded so large a share, not only of friendship, but of intimate ])er.sonal confidence, as to Doctor Mac- leod. Nor does it appear that this favour was purchased by any manner of undue subserviency. His varied employments, avoca- tions in the strictest sense of the word, called him much, and for long periods, away from his vast pariMi, which must have been left somewhat largely to the care of substitutes. Yet a large part of his heart always remained there, and he [)robably exercised much active care even iiom a distance. He was a man who would not have neglected his Hock, even if he had dared to do so ; but in Scotland he would be a bold as well as bad man who, especially in the case of such a Hock, should hazard the experiment. It seems plain that Dr. Macleod returned the confidence and affec- tion of the people in its fulness to the last. His unwearied labours led, in course of time, to great derangement of health. Mbt MEMOIR OF NORMAN MACLEOD. Ji. witli much acuto pain. Against all this he struggled with an heroic H})irit. But on Juno 10, 1872, he .succumbed to a peaceful and happy death ; and he lies buried under a marble cro.ss in the cliurchyard of Cami)sie, where his father had once been minister, and around which clustered many of his own happiest memories. So much for the form of his biogi-aphy, and for the shell or outer facts of his life. Let us now endeavour to obtain a nearer view both of his personality, and of his relation, in thought and action, to the great movements of the time. For such men are not bom every day ; and though .Scotland has been remarkable for its abundance of zealous and able ministers, Dr. MacJeod, who was this, was also much uv I'c. He stands out, we think, as having supplied, after Dr. Chaiaiers, one of the most distinguished names in the history of P*">sljyterianisip. In some respects, ujuch after Dr. Chalmers ; in others, probably before him. He had not, so fat as we see, the philosophic faculty of Chalmers, nor his intensity, nor his gorgeous gift of eloquence, nor his commanding passion, iior his absolute simplicity, nor his profound, and, to others, sometimes embruTassing humilit)^ Chalmers, whose memory, at a period more than forty years back, is .still fresh in the mind of the wi-iter of thf-se pages, was, indeed, a man gi-eatly lifted out of the region of mere flesh and blood. He may be compared with those figures who, in Church hi.story or legend, are represented as risen into the air under the influence of religious emotion. Macleod, on the other hand, had more .shrewdness, more knowledge of the worUl, and far greater elasticity and variety of mind. Chalmers was rather a man of one idea, at least one idea at a time ; Macleod, receptive on all hands and in all ways. Chalmers had a certain clumsiness, as of physical, so of mental gait; Macleod was brisk, ready, mobile. Both were men devoted to God; eminently able, earnest, energetic; with great gifts of oratory, and large organizing power. A Church that had them not may well envy them to a Church Jiat had them. Nor do they stand alone. The Presbyterianism of Scot- land, which has done but little for literature or for theology. 8 MEMOIR OF NORMAN MACLEOD. --s, has, notwithstanding, been adorned, during the last fifty years, by the names of many remarkable persons, men of high and pure character : with great gifts of government and construction, like Candlish ; of winning and moving oratory, like Guthrie l and only a notable fertility in the production of such men could have enabled the National Establishment of that small country to endure the fearful drain which has been brought upon it, since its establishment at the Revolution, by repeated catas- trophes within its borders. And it is with reference to these particular departments of excellence that we would venture earnestly to commend the life of Macleod to the consideration of the English clergy; who, trained and fed under a more catholic system, should never be content to allow any gift either to escape them, or to remain with them only in an imperfect development. As respects government, the Presbyterian communions have derived very great benefit, in some im})ortant respects, from their regular and elaborate internal organization. It has given them the advan- tages which in the civil order belong to local self-government and representative institutions: orderly habits of mind, respect for adversaries, and some of the elements of a judicial temper ; the develo])ment of a genuine individuality, together with the discouragement of mere arljitrary will and of all eccentric ten- dency ; the sense of a common life ; the disposition energetically to defend it ; the love of law combined with the love of freedom ; and, last not least, the habit of using the faculty of speech with a direct and immediate view to persuasion. We do not doubt but that similar advantages of mental and i)ractical habit will be derived by our own clergy from that revival of ecclesiastical organization, in which this generation of bishops, clergy, and churchmen has made laudable and considerable progress. But we have yet much ground to cover : these things are not done in a day. Yet more, perhaps, have we to learn from that more practical habit of preaching which prevails in the higher Scottish pul})its. We do not mean practical in the sense in which it is J 4 MEMOIR OF NORMAN MACLEOD. 9 # distinguished from the devotional, but in this broader sense, that the sermon is delivered with the living intention and determina- tion to act upon the mind of the hearer, and to carry him along with the movement of the preacher's mind. Many an English clergyman will think that, if he has embodied in his sermon a piece of good divinity, the deed is done, the end of preaching is attained. But the business of a sermon is to move as well as teach, and if he teaches only without moving, may it not almost be said that he sows by the wayside ? It is often said, censo- riously, to be a great advantage possessed by the clergy, that no one can answer them. To a bad clergyman this may be an ad- vantage, in respect that it allows him to remain bad, and to grow worse with impunity. But to the true preacher or speaker it surely is far otherwise. It relaxes that health}^ tension, that bracing sense of responsibility, under which we must habituate ourselves to act, if we are ever to do anything that is worth the doing. It is no advantage, but rather a temptation and a snare. The hint conveyed in these remarks does not principally touch the question that may be raised as to the relative merits of written and unwritten sermons. The sermons of Dr. Maclood were, it appears, to a great extent, written l)ut not read. The sermons of Dr. Chalmers were certainly in some cases, if not in all, both written and read. But all Scotch ministers of any note who read their sermons take, or used to take, cfood care to read as if reading not. To a great extent, Scottish sermons were delivered without book, having been committed to memory. When notes were used, they were sometimes, as nmch as might be, conceaWl on a small shelf within the pul})it, for the people had a prejudice, almost a superstition, against "the paj)ers," and could not reconcile them with the action of the Holy Ghost in the preaching of the Gospel. Reading, pure and simple, was very rare. Apart from the question of the merit of this or that form in the abstract, there v, as a traditional and almost universal idea of preaching as a k'.nd of spiritual wrestling with a con- gregation; and the better professors of the art entered into it 10 MEMOIR OF NORMAN MACLEOD. t - as athletes, and sti-ove habitually and throughout to get a good "grip" of the hearer, as truly and as much as a Cumbrian wrestler struggles, with persistent and varied movement, to get a good grip of his antagonist. To give eti'ect to this idea, in preaching or in other si)eaking, the hearers must be regarded in some sense as one. All fear of the individual lauat be discarded. Respect for the body may be maintained, and may be exhibited by pleading, by ex- postulating, by Ijeseeching ; but always with a reserve and under- thought of authority, of a title to exhort, rebuke, convince. It is really the constitution of a direct and intimate })ersonal relation, for the moment, between preacher and hearers, wliich lies at the root of the matter ; such a relation as establishes itself spontane- ously between two persons who are engaged in an earnest practical conversation to decide whether some given thing shall or shall not be done ; and for this reason it is that we suggest that the mass of living humanity gathei'ed in a congregation should perha])s be dealt with as one, and that, unless in exceptional junctures, the ]>reacher might find a |)athway of power, as the singer, the instru- mentalist, or the actor does, in treating a crowd as an unity. What has been said is said tentatively, and so to s})eak provoca- tively, not to offer the solution of a great i)roblem, but at any rate to set others upon solving it. For a great })roblem it is : and a solution is required. The problem is how, in the face of the ])ress, the triluine, the exchange, the club, the nmltiplied solicita- tions of modern life, to awaken in full the dormant powers of the j>ulpit, which, though it has lost its exclusive privileges, is as able as it ever was manfully to c(jmpete for, and to share in, the com- mand of the human spirit, and of the life it rules. The Church cannot, indeed, do what she will, make her twenty thousantain from a careful study of the methods pursued in the Italian and in o<^her foreign pulpits ; and more generally, and for all who have not the Continent within reach, by noticing and digesting the practice in our own coimtry of non-Anglican, and certainly not least of Scottish Presbyterian pulpits. On the faculty and habit of government, as they are cherished in the same ([uartei", we have already said as much as our limitepreciation, says Principal Shairp, of Newman's sermons. Again, it seems that the venom of the system penetrated even within the precinct of the Evangelical Alliance. Attending its conference in Paris, he had to make this entry : " Heard a Puseyite sermon ; horrid trash." But, all this notwithstanding, we find passages uttered or written by him which apj)ear to convict him of nothing less than Hat Puseyism. Many a man has been (morally) hanged, drawn, and (quartered for less of it. He quotes in favour of an education beyond the grave the interpretation jtlaced by "the early Church" on the preaching " to the spirits that are in prison." He thought it right and not wrong to utter to God a devout as[)iration for the peace and rest of a departed spirit. Nay, he even wrote, " The living Church is more than the dead Bible, for it is the Bible and something more." And he complained, " we ignore sixteen centuries almost." Apart from cavil,'and even from careful scrutiny of expressions, the truth seems to be that the mind of Dr. Macleod was in a hif'h and true sense catholic. But he ha, truth is like a flower, which has grown from a (hnighill of lies and myths ! ' Good Lord, deliver jiie from such conclusions : If the battle has come, let it : but before God I will fight it witli those only, be they few or many, who believe in a risen, living Savioui-. This revelation of the influence of surface criticism has thrown me back immen.sely upon all who hold fast by an objective revelation." Indei)endent]y of the general direction of his mind, there was in him a certain fluctuation, not of piety, but of opinion, which was innnediately due to his lively emotional nature, and his large and energetic sympathies. With every form of thouo-]it capable of wearing (for him) a favourable aspect, he closed according to that aspect. Hence an intellectual, not a moral, inconstancy: and estimates almost contradictory, within brief periods, of the state and pi-osi)ect of his Church, and of its rivals. Even voluntaryism, which once stood next to Puseyijm in the scale of deadly sins, nnist have worn off some of its hateful features in his view ; for in 1871 he says, " I do not fear Dis- establishment," The consequence of all this is that we are to seek in the life and word.^ of Macleod rather for moral, religious, and practical, than for intellectual and scientific lessons. Though his bark was driven out to sea over the abysses of speculation, he wanted either the powers, or the apparatus, to sound them. His intellect availed to raise questions, not to answer them ; and his lai-ge heart and fine character neutralised the dangers which to a man of lower turn, and less of true heavenward bent, might have been very formidable. He carried on from first to last, in his journals, the work of religious introspection. Repeated so often, it almost offers to readers the appearance of routine; and on this account per- haps many of the passages might have been si)ared, for they are in general elementary as to their character and ran^^e They do not resemble the systematic work of those who m) IG MEMOIR OF NORMAN MACLEOD. I !• on digging, deeper and deeper, by a continuous process, into the profound mystenes of the human hef>rt. The imperious and violent demand of external duty prevented him from achieving what, in a more trancjuil sphere, he might probably have accomplished with a more exercised and collected spirit. He was well aware, too, of his own difficulties of temperament in this respect, and has recorded them : " The outer world of per- sons and things I always relished so intensely, that I required an extra effort to keep to quiet reading and prayer." But they did not preclude him from recording with great force and freshness abundant manifestations of an ingenuous mind, and a devoted self -renouncing heart. For example in 1870: — " God knows me better than I know myself. He knows my gifts and powers, my feelings and weaknesses, what I can do and not do. So I desire to be led, and not to lead ; to follow Him ; and I am quite sure that He has thus enabled me to do a great deal more in ways which seem to me almost a waste of life, in ad- vancing His kinirdom, than I could have done in any other way : I am sure of that. Intellectually I am weak. In scholarship nothing. In a thousand things a baby. He knows this : and so He has led me, and greatly blessed me, who am nobody, to be of some use to my Church and fellow-men. How kind, how good, how compassionate art thou, O God ! " Oh, my Father, keej) me humble. Help me to have respect towards my fellow-men, to recognise their several gifts as from Thee. Deliver me IVom the diabolical sins of malice, envy oi jealousy, and give ine hearty joy in my brother's good, in his work, in his gifts and talents : and may I be truly glad in his superiority to myself, if Thou art glorified. Root out all weak s^anity, all devilish pride, all that is abhorrent to the mind of Christ. God, hear my prayer. Grant me the wondrous joy of humility, which is seeing Thee as all in all." Again, he was too good and true a man to test religion by abundance of words. One of the fond and almost idolizin<>- attachments of his life (and it was distinguished for affectionate MEMOIR OF NORMAN MACLEOD. 