House will be in fashion again." The parliamentary athletics of those days were severe, and the athletes vigorous and hard-hitting; and Macaulay yielded to the common practice and hit as hard as any. His own place in the Bankruptcy Court was abolished by the Reform Government without any compensation, and he became comparatively poor, and his father could not help him. His pen was set to work with renewed vigour; but yet he found himself compelled to sell his Cambridge gold medals rather than run into debt, which he abhorred and kept from. The social success following his first great speech compelled him often to mix in the most select society if he would not forfeit the position he had won. Lady Holland received him with special regard, and Rogers the poet took him up; yet, in the midst of the "garish world," he found time to make and consolidate a new private lifelong friendship with Thomas Ellis, reporter of the King's Bench, and like himself a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. At this time a visit to Cambridge is recorded, when Macaulay and his sister met such lions, then young, now lights of a past generation, as Whewell, Sedgwick the geologist, Airy the astronomer, Thirwall the historian. The vacations were spent in happy seclusion at Rothley Temple.

To Macaulay's deep-rooted affection for his sisters and theirs for him, we owe many of the most charming reminiscences and records respecting him. "My accuracy as to facts," he said one day, "I owe to a cause which many men would not confess. It is due to my love of castle-building. The past is in my mind soon constructed into a romance. With a person of my turn, the minute touches are of as great interest, and perhaps greater, than the most important events. Spending so much time as I do in solitude, my mind would have rusted by gazing vacantly at the shop windows. As it is I am no sooner in the street than I am in Greece, in Rome, in the midst of the French revolution. Precision in dates, the day or hour in which a man was born or died, becomes absolutely necessary. A slight fact, a sentence, a word, are of importance in my romance. Pepys's Diary formed almost inexhaustible food for my fancy. I seem to know every inch of Whitehall. I go in at Hans Holbein's gate, and come out through the matted gallery. The conversations which I compose between great people of the time are long and sufficiently animated; in the style, if not with the merits, of Sir Walter Scott's. The old parts of London, which you are sometimes surprised at my knowing so well, those old gates and houses down by the river, have all played their part in my stories."

Meanwhile, perhaps because of Brougham's growing antipathy to him, which Macaulay was not slow to return, the latter did not get into office. He became, however, more and more important to his party, and it appeared probable that his future would be that of active politics, and his name "linked with eventful times and great deeds." It had not yet dawned on him that he was to be more celebrated as a historian than in any other aspect. His private life with his sisters was full of light-hearted mirth, and the outpouring of the rich stores of his mind, delivered with a glad countenance and a happy affectionate smile, in peculiarly beautiful and expressive language, was most charming then when most unconstrained.

At last, on the passing of the great Reform Bill, Macaulay received a reward for his services in the shape of a Commissionership of the Board of Control for India; and he devoted himself to the duties of his office with zeal

and industry. His days were spent in the India Office, and his nights in the House of Commons, so that his essays in the Edinburgh Review of this date had to be written by rising at five in the morning, when the House had released him early. At this time, among others, he wrote his essays on Lord Chatham and Horace Walpole.

During this period his sister Margaret became engaged to Mr. Edward Cropper of Liverpool, and soon after was married. This was an occasion of bitter pain to Macaulay, who had so concentrated himself upon his home affections, and especially upon his sisters, that he endured pains like those of one who mourns a beloved wife at such a severance. "I am sitting in the midst of two hundred friends (at Leeds election), all mad with exultation and party spirit, all glorying over the Tories, and thinking me the happiest man in the world. And it is all I can do to hide my tears. The separation from dear Margaret has jarred my whole temper."

In 1833 Macaulay, in the debate on the King's Speech, withstood O'Connell valiantly, and won the highest encomiums. "I tell the honourable and learned gentleman," he exclaimed, "that the same spirit which sustained us (the Whigs) in a just contest for him, will sustain us in an equally just contest against him. Calumny, abuse, royal displeasure, popular fury, exclusion from office, exclusion from Parliament, we were ready to endure them all, rather than that he should be less than a British subject. We never will suffer him to be more."

In 1833 Macaulay was greatly engaged in forwarding the new India Bill, which reformed the entire Indian system, relieved the East Indian Company of its commercial functions, and transformed it into a governing corporation. Slavery was abolished, and religious disabilities removed throughout our Indian Empire. Macaulay's speech on the second reading was described by Charles Grant (afterwards Lord Glenelg), then President of the Board of Control, as exhibiting all that was noble in oratory, all that was sublime in poetry, all that was truly great, exalted, and virtuous in human nature. During the debate on the West India Bill, Macaulay imperilled his official position by taking up an independent attitude on the apprenticeship question, in accordance with his father's wishes and his own judgment. He succeeded, with Fowell Buxton, in getting the apprenticeship of slaves reduced to seven years, and four years later found that his prophecy was so far fulfilled that it was thought advisable then to terminate the intermediate period. His resignation, though proffered, was not accepted. This was a severe test for his principles, for his father was in debt, and the son was paying off his debts. By giving up his office the chance of continuing that reduction was gone. The family generally was in low water, and yet the young politician could risk permanent exclusion from office for the sake of what he believed to be the true interests of liberty and of his father's and his own especial charge, the slaves of the West Indies.

