You must indulge me, however, for I seldom offend in that

way.

It is in part a narrative. This is a sort of composition which I have never yet attempted. You will tell me, I am sure with sincerity, how you think that I succeed in it. I have said as little about Lord Nugent's book as I decently could. Ever yours, T. B. M.

London, January 19th, 1832.

DEAR NAPIER,—I will try the "Life of Lord Burleigh,” if you will tell Longman to send me the book. However bad the work may be, it will serve as a heading for an article on the times of Elizabeth. On the whole, I thought it best not to answer Croker. Almost all the little pamphlet which he published (or rather printed, for I believe it is not for sale), is made up of extracts from Blackwood: and I thought that a contest with your grog-drinking, cock-fighting, cudgel-playing professor of moral philosophy would be too degrading. I could have demolished every paragraph of the defense. Croker defended his Ovnroì píλo* by quoting a passage of Euripides which, as every scholar knows, is corrupt; which is nonsense and false metre if read as he reads it; and which Markland and Matthiæ have set right by a most obvious correction. But, as nobody seems to have read his vindication, we can gain nothing by refuting it. Ever yours, T. B. MACAULAY.

"Mr. Croker has favored us with some Greek of his own. 'At the altar,' says Dr. Johnson, 'I recommended my .' 'These letters,' says the editor (which Dr. Strahan seems not to have understood), 'probably mean Ovnroi piλoi, departed friends.' Johnson was not a first-rate Greek scholar; but he knew more Greek than most boys when they leave school; and no school-boy could venture to use the word Ovnroì in the sense which Mr. Croker ascribes to it without imminent danger of a flogging.”—Macaulay's Review of Croker's Boswell.

CHAPTER V.

1832-1834.

Macaulay is Invited to stand for Leeds.-The Reform Bill passes.-Macaulay appointed Commissioner of the Board of Control.-His Life in Office.-Letters to his Sister.-Contested Election at Leeds.-Macaulay's Bearing as a Candidate.-Canvassing.-Pledges.-Intrusion of Religion into Politics.Placemen in Parliament.-Liverpool. Margaret Mac

aulay's Marriage.— How it Affected her Brother.--He is Returned for Leeds.-Becomes Secretary of the Board of Control.-Letters to Lady Trevelyan. Session of 1832.--Macaulay's Speech on the India Bill.-His Regard for Lord Glenelg.-Letters to Lady Trevelyan.-The West Indian Question.-Macaulay resigns Office.-He gains his Point, and resumes his Place.-Emancipation of the Slaves.--Death of Wilberforce.— Letters to Lady Trevelyan.-Macaulay is appointed Member of the Supreme Council of India.-Letters to Lady Trevelyan, Lord Lansdowne, and Mr. Napier. --Altercation between Lord Althorp and Mr. Sheil.— Macaulay's Appearance before the Committee of Investigation.--He sails for India.

DURING the earlier half of the year 1832 the vessel of Reform was still laboring heavily; but long before she was through the breakers, men had begun to discount the treasures which she was bringing into port. The time was fast approaching when the country would be called upon to choose its first Reformed Parliament. As if the spectacle of what was doing at Westminster did not satisfy their appetite for political excitement, the constituencies of the future could not refrain from anticipating the fancied pleasures of an electoral struggle. Impatient to exercise their privileges, and to show that they had as good an eye for a man as those patrons of nomination seats whose discernment was being vaunted nightly in a dozen speeches from the opposition benches of the House of Commons, the great cities were vying with each other to seek representatives worthy of the occasion and of themselves. The Whigs of Leeds, already provided with one

candidate in a member of the great local firm of the Marshalls, resolved to seek for another among the distinguished politicians of their party. As early as October, 1831, Macaulay had received a requisition from that town, and had pledged himself to stand as soon as it had been elevated into a parliamentary borough. The Tories, on their side, brought forward Mr. Michael Sadler, the very man on whose behalf the Duke of Newcastle had done "what he liked with his own" in Newark, and, at the last general election, had done it in vain. Sadler, smarting from the lash of the Edinburgh Review, infused into the contest an amount of personal bitterness that, for his own sake, might better have been spared; and, during more than a twelvemonth to come, Macaulay lived the life of a candidate whose own hands are full of public work at a time when his opponent has nothing to do except to make himself disagreeable. But, having once undertaken to fight the battle of the Leeds Liberals, he fought it stoutly and cheerily, and would have been the last to claim it as a merit, that, with numerous opportunities of a safe and easy election at his disposal, he remained faithful to the supporters who had been so forward to honor him with their choice.