17 friendships) was to Cami)bell of Row, who was deposed, under the stem prescrijttions of the Westminster Confession, for teach- ing what is termed universal redemption. Macleod jtreached his funeral sermon ; and thus finely comments on his deathbed : " He spoke not much of religion when dying. His silent death was, like his life, an Amen to God's will." In most points, Macleod's deviations from the Westminster Confession were approximations to the belief of the Churcli of Ensxland. Most men will re'^ard with an indiscriminatinij- satis- faction the relinrjuishment of grim and dreary tern'ts, wliich, when taken in theii" rigour, seem to im],)air the grand moral base of the Divine character. The rather judaical Sabbatarianism of Scotland, like the Calvinistic formuUu, was simply a form of Protestant tradition, founded neither in the word of God nor in the general consent of Christendom. Still we must ])lead guilty to regai'ding with very mixed emotions the crumbling away of these conventional theologies. It was plain that such an end must come ; but the (juestion is, are they ready for it ? and then, what is to come next ? When a great void was made in the religious system of Scotland by utterly sweeping away the Divine office of the Church, the gap was filled up by broader as well as more rigid conceptions of the coi*poreal perfection (so to s})eak) and absolute auth(jrity of the Scriptures of the Old as well as the New Testament. The judaizing tendency, but too evident in the Covenanters and Puritans, had at least this advanta^ge, that they fell back upon a code, and that they were enabled to give to their religious system a completeness and detail which had in other days been sought in the historical developments of the Christian society. We have some fear lest it should be found that when the wood, hay, straw, and stubble are swei)t away, they may be found to have departed without leaving any firmer or other substitute behind them. For any system, civil or religious, to come to a breach with its traditions is a great, even though not always the greatest calamity ; and remembering what in other countries has become of Calvinism after once it B 18 MEMOIR OF NORMAN MACLEOD has put to sea, we feel some anxiety to know what will be its fate in Scotland, and who will be its eventual heirs. Be this as it may, Dr. Macleod had always the courage of his opinions ; and he was prepared to face the contingencies of the future by frankly casting the Church Establishment of Scotland upon the tide of popular sentiment. But without making the smallest deduction from the respect and admiration due to his memory, we doubt whether the course upon which he heli)ed to embark that body was a safe one. On this subject he was, with- out doubt, eminently consistent. In 1843 he foretold that patron- age must be given up to save the Church ; and in 1871 he gave his weighty countenance to the movement, which terminated in the Act of 1874 for its abolition. But perhaps he was more consistent than wise. The Established Church of Scotland is in a decided minority of the population. It claims 42 per cent., a little over two-fifths of the whole ; it is allowed to have 36 per cent., somewhat beyond one-third. Let us take it nearly at its own estimate, and suppose it has a full two-fifths. Is it, then, so easy to justify in argument the position of an establishment of religion for the minority of the population, as to make it prudent for such a body to assume against a clear nonconforming ma- jority what has to them the aspect of an aggressive attitude ? In the view of that majority, the Patronage Act of 1874, which gave the appointment of established ministers to the people of their communion, was an attempt to bid and buy back piecemeal within the walls those who had been ejected wholesale. It was resented accordingly ; and by means of that Act, the controversy of Disestablishment, which had been almost wholly asleep beyond the Tweed, has been roused to an activity, and forced into a pro- minence, which may make it the leading Scottish question at the 'next general election, and which is not without possible moment or meaning, to a limited extent, even for England. Of Scottish Episcopalianism we shall here say nothing, except that it is, in nearly every diocese, harmonious and moderately progressive ; and that Dr. Macleod regarded it as a somewhat formidable anta- t MEMOIR OF NORMAN MACLKOD. 19 i^ gonist. Ho even thouglit that "an episcopal era is ncai- for Scotland's ecclesiastical history ; " and reckoned the ad.t^pticjn of several among its principles and usages as a main part of the ap- paratus necessary, in order to enable the Kirk to grapple success- fully with its future. In ecclesiastical policy we cannot resist the im|)ression that he was, without knowing it, somewhat of a Rupert. But in estimating a life and character, the question rarely tunis on the correctness of this or that opinion held. Least o.^ all could it so turn in the case of Macleod. For there are few men in whom emotion more conspicuously towered above mere opinion, and con- duct above both. Brave and tender, manful and simple, pro- foundly susceptible of enjoyment, but never preferring it to duty ; overflowing with love, yet always chivalrous for trath ; full of power, full of labour, full of honour, he has died, and has be- (pieathed to us for a study, which we hope will reach far beyond the bounds of his communion and denomination, the portrait of a great orator and pastor, and a true and noble-hearted man. /A I LORD M^C^Ur.-A.Y. ■<.- Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, by his nephew, G. Otto Trevelyan. Two Vohinius. Longnian.s, London ; Hari>oi- Bros,, Now York. A peculiar faculty, and one approaching to the dramatic order, belongs to the successful painter of historical portraits, and be- longs also to the true biogia])her. It is that of representing per- sonality. In the ])icture, what we want is not merely a collection of unexceptionable lines and colours so })resented as readily to identify their original. Such a work is not the man, but a duly attested certificate of the man. What we require, however, is the man, and not merely the certificate. In the same way, what we want in a biograi)hy, and what, despite the etymology of the title, we very seldom find, is life. The very best transcri[)t is a failure, if it be a transcript only. To fulfil its idea, it must have in it the essential quality of movement ; must realize the lofty fiction of the divine Shield of Achilles, where the upturning earth, though wrought in metal, darkened as the plough went on, and the figures of the battle-piece dealt their strokes and parried them, and dragged out from the turmoil the bodies of their dead. To write the biography of Lord Macaulay was a most arduous task. Such seems to have been the conception with which it was approached ; nor is it belied by the happy faculty with which it has been accomplished. Mr. Trevelyan had already achieved a reputation for conspicuous ability ; and the honour of near rela- tionship was in this case at least a guarantee for reverent and de- voted love. But neither love, which is indeed a danger as well as an ally, nor intelligence, nor assiduity, nor forgetfulness of self, will make a thoroughly good biography, without this subtle gift of imparting life. By this it was that Boswell established him- LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. 21 -f A Hulf as the ])rinco of all biotj^rapliers ; Ijy this Mr. Trevelyan ha.-*, we believe, earned for hiui.self a })lar3 on what is still asoiuowhat scanty roll. Beyond doubt, his subject has supplied hiui with great and, to the general reader, unexpected advanta<^es. The world was fami- liar in a high degree with the name of Lord Macaulay, and thought it knew the man, as one transcendent in much, and greatly emi- nent in all, that he undertook. With the essayist, the orator, the historian, the poet, the gi-eat social star, and even the legist, we were all prepared, in our anticipations of thisbiograi>hy, to renew an admiring acquaintance. But there lay behind all these what \^as in truth richer and better than them all — a marked and noble human character ; and it has not been the well-known aspects, and the better-known works, of the man which Mr. Trevelyan has set himself to exhibit. He has executed a more congenial and delightful office in exhibiting ml mvum tliis pei*sonality, of which the world knew little, and of which its estimate, though never low, was, as has now been shown, very far beneath the mark of truth. This is the pledge which he gives to his readt s at the outset (vol. ip-3): " For every one who sat with him in private company, or at the transaction of public business, for every ten who have listened to his oratory in Parlia- ment or on the hustings, there must be tens of thousands whose interest in history and literature he has awakened and informed by his pen, and who would gladly know what manner of man it was that ha.s done them so great a service. To gratify that most legitimate wish is the duty of those who have the means at their command His own letters will supply the deticien- cies of the bit)grapher." And the promise thus conveyed he redeems in some nine hun- dred and fifty pages, which are too few rather than too many. In the greater part of the work, he causes Lord Macaulay to speak for himself. In the rest he is, probably for the reason that it was Lord Macaulay's custom to destroy the letters of his con-e- spondents, nearly the sole interlocutor ; and the setting will not disappoint those who admired, and are jealous for, the stones. Lord Macaulay lived a life of no more than sixty years and 22 LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. three months. But it was an extraordinarily full life of sustained exertion — a high table-land without depressions. If in its outer aspect there be anything wearisome, it is only the wearisomeness of reiterated splendour, and of success so uniform as to be almost monotonous. He speaks of himself as idle ; but his idleness was more active, and carried with it hour by hour a greater expendi- ture of brain-power, than what most men regard as their serious employments. He might well have been, in his mental career, the spoiled child of fortune ; for all he tried succeeded, all he touched turned into gems and gold. In a happy childhood he evinced extreme precocity. His academical career gave sufficient, though not redundant, promise of after celebrity. The new golden age he imparted to the " Edinburgh Review," and his first and most important, if not best, parliamentary speeches in the grand crisis of the first Reform Bill, achieved for him, years be- fore he had reached the middle point of life, what may justly be termed an immense distinction. For a century and more, per- haps no man in this country, with the exception of Mr. Pitt and of Lord Byron, had attained at thirty-two the fame of Macaulay. His parliamentary success and his literary eminence were each of them enough, as they stood at this date, to intoxicate any brain and heart of a meaner order. But to these was added in his case an amount and quality of social attentions such as invariably partake of adulation and idolatry, and as perhaps the high circles of London never before or since have lavished on a man whose claims lay only in himself, and not in his descent, his rank, or his possessions. Perhaps it was good for his mental and moral health that the enervating action of this process was sus- pended foi' four years. Although after his return from India in 1831) it could not but revive, he was of an age to bear it with less peril to his manhood. He seems at all times to liave held his head high above the stir and fascination which excite and enslave the weak. His masculine intelligence, and his ardent and single-minded devotion to literature, probably derived in this. •"•^ !■ i LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. 2f8 respect essential aid from that depth and warmth of domestic affections which lay nearer yet to the centre of his being, Mr. Trevelyan has further promised us (i. 4) that he " will sup- press no trait in his disposition, or incident in his career, which might provoke blame or question Those who best love him do not fear the consequences of freely submitting his character and his actions to the public verdict." The pledge is one which it was safe to give. It is with Macaulay the man that the bio- grapher undertakes to deal, and not with Macaulay the author. Upon the structure of the mind, upon its extraordinary endow- ments and its besetting dangers, there is much that must or may be said, in tones of question and of warning, as well as of ad- miration and applause. But as regards the character and life of the man, small indeed is the space for animadversion ; and the world must be more censorious than we take it to be, if, after reading these volumes, it does not conclude with thankfulness and pleasure that the writer who had so long ranked among its marve's has also earned a high place among its worthies. He was, indeed, prosperous and brilliant ; a prodigy, a meteor, almost a portent, in literary history. But his course was laborious, truthful, simple, inde])endent, noble ; and all these in an eminent degree. Of the inward battle of life he seems to have known nothing ; his experience of the outward battle, which had reference to money, was not inconsiderable, but it was confined to his earlier manhood. The general outline of his career has long been familiar, and off'ei-s neither need nor scope for detail. After four years of high parliamentary distinction, and his first assumption of office, he accepted a lucrative appointment in India, with a wise view to his own pecuniary indepjndence, and a generous regard to what might be, as they had been, the demands of his nearest re- lations npon his affectionate bounty. Another term of four years brought him back, the least Indian, despite of his active labours upon the legislative code, of all the civilians who had ever served the Company. Ii« soon re-entered Parliament ; but his zest for the political arena ssems never to have regained the tera[)erature 24 LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. of his virgin love at the time of the Reform Bill. He had offered his resignation of office during the debates on the Emancipation Act, at a time when salary was of the utmost im})ortance to him, and for a cause which was far more his father's than his own. This he did with a promptitude, and a manly unconsciousness of effect or merit in the act, which were truly noble. Similar was his dig- nified attitude, when his constituents of Edinburgh committed their first fault in rejecting him on account of his vote for May- nooth. This was in 1847. At the general election in 1852, they were again at his feet ; as though the final cause of the indignity had been only to enhance the triumph of his re-election. Twice at least in the House of Commons he aiTested the successful i)ro- gress of legislative measures, and slew them at a moment's notice and by his single arm. The first was the Copyright Bill of Ser- jeant Talfourd in 1841 ; the second, the Bill of 1853 for exclud- ing the Master of the Rolls from the House of Commons. Put whenever he rose to speak, it was a summons to fill the benches. He retired from the House of Commons in 1850. At length, when in 1857 he was elevated by Lord Palmerston to the peerage, all the world of letters felt honoured in his person. The claims of that which he felt to be indeed his pi'ofession acquired an in- ci'easing command on him, as the interests of political life grew less and less. Neither was social life allowed greatly to interfere with literary woi-k, although here, too, his triumphs were almost unrivalled. Only one other attraction had power over him, and it was a life-long power — the love of his sisters, which about the mid-point of life came to mean of his sister, Lady Trevelyan. As there is nothing etpially toucning, so there is really nothing more wonderful in the memoirs, than the large, the immeasurable abundance of this gushing stream. It is not sin-prising that the full reservoir overfiowed upon her children. Indeed he seems to have had a store of this love that could not be exhausted (ii. 209) for little children generally ; his simplicity and tenderness vying all along in graceful rivalry with tlie manly (jualities, which in no one were more pronounced. After some forewarnings, a period T t i^. Mi LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. '.0 T I: I. of palpable decline, which was brief as well as tranrjuil, brought him to his end on the 28th December, 1859. With these few words we part from the general account of Macau lay's life. It is not the intention of this article to serve for lazy readers, instead of the book which it reviews. In the pages of Mr. Trevelyan they will find that which ought to be studied, and can hardly be abridged. They will find too, let us say in passing, at no small number of points, the nearest approach within our knowledge, not to the imitation but to the reproduc- tion of an inimitable style. What remains for critics and ob- servers is to interpret the picture which the biography presents. For it offers to us much matter