Towards the end of this session it appeared probable that a post on the Supreme Council of India would be offered to Macaulay. The salary was to be £10,000 a year. By accepting it for six years, he could save largely for his family and himself, and a few years would set him at ease. He accepted it in the hope that his sister Hannah would go with him. She consented, and his happiness was complete.

Among the most conspicous of British gains by Macaulay's voluntary

banishment are the two brilliant essays in which he has dealt with Indian history. Studied on the spot, in surroundings which so vividly recalled the notable achievements by which our Indian power was consolidated, his word pictures are likely to remain long the chief means from which English people will derive their impressions of India. The latter country owes to him the noblest digest of the Indian Criminal Law, and the introduction to that code, which ranks as one of the most successful efforts of modern jurisprudence. But this was by no means the only sphere in which Macaulay's efforts were of intense value to India. The spread and improvement of popular instruction, both in the vernacular tongues and in English, was so greatly promoted by a minute of his on the subject, that he was nominated President of the Council of Public Instruction, in which capacity he framed a scheme for education in all grades. It is hardly conceivable what opposition he encountered from those who favoured the teaching of Sanscrit, Persian and Arabic to a select few. But he showed infinite conciliation in dealing with irritable colleagues and subordinates, and with strong practical common sense cut the difficult knots which were presented to him for solution. His minutes on educational questions afford abundance of entertaining and instructive reading.

Soon after his settlement at Calcutta, Miss Macaulay became engaged to Mr. Trevelyan, then gaining high renown as a courageous Indian administrator. The marriage, after which the Trevelyans continued to live with Macaulay, was not only most happy, but most productive of happiness for Macaulay, both in India and afterwards at home. Yet in the midst of Indian work and splendour, he longed for England. "I have no words," he writes, "to tell you how I pine for England, or how intensely bitter exile has been to me. I feel as if I had no other wish than to see my country again and die. A complete revolution in all the habits of life; an estrangement from almost every old friend and acquaintance; fifteen thousand miles of ocean between the exile and everything that he cares for; all this is, to me at least, very trying. There is no temptation of wealth or power which would induce me to go through it again." But he could never come back to the same home circle which he had left. His other beloved sister, Margaret, Mrs. Cropper, died in 1834, and the news arrived a few weeks after Hannah's marriage. Its effect on him was only to be prevented from becoming crushing by intense devotion to official work. One result of this labour was the long article on Francis Bacon which appeared in 1837.

A cloud shadowed the return of Macaulay and the Trevelyans to England. Zachary Macaulay died in May, 1838, while his children were on their homeward voyage. His son took refuge in planning his great History, which now came within the bounds of practicability. The first part, he thought, would occupy five volumes, and extend from the Revolution of 1688 to the beginning of Sir Robert Walpole's administration. He hoped to bring it down to the death of George IV. He wished to quit politics for letters, and this seemed his best mode of doing so. In October, 1838, he started on a tour in Italy, in which his enjoyment, owing to the enormous extent of his classical knowledge, was intense.

But Lord Melbourne wanted his aid in parliament, and the post of Judge Advocate was offered him. The salary was now no temptation, and writing was more attractive. The only thing that would ever tempt him to give up

his liberty and his studies was the power to effect great things; and of that power, he said, no man had so little as a man in office out of the Cabinet. He was determined, if he entered Parliament, to have the authority belonging to evident disinterestedness.

In this tour Macaulay wrote, partly, the "Lays of Ancient Rome." Early in 1839, he wrote his vigorous article on Mr. Gladstone's "Church and State." "The Lord hath delivered him into our hand," he wrote. At the same time he admitted the author to be both "a clever and an amiable man." Mr. Gladstone's letter to him in acknowledgment of the fairness and singlemindedness it displayed pleased Macaulay greatly, for it was the only letter he kept unburned. About this time Macaulay scented a crisis which has not yet arrived. He believed the House of Lords must soon be abolished. He even went so far as to draw up a plan for reforming the House of Lords, and re-constituting it upon an elective basis, which he submitted to Lord Landsdowne.

