"His Grace Archbishop Manners SuttonCould not keep on a single button.As for Right Reverend John of Chester,His waistcoats open at the breast are.Our friend* has filled a mighty trunkWith trophies torn from Doctor MonkAnd he has really tattered foullyThe vestments of Archbishop HowleyNo button could I late discern onThe garments of Archbishop Vernon,And never had his fingers mercyUpon the garb of Bishop Percy.The buttons fly from Bishop RyderLike corks that spring from bottled cyder,—"
[*The name of this gentleman has been concealed, as not being sufficiently known by all to give point, but well enough remembered by some to give pain.]
and so on, throughout the entire bench, until, after a good half-hour of hearty and spontaneous nonsense, the girls would go laughing back to their Italian and their drawing-boards.
He did not play upon words as a habit, nor did he interlard his talk with far-fetched or overstrained witticisms. His humour, like his rhetoric, was full of force and substance, and arose naturally from the complexion of the conversation or the circumstance of the moment. But when alone with his sisters, and, in after years, with his nieces, he was fond of setting himself deliberately to manufacture conceits resembling those on the heroes of the Trojan War which have been thought worthy of publication in the collected works of Swift. When walking in London he would undertake to give some droll turn to the name of every shopkeeper in the street, and, when travelling, to the name of every station along the line. At home he would run through the countries of Europe, the States of the Union, the chief cities of our Indian Empire, the provinces of France, the Prime Ministers of England, or the chief writers and artists of any given century; striking off puns, admirable, endurable, and execrable, but all irresistibly laughable, which followed each other in showers like sparks from flint. Capping verses was a game of which he never tired. "In the spring of 1829," says his cousin Mrs. Conybeare, "we were staying in Ormond Street. My chief recollection of your uncle during that visit is on the evenings when we capped verses. All the family were quick at it, but his astounding memory made him supereminent. When the time came for him to be off to bed at his chambers, he would rush out of the room after uttering some long-sought line, and would be pursued to the top of the stairs by one of the others who had contrived to recall a verse which served the purpose, in order that he might not leave the house victorious; but he, with the hall-door open in his hand, would shriek back a crowning effort, and go off triumphant."
Nothing of all this can be traced in his letters before the year 1830. Up to that period he corresponded regularly with no one but his father, between whom and himself there existed a strong regard, but scanty sympathy or similarity of pursuits. It was not until he poured out his mind almost daily to those who approached him more nearly in age, and in tastes, that the lighter side of his nature began to display itself on paper. Most of what he addressed to his parents between the time when he left Cambridge, and the time when he entered the House of Commons, may be characterised as belonging to the type of duty-letters, treating of politics, legal gossip, personal adventures, and domestic incidents, with some reticence and little warmth or ease of expression, The periodical insertion on the son's part of anecdotes and observations bearing upon the question of Slavery reminds the reader of those presents of tall recruits with which, at judiciously chosen intervals, Frederic the Great used to conciliate his terrible father. As between the Macaulays, these little filial attentions acquire a certain gracefulness from the fact that, in the circumstances of the family, they could be prompted by no other motive than a dutiful and disinterested affection.
It must not be supposed,—no one who examines the dates of his successive essays will for a moment suppose,—that his attention was distracted, or his energy dissipated, by trifles. Besides the finished study of Machiavelli, and the masterly sketch of our great civil troubles known as the article on Hallam's Constitutional History, he produced much which his mature judgment would willingly have allowed to die, but which had plenty of life in it when it first appeared between the blue and yellow covers. His most formidable enterprise, during the five earliest years of his connection with the great Review, was that passage of arms against the champions of the Utilitarian philosophy in which he touched the mighty shields of James Mill and Jeremy Bentham, and rode slashing to right and left through the ranks of their less distinguished followers. Indeed, while he sincerely admired the chiefs of the school, he had a young man's prejudice against their disciples, many of whom he regarded as "persons who, having read little or nothing, are delighted to be rescued from the sense of their own inferiority by some teacher who assures them that the studies which they have neglected are of no value, puts five or six phrases into their mouths, lends them an odd number of the Westminster Review, and in a month transforms them into philosophers." It must be allowed that there was some colour for his opinion. The Benthamite training may have stimulated the finer intellects, (and they were not few,) which came within its influence; but it is impossible to conceive anything more dreary than must have been the condition of a shallow mind, with a native predisposition to sciolism, after its owner had joined a society "composed of young men agreeing in fundamental principles, acknowledging Utility as their standard in ethics and politics," "meeting once a fortnight to read essays and discuss questions conformably to the premises thus agreed on," and "expecting the regeneration of mankind, not from any direct action on the sentiments of unselfish benevolence and love of justice, but from the effect of educated intellect enlightening the selfish feelings." John Stuart Mill, with that candour which is the rarest of his great qualities, gave a generous and authoritative testimony to the merit of these attacks upon his father, and his father's creed, which Macaulay himself lived to wish that he had left unwritten.