of wide human interest, even beyond and apart from the numerous questions which Macaulay's works would of themselves suggest. One of the very first things that must strike the observer of this man is, that he is very unlike to any other man. And yet this unlikeness, this monopoly of the model in which he was made, did not spring from violent or eccentric features of origi- nality — for eccentricity hehad none whatever — but from the pecu- liar mode in which the ingredients were put together to make up the composition. In one sense, beyond doubt, such powers as his famous memory, his ?'are power of illustration, his command of language, separated him broadly from others ; but gifts like these do not make the man ; and we now for the first time know that he possessed, in a far larger sense, the stamp of a real and strong individuality. The most splendid and complete assemblage of intellectual endowments, does not of itself suffice to create an in- terest of the kind that is, and will be, now felt in Macaulay. It is from ethical gifts alone that such an interest can spring. They existed in him not only in abundance, but in forms distinct from, and even contrasted with, the fashion of his intellectual faculties, and in conjunctions which come near to paradox. Behind the mask of splendour lay a singular simplicity : behind a litei-ary severity which sometimes approached to vengeance, an extreme tenderness : behind a rigid repudiation of the sentimental, a sen- 26 LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. sibility at all times quick, and in the latest times almost threaten- ing to sap his manhood. He, who as speaker and writer seemed above all others to represent the age and the world, had the real centre of his being in the simplest domestic tastes and joys. He, for whom the mysteries of human life, thought, and destiny appear to have neither charm nor terror, and whose writings seem audibly to boast in every page of being bound by the visible horizon of the practical and work-day sphere, in his virtues and in the com- bination of them, in his freshness, bounty, bravery, in his unshrink- ing devotion both to causes and to persons, and most of all, per- haps, in the thoroughly inborn and spontaneous character of all these gifts, really recalls the age of chivalry and the lineaments of the ideal. The peculiarity, the diferentia (so to speak) of Macaulay seems to us to lie in this, that while, as we frankly think, there is much to question — nay, much to regret or even censure — in his writings, the excess or defect, or whatever it may be, is never really ethical, but is in all cases due to something in the structure and habits of his intellect. And again it is pretty plain that the faults of that intellect were immediately associated with its excellencies : it was in some sense, to use the language of his own Milton, " dark with excessive bright."* Macaulay was singularly free of vices, and not in the sense in which, according to Swift's note on Burnet, William III. held such a freedom ; that is to say, " as a man is free of a corporation. One point only we reserve — a certain tinge of occasional vin- dictiveness. Was he envious ? Never. Was he servile ? No. Was he insolent ? No. Was he prodigal ? No. Was he avaricious ? No. Was he selfish ? No. Was he idle ? The question is ri- diculous. Was he false ? No ; but true as steel and transparent as crystal. Was he vain ? We hold that he was not. At every point in the ugly list he stands the trial ; and though in his history he judges mildly some sins of appetite or passion, there is no sign in his life, or his remembered character, that he was conq)Ounding for what he was inclined to. *" Paradise Lost," iii. 380. T' i LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. 27 •^■( ^^ The most disputable of the negative.^ we have pronounced is that which relates to vanity ; a defect rather than a vice ; never ad- mitted into the septenary catalogue of the mortal sins of Dante and the Church ; often lodged by the side of high and strict virtue, often allied with an amiable and playful innocence ; a token of imperfection, a deduction from greatness ; and no more. For this imputation on Macaulay there are apparent, but, as we think, only apparent, grounds. His moderation in luxuries and pleasures is the more notable and praiseworthy because he was a man who, with extreme healthiness of faculty, enjoyed keenly what he enjoyed at alL Take in proof the following hearty notice of a dinner a quattr' ocelli to his friend : — " Ellis came to dinner at seven. I gave him a lobster- curry, woodcock and maccaroni. I think that I will note dinners, as honest Pepys did " (ii. 243 ; compare ii. 281). His love of books was intense, and was curiously develoi)ed. In a walk he would devour a play or a volume (ii. 287, 209, 282 ); and once his performance embraced no less than fourteen Books of the " Odyssey " (vol. ii. 295). " His way of life," says Mr. Tre- velyan, " would have been deemed solitary by others ; but it was not solitary to him " (ii. 405). This development blossomed into a peculiar specialism (ii. 4GG). Henderson's " Iceland " was " a favourite breakfast-book " with him. " Some books, which I would never think of opening at dinner, please me at breakfast, and vice versd ! " There is more subtlety in this distinction than could easily be found in any passage of his writings. But how quietly both meals are handed over to the dominion of the master-pro- pensity ! This devotion, however, was not without its drawbacks. Thought, apart from books and from com]»osition, perhaps he dis- liked, certainly he eschewed. Crossing that evil-minded sea, the Irish Channel, at night in rough weather, he is disabled from reading ; he wraps himself in a pea-jacket and sits upon the deck. What is his employment ? He cannot sleep, or does not. What an opi)ortunity for moving onwards in the processes of thought 28 LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. which ought to weigh on the historian. The wild yet soothing music of the waves would have helped him to watch the verging this way or that of the judicial scales, or to dive into the pro- blems of human life and action which history continually casts upon the surface. No, he cared for none of this. He set about the marvellous feat of going over " Paradise Lost " from memory ; when he found he could still repeat half of it (ii. 2G3). In a word, he was always conversing, or recollecting, or reading, or composing ; but reflecting, never. The laboriousness of Macaulay as an author demands our gratitude ; all the more because his natural speech was in sen- tences of set and ordered structure, well-nigh ready for the press. It is delightful to find that the most successful prose writer of the day was also the most painstaking. Here is indeed a literary conscience. The very same gi-atification may be expressed with reference to our most successful i)oet, Mr. Tennyson. Great is the ^raise due to the poet : still greater, from the nature of the case, that share which falls to the lot of Macaulay. For a poet's diligence is, all along, a honeyed work. He is ever travelling in flowery meads. Macaulay, on the other hand, unshrinkingly went through an immense mass of im^uiry, which even he some- times felt to be irksome, and which to most men would have been intolerable. He was perpetually picking the grain of com out of the bushel of chaft". He freely chose to undergo the dust, and heat, and strain of battle, before he would challenge from the public the crown of victory. And in every way it was remarkable that he should maintain his lofty standard of concep- tion and performance. Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dan- gerous, commonly fatal, to the poet : but among even the ijuc- cessful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly alove it are the very rare exceptions. The tests of excellence in prose are as much less palpable, as the public appetite is less fastidious. Moreover, we are moving downwards in this respect. The pro- l)ortion of middling to good writing constantly and rapidly increases. With the average of performance, the standard of i- i ■fl^ ^Bm LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. 29 judgment progressively declines. The inexorable conscientious- ness of Macaulay, his determination to put out nothing from his hand which his hand was still capable of improving, was a per- fect godsend to our slipshod generation. It was naturally consequent upon this habit of treating com- position in the spirit of art, that he should extend to the body of his books much of the regard and care which he so profusely bestowed upon their soul. We have accordingly had in him, at the time when the need was greatest, a most vigilant guardian of the language. We seem to detect rare and slight evidences of carelessness in his Journal : of which we can only say that, in a production of the moment, written for himself alone, we are sur- prised that they are not more numerous and considerable. In general society, carelessness of usage is almost universal, and it is exceedingly difficult for an individual, however vigilant, to avoid catching some of the trashy or faulty usages which are continu- ally in his ear. But in his published works, his grammar,* his orthography, nay, his punctuation (too often surrendered to the printer), are faultless. On these questions, and on the lawfulness or unlawfulness of a word, he may even be called an authority without appeal ; and we cannot doubt that we owe it to his works, and to their boundless circulation, that we have not witnessed a more rapid coiTui)tion and degeneration of the lanonaire. To the literary success of Macaulay it would be difficult to find a parallel in the history of recent authorship. For this, and probably for all future, centuries, we are to regard the })ublic * In an sentence soon 1)1 found uu^«m re lu mu jiuuiisiieu worKs 01 jiiicauiay Y Or in any writer of fair rejmtc present century? Or even before the present day?' Let any one who desires to test its accuracy try to translate it into a foreisfu languajfe. Fonblanque, who was laudablv jealous for our nol)le mother tongue, protested agaiiist this usaf,'o. His editor records the protest'; and in the next page himself coinniits the crime. We find another examr)lc in Macaulav's letter to his father at p 150 of vol. 1. "All minds seein to be perfectly made up as to the certainty of Catholic Emancipation having conm at lant. This very slovenly form of speech is now comini,' in upon us like a flood, through the influence of newspapers, otiicial correspondence, and we know i;ot what beside. As to errors of printing not obviously due to the operative department, during (jur searclies in preparation for this article we have only chanced to stumble upon one ; in the Kssay on Bacon, the word oTrorr- poT\yiXfva is twice printed with the accent on the aiitepemiltima. Mr. Trevelyan record.^ the ri'^our with which Macaulay proscribed ' Bosphorus' instead of Bo.sporus, and Syren instead of Siren In the Interests of extreme accuracy, we raise the question whctiier Macaulay himself is correct in writiu" macaroni (ii. 'i43) insteail of maccaroni. Macaroni is according to the French u.sage, and is refor"- red byWebster to jxaKap, a derivation which we utterly reject. But the original word is Italian Na'^lei'^lSSl)'^ ^'"°'" '""*''"' ^'^'''"^^"'"^'''^'^^''^'^"ce or heap (see the admirable " Tramater" Dictionary^ :80 LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. as the patron of literary men ; and as a patron abler than any that went before to heap both fame and fortune on its favourites. Setting aside works of which the primary purpose was enter- tainment, Tennyson alone among the writers of our age — in point of public favour, "nd of emolument following upon it — comes near to Macaulay. But Tennyson was laboriously cultivat- ing his gifts for many years before he acquired a position in the eye of the nation. Macaulay fresh from college, in 1825, as- tonished the world by his brilliant and most imposing essay on Milton. Full-orbed he was seen above the horizon ; and full- orbed, after thirty -five years of constantly-emitted splendour, he sank beneath it. His literary gains were extraordinary. The cheque for £20,000 is known to all. But his accumulation was reduced by his bounty ; and his profits would, it is evident, have been far larger still, had he dealt with the products of his mind on the principles of ec jnomic science (which, however, he heartily professed), and sold his wares in the dearest market, as he un- doubtedly acquired them in the cheapest. No one can measure the elevation of Macaulay 's character above the mercenary level, without bearing in mind, that for ten years after 1825 he was a poor and contented man, though ministering to the wants of a father and a^family reduced in circumstances ; though in a blaze of literary and political success ; and though he must have been conscious from the first of the possession of a gift which, by a less congenial and more compulsory use, would have rapidly led him to opulence. Yet of the comforts and advantages, both social and physical, from which he thus forebore, it is plain that he at all times formed no misanthropic or ascetic, bu<" on the con- trary a very liberal, estimate, it is truly touching to find that never, except as a Minister, until 1851 (ii. 291, 292), when he had already lived fifty of his sixty years, did this favourite of for- tune, this idol of society, allow himself the luxury of a carriage. It has been observed, that neither in art nor letters did Macaulay display that faculty of the higher criticism, which depends upon •certain refined perceptions and the power of subtle analysis. His t LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. 31 analysis was always rou<,^h, hasty, and sweeping and his j)ercei)- tions robust. By these properties it was that he was so eminently opTiKos, not in the vulgar sense of an appeal to spurious senti- r^-^nt, but as one bearing his reader along by violence, as the River Scamander tried to bear Achilles. Yet he was never pretentious ; and he said frankly of himself, that a criticism like that of Les- sing in his Laocoon, or of Goethe on Hamlet, tilh^l him with wonder and despair. His intense devotion to the gi'eat work of Dante (ii. 22) is not in keeping with his tastes and attachments gene- rally, but is in itself a circumstance of much interest. We remember, however, at least one observation of Macaulay's in regard to art, which is worth perserving. He observed that the mixture of gold with ivory in great works of ancient art — for exami)le, in Jupiter of Phidias — was probalily a condescension to the tastes of the people who were to be the worshippers of the statue ; and he noticed that in Christian times it has most rarely happened that productions great in art have also been the objects of warm popular veneration. Neither again had he })atience for the accurate collection of minute particulars of evidence, to disentangle an intricate con- troversy, and by the recovery of the thread to bring out the truth. He neither could nor would have done, for example, what Mr. Elwin has done in that masterly Preface to the Letters of Pope, which throws so much light upon the character.* All such ques- tions he either passed by unnoticed, or else carried by storm. He left them to the Germans, of whose labours he possessed little knowledge, and from a very insufficient estimate. His collection of jjarticulars was indeed most minute, but he was the master, not the servant, of his subject-matter. When once his rapid eye was struck with some powerful effect, he could not wait to ascer- tain whether his idea, formed at a first view, really agreed with the ultimate presentation of the facts. If, however, he wrote many a line that was untrue, never did he write one that he did not believe to be true. He very rarely submitted to correct or * Tlie Works of Alexander Pope. Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Rev, Whitwell Elwin. 