The old system died hard; but in May, 1832, came its final agony. The Reform Bill had passed the Commons, and had been read a second time in the Upper House; but the facilities which committee affords for maiming and delaying a measure of great magnitude and intricacy proved too much for the self-control of the Lords. The king could not bring himself to adopt that wonderful expedient by which the unanimity of the three branches of our legislature may, in the last resort, be secured. Deceived by an utterly fallacious analogy, his majesty began to be persuaded that the path of concession would lead him whither it had led Louis the Sixteenth, and he resolved to halt on that path at the point where his ministers advised him to force the hands of their lordships by creating peers. The supposed warnings of the French Revolution, which had been dinned into the ears of the country by every Tory orator from Peel to Sibthorpe, at last had produced their effect on the royal imagination. Earl

Grey resigned, and the Duke of Wellington, with a loyalty which certainly did not stand in need of such an unlucky proof, came forward to meet the storm. But its violence was too much even for his courage and constancy. He could not get colleagues to assist him in the Cabinet, or supporters to vote with him in Parliament, or soldiers to fight for him in the streets; and it was evident that in a few days his position would be such as could only be kept by fighting.

The revolution had, in truth, commenced. At a meeting of the political unions on the slope of Newhall Hill at Birmingham, a hundred thousand voices had sung the words:

God is our guide. No swords we draw.

We kindle not war's battle fires.

By union, justice, reason, law,

We claim the birthright of our sires.

But those very men were now binding themselves by a declaration that, unless the bill passed, they would pay no taxes, nor purchase property distrained by the tax-gatherer. In thus renouncing the first obligation of a citizen, they did in effect draw the sword, and they would have been cravens if they had left it in the scabbard. Lord Milton did something to enhance the claim of his historic house upon the national gratitude by giving practical effect to this audacious resolve; and, after the lapse of two centuries, another Great Rebellion, more effectual than its predecessor, but so brief and bloodless that history does not recognize it as a rebellion at all, was inaugurated by the essentially English proceeding of a quiet country gentleman telling the collector to call again. The crisis lasted just a week. The duke had no mind for a succession of Peterloos, on a vaster scale, and with a different issue. He advised the king to recall his ministers; and his majesty, in his turn, honored the refractory lords with a most significant circular letter, respectful in form, but unmistakable in tenor. A hundred peers of the opposition took the hint, and contrived to be absent whenever Reform was before the House. The bill was read for a third time by a majority of five to one on the 4th of June; a strange, and not very com

plimentary, method of celebrating old George the Third's birthday. On the 5th it received the last touches in the Commons; and on the 7th it became an act, in very much the same shape, after such and so many vicissitudes, as it wore when Lord John Russell first presented it to Parliament.

Macaulay, whose eloquence had signalized every stage of the conflict, and whose printed speeches are, of all its authentic records, the most familiar to readers of our own day, was not left without his reward. He was appointed one of the commissioners of the Board of Control, which, for three quarters of a century, from 1784 onward, represented the crown in its relations to the East Indian directors. His duties, like those of every individual member of a commission, were light or heavy as he chose to make them; but his own feeling with regard to those duties must not be deduced from the playful al'usions contained in letters dashed off during the momentary leisure of an overbusy day for the amusement of two girls who barely numbered forty years between them. His speeches and essays teem with expressions of a far deeper than official interest in India and her people; and his minutes remain on record to prove that he did not affect the sentiment for a literary or oratorical purpose. The attitude of his own mind with regard to our Eastern empire is depicted in the passage on Burke, in the essay on Warren Hastings, which commences with the words "His knowledge of India," and concludes with the sentence "Oppression in Bengal was to him the same thing as oppression in the streets of London." That passage, unsurpassed as it is in force of language and splendid fidelity of detail by any thing that Macaulay ever wrote or uttered, vas inspired, as all who knew him could testify, by sincere and entire sympathy with that great statesman of whose humanity and breadth of view it is the merited, and not inadequate, panegyric.

In Margaret Macaulay's journal there occurs more than one mention of her brother's occasional fits of contrition on the subject of his own idleness; but these regrets and confessions must be taken for what they are worth, and for no more. He worked much harder than he gave himself credit for. His