In May, 1839, the Speaker, Abercromby, was raised to the peerage, and to his vacant seat at Edinburgh, Macaulay was recommended. He came forward as a thorough Whig, supporting the Ballot in addition to the regular programme. "I look with pride," he wrote in his election address, "on all that the Whigs have done for the cause of human freedom and of human happiness. I see them now hard pressed, struggling with difficulties, but still fighting the good fight; at their head I see men who have inherited the spirit and the virtues, as well as the blood, of old champions and martyrs of freedom. To these men I propose to attach myself; while one shred of the old banner is flying, by that banner will I, at least, be found."

On his re-appearance in parliament, Macaulay's first speech was upon Mr. Grote's Ballot Bill. As it had been agreed that the more Radical ministers might support it, Macaulay had a good opportunity for defending this degree of freedom, often not permitted by prime ministers. Meanwhile the celebrated essay on Lord Clive was being pushed forward, interrupted unexpectedly by Lord Melbourne's offer of the post of Secretary for War, with a seat in the Cabinet. This high promotion did not fail to inspire many with envy, and to arouse plentiful detraction. The Times, which had been vigorously supporting Sir Robert Peel, did not scruple in its leading article to designate him "Mr. Babbletongue Macaulay." Sheil and he were sworn in the Privy Council on the same day; the Times exclaimed, "These men Privy Councillors! These men petted at Windsor Castle! Faugh! Why they are hardly fit to fill up the vacancies that have occurred by the lamented death of Her Majesty's two favourite monkeys." The unlucky dating of his election address from Windsor Castle was made the occasion for comments and sarcasms without number. But Macaulay took newspaper abuse very quietly. He thought it both a cause and a symptom of weakness.

Macaulay, too, had a very happy home-life now. Fortunately his brotherin-law, Mr. Trevelyan, was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in 1839, before his Indian furlough expired, and Macaulay joyfully set up housekeeping in Great George Street, where his sister and brother-in-law lived with him in unalloyed happiness.

The secretaryship, however, put aside Macaulay's historical work for the time. He wrote in his journal for 1839: "Friday, March 9. I began my History with a sketch of the early revolutions of England. Pretty well; but

a little too stately and rhetorical." The secretary mastered his official business with that power which he displayed in everything he undertook, and conducted the parliamentary portion of his work with skill and tact.

In 1840, Macaulay was at first not so successful on other questions. He failed to get a fair hearing in answering a motion of want of confidence in the Ministry, when Sir James Graham made some ungenerous allusions to his former allies. A further motion of censure on the China war was, however, the occasion of one of Macaulay's finest patriotic speeches. "It was natural,” he exclaimed," that they should look up with hope and confidence to that victorious flag. For it reminded them that they belonged to a country unaccustomed to defeat, to submission, or to shame; to a country which had exacted such reparation for the wrongs of her children as had made the ears of all who heard it to tingle; to a country which had made the Dey of Algiers humble himself to the dust before her insulted consul; to a country which had avenged the victims of the Black Hole on the field of Plassey; to a country which had not degenerated since the great Protector vowed that he would make the name of Englishman as much respected as ever had been the name of Roman citizen. They knew that, surrounded as they were by enemies, and separated by great oceans and continents from all help, not a hair of their heads would be harmed with impunity."

In January, 1840, the Clive essay came out, and was received with tremendous plaudits. That on Von Ranke's "History of the Popes" followed. In 1841, Macaulay made himself somewhat unpopular by an official defence of Lord Cardigan, which to a generation that has abolished purchase in the army, loses its force. It was unfortunate that Macaulay should have felt able to defend a man who dragged a fine cavalry regiment "through a slough of scandal, favouritism, petty tyranny, and intrigue. Within the space of a single twelvemonth one of his captains was cashiered for writing him a challenge; he sent a coarse and insulting verbal message to another, and then punished him with prolonged arrest because he respectfully refused to shake hands with the officer who had been employed to convey the affront; he fought a duel with a lieutenant who had left the corps, and shot him through the body; and he flogged a soldier on Sunday, between the services, on the very spot where, half an hour before, the man's comrades had been mustered for public worship."

The Ministry, which had been growing more and more unpopular, was defeated on the 19th of May, 1841, on the question of the reduction of the duty on foreign sugar, which was represented as a concession to slaveholding countries as compared with our free colonies. The Ministry, retaining office, was defeated by a majority of one on a direct vote of want of confidence on the 4th of June, after having given notice of a motion to consider the Corn Laws. In the general election which followed, the Whigs were soundly beaten by the protectionist cry; but Macaulay was returned unopposed for Edinburgh. The Ministry was defeated on the Address, and resigned in August.

Macaulay was now set free for his historical work. To carry it on more effectively, he took chambers at the Albany, while Mr. and Mrs. Trevelyan removed to Clapham. He read again omnivorously, and knew every bookstall in London. He collected old ballads and studied the scraps of the pavement. "He bought every halfpenny song on which he could lay hands