MACAULAY [Thomas Babington Macaulay was born in 1800, the son of Zachary Macaulay; he was educated at Clapham and at private schools elsewhere, till the time of his residence at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was elected to a Fellowship in 1824. He was called to the bar in 1826; and in 1830 he entered the House of Commons as member for Calne. In 1823, with the publication of Knight's Quarterly Magazine under Praed as editor, Macaulay's contributions to the reviews began the series of essays in the Edinburgh Review began in 1825 and went on till 1844, when it was dropped for the sake of the History of England. Macaulay's public life was at first involved in the debates on the Reform Bill, where he distinguished himself as a vehement orator. Shortly after the passing of the Bill he was appointed to the Board of Control (constituted by Pitt's East India Act, in 1784), and in 1834, in order to restore the fortunes of his family, he went to India as member of the Supreme Council. In India his principal work was the framing of the Criminal Code; his notes for this purpose are included in his Miscellaneous Works. His stay in India did not interrupt his work for the Review. He returned in 1838 and was shortly afterwards elected member for Edinburgh. His position in the House of Commons was not injured by his five years' absence; he spoke with effect on many questions, especially on the policy of Lord Ellenborough in India in 1842. In the election of 1847, owing chiefly to Macaulay's want of interest in the ecclesiastical controversies of Scotland, he was rejected by the Edinburgh electors. He did not enter Parliament again till he was re-elected at Edinburgh in 1852, without coming forward as a candidate. The first two volumes of the History were published in 1849, volumes iii. and iv. in 1855. In the former year he delivered an Inaugural Address as Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow. In 1854 he published a corrected edition of his Speeches. Out of friendship for Mr. Adam Black, the publisher, he contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica the short biographies of Atterbury, Bunyan, Goldsmith, Johnson, and Pitt, which are among his latest writings; the life of Pitt was finished in August 1858. In 1856 Macaulay resigned his seat on account of failing health. In 1857 he was created Baron Macaulay of Rothley. died on the 28th of December 1859. The fifth volume of the History was published in 1861. He Macaulay's Essays appeared in the following order in the Edinburgh Review:-Milton, 1825; Machiavelli, 1827; Dryden, History, and Hallam's Constitutional History, 1828; the three controversial essays on James Mill's Theory of Government, 1829; Southey's Colloquies, Robert Montgomery's Poems, 1830; Sadler's Law of Population, 1830 and 1831; Civil Disabilities of the Jews, Byron, Croker's Boswell, Bunyan, Hampden, 1831; Burleigh, Mirabeau, 1832; War of the Succession in Spain, Horace Walpole, 1833; Lord Chatham, 1834; Mackintosh, 1835; Bacon, 1837; Sir William Temple, 1838; Gladstone on Church and State, 1839; Clive, 1840; Ranke, 1840; Comic Dramatists of the Restoration, Lord Holland, Warren Hastings, 1841; Frederick the Great, 1842; Madame d'Arblay, Addison, 1843; Barère, and the second essay on Chatham, 1844. The Lays of Ancient Rome were published in 1842.] THE popularity of Macaulay's writings is not due to any remote or hidden causes. It is rather idle to ascribe his influence and fame to his expression of popular sentiments and prejudices, or to lay emphasis on those passages in his works where he may have followed or accompanied the multitude in judging rashly. While no one can doubt the effect on his work of his conformity with popular standards of judgment, or question his right to be taken as a representative of the common sense of his time, it is not to that conformity that his influence is to be traced. His popularity was honestly won by the energy and capacity of his mind, and by an eloquence which, whatever its faults may be, at any rate was able to enliven the weight of his learning. By the resources and the quickness of his memory, by his erudition, and his command of his erudition, by his fluency and studied clearness, he has gained no more than the rank he deserves as an exponent of the matter of history, and as a critic of opinions. No amount of distaste for Whiggery or for common sense can with justice be allowed to detract from Macaulay's fame. He was a man who knew himself to be destined from his birth for literature, and who "followed his star" without wavering or regret to the end. His literary ambition was one of the noblest, and its fulfilment among the happiest, in the record of English authors. The weaknesses of his style were known to himself, but among them he had no cause to reckon the vices of pretence or vanity. He knew the things that he appeared to know, and much more; and his reputation is only a fair tribute paid to him by those who have learned from him. Macaulay in his prose never succeeded in giving such unity of life to his compositions as he was able to give in some of his poems. There is no battle in his History, not even the relief of Londonderry, that has the impetuous and continuous energy of the Battle of Lake Regillus; no typical character or “humour" is delineated with the same unity of effect as Obadiah Bind-their kings-in-chains in his dramatic ballad; no description of a character, no peroration, in the Essays or the History has any claim to be set beside the Jacobite's Epitaph, or represents the dignity of the old school of historical composition as those couplets represent the school of the Vanity of Human Wishes. The best of his poems however display the same mode of thought and imagination as the Essays and the History. If the action is livelier at the bridge of Tiber than at Boyne Water, still the way in which the two scenes are imagined is much the same; and the spectacle of the trial of Warren Hastings is rendered with the same kind of selection and distribution of characteristic epithets, and the same spirit, as the "catalogue of forces sent into the field" in the ballads of Rome. No man ever did more than Macaulay by way of imaginative recollection in illustration of history; no historian remembers at once so much and with so much vividness. It is always however, both at its best and at its worst, a vividness of illustration and commentary rather than of the central and creative