32 LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. retract ; and yet not because he disliked it, but simply because, from the habits of his mind, he could not see the need of it. Nothing can be more ingenuous, for example, than the following passage, written when he was at the very zenith of his fame (ii. 442), in 1858: " To-day I got a letter from , pointing out what I must admit to be a gross impropriety of language in my book ; an improi)riety of a sort rare, I hope, with me . It shall be corrected, and I am obliged to the fellow, little as I like him." If then Macaulay failed beyond many men inferior to himself in the faculty (as to his works) of self -correction, what was the cause of this defect ? It certainly did not lie in any^^^coarse, out- ward, vulgar view of his calling. It was not in such a s})irit that Macaulay wooed^the Muses. In whatever garb he wooed them, it was always in the noble wor- ship of the Georgics, as the divinities — " Quarum sacra fer*; iiigenti perculsus amore." Though, relatively to the common standard of literaiy produc- tion, his very worst would have been good, his taste and his prin- ciple alike forbade him to be satisfied with less than his best. His conception of the vocation was lofty to the uttei'most ; his execution was in the like degree scrupulous and careful. No- whei'e, perhaps, can we find a more true description of the motive which impels a great writer, than in the fine thought of Filicaja : " Fama non cerco o mercenaria lode," that poet was content to sing for love of singing — " Purch' io cantando del bell' Arno in riva Sfoghi I'alto desio che '1 cor mi rode." He could not, indeed, have accepted that portion of the Italian minstrel's " self-denying ordinance " which dispensed with Fame. With the entire and peculiar force of his fancy, he projected in his mental vision the renown which the future was to bring him : and, having thus given body to his abstraction, allowed himself to dwell on it with rich enjojnnent, as on some fair^and bound- LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. 33 f less landsca])e. On the publication of his History, he felt as i!i all its fulness, so in all its forms, "La procellosa e trepida Gioia d' un i;ran disogno."* "The sale has surpassed exi)Octation ; but that i^'oves only that pei)i»le have formed a high idea of what they are to have. The disappointmout, if there is disappointment, will be great. All that I hear is laudatory. But who can trust to praise that is poured into his own ear I At all events, I have aimed high. 1 have tried to do something that may be remembered. I have had the year 2000, and even the year 3000, often in my mind. I have sacri- ticed nothing to temporary fashions of thought and style ; and, if I fail, my failure will be more honourable than nine-tenths of the successes that 1 have witnessed."— (ii. 240.) Yet we infer from the general strain of his Journals and Letters that even had there been no such thing as fame in his view, he still would have written for the sake of writing ; that for him re- putation was to work, what pleasure inobably is to virtue — the normal sequel, the grace and complement of the full-formed figure, but not its centre nor its heart. We have spoken of some contrast between Macaulay himself and his works. It cannot be more fairly illustrated than in an instance which Mr. Trevelyan, true to his pledge, has not shnink from exhibiting. Macaulay used the lash with merciless severity against the poems of Robert Montgomery ; and it entered deeply into the fle.sh of the man. Like " poor Yorick," there are those who remember Montgomery, and who can say of him this, that if he was not, as he was not, " a fellow of infinite jest, of most ex- cellent fancy," he w^as a man of pure and high character, ami of natural gifts far above the conmion. If his style was affected, his life was humble. He committed the fault of publishing, as hundreds do, indifferent verses ; and the popular press of the day, with the public at its back, offered an absurd worship before the idol. But he was an idol ; and Macaulay as the minister of justice for the welfare of the republi:^i:Kfr*s%^i? li^M :'W?5^R 30 LIFE OF LORD MACAULA.T. v'orld. What records the oriirin of the wars of the Investitures, tho League, and the Thirty Years, could not be foreign to the mind and eye of Macaulay. But very large tracts of Church History lie outside the current of contemporary events, though they involve profoundly the thoughts and feelings, the training and the destiny of individual men. Of all these it would be hard to show that he had taken any serious account at all. It must be admitted, indeed, that no department of human records has on the whole pi'ofited so little as Church History by the charms, perhaps even by the methods^ of literary art; but Macaulay, if he had desired to get at the kernel, was not the man to be re})elled by the uncouth rudeness of the shell. As respects theology, the ten volumes of his published works do nothing to bear out the assertion of Mr. Tre- velyan. We have ourselves heard him assert a paradox which common sense and established opinion alike rt^ject : that the theo- logy of the Seventeenth Article was the same as that of the por- tentous code framed at Lambeth about the close of the sixteenth century. A proof yet more conclusive of a mind, in which the theological sense has never been trained or developed, is supplied by his own contemptuous languag respecting a treatise which has ever been regarded as among the genis of Christian literature, " I have read Ausrustine's ' Confessions.' The book isiot without interest. But he expresses himself in the style of a field preacher " (i. 465). And again, he rather contemptuously classes the great Father with the conunon herd of those who record their confessions, or, in the cant phrase, their experience. He had indeed no admiration, and but little indulgence, for any of these intros})ective productions. They lay in a region which he did not frequent ; and yet they are among not only the realities, but the deepest and most determin- ing realities, of our nature. We reckon his low estimate of this inward work as betokening the insufficient development of his own powerful mind in that direction. It has been felt and pointed out ^'n many quarters that Mac- aulay, as a writer, was the child, and became the type of his coun- try and his age. As, fifty years ago, the inscription " Bath " used ! 1 t mMk LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. 37 I f I to be carried on our letter-paper, so the word " English " is a>s it were in the water-mark of every leaf of Macaiilav's writino-. His country was not the Empire, nor was it the United Kingdom. It was not even Great Britain, though he was descended in the higher, that is the paternal, half from Scottish ancestry, and was linked specially with that country through the signal virtues, the victorious labours, and the considerable reputation of his father Zachary. His country was England. On this little spot he con- centrated a force of admiration and of worship, which might have covered all the world. But as in space, so in time, it was limited. It was the England of his own age. The higher ener- gies of his life were as completely summed up in the present, as those of Walter Soott were projected upon tlie jiast. He would not have filled an Abbotsford with armour and relics of the mid- dle ages. He judges the men and institutions and events of other times by the instruments and measures of the ])resent. The characters whom he admires are those who would have conformed to the type that was before his eyes, who would have moved with effect in the court, the camp, the senate, the drawing-room of to- day. He contemplates the past with no demderivin, no regretful longing, no sense of things admiraV)le, which ai'e also lost and ir- recoverable. Upon this limitation of his retrospects it follows in natural sequence that of the futu'-e he has no glowing antici])a- tions, and even the present he is not apt to contemplate in its mysterious and ideal side. As in respect to his ])ersonal aii)acity of loving, so in regard to the corresponding literary power. The facult}' was singularly intense, and y^t it was spent within a nar- row circle. There is a marktd sign >. Uiis narrowness in his dis- inclination evon to look at the works of contemporaries whose tone or manner he dislike gathered into his great magazine, wherever the dehniteness of their outline was not so rigid as to defy or disarm the action of the intruding and falsifying faculty. Imagination could not alter the date of the battle of Marathon, or the Council of Nice, or the crowning of Pepin. But it might seriously or even fundamentally disturb the balance of light and dark in his account of the opinions of Mil- ton or of Laud, or his estimate of the effects of the Protectorate or the Restoration, or of the character, and even the adulteries, of William III. He could detect justly this want of dry light in others : he probably suspected it in himself : but it was hardly possible for him to be enovigh upon his guard against the distract- ing action of a faculty at once so vigorous, so crafty, and so plea- surable in its intense activity. Hence arose, it seems reasonable to beHeve, that charge of par- tisanship against Macaulay as a historian, on which much has been, and probably much more will be, said. He may not have possessed that scrupulously tender sense of obligation, that nice tact of exact justice, which is among the verj' rarest, as well as the most precious, of human virtues. But there never was a v/riter less capable of intentional unfairness. This, during his lifetime, was the belief of his friends, but was hardly admitted by opponents. His biographer has really lifted the question out of the range of controversy. He wrote for truth ; but, of course, for truth such as he saw it ; and his sight was coloured from within. This colour, once attached, was what in manufacture is called a mordant ; it was a fast colour ; he coidd not distinguish between what his mind had received and what his mind had im- j^arted. Hence, when he was wrong, he could not see that he was wrong ; and of those cala^aities which are due to the intellect only, and rot the heart, there can hardly be a greater. The hope of amendmg is, after a.l, our very best and brightest hope ; of amending our works as well as ourselves. Without it we are for- bidden revocare gradu7%, superasque evadere ad auras, when we have accidentally, as is the way with men, slipped into Avemus. 42 LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. While, as to his authorship, Macaulay was incessantly labouring to improvi.', in the substance of what he had written he could neither himself detect his errors, nor could he perceive them when they were pointed out. There was a htrange contrast between his own contidence in what he said, and his misgivings about his manner of saying it. Woe to him, he says of his History, if some one should review him as he could review another man. He had, and could not but have, the sense of his own scarifying and tomahawking power, and would, we firmly believe, not have resented its use against himself. " I see every day more and more clearly how far my performance is below excellence " (ii. 232). " When I compare my book with what I imagine his- tory ought to be, I feel dejected and ashamed," It was only on comparing it with concrete examples that he felt reassured (ibid.) He never so conclusively proved himself to be a true artist, as in this dissa./isftiction with the products of his art because they fell below his 'd-^al • that Will-o'-the-wisp who, like the fabled sprite, ever stirs pursuit, and ever baffles it, but who, unlike that imp, rewards with large, even if unsatisfying, results every step of real progress. But it is quite plain tliat all this dissatisfaction had reference to the form, not the matter, of his works. Unhappily, he never so much as glances at any general or serious fear lest he should have mistaken the nature or proportions of events, or, what is, perhaps, still more serious, lest he should have done in- justice to characters : although he must have well known that in- justice from his x«''P Tra^fia, his great, massive hand, was a thing so crushing and so terrible. Hence what is at first sight a strange contrast — his insensibility to censure in the forum, his uneasiness in the study ; his constant repulsion of the censure of others ; his not less constant misgiving, nay censure on himself. In a de- based form this phenomenon is, indeed, common, nay, the com- monest of all. But he was no Sir Fretful Plagiary, to press for criticism, and then, in wrath and agony, to damn the critic. The explanation is simple. He criticised what men approved ; he ap- proved what they criticised. His style, unless in some very rare LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. 43 range cases it was wrought up to palpable excess,* no one attempted to criticise. It was felt to be a thing above the heads of common mortals. But this it was which he watched with an incessant, a passionate, and a jealous care, the care of a fond parent, if not of a lover ; of a parent fond, but not doting who never spared the rod, that he might not spoil the child. Of his matter, his mode of dealing with the substance of men and things, by the constitu- tion of his mind he was blind to the defects. As other men do in yet higher and more inward regions of their being, he missed the view of his own besetting sin. However true it may be that Macaulay was a far more consum- mate workman in the manner than in the matter of his works, we do not doubt that the works contain, in multitudes, passages of high emotion and ennobling sentiment, just awards of praise and blame, and solid expositions of principle — social, moral, and constitutional. They are pervaded by a generous love of liberty, and their atmosphere is pure and bracing, their general aim and basis morally sound. Of ^.he qualifications of this eulogy we have spoken, and have yet to speak. But we can speak of the style of the works with little qualification. We do not, indeed, venture to assert that his style ought to be imitated. Yet this is not because it was vicious, but because it was individual and in- communicable. It was one of those gifts, of which, when it harace of the image he himself had fashioned and adored. All this, however, is not to be taken for granted. We shall support it by reference to the works of those who we \ .. have supplied the proof, and shall likewise proceed to add some illus- trations in detail. For his own eye, the ornaments of his Essay on Milton were so soon as in 1848 gaudy and ungraceful, while for the world they were only rich, dazzling, or at most profuse. As he writes in that year, it contains "scarcely a paragi'aph such as his matured judg- ment approves " (" Essays," Preface). But there is no misgiving as to the substance of the Essay ; and even with regard to his articles on James Mill, which he had dropped on special grounds, he was not "disposed to retract a single doctrine which i^^'^y con- tain."