Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

suppose, a little before seven in the evening), when a servant arrived with an urgent summons. As we drove up to the

porch of my uncle's house, the maids ran, crying, out into the darkness to meet us, and we knew that all was over. We found him in the library, seated in his easy-chair, and dressed as usual; with his book on the table beside him, still open at the same page. He had told his butler that he should go to bed early, as he was very tired. The man proposed his lying on the sofa. He rose as if to move, sat down again, and ceased to breathe. He died as he had always wished to die— without pain; without any formal farewell; preceding to the grave all whom he loved; and leaving behind him a great and honorable name, and the memory of a life every action of which was as clear and transparent as one of his own sentences. It would be unbecoming in me to dwell upon the regretful astonishment with which the tidings of his death were received wherever the English language is read; and quite unnecessary to describe the enduring grief of those upon whom he had lavished his affection, and for whom life had been brightened by daily converse with his genius, and.ennobled by familiarity with his lofty and upright example. "We have lost" (so my mother wrote) "the light of our home, the most tender, loving, generous, unselfish, devoted of friends. What he was to me for fifty years how can I tell? What a world of love he poured out upon me and mine! The blank, the void, he has left-filling, as he did, so entirely both heart and intellect no one can understand. For who ever knew such a life as mine passed as the cherished companion of such a man?"

He was buried in Westminster Abbey, on the 9th of January, 1860. The pall was borne by the Duke of Argyll, Lord John Russell, Lord Stanhope, Lord Carlisle, Bishop Wilberforce, Sir David Dundas, Sir Henry Holland, Dean Milman, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, the Lord Chancellor, and the Speaker of the House of Commons. "A beautiful sunrise," wrote Lord Carlisle. "The pall-bearers met in the Jerusalem Chamber. The last time I had been there on a like errand was at Canning's funeral. The whole service and ceremony

were in the highest degree solemn and impressive. All befitted the man and the occasion."

He rests with his peers in Poet's Corner, near the west wall of the south transept. There, amidst the tombs of Johnson, and Garrick, and Handel, and Goldsmith, and Gay, stands conspicuous the statue of Addison; and at the feet of Addison lies the stone which bears this inscription:

THOMAS BABINGTON, LORD MACAULAY.

BORN AT ROTHLEY TEMPLE, LEICESTERSHIRE,

OCTOBER 25TH, 1800.

DIED AT HOLLY LODGE, CAMPDEN HILL,
DECEMBER 28TH, 1859.

"HIS BODY IS BURIED IN PEACE,

BUT HIS NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE."

APPENDIX.

LORD MACAULAY ON AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS.

Holly Lodge, Kensington, January 18th, 1857.

SIR, I beg you to accept my thanks for your letter inclosing the autograph of Washington, which reached me three weeks ago, and for the "History of the State of New York," which I received the day before yesterday.

I shall look forward with curiosity to the appearance of your "Life of Jefferson." I can not say that he is one of my heroes; but it is very probable that you may convince me that I have formed an erroneous estimate of his character.

I am a little surprised to learn from you that Americans generally consider him as a foil to Washington, as the Arimanes of the republic contending against the Oromasdes. There can, I apprehend, be no doubt that your institutions have during the whole of the nineteenth century been constantly becoming more Jeffersonian and less Washingtonian. It is surely strange that while this process has been going on, Washington should have been exalted into a god, and Jefferson degraded into a demon.

If there were any chance of my living to write the history of your Revolution, I should eagerly and gratefully accept your kind offer of assistance. But I now look to the accession of the house of Hanover as my extreme goal. With repeated thanks, I have the honor to be, sir, your faithful servant, T. B. MACAULAY.

H. S. RANDALL, Esq., etc., etc., etc.

Holly Lodge, Kensington, London, May 23d, 1857. DEAR SIR,-The four volumes of the "Colonial History of New York" reached me safely. I assure you that I shall value them highly. They contain much to interest an English as well as an American reader. Pray accept my thanks, and convey them to the regents of the university.