imagination. In the essay on Byron, in one of those passages of literary criticism which he unduly depreciated, Macaulay has described the difference between the personages of a drama and the characters in a satire: “a dramatist cannot commit a greater error than that of following those pointed descriptions of character in which satirists and historians indulge so much." The kind of narrative and description in which Macaulay himself excelled was more nearly related to the satire of Dryden or Pope, than to the more difficult and more imaginative order of invention which Macaulay recognised so well and honoured so unreservedly wherever he found it. There is something of the nature of satura in some of his finest passages, and some of his worst are those which he has described by anticipation in his notes on Byron's Sardanapalus. "By judicious selection and judicious exaggeration the intellect and the disposition of any human being might be described as being made up of startling contrasts." It is by this process that Macaulay's descriptions of Johnson, of Boswell, and of Horace Walpole have been composed; not by a dramatic conception of their characters, but mainly by a collection of quotations strung together. The variety and brilliance of details in Macaulay's writing make one of the chief distinctions between his manner and that of the preceding century. He kept the old standards of taste in many things. His fondness for abrupt short sentences does not always conceal the old model on which they are formed. His short sentences are generally clauses in an old-fashioned antithetic period. Instead of the roll and volume of the periods of Gibbon, there is a succession of short waves; but these are carried forward generally on the top of a swell, the rhythm of which is the rhythm of the older period, while this older periodic cadence reappears undisguised whenever Macaulay chooses to keep his sentences long. Though he had escaped with his contemporaries from the old dogmas of criticism, he had no hatred of the eighteenth century and its respectability, such as moved the more vehement spirits in his day. He had, however, in common with men as unlike him as Carlyle, an aversion to the colourless and abstract graces of the old polite literature. In the plan of his work he seldom chooses to vary much from the old conventions of literary architecture; he does not envy the craft of Teufelsdröckh; his building is ruled by the simplest principles of proportion. But while the outlines are thus conformable to the old fashions, there is a very much greater amount of picturesque detail than would have been admitted by the old masters. The outlines are filled up with crowds of particulars. That fondness for particulars in description which distinguished the poems and novels of the new age from the more generalised and abstract compositions of the old school was hardly less strong in Macaulay than in Carlyle or in Browning. Though even in this respect, where Macaulay seems to come nearest in his prose to the flamboyant varieties of romance and poetry, he invents no new procedure or method of handling, but keeps the old tools of illustrative rhetoric. Johnson could write that "no man can reasonably be thought a lover of his country for roasting an ox, or burning a boot, or attending the meeting at Mile-End, or registering his name in the lumber-troop." Macaulay's illustrations are introduced by the same familiar method of satirical elaboration. He goes to greater expense in this way than his predecessors had done, but he does not go out of his way to invent new devices like those of Sartor Resartus or the Opium Eater. Though he may be more extravagant and profuse in his variety of details than is consistent with the old "dignity of history," this variety is all supported by a structure of great plainness. Some of his decorations appear to have surprised "the judicious" almost as much as Carlyle's French Revolution, but there was nothing in Macaulay's general plan of writing that was at all in sympathy with that new model. The great fault of his style may be discovered in a want of harmony between his abstract foundations and his picturesque ornaments. In Gibbon there is an exact proportion between the form and the contents. The unity of no chapter is broken by excess of detail in particular parts of the subject. The rhythm of each sentence is adequate to the amount of matter it contains. In Macaulay's prose the continuity of the narrative or dissertation is frequently sacrificed for the sake of a number of small rhetorical points, which help to stimulate the attention at first, but may easily become monotonous or irritating. The cumulative effect of the story is not always secured; the short sentences, the strings of particulars, interfere with it. Thus the glories of the "wonderful year" of 1759 are proclaimed in a brisk staccato manner that leaves no clear impression of the significance of the events. "The year of 1759 opened with the conquest of Goree. Next fell Guadaloupe, then Ticonderoga, then Niagara. The Toulon squadron was completely defeated by Boscawen off Cape Lagos. But the greatest exploit of the year was the achievement of Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham. The news of his glorious death reached London in the very week in which the Houses met. All was joy and triumph. Envy and faction were forced to join in the general applause." Here it is evident that, the effect desired is that of variety, and that this variety has broken up a good rhetorical period and dissipated its strength. The ear has not recovered from Ticonderoga and Cape Lagos in time to appreciate the climax of the story at Quebec. It is all confused noise; "joy and triumph," "envy and faction" are discharged at the end in the same loud emphatic monotone as the names of the victories at the beginning. The description of the battle of the Boyne is faulty in the same way. The author has not chosen to make use of any new method in arranging his details. He has more details on his hands than will easily go into the old framework; but in they must go. "During near half an hour the battle continued to rage along the southern shore of the river. All was smoke, dust, and din. Old soldiers were heard to say that they had seldom seen sharper work in the Low Countries. But just at this conjuncture William came up with the left wing. He had found much difficulty in crossing. The tide was running fast. His charger had been |