* If it be thought unfair or misleading to scrutii lo.sely a production which, while so wonderful, is likewise so youthful as the Essay on Milton, we reply that we examine it for the fol- lowing reason : because it was the work over which he cast the longest retrospect, and yet this retrospect did not suggest even so much as a qualification, however general, of the opinions it con- veyed. We nmst observe, however, that in the case of Macaulay general qualification would be nearly useless. The least we could have craved of his repentance, had he repented, would have been that the peccant passages should be obelized. For in all his works, the sound and the unsound parts are closely dovetailed ; his series juncturaque, his arrangement and his transitions, are perfect ; the assertions are everywhere alike fearless, the illustrations alike happy ; and the vision of the ordinary reader has scarcely a chance of distiriguishing between truth and error, where all is bathed, and lost, in one overpowering blaze and flood of light. We * Preface to " Essays," republished in 1S43. r,lFF OF T,ORD MAf'Arr.AV. 40 ly a 1 is We might ns well attempt to detect, witli the nuked eye, the spot'^ in the Him. The Essay coinhines in onr view the wttrks, tlir npininn^, and the character of Milton; and it may perhaps he pronounced at once the most gorgeous and the most higlitlown ])an»'g}-rie to he found anywhere in print. It descrihes Milton (""Essays," i. 4) as the martyr of English lihcrtv ; secminnly for no othei- ivason than that in later life the course of ]»idilic atiairs was not to his mind. Deeply dyed with regicide, he was justly and wisely .s])ared ; and he suttered no molestation from those whom, the first day he had got the i)Ower, he would not have lost a moment in molesting. Macavdav scoffs at the idea that Charles 1. was a martyr to reji- gion ; hut religion had manifestly something to do with his end, and his title to the name is sounder than Milton's at least in this, that his head was actually cut off. Milton took (says the great Reviewer, p. 30) in ])olitics the part to be expected from his high spirit and his great intellect; for he lived "at the very crisis of the conflict I'etween Oromasdes and Ahrimanes," when the mighty principles of liberty were exhibited in the form of a battle between the prin(nple of good and the principle of evil. Such is Macaulay's trenchant view of the char- acter and merits of the great and mixed conflict known by the name of the Great Rebellion. In what strange contrast does it stand with that of another writer, his contemporary and his friend, not less truly nor less heartily a lover of freedom than himself. Let those who jtrefer a temperate to a torrid zone, pass from these burning utterances to Mr. Hallam's discussion, in his Eleventh Chapter, of the respective claims and merits of the two parties to the war. In a statement, than which perha}is the whole compass of history does not contain a finer example of searching scrutiny together wdth judicial temper, he arrives at the conclusion that the war was opened in lf)42 "with evil auspices, with much peril of despotism on the one hand, with more of anarchy on the other."* » ' Constitutional History' (4to.), i. 615. D 'If 50 LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. Referring to the (then) recently published work of Milton on "Christian Doctrine," Macaulay observes "some of the heterodox doctrines which he avows seem to have excited considerable amazement, particularly his Arianisrn, and his theory on tlie sub- ject of polygamy." At this amazement he is himself amazed ; and with a cursory remark he i)asses lightly on. As regards his Arian- isrn, we could not reasonably have ex})ected more. That, after all, touches only dogma ; and though dogm.?. be the foundation- stone of Christianity, still, like other foundation-stones, it is out of sight. But the " theory of polygamy" which, as the Essayist observes^, Milton did something to illustrate in his life, ought surely to ha\ e made him " think thrice" before he proceeded to assure us that Milton's conception of love had not only " all the voluptuousness of the Oriental harem," and not only " all the gal- lantry of the chivalric tournament," but " all the pure and quiet a,ffection of our English fireside" (p. 29.) It is especially to be borne in mind that IVlilton's advocacy of this detestable and degrading institution is not either casual or half-hearted. " So far," he says himself, " is the question respect- ing the lawfulness of polygamy from being a trivial, that it is of the highest importance it should be decided."* He then discusses it at such length, and witli such care, that it may fairly ])e termed a treatise v.4thin a treatise. It is not necessary to cite more than a few sl;ort references. " With regard to the jiassage, they twain " . . . " shall be one flesh" ... if a man has many waves, the relation which he bears to each will not be loss perfect in itself, nor will the husband be less one flesh with each of t!iem, than if he had only one wife."-f- " He who puts away his wife, and marries another, is not said to commit adultery because he marries another, but because, in consequence of his marriage with another, he does not, retain his former wife."+ " 11^ then, polygamy be marriage properly so called, it is also lawful and honourable, according to the same apostle : marriage is honour- able in all, and the bed undefiled "§ Nor was his system incom- [;32. Milton on "Clirifltian Doctrine." (Summer's translation), p. 23 Ibid. : Ibid. p. 237. § Ibid. p. 241. ry'^^f'A.Jl^p^^.-,. LIFE OV LOUD MACAULAY. 51 ilton on terodox iderable bhe sub- ;ed ; and s Arian- at, after ndation- it is out Essayist e, ought eeded to " all the 1 the gal- Lnd quiet ^'ocacy of casual or I rcspect- it it is of discusses airly be y to cite jiassage, man has t be less rith each way his because marriage 1 11^ then, ^ful and honour- u incom- plete. The liberty of plurality, with winch it begins, is cai)[i('d at the other end by an equally large liberty of divorce. The /xn'- ne'ia, for which (he says) a wife may be put away, includes (ac- cording to him) " any notable disobedience or intractal)le carriage of the wife to the husband," " any point of will worship," " any withdrawing from that nearness of zeal and confidence which ouject of the lessons of Philosophy is to form the soul." " Non est, incpiam, instj-umen- torum ad u.sus necessarios opifex." The Baconian })hilosophy strikes away the iion. " If we are forced to make our cIkjIcc between the first shoemaker, and the author of the three Books on Anger, we pronounce for the shoemaker ;" so says the Essay- ist. From this peculiarity of the Baconian philosophy, " all its * " Adv. of Learning," book i. t De Aiif/m., vii. 1. X Nor. Orj. i. apli. 81. (Also, cites Dc Avgm, "Essays," ii. 373 seqq, 9th edit. ; 2, and CoyUata ct Visa.) II ^m 54 LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. other peculiarities directly and almost necessarily sprang." And Seneca is a type of what was both before and after. Socrates and Plato (but where we would ask is Aristotle ?) produced flowers and leaves, not fruits. Accordingly, " we are forced to say with Bacon that this celebrated philosophy ended in nothing but dis- putation ; that it was neither a vineyard nor an olive ground, Vjut an intricate wood of briars and thistles, from which those, who lost themselves in it, brought back many scratches and no fruit" (p. 37cS). The ])owers of these men were " systematically misdi- rected." The ancient philosophy was a treadmill, not a i)ath. He then enumerates, among the subjects which that philosophy hanuied, the following heads : " what is the highest good ; whether pain be an evil ; whether all things be fated ; whether we can be certain of anything ; whether a wise man can be unhappy." These questions he next compares to the Bigendian and Littlendian con- troversies in Gulliver, and he gravely pronounces that such dis- putes " could add nothing to the stock of knowledge," that they accumulated nothinfr, and transmitted nothinu'. " There had liecn plenty of |)loughing, harrowing, rea[)ing, and thrashing. But the garners contained only smut and stubble" (p. 880). At this point we must in fairness allow the reader to pause and ask himself two questions : first, whether in what he has read he is to believe the witness of his own eyes ; and secondly, after due rubbing and ruminating, whether Bacon is really responsible for these astounding doctrines { Unfortunately Macaulay has a con- tempt for Saint Augustine, and therefore we may make an ap- peal that would in his view be vain, if we observe that that great intellect and heart has left upon record in his works an acknow- ledgment in terms superlative if not extravagant of the value as well as the vast power of the works of Tlato ; the " godly Plato," as Alexander Barclay calls him. Something more we may hope to effect, since, Macaulay not only admired but rJmost woi'shi])- ped Dante, if we plead that the intellect of that extraordinary man was trained under Aristotelian influences, and imbued, nay saturated, with Ai-istotelian doctrines. But if we plead for the LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. 00 persons, much more must we contend for the subjects. Can it really be that, in this nineteenth century, the writer who, a.. Mr. Trevelyan truly says, teaches men by millions, has o-ravely taught them that the study of the nature of good, of the end for which we live, of the discipline of pain, of the mastery to be gained over it by wisdom, of the character and limits of human knowledge, is a systematic misdirection of the mind, a course of effort doomed beforehand to eternal barrenness, a sowing of seed that is to pro- duce only smut and stubble -? From this strange bewilderment, ji'id this ganglion of errors, even his own Milton might have saved him, who says of his lost angels, " on a hill retired " — " Of ji:ood and evil much they argued them, Of happiness and final misery, Passion and apathy, and glory and shame. " And then, as if from l)etween narrowing defiles of Puritanism which left him but a strip of sky and light, condemns their high themes and thoughts — " Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy ;" but yet he cannot help emerging a little ; and he adds — " Yet with a pleasing sorcery cDuld charm Pain for a irlnb' or un/piUli, and excite Fallacious hope, :• arm the obdured breast With fihtbhorn pati.,i)icc', as with triple steel.''* Having disposed of the Greek and Roman philosophers, the Essayist finds, as might be expected, still less difiiculty in " set- tling the hash" of the schoolmen, to whom the more cautious in- tellects of Mackintosh and Milman have done another kind of jus- tice ; and at length we have the summary, p. :388 : — " Words, and more words, and nothing but words, had been all the fruit of all the toil of all the most renowned sages of sixtv ii'enerations." But the new epoch liad arrived, and the new system, " Its object was the good of mankind, in the sense in which the mass of mankind always have understood, and always will under- stand, the word 'good.' ' M editor' said Bacon, ' instaurationem * " Paradise Lost," ii. .M2. oG LTFI-: OF LOKI) MACAULAY. philosophice cjusmodi quw nihil inanis aid (ihstraeti haheut, qumqiie vitce humanoi conditiones in melius iwoveltat!* " To make men perfect was no part of Bacon's plan. His hum- ble aim was to make imperfect men comfortable." As if Bacon had been an upholsterer, or the shoemaker whom Macaulay says, if driven to choose, he would prefer to the philo- sopher. So, if driven to choose for food between the moon and gi-een cheese of which in the popular saying it is supposed to be made, we should unquestionably choose the green cheese. But we could never be so driven : because the objects of choice sup- posed to conifiete are not in pari materia. Nor are the shoe- maker and the philosopher : there is no reason why we should not have both — the practitioner in useful arts, and the man medi- tative of the high subjects of human thought, mind, destiny, and conduct. The imagined opposition is a pure figment ; a case of " words and more word.s, and nothing but words," if not indeed, of " smut and stubble." The truth is that Macaulay was not only accustomed, like many more of us, to go out hobby-riding, but from the portentous vigour of the animal he mounted, was liable, more than most of us, to be run away with. His merit is, that he could keep his seat in such a steeple-chase : but as the object in view is arbitrarily chosen, so it is reached by cutting the fields, spoiling the crops, and spoiling or breaking down the fences, need- ful to secure to labour its profit, and to a man at large the full enjoyment of the fruits of the earth. Such is the overpowering- glow of colour, such the fascination of the grouping in the first sketches which he draws, that, when hot upon his work, he seems to lose all sense of restraints of fact and the laws of moderation : he vents the strongest paradoxes, sets upon the niost violent cari- catures, and handles the false weight and measure as efi'ectively as if he did it knowingiy. A man so able and so upright is never indeed wholly wrong. He never for a moment consciously pur- sues anything but truth. But truth depends, above all, on pro- portion and relation. The preter-hunuin vividness with which * " Redargutio Philosophiarum. " LIFE OF LORD MA( AULAV. 57 ling ver )ur- jro- licli Macaulay sees liis object, al)solulely casts a shadow upon what lies round ; he loses his perspective ; and imagination, impelled headlong by the strong consciousness of honesty in purpose, achieves the work of fraud. All things for him stand in violent contrast to one another. For the shadows, the gradations, the middle and transition touches, which make up the bulk of human life, character, and action, he has neither eye nor taste. They are not taken account of in his practice, and they at length die away from the ranges of his vision. We presume it cannot be doubted that Bacon found i>hiloso])hy had llown too high ; had been too neu'lectful both of iimnblc methods, and of what are commonly termed useful aims. What he deemed of himself is one thinu* : what we are now to deem of him is another. And we believe the true opinion to be that Bacon introduced into philoso})hy no revolutionary principle or power, either as to aims or as to means ; but that he helped to bring about important modiiications of degree. To the bow, bent too far in one direction, he gave a strong wrench in the other. He did nuich to discourage the arbitrarv and excessive use of a 2yriori and deductive methods, and, though he is tliought him- self to have effected nr>thing in physical science, largely contri- buted to open the road which others have trodden with such excellent effect. But the ideas imperfectly expressed in these sentences were far too homely to carry the blaze of colour and of gilding, which Macaulay was re(|uired by the constitution of his mind to lay on any ol)iects he was to handle with effect. Hence the really outi'ageous exaggerations (for in this case we cannot call them less), of which we have given the sum. But, after writing in that strain for twenty-five or thirty pages, at length his Hippogriff alights on terra Jirma ; and he tells us witli per- fect na'ivete (p. 403) that Bacon's philosophy was no less a moral than a natural philoso})hy, and that, though his illustrations are dravMi from physical science, his principles " are just as a})}»licable to ethical and political inquiries as to inquiries into the nature of heat and vegetation." Very good : but then why the long series 58 LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. :i of .spurious, as well as needless, contrasts between the useful and the true, lietween the world of mind and the world of matter, be- tween the good on which philosophers have speculated and the good which the masses of mankind always have sought, and al- ways will ; and why, in order that Lord Macaulay may write a given number of telling sentences and fascinating pages, is Bacon to be made responsible for a series of extravagances which with his mind, not less rational than powerful, not less balanced than broad, we are persuaded that he would have abhorred '. We shall not attcm[)t any more precise appreciation of the philosophy of this extraordinary man. Of all English writers, until Germany cast the eye of patient study upon Shakespeare, he has enjoyed, perhai)s, the largest share of European attention, as in his speculations he touched physics with one hand, and the unseen world with the other. There has, however, been much doubt, and much dift'erence of opinion, as to the exact place which is due to him in the history of science and philosophy. So far as we can gather, a sober estimate prevails. De Maistre has, indeed, in a work on the subject of Bacon and his philosophy, degraded him to the rank of something very near a charlatan : and, with reference to his character as a forerunner and torch-bearer on the paths of science, asserts that Newton was not even acquainted with his works. We do not suppose that any mere invectives of so inveterate a ])artisan will sensibly affect the judgment of the world. But writers of a very different stamp have not been wanting to point out that Bacon's own writings partake of preju- dice and passion. Mr, Stanley Jevons, for example, in his able work on " The piinciples of Science,"* animadverts on his undue disparagement of philosophic anticipation. Upon the whole, we fear that the coruscations of Lord Macaulay have done but little to assist an impartial inquirer, or to fix the true place of this great man in the historical evolution of modern })hilosophy. Those who may at all concur in our conmients on Macaulay' s besetting dangers, will observe without sur])rise that, while his * London Macmillan, 1H74. LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. 