M N

You are surprised to learn that I have not a high opinion of Mr. Jefferson, and I am surprised at your surprise. I am certain that I never wrote a line, and that I never, in Parliament, in conversation, or even on the hustings-a place where it is the fashion to court the populace uttered a word indicating an opinion that the supreme authority in a state ought to be intrusted to the majority of citizens told by the head; in other words, to the poorest and most ignorant part of society. I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both. In Europe, where the population is dense, the effect of such institutions would be almost instantaneous. What happened lately in France is an example. In 1848 a pure democracy was established there. Dur ing a short time there was reason to expect a general spoliation, a national bankruptcy, a new partition of the soil, a maximum of prices, a ruinous load of taxation laid on the rich for the purpose of supporting the poor in idleness. Such a system would, in twenty years, have made France as poor and barbarous as the France of the Carlovingians. Happily, the danger was averted; and now there is a despotism, a silent tribune, an enslaved press. Liberty is gone, but civilization has been saved. I have not the smallest doubt that if we had a purely democratic government here the effect would be the same. Either the poor would plunder the rich, and civilization would perish; or order and prosperity would be saved by a strong military government, and liberty would perish. You may think that your country enjoys an exemption from these evils. I will frankly own to you that I am of a very different opinion. Your fate I believe to be certain, though it is deferred by a physical cause. As long as you have a boundless extent of fertile and unoccupied land, your laboring population will be far more at ease than the laboring population of the Old World, and, while that is the case, the Jefferson politics may continue to exist without causing any fatal calamity. But the time will come when New England will be as thickly peopled as old England. Wages will be as low, and will fluctuate as much with you as with us. You will have your Manchesters and Birminghams, and in those Manchesters and Birminghams hundreds of thousands of artisans will assuredly be sometimes out of work. Then your institutions will be fairly brought to the test. Distress everywhere makes the laborer mutinous and discontented, and inclines him to listen with eagerness to agitators who tell him that it is a monstrous iniquity that one man should have a million, while another can not get a full meal. In bad years

there is plenty of grumbling here, and sometimes a little rioting. But it matters little. For here the sufferers are not the rulers. The supreme power is in the hands of a class, numerous indeed, but select; of an educated class; of a class which is, and knows itself to be, deeply interested in the security of property and the maintenance of order. Accordingly, the malcontents are firmly yet gently restrained. The bad time is got over without robbing the wealthy to relieve the indigent. The springs of national prosperity soon begin to flow again: work is plentiful, wages rise, and all is tranquillity and cheerfulness. I have seen England pass three or four times through such critical seasons as I have described. Through such seasons the United States will have to pass in the course of the next century, if not of this. How will you pass through them? I heartily wish you a good deliverance. But my reason and my wishes are at war, and I can not help foreboding the worst. It is quite plain that your Government will never be able to restrain a distressed and discontented majority. For with you the majority is the Government, and has the rich, who are always a minority, absolutely at its mercy. The day will come when in the State of New York a multitude of people, none of whom has had more than half a breakfast, or expects to have more than half a dinner, will choose a Legislature. Is it possible to doubt what sort of a Legislature will be chosen? On one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for vested rights, strict observance of public faith. On the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalists and usurers, and asking why any body should be permitted to drink Champagne and to ride in a carriage, while thousands of honest folks are in want of necessaries. Which of the two candidates is likely to be preferred by a working-man who hears his children cry for more bread? I seriously apprehend that you will, in some such season of adversity as I have described, do things which will prevent prosperity from returning; that you will act like people who should in a year of scarcity devour all the seed-corn, and thus make the next a year not of scarcity, but of absolute famine. There will be, I fear, spoliation. The spoliation will increase the distress. The distress will produce fresh spoliation. There is nothing to stop you. Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor. As I said before, when a society has entered on this downward progress, either civilization or liberty must perish. Either some Cæsar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the

« AnteriorContinuar »