["The author has been strongly urged to insert three papers on the Utilitarian Philosophy, which, when they first appeared, attracted some notice. * * * He has, however, determined to omit these papers, not because he is disposed to retract a single doctrine which they contain, but because he is unwilling to offer what might be regarded as an affront to the memory of one from whose opinions he still widely dissents, but to whose talents and virtues he admits that he formerly did not do justice. * * It ought to be known that Mr. Mill had the generosity, not only to forgive, but to forget the unbecoming acrimony with which he had been assailed, and was, when his valuable life closed, on terms of cordial friendship with his assailant."—Preface to Macaulay's Collected Essays.]
He was already famous enough to have incurred the inevitable penalty of success in the shape of the pronounced hostility of Blackwood's Magazine. The feelings which the leading contributors to that periodical habitually entertained towards a young and promising writer were in his case sharpened by political partisanship; and the just and measured severity which he infused into his criticism on Southey's "Colloquies of Society" brought down upon him the bludgeon to whose strokes poetic tradition has attributed the death of Keats. Macaulay was made of harder stuff, and gave little heed to a string of unsavoury invectives compounded out of such epithets as "ugly," "splay-footed," and "shapeless;" such phrases as "stuff and nonsense," "malignant trash," "impertinent puppy," and "audacity of impudence;" and other samples from the polemical vocabulary of the personage who, by the irony of fate, filled the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. The substance of Professor Wilson's attacks consisted in little more than the reiteration of that charge of intellectual juvenility, which never fails to be employed as the last resource against a man whose abilities are undoubted, and whose character is above detraction.
"North. He's a clever lad, James.
"Shepherd. Evidently; and a clever lad he'll remain, depend ye upon that, a' the days of his life. A clever lad thirty years auld and some odds is to ma mind the maist melancholy sight in nature. Only think of a clever lad o' three-score-and-ten, on his deathbed, wha can look back on nae greater achievement than having aince, or aiblins ten times, abused Mr. Southey in the Embro' Review."
The prophecies of jealousy seldom come true. Southey's book died before its author, with the exception of the passages extracted by Macaulay, which have been reproduced in his essay a hundred times, and more, for once that they were printed in the volumes from which he selected them for his animadversion.
The chambers in which he ought to have been spending his days, and did actually spend his nights between the years 1829 and 1834, were within five minutes' walk of the house in Great Ormond Street. The building of which those chambers formed a part,—8 South Square, Gray's Inn,—has since been pulled down to make room for an extension of the Library; a purpose which, in Macaulay's eyes, would amply compensate for the loss of such associations as might otherwise have attached themselves to the locality. His Trinity fellowship brought him in nearly three hundred pounds annually, and the Edinburgh Review nearly two hundred. In January 1828, during the interregnum that separated the resignation of Lord Goderich and the acceptance of the Premiership by the Duke of Wellington, Lord Lyndhurst made him a Commissioner of Bankruptcy; a rare piece of luck at a time when, as Lord Cockburn tells us, "a youth of a Tory family, who was discovered to have a leaning towards the doctrines of the opposition, was considered as a lost son." "The Commission is welcome," Macaulay writes to his father, "and I am particularly glad that it has been given at a time when there is no ministry, and when the acceptance of it implies no political obligation. To Lord Lyndhurst I of course feel personal gratitude, and I shall always take care how I speak of him."
The emoluments of the office made up his income, for the three or four years during which he held it, to about nine hundred pounds per annum. His means were more than sufficient for his wants, but too small, and far too precarious, for the furtherance of the political aspirations which now were uppermost in his mind. "Public affairs," writes Lady Trevelyan, "were become intensely interesting to him. Canning's accession to power, then his death, the repeal of the Test Act, the Emancipation of the Catholics, all in their turn filled his heart and soul. He himself longed to be taking his part in Parliament, but with a very hopeless longing.
"In February 1830 I was staying at Mr. Wilberforce's at Highwood Hill when I got a letter from your uncle, enclosing one from Lord Lansdowne, who told him that he had been much struck by the articles on Mill, and that he wished to be the means of first introducing their author to public life by proposing to him to stand for the vacant seat at Calne. Lord Lansdowne expressly added that it was your uncle's high moral and private character which had determined him to make the offer, and that he wished in no respect to influence his votes, but to leave him quite at liberty to act according to his conscience. I remember flying into Mr. Wilberforce's study, and, absolutely speechless, putting the letter into his hands. He read it with much emotion, and returned it to me, saying 'Your father has had great trials, obloquy, bad health, many anxieties. One must feel as if Tom were given him for a recompense.' He was silent for a moment, and then his mobile face lighted up, and he clapped his hand to his ear, and cried: 'Ah! I hear that shout again. Hear! Hear! What a life it was!'"