69 excesses in panegyric gave rise to little criticism, the number and vehemence of his assaults drew upon him a host of adversaries. He received their thrusts upon his target as coolly as if they had been Falstatf's men in buckram. We do not regi'et that he should have enjoyed the comforts of eciuanimity. But there is some- thing absolutely marvellous in his incapacity to acknowledge force either in reasonings of op})onents, or in those arrays of fact, under which, like battering rams, so many of his towering struc- tures of allegation .vere laid level with the fjround. " It surely was his profit, had ho known : It would have been his pleasure, had he seen."' The corrections made in his works were lamentably rare ; the acknowledgments were rarer and feebler still. Nor was this from any want of kindliness of heart, as these volumes would of them- selves suffice to demonstrate, or from any taint in his love of truth. It was due, we sincerely hold, to something like what the theolo- gians call invincible ignorance. The splendid visions which his fancy shaped had taken possession of his mind ; they abodr thure each of them entire in their majesty or beauty ; they could only have been dislodged by some opposing spell as potent as his own; they were proof against corrections necessarily given piecemeal, and prepossession prev^ented him from jKn'ceiving the aggregate effect, even when it was most conclusive'. It would be all well, or at least well in comparison, had w' only to contemplate this as a case of psychological curiosity. But the mischief is, that wrong has been done, and it remains unre- dressed. In ordinary eases of literarj^ (piarrel, assailants and de- fendants have something not hopelessly removed from ei^ual chances ; although as a rule the greater pungency, and less com- plexity, of attack makes it decidedly more po|)ular and effect! s^e than defence, when the merits do not greatly differ. But in this case the inecjuality was gross, was measureless. Foi- every single ear that was reached by the reply, the indictment, such was Macaulay's monarchy over the world of ivaders, had sounded in * Tennyson's "Guinevere." (iO LIFE OF LOUD MACAULAY. scores or hundreds, or even thousands. Tlio sling and the stone in the hands of half-a-scoi-e of Davids, however dcnighty, found no way of reproach to the foi'ehead of this Gcjliath, and scarcely whizzed past him in the air. And yet among the opposers whom he roused, there were men who spoke with care, information, or authority : some of them had experience, some had a relative popularity, some had great weight of metal. We have already referred to the champions in the case of Bacon. In relation to Mr. Croker's " Boswell," no less a person than Lockhart — nomen intra hoj^ cedef^ semper vener- anduni* — confuted and even retorted, in " Blackwood's Maga- zine," a number of the charges of inaccuracy, and reduced others to insignificance. So far as this instance was concerned, the fame of Boswell's work supplied a criterion which appears decisive of the controversy ; for Mr. Croker's edition has been repeatedly re- published, and has become classical, although the mere amount of material, extraneous to the text, which it carries, cannot but 1)e deemed a disadvantage. Warren Hastings had not a son ; but the heavy charges against Sir Elijah Impey, especially in connec- tion with the condemnation and execution of Nuncomar, brought the son of that Judge into the field. Mr. Impey's " Memoirs "f of his father appear sutiiciently to repel these accusations ; but the defence is lost in the mazes of a ponderous volume, known perhaps to no more than a few scores of readers, and that imper- fectly, while the original accusation circulates, with the other Essays, in a Student's Edition, 1 vol. ; a People's Edition, 2 vols. ; a Cabinet Edition, 4 vols. ; a Library Edition, 3 vols. ; a Cheap Edition, 1 vol. ; and as a separate Essay, at Is.^ Who shall rectify or mitigate these fearful odds ? With greater power and far gi'eater skill, and with more effect, Mr. Hay ward, in this Review and else- where, cast his shield over Madame Piozzi. Yet the number of persons who have read, mthout the means of guarding against * See the inscription under the buHt of Wolsey in the Quadrangle of Christ Church. f " Memoirs of Sir Elijah Impey." .Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1846, pp. ix. seqq, ; chjipters iii. iv. ix. xiii. , and elsewhere. X From the advertising ssheet at the close of the Biography. LIFE OF LOUD MACAULAV. Gl error, soiue of the harsliest ami moat gratiutous imputations ever scattered ])roa(Ica.st in the tlioiij^ditless wantonmsss of literary power, must be immensely larger than those who have had the means of estimating the able, and, we apprehend, irrefragable de- fence.* A remarkalde article in " Fraser's Maamphlet-writer of his day, entered into a correspondence with Macaulay, which was afterwards pultlished. chiefly on his grave inaccuracies in relation to Church Histor}-. The Bishop, a biting controversialist, had, we say advisedly, none of the servility which is sometimes imputed to him ; but he was an eminently, perhaps a redundantly, courteous gentleman. We have sincere pleasure in citing a portion of his inti-oiluct(jry eulogium, which we feel confident was written with entire sinceritv. After someother compliments of a more obvious kind, the Bishop proceeds : " But your higliest merit is your unequalled truthfuluesa. Biassed as you must l)e by your political creed, your party and C(jnnections, it is quite clear that you will never sacrifice the smallest particle of truth to those con- siderations. "+ This correspondence ended as amicably as it began. The Bi.shop obtained a courteous admission " of the propriety of making some alterations." j But they were to be "slight." On the main points the historian's opinion was " unchanged." We will notice but one of them. It has to do with the famous Commissions taken out by certain Bishops of the sixteenth century, among whom Bonner, under Henry VIIL, was one. Macaulay had stated that these * " Quarterly Review," April, 1868, p. 166. Hayward's " Autobiography, Letters, and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi. " 2 vols. 8vo. London, 18G1. t " Correspondence between the Bishop of Exeter and the Right Hon. T. B. Macau- lay. " London, Murray, 1861, p. 3, X p. 44. 62 LIFE OF LOUD MAC'AULAY ilocniDieiits rccoo-nisod the (*rown as the fountain of all E|»i.scopal aiitli(ji'ity witliout distinction. Tlie Bisho[) pointed out tliat the uutiiority conveyed by the Connnissions was expressly stated to l>e over and above pra'ter et ultra e(i,qiuv tibi, in Sticrii^ Lih)'h,(livinl- tu8 cominwsa esse d'Kjnoscuntur. In gallant defiance alike of the grammar and the sense, as will he seen on reference, Macaulay calmly adheres to his oi>inion.* It is hardly too much to say that with so prepossessed a mind, when once committed, argument is pcjwerless and useless. One able writer, Mr. Paget, in his " Now Examen,"-f" took up and dealt with most of the passages of the History which had l»een impugned; nor can we do better than refer the readers to his pages for the defence, against very swee])ing and truculent accusations, of Dundee, Marlborough, and William Penn. All these cases are of gi-eat interest. In all, the business of defence has been ably, and in most ])oints conclusively, i>erformed. But the rejoinder to the defence is truly forrnidalde. It consists in this, that the charge, witliout the reply, has been sold probaljly to the extent of half a nullion copies, and has lieen translated (ii. 390) into twelve languages. It would not l)e })Ossible, without adding too greatly to the number of these pages, to give an out- line of the argument on the respective cases. But there is an in- cident connected with the case of Penn, which we cannot omit to notice. The peaceful Society, to which he belonged, does not wholly alijure the practice of self-defence on grave occasions ; nor could there be a graver, than when one of the most revered names in its annals had been loaded by so commanding an author- ity with a mass of obloquy: " Lord Macaulay seeks to show that this same William Peni prosi.,ui. d himself to the meanest wishes of a cruel and profligate '•• loated with delight on the horrors of the scaflbld and the stake, wa , liJing tool of bloodthirsty and treacherous tyrant, a trafficker in sim. \' and sr homer of perjury, a conspirator seeking to deluge his country in blood, a s; cophant, a traitor, and a liar. "J ♦ P. 13. t " The New Examen " (reprinted in " Paradoxes and Puzzles." Blackwood, 1874). t Paget "New Examen," sect. v. ("Paradoxes and Puzzles," p. 1:^4). MTH or LOUD MACAl'LAY 63 574). From oi'ij^iiml sourei's, Mr. Pajjfct lias aiisworod the elmrnt-.s Avhicli lie had tlius cni])liatically suimiied u]). Mr. Fnrstcr, wlio has since risen to such hij^di distinction in the House of (\»iii- nions, performed the .same duty iu a preface to the " lAW' of Clarkson," afterwards separately re}>uhlished.* Thei'e remains inqtressed on the mind of that community a sentiment wliieli. even if it be somewhat mellowed \>y the laj>se of nearly tliiity years, can still he recoo-nised as one of indii^iiation aj^-ainst w hut is felt or thought to be literary outi-age. That Macaulay should have adhered to his cliarges with unabated confidence can, after what we have already seen, excite little surju'ise. But there still remains room for a new access of wondei' wIh-u we find that he not only remained himself unconverted, but even believed he had converted the Quakers. " Febniary 5, 1849. Lord Sliellmrn, Charles Austin, jiud MilniMii to lu'uak- fast. A pleasant ineal. Then the Quakera, five in nunilier. Never was there such a rout. They had al)S()lutely nothing to .say. Every charge against Penn came out as clear as any case at the Old IJailey. They had nothing to urge Init what was true enough, that he looked worse in uiy His- tory than he would have done on a general survey of Iiis whole life. But that is not my fault. . . . The Quakers were extremely civil. So was I. They complimented me on my courtesy and candour, "--ii. 251. And all this when they had left him boiling, or at lea.st shii- mering, in unanimity of wrath, and silent only because hopeless of redress, and borne down by a torrent that nothing could resist. We shall trespass on the reader with a rather moi-e de- tailed examination of a single remaining point, because it has not been touched by any of the vindicators whom we have already named. It is of considerable historic interest ami importance ; and it illustrates, perhaps more forcibly than any foregoing instance, that })articular phenomenon which we believe to be for its magnitude unparalleled in literature, namely, the al)- sence of remedy when a wrong has been done ; the utter and measureless disparity between the crushing force of this on- slaught, together with its certain and immediate celebrity through- * London, C. Gilpin, 1849. ■on 04. LIFK OF LORD MACAULAY, out the whole readinp^ world, and the feeble efforts at I'esistance which have had nothing adventitious to recommend them. For, the style of Macaulay, though a fine and a great, is without a doubt a pampering style, and it leaves upon the palate a disrelish for i\\i\ homely diet of mere truth and sense. We refer to the celebrated desc"ii>tion, wliich Macaulay has given, of the Anglican clergy of the Restoration j)eriod. Few })ortions of his brilliant work have achieved a more successful notoriety. It may perhaps be said to have been stereotyped in the common English mind. It is in its general result highly disparaging. And yet that gen- eration of clergy was, as we conceive, the most powerful and famous in the annals of tlie Eno-lish Church since the Reibrma- tion. If we do not include yet eaili(n' times, it is froi> want of record, rather than from fear of comparison. Perhaps, at the very most, one reader in a thonriand could ff)r and by himself correct, i|ualify, or confute, Macaiday's glittering a,nd most exaggerative description. The other nine hundred and ninety-nine lay wholly a«; his mercy. We Avere ourselves at the outset, and we have con- tinued to be, among the sturdiest disbelievers. But it will best serve the general purpose of this article if, instead of statijig the detailed grounds of our own rel)ellion, we follow a guide, whom we shall afterwards introduce to our readers. Though it may seem presum[)tuous, we will boldly challenge the general statement of Macaulay, that the reign of Charles II., when the influence of the Church was at its height, was the most immoral in our history. There has been a fashion of indulging in this kind of cant, and that mainly among those who exagger- ate the strictness of the Puritan ascendency which immediately preceded it ; as if it were possible for a i)eople, much less for a solid and stable people like the English, thus violently to alter its morality in the space of a few years. It is hard for an individual to descend instantaneously into the lower depths : nemo repente fuif turpissimus ; but for a nation it is impossible. Macaulay has, we are convinced, mistaken the Court, the theatre, and the circles connected with them, which may be called metropolitan. LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. 65 for the country at large. In these, indeed, the number of the dissolute was great, and the prevailing tone was vile. We, who have seen and known what good the example of Victoria and Albert amidst their Coai"t did during twenty years for the higher society of our own generation, may well comprehend the force of the converse operation, and rate highly the destructive contagion spread by Charles II. and his associates. But even for the Court of Charles II., we appeal from Lord Macaulay to the most recent and able historian of Non-conformity, Dr. Stoughton. From his pages we may perceive that ev^eu within that precinct were to be found lives and practices of sanctity, no less remarkable than the pollutions with which they were girt about.* We have intro- duced these preliminary sentences because even now there is, and much more at that time there was, no small degree oi connection between the morality of the country, anrl the piety, honour, and efficiency of the clergy. Amorg the corrupt retainers of the Court and theatre, there can be little doubt that they were in contempt. From such a stage as then existed, it would have been too much to ask respect for Jeremy Collier and his order. We shall take in succession the leading propositions of M.icau- lay. The Reformation, he says, fundamentally altered the place of the clergyman in society. Six or seven sons of peers at the close of Charles II. 's reign held episcopal or other valuable prefer- ment; but "the clergy were regarded as on the whole a plel»eian class; and, indeed, for one who made the figure of a gentleman, ten were rtiere menial servants!' ("History," i. pp. 325 seqq) No doubt the prizes of the Church, as they are called, were fewer and poorer, than they had been before the time of Henry VIII. But more than twice the number of members of nol)le families stated by Macaulay have been enumerated. This, how- ever, is a secondary error. It is more to the purpose that Eiich- ard, a favourite authority of Macaulay, complains that the gentry as a class made a practice of sending their inditferent and ill-pro- * Stoughton's " Ecclesiastical History." Ijondon, 1867-70. See also the very rs- markable "Life of Mrs. (iodolphin," fugnim. London, 1847. 66 LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. vided children into the ministry. While Archdeacon Oley, who published a preface to Herbert's "Country Parson," in 1675, writes as follows : " Though the vulgar ordinarily do not, yet the nobility and gentry do, distinguish and abstract the en'ors of the man from the holy calling, and not think their dear relations degraded by receiving holy orders." Wood says in the " Life of Compton," that holy orders were the readiest way of preferment for the younger sons of noble- men.* And Jeremy Collier is yet more to the point. " As for the gentry, there are not many good families in England, but either have or have had a clergyman in them. In short, the priesthood is the profession of a gentleman." Here is a flat contradiction to Macaulay, from a man whom he himself declares to be "of high note in ecclesiastical history ; " and is taken from the work on the stage, declared by him to be " a book which threw the whole literary world into commotion,, but which is now much less read than it deserves." (" Essays," vol. iii. pp 298-3()l.)t Again, if the clergy were a plebeian class, and nine-tenths of them wftre menial servants, we must take it for granted that their education was low in proportion. Yet Eachard, on whom Macau- lay loves to rely, in his work on the Contempt of the Clergy, cites as one of the causes of the mischief, that in the Grammar Schools, where they were educated, they were until sixteen or seventeen kept in pure slavery to a few Latin and Greek WGrds.:J: the very complaint most rife against Eaton and the other public schools during the last fifty years. To make good his view of the ignorancie prevailing among the clergy, Macaulay falls foul of the Universities. But his favourite, Buniet, writes, " learning was then liigh at Oxford " (" Own Time," i. p. 321), and BaiTow, a still higher authority, thus addresses an academic audience at Cambridge (" Opusc." iv., 123, 124) : " Greecos auctores omne genus, poetas, philosophos, historicos, scholiastas, quos non ita pridsm tanquam barbaroa raajoruin iiiscitia verita est attingere,,. • "Ath. Ox."ii. 968 (fol. ed.). + " Babingtou," pp. 18-2L X "Contempt," etc., p. 4, - «►'■ LIFE OF LORD MACAULAT. 67 or )lic of of iing ow, at jam matris nostroe etiani juniores filii intrepid^ pervolvunt, ipsorum lectionem in levis negotii censu reputantes ; nee minus prompts Lyceum, aut Acade- miani adeunt, quam si, remeantibus seculis, cum Platone et Aristotele in medii Athenis versarentur." Not a whit better* stand the statements of the historian con- cerning the marriages of the clergy. " The wife had ordinarily- been in the patron's service ; and it was well " — such is the easy audacity of his license — " if she was not suspected of standing too liigh in the patron's favour." Girls of honourable family were enjoined to eschew lovers in orders. Clarendon marks it as a sign of disorder that some " damsels of noble families had be- stowed themselves on divines." (" History," i. 328, 329.) For the extraordinary libel on the purity of the contemporary brides of clergymen, there does not appear to be either the founda- tion, or even the pretext, of authority. An injunction of Queen Elizabeth in 1559 is cited to prove the vulgarity of clerical mar- riages one hundred anJ twenty years afterwards : not to mention that even that Injunction appears to be seriously misunderstood. Clarendon's passage refers to " the several sects in religion," and nothing can be more improbable than that, with his views of Church polity, he could by these words intend to designate the Church of England. The divines whom he goes on to mention (early in Charles's reign), are " the divines of the time," and it seems more than probable that he intends by the phrase the Nonconforming Ministers, not the young men recently ordained, and of the ordinary age for marriage. Besides, even at the j)re- sent day, a certain inequality would be recognised in the nuptials of women of rank with clergymen of average station and condi- tion. In citing the testimony of plays of the time, Macaulay for- gets the preface to one of those he quotes. " For reflecting upon the Church of England ... no learned or wise divine of the Church will believe me guilty of it. ... A foolish lord or knight, is daily represented : nor are there any so silly to believe it an abuse to their order." (Preface to Shadwell's " Lancashire ■ " Kftbington," sect. iv. pp. 37-52. 68 LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. Witches.") It may be truly said that instances of good or high marriages, which can easily be supplied, do not prove the case affirmatively. But Pepys speaks of the extreme satisfaction with which he would give his sister to his friend Cumberland, a priest.* Nelson speaks of Bull's marrying a clergyman's daughter with praise, because he preferred piety and virtue to the advantages " which for the most part influence the minds of men upon such occasions. "i* Herbert warns the clergy against marrying " for beauty, riches, or honour. "| Be veridge speaks of the same tempta- tion in hi3 own case. Collier§ notes as a strange order the Injunc- tion of 1559 (already mentioned), that a clergyman should gain the consent of the master or mistress where a damsel served. Every one of these testimonies loses its force and meaning, if Macaulay is otherwise than grossly wrong in his allegation that the clergy were mostly in the state of menial serv'ants, and made corresponding marriages. Our readers may be already wearied with this series of expo- sures, and it cannot be necessary to dwell at any length on the incomes of the clergy. It is extremely difficult to compute them in figures ; and Macaulay judiciously avoids it. Yet even here he cannot escape from the old taint of exaggeration : "Not one living in fifty enabled the incumbent to bring up a family c<^m- fortably." Ordinarily, therefore, he followed manual employ- ments. On " white days " he fed in the kitchens of the great. " Study was impossible. ' " His children were brought up like the children of the neighbouring peasantry." (" History," i. 330.) Now, on the point of manual labour, George Herbert, in the pre- face to the " Country Parson," expressly says the clergy are censured " because they do not make tents, as Saint Paul did, nor hold the plough, thrash, or drive trades, as themselves do." (i. e. laymen). Walker, in the " Suflferings of the Clergy," speaks of it as a special hardship when they are driven to such occiipation?. • " Diary," iii. 170. + " Life of Bull," p. 44. X " Country Parson," chap. ix. § ♦• Ou Pride," p. 40. LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. 69 Eachard speaks of the extreme poverty of such as had but £20 or £30 j)er annum, and certifies that there are hundreds of such * Now, multiplying by four for the then gi-eater power of money, these extreme cases correspond with £80 and £120 at the present day : and there are not only hundreds, but thousands, of our clergy, whose professional incomes do not rise above the higher of the figures. A yet more telling piece of evidence may be had from Walker, who calls a living of £40 or £50 a year small. Such a living corresponds with £160 or £180 at the present time. This is still about the income of a " small living ;" and the evidence under this, as well as the other heads, goes to show, in contradic- tion to Macaulay, that while the absolute clergyman was witliout doubt much less refined, his social position relatively to the other members of society was in ordinary cases nearly the same as now. Of the aggregate national income, there can, we think, be no doubt that the clerical order had not a smaller but a larger share. With respect to the children of the clergy, as a general rule, Macaulay's statement (which he does not support by any author- ity), that the boys followed the plough and the girls went out to service, is no more and no less than a pure fable. It is also unpar- donable, because the contemporary or nearly contemporary author- ities, who confute it, are not obscure men, but men whose works any writer on the history of the period must or ought to have known ; such as George Herbert, in the " Country Parson,'" Ful- ler, in his " Worthies of England," Beveridge, in his " Private Thoughts," Dr. Sprat, aftei-wards a Bishop, preaching upon the Sons of the Clergy in 1678, and White Kennet, in his "Col- lectanea Curiosa." Only want of space prevents our crowding these pages with citations ; and we content ourselves with two pas;iages, each of a few words. The first is from White Kennet, who declares that " many of the jworer clergy indulge the in- clination of tneir sons by breeding them to a good competence of school learning," though they are afterwards unable, just as is now the case, to support them at the University, and are in such cases * " Contempt," etc., pp. 112-14. "Babington," sect, v., pp. 59, 64. 70 TJFE OF LORD MACAULAT. driven to divert them to " mean and unsuitable employs."* The second is from Fuller,*!* who heads one of his sections thus : " That the children of clergymen have been as successful as the sons of men of other professions." Without doubt the difficulties, which press so hardly now upon the clerical order along its lower fringe, pressed in like manner on it then. But Macaulay's description is of the order, not of the lower fringe of it. What would he have said if he had discovered that there vvas under Charles II., as there has been under the sovereigns 'of the nineteenth century, a " Poor Pious Clergy Society," which expressly invited, on behalf of the impoverished priesthood, gifts of cast-off clothing ? We then pass to the libraries of the clergy : " He might be considered as unusually lacky if he had ten or twelve dog-eared volumes among the pots and pans in his shelves " (i. 330). If the volumes were dog-eared, it was by being much read. If they were but ten or twelve, there was much to be got out of ten or twelve of the close and solid tomes which then were more custom- ary than now. But then it was only the lucky man who had ten 0^ twelve. Now, let the reader mark how this stands. His favourite Eachard I describes the case of men having six or seven works, which he enumerates, together with a bundle of sermons, for their library. For this account he was taken to task by his opponent in the "Vindication." Whereupon, Eachard himself thus replies : " The case is this : whether they may not be here and there a clergyman so ignorant, as that it might be wished that he were wiser. For my own part, I went, and guessed at random, and thought there might be one or so." § And this minimum is transformed by Macaulay's magic wand into a tnaxiifnum, this uncertain exception into the positive and prevailing rule. And here, again, while the solitary prop crumbles into dust, the counter-evidence is abundant. Walker recites the " rabbling " and plunder of clerical libraries of the value of 500^. * "CoU. Cur."ii. 304. t "Worthies,"!. 78. X " Contempt," &c. pp. 106, 7. § " Letter to the Author of the Vindication," p. 234. LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. 71 and 600^. St. David's was one of the poorest dioceses of the country; but Nelson* tells us that Bishop Bull considered the reading of the Fathers, " at least of those of the first three centu- ries " " not only as useful but absolutely necessary to support the character of a priest." Burnet's demands on the clergy in the ^' Pastoral Care,""!- seem to be quite as large as a bishop could now venture to put forward ; and many other writers may be cited to a similar effect.j The general rule, that no clergyman should be ordained without an university degree,§ was in force then as now ; and probably then more than now. The Grand Duke Cosmo III. states in his " Travels," when he visited the two Universities, that Cambridge had more than two thousand five hundred students, and Oxford over three thousand ; and it is safely to be assumed that a larger proportion of these large numbers, than now, were persons intending to take holy orders. That we may in winding up the case come to yet closer quar- ters, let it be observed that Macaulay admires and alleges || that there was assuredly no lack of clergymen "distinguished by abilities and learning." But " These eminent men were to be found, with scarcely a single exception, at the universities, at the great cathedrals, or in the capital." A passage perfectly consistent with all that has preceded ; as, indeed. Lord Macaulay is perhaps more notable than any writer of equal bulk for being consistent with himself. For the place.9 thus enumerated could hardly have included more than a tenth of the clergy. Of the mass the historian has yet one disparaging remark to make : that " almost the only important theological works which came forth from a rural parsonage " were those of Bull ; and those only because, inheriting an estate, he was able to purchase a library, " such as probably no other country clergyman in England possessed." 1" This assertion, not less unhappy than those which have preceded, is reduced to atoms by the production ♦ " Life of Bull," p. 428. + Chap. vii. t " Babington," sect. vii. pj). 87-9. S Cardwell's " Documentary Annals," ii. 304, 5, II I. 330. H II. 331. 72 LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. of a list of men, who sent forth from country parsonages works of divinity that were then, and in most cases that are now, after two hundred years, esteemed. Many of them, indeed, have been recently republished. The list includes the names, with others, of Towerson, Puller, Sherlock, Norris, Fulwood, Fuller (who died in 1661), Kettlewell and Beveridge. From this compressed examination, which would gain by a greater expansion, it may sufficiently appear that Lord Macaulay's charges of a menial condition and its accompaniments against the clergy of the Restoration jjeriod, generally and miserably break down. In no instance are they tolerably supported by positive evidence ; in many they are absolutely confuted and annihilated. Not, indeed, that he was absolutely and wholly wrong in any point, but that he was wrong in every point by omission and by exaggeration. Because books were then, especially in the country ,^ more difficult to obtain than now ; because manners were more rude and homely in all classes of the community ; because cases of low birth and conduct, still individually to be found, were per- haps somewhat more frequent ; because a smaller number of the well-born might have taken orders during the period of the Pro- tectorate, so that the Episcopal Bench was for a short time filled with men of humble origin, though of great learning and ability ;. these incidents must be magnified into the portentous statement, that " for one who made the figure of a gentleman, ten were mere menial servants." Isolated facts and partial aspects of his case he eyes with keenness ; to these he gives a portentous develop- ment ; and a magnified and distorted part he presents to us as the whole. The equilibrium of the truth is gone; and without its equilibrium it is truth no longer. That which may be alleged of the clergy of that period is, that they were unmitigated Tones. This is in reality the link which binds together the counts of the indictment ; as a common hostil- ity to William of Orange, or sympathy with James the Second^ brings into one and the same category of invective and condem- nation persons appearing at first sight to have so little in commoa LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. 