And so, on the eve of the most momentous conflict that ever was fought out by speech and vote within the walls of a senate-house, the young recruit went gaily to his post in the ranks of that party whose coming fortunes he was prepared loyally to follow, and the history of whose past he was destined eloquently, and perhaps imperishably, to record.
York: April 2, 1826.
My dear Father,—I am sorry that I have been unable to avail myself of the letters of introduction which you forwarded to me. Since I received them I have been confined to the house with a cold; and, now that I am pretty well recovered, I must take my departure for Pontefract. But, if it had been otherwise, I could not have presented these recommendations. Letters of this sort may be of great service to a barrister; but the barrister himself must not be the bearer of them. On this subject the rule is most strict, at least on our circuit. The hugging of the Bar, like the Simony of the Church, must be altogether carried on by the intervention of third persons. We are sensible of our dependence on the attorneys, and proportioned to that sense of dependence is our affectation of superiority. Even to take a meal with an attorney is a high misdemeanour. One of the most eminent men among us brought himself into a serious scrape by doing so. But to carry a letter of introduction, to wait in the outer room while it is being read, to be then ushered into the presence, to receive courtesies which can only be considered as the condescensions of a patron, to return courtesies which are little else than the blessings of a beggar, would be an infinitely more terrible violation of our professional code. Every barrister to whom I have applied for advice has most earnestly exhorted me on no account whatever to present the letters myself. I should perhaps add that my advisers have been persons who cannot by any possibility feel jealous of me.
In default of anything better I will eke out my paper with some lines which I made in bed last night,—an inscription for a picture of Voltaire.
If thou would'st view one more than man and less,Made up of mean and great, of foul and fair,Stop here; and weep and laugh, and curse and bless,And spurn and worship; for thou seest Voltaire.That flashing eye blasted the conqueror's spear,The monarch's sceptre, and the Jesuit's beadsAnd every wrinkle in that haggard sneerHath been the grave of Dynasties and Creeds.In very wantonness of childish mirthHe puffed Bastilles, and thrones, and shrines away,Insulted Heaven, and liberated earth.Was it for good or evil? Who shall say?
Ever affectionately yours
T. B. M.
York: July 21, 1826.
My dear Father,—The other day, as I was changing my neck-cloth which my wig had disfigured, my good landlady knocked at the door of my bedroom, and told me that Mr. Smith wished to see me, and was in my room below. Of all names by which men are called there is none which conveys a less determinate idea to the mind than that of Smith. Was he on the circuit? For I do not know half the names of my companions. Was he a special messenger from London? Was he a York attorney coming to be preyed upon, or a beggar coming to prey upon me, a barber to solicit the dressing of my wig, or a collector for the Jews' Society? Down I went, and to my utter amazement beheld the Smith of Smiths, Sydney Smith, alias Peter Plymley. I had forgotten his very existence till I discerned the queer contrast between his black coat and his snow-white head, and the equally curious contrast between the clerical amplitude of his person, and the most unclerical wit, whim, and petulance of his eye. I shook hands with him very heartily; and on the Catholic question we immediately fell, regretted Evans, triumphed over Lord George Beresford, and abused the Bishops. [These allusions refer to the general election which had recently taken place.] He then very kindly urged me to spend the time between the close of the Assizes and the commencement of the Sessions at his house; and was so hospitably pressing that I at last agreed to go thither on Saturday afternoon. He is to drive me over again into York on Monday morning. I am very well pleased at having this opportunity of becoming better acquainted with a man who, in spite of innumerable affectations and oddities, is certainly one of the wittiest and most original writers of our times.
Ever yours affectionately
T. B. M.
Bradford: July 26, 1826.
My dear Father,—On Saturday I went to Sydney Smith's. His parish lies three or four miles out of any frequented road. He is, however, most pleasantly situated. "Fifteen years ago," said he to me as I alighted at the gate of his shrubbery, "I was taken up in Piccadilly and set down here. There was no house, and no garden; nothing but a bare field." One service this eccentric divine has certainly rendered to the Church. He has built the very neatest, most commodious, and most appropriate rectory that I ever saw. All its decorations are in a peculiarly clerical style; grave, simple, and gothic. The bed-chambers are excellent, and excellently fitted up; the sitting-rooms handsome; and the grounds sufficiently pretty. Tindal and Parke, (not the judge of course,) two of the best lawyers, best scholars, and best men in England, were there. We passed an extremely pleasant evening, had a very good dinner, and many amusing anecdotes.
After breakfast the next morning I walked to church with Sydney Smith. The edifice is not at all in keeping with the rectory. It is a miserable little hovel with a wooden belfry. It was, however, well filled, and with decent people, who seemed to take very much to their pastor. I understand that he is a very respectable apothecary; and most liberal of his skill, his medicine, his soul, and his wine, among the sick. He preached a very queer sermon—the former half too familiar and the latter half too florid, but not without some ingenuity of thought and expression.
Sydney Smith brought me to York on Monday morning, in time for the stage-coach which runs to Skipton. We parted with many assurances of goodwill. I have really taken a great liking to him. He is full of wit, humour, and shrewdness. He is not one of those show-talkers who reserve all their good things for special occasions. It seems to be his greatest luxury to keep his wife and daughters laughing for two or three hours every day. His notions of law, government, and trade are surprisingly clear and just. His misfortune is to have chosen a profession at once above him and below him. Zeal would have made him a prodigy; formality and bigotry would have made him a bishop; but he could neither rise to the duties of his order, nor stoop to its degradations.
He praised my articles in the Edinburgh Review with a warmth which I am willing to believe sincere, because he qualified his compliments with several very sensible cautions. My great danger, he said, was that of taking a tone of too much asperity and contempt in controversy. I believe that he is right, and I shall try to mend.
Ever affectionately yours
T. B. M.
Lancaster: September 1, 1827.
My dear Father,—Thank Hannah from me for her pleasant letter. I would answer it if I had anything equally amusing to say in return; but here we have no news, except what comes from London, and is as stale as inland fish before it reaches us. We have circuit anecdotes to be sure; and perhaps you will be pleased to hear that Brougham has been rising through the whole of this struggle. At York Pollock decidedly took the lead. At Durham Brougham overtook him, passed him at Newcastle, and got immensely ahead of him at Carlisle and Appleby, which, to be sure, are the places where his own connections lie. We have not been here quite long enough to determine how he will succeed with the Lancastrians. This has always hitherto been his least favourable place. He appears to improve in industry and prudence. He learns his story more thoroughly, and tells it more clearly, than formerly. If he continues to manage causes as well as he has done of late he must rise to the summit of the profession. I cannot say quite so much for his temper, which this close and constant rivalry does not improve. He squabbles with Pollock more than, in generosity or policy, he ought to do. I have heard several of our younger men wondering that he does not show more magnanimity. He yawns while Pollock is speaking; a sign of weariness which, in their present relation to each other, he would do well to suppress. He has said some very good, but very bitter, things. There was a case of a lead-mine. Pollock was for the proprietors, and complained bitterly of the encroachments which Brougham's clients had made upon this property, which he represented as of immense value. Brougham said that the estimate which his learned friend formed of the property was vastly exaggerated, but that it was no wonder that a person who found it so easy to get gold for his lead should appreciate that heavy metal so highly. The other day Pollock laid down a point of law rather dogmatically. "Mr. Pollock," said Brougham, "perhaps, before you rule the point, you will suffer his Lordship to submit a few observations on it to your consideration."
I received the Edinburgh paper which you sent me. Silly and spiteful as it is, there is a little truth in it. In such cases I always remember those excellent lines of Boileau
"Moi, qu'une humeur trop libre, un esprit peu soumis,De bonne heure a pourvo d'utiles ennemis,Je dois plus a leur haine (il faut que je l'avoue)Qu'au faible et vain talent dont la France me loue.Sitot que sur un vice un pensent me confondre,C'est en me guerissant que je sais leur repondre."
This place disagrees so much with me that I shall leave it as soon as the dispersion of the circuit commences,—that is, after the delivery of the last batch of briefs; always supposing, which may be supposed without much risk of mistake, that there are none for me.
Ever yours affectionately
T. B. M.
It was about this period that the Cambridge Senate came to a resolution to petition against the Catholic Claims. The minority demanded a poll, and conveyed a hint to their friends in London. Macaulay, with one or two more to help him, beat up the Inns of Court for recruits, chartered a stage-coach, packed it inside and out with young Whig Masters of Arts, and drove up King's Parade just in time to turn the scale in favour of Emancipation. The whole party dined in triumph at Trinity, and got back to town the same evening; and the Tory journalists were emphatic in their indignation at the deliberate opinion of the University having been overridden by a coachful of "godless and briefless barristers."
Court House, Pomfret: April 15, 1828.
My dear Mother,—I address this epistle to you as the least undeserving of a very undeserving family. You, I think, have sent me one letter since I left London. I have nothing here to do but to write letters; and, what is not very often the case, I have members of Parliament in abundance to frank them, and abundance of matter to fill them with. My Edinburgh expedition has given me so much to say that, unless I write off some of it before I come home, I shall talk you all to death, and be voted a bore in every house which I visit. I will commence with Jeffrey himself. I had almost forgotten his person; and, indeed, I should not wonder if even now I were to forget it again. He has twenty faces almost as unlike each other as my father's to Mr. Wilberforce's, and infinitely more unlike to each other than those of near relatives often are; infinitely more unlike, for example, than those of the two Grants. When absolutely quiescent, reading a paper, or hearing a conversation in which he takes no interest, his countenance shows no indication whatever of intellectual superiority of any kind. But as soon as he is interested, and opens his eyes upon you, the change is like magic. There is a flash in his glance, a violent contortion in his frown, an exquisite humour in his sneer, and a sweetness and brilliancy in his smile, beyond anything that ever I witnessed. A person who had seen him in only one state would not know him if he saw him in another. For he has not, like Brougham, marked features which in all moods of mind remain unaltered. The mere outline of his face is insignificant. The expression is everything; and such power and variety of expression I never saw in any human countenance, not even in that of the most celebrated actors. I can conceive that Garrick may have been like him. I have seen several pictures of Garrick, none resembling another, and I have heard Hannah More speak of the extraordinary variety of countenance by which he was distinguished, and of the unequalled radiance and penetration of his eye. The voice and delivery of Jeffrey resemble his face. He possesses considerable power of mimicry, and rarely tells a story without imitating several different accents. His familiar tone, his declamatory tone, and his pathetic tone are quite different things. Sometimes Scotch predominates in his pronunciation; sometimes it is imperceptible. Sometimes his utterance is snappish and quick to the last degree; sometimes it is remarkable for rotundity and mellowness. I can easily conceive that two people who had seen him on different days might dispute about him as the travellers in the fable disputed about the chameleon.
In one thing, as far as I observed, he is always the same and that is the warmth of his domestic affections. Neither Mr. Wilberforce, nor my uncle Babington, come up to him in this respect. The flow of his kindness is quite inexhaustible. Not five minutes pass without some fond expression, or caressing gesture, to his wife or his daughter. He has fitted up a study for himself; but he never goes into it. Law papers, reviews, whatever he has to write, he writes in the drawing-room, or in his wife's boudoir. When he goes to other parts of the country on a retainer he takes them in the carriage with him. I do not wonder that he should be a good husband, for his wife is a very amiable woman. But I was surprised to see a man so keen and sarcastic, so much of a scoffer, pouring himself out with such simplicity and tenderness in all sorts of affectionate nonsense. Through our whole journey to Perth he kept up a sort of mock quarrel with his daughter; attacked her about novel-reading, laughed her into a pet, kissed her out of it, and laughed her into it again. She and her mother absolutely idolise him, and I do not wonder at it.
His conversation is very much like his countenance and his voice, of immense variety; sometimes plain and unpretending even to flatness; sometimes whimsically brilliant and rhetorical almost beyond the license of private discourse. He has many interesting anecdotes, and tells them very well. He is a shrewd observer; and so fastidious that I am not surprised at the awe in which many people seem to stand when in his company. Though not altogether free from affectation himself, he has a peculiar loathing for it in other people, and a great talent for discovering and exposing it. He has a particular contempt, in which I most heartily concur with him, for the fadaises of bluestocking literature, for the mutual flatteries of coteries, the handing about of vers de societe, the albums, the conversaziones, and all the other nauseous trickeries of the Sewards, Hayleys, and Sothebys. I am not quite sure that he has escaped the opposite extreme, and that he is not a little too desirous to appear rather a man of the world, an active lawyer, or an easy careless gentleman, than a distinguished writer. I must own that, when Jeffrey and I were by ourselves, he talked much and very well on literary topics. His kindness and hospitality to me were, indeed, beyond description, and his wife was as pleasant and friendly as possible. I liked everything but the hours. We were never up till ten, and never retired till two hours at least after midnight. Jeffrey, indeed, never goes to bed till sleep comes on him overpoweringly, and never rises till forced up by business or hunger. He is extremely well in health; so that I could not help suspecting him of being very hypochondriac; for all his late letters to me have been filled with lamentations about his various maladies. His wife told me, when I congratulated her on his recovery, that I must not absolutely rely on all his accounts of his own diseases. I really think that he is, on the whole, the youngest-looking man of fifty that I know, at least when he is animated.
His house is magnificent. It is in Moray Place, the newest pile of buildings in the town, looking out to the Forth on one side, and to a green garden on the other. It is really equal to the houses in Grosvenor Square. Fine, however, as is the new quarter of Edinburgh, I decidedly prefer the Old Town. There is nothing like it in the island. You have been there, but you have not seen the town, and no lady ever sees a town. It is only by walking on foot through all corners at all hours that cities can be really studied to good purpose. There is a new pillar to the memory of Lord Melville; very elegant, and very much better than the man deserved. His statue is at the top, with a wreath on the head very like a nightcap drawn over the eyes. It is impossible to look at it without being reminded of the fate which the original most richly merited. But my letter will overflow even the ample limits of a frank, if I do not conclude. I hope that you will be properly penitent for neglecting such a correspondent when you receive so long a dispatch, written amidst the bellowing of justices, lawyers, criers, witnesses, prisoners, and prisoners' wives and mothers.
Ever yours affectionately
T. B. M.
Lancaster: March 24, 1829.
My dear Father,—A single line to say that I am at Lancaster. Where you all are I have not the very slightest notion. Pray let me hear. That dispersion of the Gentiles which our friends the prophets foretell seems to have commenced with our family.
Everything here is going on in the common routine. The only things of peculiar interest are those which we get from the London papers. All minds seem to be perfectly made up as to the certainty of Catholic Emancipation having come at last. The feeling of approbation among the barristers is all but unanimous. The quiet townspeople here, as far as I can see, are very well contented. As soon as I arrived I was asked by my landlady how things had gone. I told her the division, which I had learned from Brougham at Garstang. She seemed surprised at the majority. I asked her if she was against the measure. "No; she only wished that all Christians would live in peace and charity together." A very sensible speech, and better than one at least of the members for the county ever made in his life.
I implore you above everything, my dear Father, to keep up your health and spirits. Come what may, the conveniences of life, independence, our personal respectability, and the exercise of the intellect and the affections, we are almost certain of retaining; and everything else is a mere superfluity, to be enjoyed, but not to be missed. But I ought to be ashamed of reading you a lecture on qualities which you are so much more competent to teach than myself.
Ever yours very affectionately
T. B. M.
To Macvey Napier, Esq.
50 Great Ormond Street, London:
January 25, 1830.
My dear Sir,—I send off by the mail of to-day an article on Southey,—too long, I fear, to meet your wishes, but as short as I could make it.
There were, by the bye, in my last article a few omissions made, of no great consequence in themselves; the longest, I think, a paragraph of twelve or fourteen lines. I should scarcely have thought this worth mentioning, as it certainly by no means exceeds the limits of that editorial prerogative which I most willingly recognise, but that the omissions seemed to me, and to one or two persons who had seen the article in its original state, to be made on a principle which, however sound in itself, does not I think apply to compositions of this description. The passages omitted were the most pointed and ornamented sentences in the review. Now, for high and grave works, a history for example, or a system of political or moral philosophy, Doctor Johnson's rule,—that every sentence which the writer thinks fine ought to be cut out,—is excellent. But periodical works like ours, which unless they strike at the first reading are not likely to strike at all, whose whole life is a month or two, may, I think, be allowed to be sometimes even viciously florid. Probably, in estimating the real value of any tinsel which I may put upon my articles, you and I should not materially differ. But it is not by his own taste, but by the taste of the fish, that the angler is determined in his choice of bait.
Perhaps after all I am ascribing to system what is mere accident. Be assured, at all events, that what I have said is said in perfect good humour, and indicates no mutinous disposition.
The Jews are about to petition Parliament for relief from the absurd restrictions which lie on them,—the last relique of the old system of intolerance. I have been applied to by some of them in the name of the managers of the scheme to write for them in the Edinburgh Review. I would gladly further a cause so good, and you, I think, could have no objection.
Ever yours truly
T. B. MACAULAY.
Bowood: February 20, 1830.
My dear Father,—I am here in a very nice room, with perfect liberty, and a splendid library at my command. It seems to be thought desirable that I should stay in the neighbourhood, and pay my compliments to my future constituents every other day.
The house is splendid and elegant, yet more remarkable for comfort than for either elegance or splendour. I never saw any great place so thoroughly desirable for a residence. Lord Kerry tells me that his uncle left everything in ruin,—trees cut down, and rooms unfurnished,—and sold the library, which was extremely fine. Every book and picture in Bowood has been bought by the present Lord, and certainly the collection does him great honour.
I am glad that I stayed here. A burgess of some influence, who, at the last election, attempted to get up an opposition to the Lansdowne interest, has just arrived. I called on him this morning, and, though he was a little ungracious at first, succeeded in obtaining his promise. Without him, indeed, my return would have been secure; but both from motives of interest and from a sense of gratitude I think it best to leave nothing undone which may tend to keep Lord Lansdowne's influence here unimpaired against future elections.
Lord Kerry seems to me to be going on well. He has been in very good condition, he says, this week; and hopes to be at the election, and at the subsequent dinner. I do not know when I have taken so much to so young a man. In general my intimacies have been with my seniors; but Lord Kerry is really quite a favourite of mine,—kind, lively, intelligent, modest, with the gentle manners which indicate a long intimacy with the best society, and yet without the least affectation. We have oceans of beer, and mountains of potatoes, for dinner. Indeed, Lady Lansdowne drank beer most heartily on the only day which she passed with us, and, when I told her laughing that she set me at ease on a point which had given me much trouble, she said that she would never suffer any dandy novelist to rob her of her beer or her cheese.
The question between law and politics is a momentous one. As far as I am myself concerned, I should not hesitate; but the interest of my family is also to be considered. We shall see, however, before long what my chance of success as a public man may prove to be. At present it would clearly be wrong in me to show any disposition to quit my profession.
I hope that you will be on your guard as to what you may say to Brougham about this business. He is so angry at it that he cannot keep his anger to himself. I know that he has blamed Lord Lansdowne in the robing-room of the Court of King's Bench. The seat ought, he says, to have been given to another man. If he means Denman, I can forgive, and even respect him, for the feeling which he entertains.
Believe me ever yours most affectionately
T. B. M.
State of public affairs when Macaulay entered Parliament—His maiden speech—The French Revolution of July 1830—Macaulay's letters from Paris—The Palais Royal—Lafayette—Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia—The new Parliament meets—Fall of the Duke of Wellington—Scene with Croker—TheReform Bill—Political success—House of Commons life—Macaulay's party spirit—Loudon Society—Mr. Thomas FlowerEllis—Visit to Cambridge—Rothley Temple—MargaretMacaulay's Journal—Lord Brougham—Hopes of Office—Macaulayas a politician—Letters to Hannah Macaulay, Mr. Napier, andMr. Ellis.
THROUGHOUT the last two centuries of our history there never was a period when a man conscious of power, impatient of public wrongs, and still young enough to love a fight for its own sake, could have entered Parliament with a fairer prospect of leading a life worth living, and doing work that would requite the pains, than at the commencement of the year 1830.
In this volume, which only touches politics in order to show to what extent Macaulay was a politician, and for how long, controversies cannot appropriately be started or revived. This is not the place to enter into a discussion on the vexed question as to whether Mr. Pitt and his successors, in pursuing their system of repression, were justified by the necessities of the long French war. It is enough to assert, what few or none will deny, that, for the space of more than a generation from 1790 onwards, our country had, with a short interval, been governed on declared reactionary principles. We, in whose days Whigs and Tories have often exchanged office, and still more often interchanged policies, find it difficult to imagine what must have been the condition of the kingdom, when one and the same party almost continuously held not only place, but power, throughout a period when, to an unexampled degree, "public life was exasperated by hatred, and the charities of private life soured by political aversion." [These expressions occur in Lord Cockburn's Memorials of his Time.] Fear, religion, ambition, and self-interest,—everything that could tempt and everything that could deter,—were enlisted on the side of the dominant opinions. To profess Liberal views was to be excluded from all posts of emolument, from all functions of dignity, and from all opportunities of public usefulness. The Whig leaders, while enjoying that security for life and liberty which even in the worst days of our recent history has been the reward of eminence, were powerless in the Commons and isolated in the Lords. No motive but disinterested conviction kept a handful of veterans steadfast round a banner which was never raised except to be swept contemptuously down by the disciplined and overwhelming strength of the ministerial phalanx. Argument and oratory were alike unavailing under a constitution which was indeed a despotism of privilege. The county representation of England was an anomaly, and the borough representation little better than a scandal. The constituencies of Scotland, with so much else that of right belonged to the public, had got into Dundas's pocket. In the year 1820 all the towns north of Tweed together contained fewer voters than are now on the rolls of the single burgh of Hawick, and all the counties together contained fewer voters than are now on the register of Roxburghshire. So small a band of electors was easily manipulated by a party leader who had the patronage of India at his command. The three Presidencies were flooded with the sons and nephews of men who were lucky enough to have a seat in a Town Council, or a superiority in a rural district; and fortunate it was for our empire that the responsibilities of that noblest of all careers soon educated young Indian Civil Servants into something higher than mere adherents of a political party.
While the will of the nation was paralysed within the senate, effectual care was taken that its voice should not be heard without. The press was gagged in England, and throttled in Scotland. Every speech, or sermon, or pamphlet, the substance of which a Crown lawyer could torture into a semblance of sedition, sent its author to the jail, the hulks, or the pillory. In any place of resort where an informer could penetrate, men spoke their minds at imminent hazard of ruinous fines, and protracted imprisonment. It was vain to appeal to Parliament for redress against the tyranny of packed juries, and panic-driven magistrates. Sheridan endeavoured to retain for his countrymen the protection of Habeas Corpus; but he could only muster forty-one supporters. Exactly as many members followed Fox into the lobby when he opposed a bill, which, interpreted in the spirit that then actuated our tribunals, made attendance at an open meeting summoned for the consideration of Parliamentary Reform a service as dangerous as night-poaching, and far more dangerous than smuggling. Only ten more than that number ventured to protest against the introduction of a measure, still more inquisitorial in its provisions and ruthless in its penalties, which rendered every citizen who gave his attention to the removal of public grievances liable at any moment to find himself in the position of a criminal;—that very measure in behalf of which Bishop Horsley had stated in the House of Peers that he did not know what the mass of the people of any country had to do with the laws, except to obey them.
Amidst a population which had once known freedom, and was still fit to be entrusted with it, such a state of matters could not last for ever. Justly proud of the immense success that they had bought by their resolution, their energy, and their perseverance, the Ministers regarded the fall of Napoleon as a party triumph which could only serve to confirm their power. But the last cannon-shot that was fired on the 18th of June, was in truth the death-knell of the golden age of Toryism. When the passion and ardour of the war gave place to the discontent engendered by a protracted period of commercial distress, the opponents of progress began to perceive that they had to reckon, not with a small and disheartened faction, but with a clear majority of the nation led by the most enlightened, and the most eminent, of its sons. Agitators and incendiaries retired into the background, as will always be the case when the country is in earnest; and statesmen who had much to lose, but were not afraid to risk it, stepped quietly and firmly to the front. The men, and the sons of the men, who had so long endured exclusion from office, embittered by unpopularity, at length reaped their reward. Earl Grey, who forty years before had been hooted through the streets of North Shields with cries of "No Popery," lived to bear the most respected name in England; and Brougham, whose opinions differed little from those for expressing which Dr. Priestley in 1791 had his house burned about his ears by the Birmingham mob, was now the popular idol beyond all comparison or competition.
In the face of such unanimity of purpose, guided by so much worth and talent, the Ministers lost their nerve, and, like all rulers who do not possess the confidence of the governed, began first to make mistakes, and then to quarrel among themselves. Throughout the years of Macaulay's early manhood the ice was breaking fast. He was still quite young when the concession of Catholic Emancipation gave a moral shock to the Tory party from which it never recovered until the old order of things had finally passed away. [Macaulay was fond of repeating an answer made to him by Lord Clarendon in the year 1829. The young men were talking over the situation, and Macaulay expressed curiosity as to the terms in which the Duke of Wellington would recommend the Catholic Relief Bill to the Peers. "Oh," said the other, "it will be easy enough. He'll say 'My lords! Attention! Right about face! March!'"] It was his fortune to enter into other men's labours after the burden and heat of the day had already been borne, and to be summoned into the field just as the season was at hand for gathering in a ripe and long-expected harvest of beneficent legislation.
On the 5th of April, 1830, he addressed the House of Commons on the second reading of Mr. Robert Grant's bill for the Removal of Jewish Disabilities. Sir James Mackintosh rose with him, but Macaulay got the advantage of the preference that has always been conceded to one who speaks for the first time after gaining his seat during the continuance of a Parliament;—a privilege which, by a stretch of generosity, is now extended to new members who have been returned at a general election. Sir James subsequently took part in the debate; not, as he carefully assured his audience, "to supply any defects in the speech of his honourable friend, for there were none that he could find, but principally to absolve his own conscience." Indeed, Macaulay, addressing himself to his task with an absence of pretension such as never fails to conciliate the goodwill of the House towards a maiden speech, put clearly and concisely enough the arguments in favour of the bill;—arguments which, obvious, and almost common-place, as they appear under his straightforward treatment, had yet to be repeated during a space of six and thirty years before they commended themselves to the judgment of our Upper Chamber.
"The power of which you deprive the Jew consists in maces, and gold chains, and skins of parchment with pieces of wax dangling from their edges. The power which you leave the Jew is the power of principal over clerk, of master over servant, of landlord over tenant. As things now stand, a Jew may be the richest man in England. He may possess the means of raising this party and depressing that; of making East Indian directors; of making members of Parliament. The influence of a Jew may be of the first consequence in a war which shakes Europe to the centre. His power may come into play in assisting or thwarting the greatest plans of the greatest princes; and yet, with all this confessed, acknowledged, undenied, you would have him deprived of power! Does not wealth confer power? How are we to permit all the consequences of that wealth but one? I cannot conceive the nature of an argument that is to bear out such a position. If we were to be called on to revert to the day when the warehouses of Jews were torn down and pillaged, the theory would be comprehensible. But we have to do with a persecution so delicate that there is no abstract rule for its guidance. You tell us that the Jews have no legal right to power, and I am bound to admit it; but in the same way, three hundred years ago they had no legal right to be in England, and six hundred years ago they had no legal right to the teeth in their heads. But, if it is the moral right we are to look at, I hold that on every principle of moral obligation the Jew has a right to political power."
He was on his legs once again, and once only, during his first Session; doing more for future success in Parliament by his silence than he could have effected by half a dozen brilliant perorations. A crisis was rapidly approaching when a man gifted with eloquence, who by previous self-restraint had convinced the House that he did not speak for speaking's sake, might rise almost in a day to the very summit of influence and reputation. The country was under the personal rule of the Duke of Wellington, who had gradually squeezed out of his Cabinet every vestige of Liberalism, and even of independence, and who at last stood so completely alone that he was generally supposed to be in more intimate communication with Prince Polignac than with any of his own colleagues. The Duke had his own way in the Lords; and on the benches of the Commons the Opposition members were unable to carry, or even visibly to improve their prospect of carrying, the measures on which their hearts were set. The Reformers were not doing better in the division lobby than in 1821; and their question showed no signs of having advanced since the day when it had been thrown over by Pitt on the eve of the French Revolution.
But the outward aspect of the situation was very far from answering to the reality. While the leaders of the popular party had been spending themselves in efforts that seemed each more abortive than the last,—dividing only to be enormously outvoted, and vindicating with calmness and moderation the first principles of constitutional government only to be stigmatised as the apostles of anarchy,—a mighty change was surely but imperceptibly effecting itself in the collective mind of their fellow-countrymen.