78 \ ! as Marlborough, Claverliouse, and Penn. The picture of the Res-- toration clergy is a romance in the form and colour of a history. But while history in the form of romance is commonly used to glorify a little our poor humanity, the illusions of this romance in the form of history go only to discolour and degrade. That William, that Burnet, that Milton should have i)ersonal embellish- ment much beyond their due, is no intolerable evil. But the case becomes far more gi'ievous when a great historian, impelled by his headstrong and headlong imagination, traduces alike individuals- and orders, and hurls them into a hot and flaming inferno of his own. We have selected this case for an exposition comparatively full, not on the ground that it is the most important, but because, bet- ter than any other, it illustrates and exemplifies the uncommon, the astounding, inequality of the attack and the defence. The rcvsearches which we have partially compressed into the last few pages are those of Mr. Churchill Babington, a Fellow of Saint John's, the neighbour college to Macaulay's justly-loved and honoured Trinity. We do not assume them to be infallible. But every candid man must admit that the matter of them is formid- able and weighty ; tliat, in order to sustain the credit of Macaulay as an historian, it demands examination and reply. It is in vain that in his "Journal,"* he disclaims the censorship of " men who have not soaked their mind with the transitory literature of the day." For in the first ])lace this transitory literature, the ballad, the satire, the jest-book, the farce or vulgar comedy, requires immense sifting and purgation, like other coarse raw material, in order to reduce the gross to the net, to seclude and express the metal from the ore. In the second place, Mr. Babington seems thus far to have made it very doubtful whether Macaulay has made out his case even as tested by that transitory literature. Give, however, transitory literature what you will, it can form no apology for the gross neglect of grave and weighty and unim- peachable authorities. » IVevelyan's "Life," ii. 224. 74 LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. But if Macaulay's invocation of the transitory literature of the day is insufficient, what shall we say of Mr. Trevelyan's appeal to Biickle ? Buckle, forsooth, bears witness that Macaulay " has rather understated the case than overetated it." Macaulay, even when least dpriTrovs, can stand better on the feet that Nature gave him, than on a crutch like this. Quote if you choose publicans on liquor laws, or slave-drivers on the capacities of blacks ; cite Martial as a witness to purity, or Bacchus to sobriety ; put Danton to conduct a bloodless revolution, or swear in the Gracchi as spe- cial constables; but do not set Mr. Buckle as an arbiter of judicial measure or precision, nor let the fame of anything that is called a religion or a clergy depend upon his nod. Mr. Babington's work can only receive due appreciation upon being consulted in extenso. It attracted little notice on its appear- ance, except from periodicals connected with the clerical profession. He had from Sir Francis Palgrave the consolatory assurance that he had supplied a confutation as complete as the nature of the attainable evidence in such a case would allow. But his work was noticed* by the Edinburgh Review, in language which we can only describe as that of contemptuous ignorance. It is a book by " a Mr. Churchill Babington " (he was a Fellow of Saint John's and Hulsean Lecturer at Cambridge), which was " apparently in- tended to confute, but in reality very much confirms, our author's views." Such was the summary jurisdiction exercised upon the material of which we have presented a sample.*|* The measure of notice accorded to it by Macaulay was simply the insertion of an additional reference (" History," 5th edition, i. 331) to the life of Dr. Bray, " to show the extreme difficulty which the country clergy found in procuring books." The text remains unaltered. The work of Mr. Babington, of which only a very few hundred copies were * Not by Macaulay's fault. " I have told Napier that I ask it, as a personal favour, that my name and writings may never be mentioned in the Edinburgh Review, September 29th, 1842, vol. ii. p. 119." The Review had a deep debt to Macaulay ; but this was not the right way to pay it. "ble work, to same fashion. He was charge ciency, carelessness, and bad faith, though the Reviewer failed to convict him of any + Mr. Paget's valuable work, to which we have previously referred, was treated bjr the Edinburgh Review in the same fashion. He was charged with ignorance, self-sum- 1 mistake or inaccuracy. Mr. Paget very properly declined to enter the arena against a champion who wielded such weapons. LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. 7.1 sold or distributed, was for its main purpose still-born, is now hardly known in the world of letters, is not founrl in some of oui- largest and most useful libraries,* and if it now and then appears in an old book-shop, confesses by the modesty of its price, that it is among the merest waifs and strays of literature. Such is the fate of the criticism ; but the perversion — the grave and gross caricature with which it grappled — still sparkles in its diamond setting, circulates by thousands and ten thousands among flocks of readers ever new and ever charmed, and has become part of the household stock of every family. Since the time when Pere Daniel, the Jesuit, with guns at once so ponderous and so weak, replied inaudibly to the raking and devouring fire of Pascal, there never has been a case of such resistless absolutism in a writer, or such un- questioning and general submission in the reading world. Of this kind has been the justice administered by the tribunals of the day. We sorrowfully admit our total inability to redress the balance. Is there, then, any hope for the perturbed and wan- dering ghosts whom Macaulay has set agog, for Dundee, for Marl- borough, for Quaker Penn, for Madame Piozzi, for the long and melancholy train of rural clergy of the Restoration period, still wearing their disembodied cassocks, in the action of the last, the serenest, the surest, the most awful judge, in the compensating award of posterity ? Our hope is, that final justice will be done ; but first let us ask whether the injustice which has been done already will, not as injustice, but by virtue of the other and higher elements with which it is fused, stand the trying test of time. Has Macaulay reared a fabric — " Quod nee Jovis ira, nee ignes. Nee poterit femim, nee edax abolere vetustas ? " + Among the topics of literary speculation there is none more legitimate or more interesting than to consider who, among the writers of a given age, are elected to live ; to be enrolled among the Band of the Immortals ; to make a permanent addition to the * In the only one where we ehance to have discovered the work, it is a presentation ( copy. t " Ov. Met." XV. in fin- * » 76 LIFE OF LOUD MACAULAY, I mental ])atrimony of tlie human race. There is also none more difficult. Not that there is any difficulty at all in what is techni- cally called purging the roll : in supplying any number of names which are to sink ( if they have not yet sunk) like lead in the mighty waters, or which, by a slower descent — perhaps like the zigzag from an alpine summit — are to find their way into the repose of an undisturbed oblivion. Sad us it may seem, the heroes of the pen are in the main but fools lighted by the passing day on the nmd to dusty death. But it is when the list has been reduced, say to a hundredth part of the writers, and to a tenth of the few pro- minent and well-known writers of the day, that the pinch, so to call it, of the task begins. We now stumble onwards with unde- fined and partial aids. Bulk will surely kill its thousands ; that, which stood the ancient warrior in such good stead, will be fatal to many a modern author, who, but for it, might have lived. And money will as surely have killed its tens of thousands beforehand, by touching them as with palsy. It was one of the glories of Macaulay that he never wrote for money; it was the chief calamity of a yet greater, a much greater, man, of Scott, that iron necessities in later life, happily not until liLs place had long been secure, set that yoke upon his lofty crest. And few are they, who, either in trade or letters, take it for their aim to supply the market, not with the worst they can sell, but with the best they can produce. In the train of this desire, or need, for mor>3y comes haste with its long train of evils: crude conception, dip-shod execution, the mean stint of labour, suppression of the inconvenient, blazoning of the insignificant, neglect of causes, loss of proportion in the presenta- tion of results; we write from the moment, and therefore we write for the moment. Survival, we venture to suggest, will probably depend not so much on a single quality, as upon a general or composite result. The chance of it will vary directly as quality, and inversely as quantity. Some ores yield too low a percentage of metal to be woAh the smelting, whereas had the mass been purer, it had been extracted and preserved. Posterity will have to smelt largely the LIFK OF LOIU) MArAULAY. 77 products of the mines of modorn literature ; and will too often find the reward in less than due proportion to the task. So much for quantity. But (juality itself is not homogeneous ; it is made up of positives and negatives. Merits and demerits are subtly and variously combined ; and it is hard to say what will he the effect in certain cases of the absence of faults as compared with the pre- sence of excellences, towards averting or commuting that sentence of capital punishment which, estimate as we may the humanity of the age, must and will be carried into wholesale execution. Again, men look for different excellences in wr>rks of different classes. We do not hold an "yEneid" or a "Paradise Lost" bound to the veracity of an annalist. We do not look to Burke or Sheridan for m\ accurate and balanced representation of the acts of Warren Hastings. The subtle gifts of rhetoric, the magic work of jioetry, are loved for their own sake ; and they are not severely cross- examined upon the possession of historic attributes to which they do not pretend. But rhetoric is not confined to speeches, nor poetry to metre. It can hardly be denied, either by eulogist or detractor, by friend or foe, that both these elements are found in the prose of Macaulay ; and if they are most attractive, they are also perilous allies in the work of the historian and the critic. In truth, if we mistake not, the poetical element in his mind and temperament was peculiar, but was strong and pervading. Those who may incline to doubt our opinion that he was a poet as well as a rhetorician, and, perhajs a poet even more than a rhetori- cian, would do well to consult the admirable criticism of Professor Wilson on his "Lays." ("Life," ii. 12L) We will not dwell upon the fact (such we take it to be) that his works in verse possess the chief merits of his other works, and are free from their faults. But his whole method of touch and handling are poetical. It is, indeed, infinitely remote from the reflective and introspec- tive character, which has taken possession of contemporary poetry among our writers in such a degree, as not only to make its inter- pretation a work of serious labour, but also to impair its objective force. Macaulay was, perhaps, not strong in his reflective facul- 78 LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. i ties ; certainly he gave them little chance of development by exer- cise. He was eminently objective, eminently realistic ; resembling- in this the father of all poets, whom none of his children have surpassed, and who never converts into an object of conscious contemplation the noble powei"S which he keeps in such versatile and vigorous use. In Macaulay all history is scenic ; and philo- sophy he scarcely seems to touch, except on the outer side where it opens into action. Not only does he habitually present facts in forms of beauty, but the fashioning of the form predominates over, and is injurious to, the absolute and balanced presentation of the subject. Macaulay was a master in execution, rather than in what painting or music terms expression. He did not fetch from the depths, nor soar to the heights ; but his power upon the surface was rare and marvellous ; and it is upon the surface thaL an ordinary life is passed, and that its imagery is found. He mingled, then, like Homer, the functions of the poet and the chro- nicler ; but what Homer did was due to his time, what Macaulay did, to his temperament. \Vu have not attempted to ascertain his place among historians. That is an office which probably none but a historian can perform. It is more easy to discover for him contrasts and resemblances. Commonly sound in his classical appreciations, he was an enthusiastic admirer of Thucydides ; but there can hardly be a sharper contra.st than between the history of Thucydides and the history of Macaulay. Ease, brilliancy, pellucid clearness, commanding fascination, the crt'ective marshal- ling of all facts belonging to the external world as if on parade — all these gifts Macaulay has, and Thucydides has not. But weight, breadth, proportion, deep discernment, habitual contem})latian of the springs of character and conduct, and the power to hold the scales of human action with firm and even hand — these must be sought in Thucydides, and are rarely observable in Macaulay. But how few are the writers whom it would Oe anything less than ridiculous to place in comparison with Thucydides. The HLstoiy of Macaulay, whatever else it may be, is the work not of a jour- neyman but of a great artist, and a great .%rtist who lavishly LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. 7^ bestowed upon it all his powers. Such a work, once committed to the press, can hardly die. It is not because it is translated into> a crowd of languag^H-s, nor because it has been sold in hundreds of ' thousands, that Wb believe it will live, but because, however open it may be to criticism, it hsus in it the character of a true and high work of art. ,. We are led, then, to the conclusion or the conjecture, that, how- ever the body of our writers may be reduced in a near future by many and many a decimation, Macaulay will, and must, survive. Personal existence is beset with dangers in infancy, and again in . age. But au+horship, if n survive the first, has little to fear from the after-peril. If it subsist for a few generations (and generations are for books what years are for their writers), it is not likely to sink in many. For works of the mind really great there is an old age, no decrepitude. It is inconceivable that a time should conu' when Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, nhall not ring in the ears of civilized man. On a lower throne, in a less imperial hall of the same mansion, we believe that Macaulay will probably be found, not only in A.i). 2,000, which he modestly specifies, but in .'},0()0 or 2,850, which he more boldly formulates, or for so much of thi.H long, or any longer lease as the commentators on the A})ocalyp.se ■will allow the race to anticipate. Wliether he will remain as a standard and supreme authority, is another (juestion. Wherever and wilt vie v-^er read, he will be read with fascination, with delight, with wonder. And with copious instruction too; but also with Cv>p" )us reserve, with questioning scrutmy, with liberty to reject, g,nd with much exercise of that liberty. The contemporary mind may in rare cases be taken by storm ; but posterity, never. The tribunal of the present is accessible to iufiuence ; that of the future is incorrupt. The coming generations wi'' not give Macaulay up. but they will, probably, attach much less value than we have done to his ipse dixit. They will hardly accept from him his net solu- tions of literary, and still less of historic, problems. Yet they will obtain from his marked and telling points of view great aid in solving them. We sometimes fancy tliat ere long there will be 80 LIFE OF LORD MACAULAY. editions of his works in which his roadcrs may be saved from pit- falls by brief, respectful, and judicious commentary, and that his great achievements may be at once commemorated and corrected by men of slower pace, of drier light, and of more tranquil, broad- set, and comprehensive judgment. For his works are in many respects among the prodigies of literature ; in some, they have never been sur}.-ass3d. As lights that have shone through the whole universe of letters, they have made their title to a place in the solid firmament of fame. But the tree is greater and better than its fruits ; and greater and better yet than the works them- selves are the lofty aims and conceptions, the large heart, the independent, manful mind, the pure and noble career, which in this Biography have disclosed to us the true figure of the man who wrote them. ■■iMm)^V^il^A-k''^'-f'rr^e i H ti' i * t* ^ «■* « ■' *^vv: