isters receded before the Lords, and hesitated to make peers, they and the Whig party were lost; that nothing remained but an insolent oligarchy on the one side, and an infuriated people on the other; and that Lord Grey and his colleagues would become as odious and more contemptible than Peel and the Duke of Wellington. Why did they not think of all this earlier? Why put their hand to the plow and look back? Why begin to build without counting the cost of finishing? Why raise the public appetite, and then balk it? I told him that the House of Commons would address the king against a Tory ministry. I feel assured that it would do so. I feel assured that, if those who are bidden will not come, the highways and hedges will be ransacked to get together a reforming cabinet. To one thing my mind is made up. If nobody else will move an address to the crown against a Tory ministry, I will. Ever yours, T. B. M.

London, October 17th, 1831.

MY DEAR ELLIS,-I should have written to you before, but that I mislaid your letter and forgot your direction. When shall you be in London? Of course you do not mean to sacrifice your professional business to the work of numbering the gates and telling the towers of boroughs* in Wales. You will come back, I suppose, with your head full of ten-pound householders instead of pwes, and of Caermarthen and Denbigh instead of Carians and Pelasgians. Is it true, by-the-bye, that the commissioners are whipped on the boundaries of the boroughs by the beadles, in order that they may not forget the precise line which they have drawn? I deny it wherever go, and assure people that some of my friends who are in the commission would not submit to such degradation.

I

You must have been hard-worked indeed, and soundly whipped too, if you have suffered as much for the Reform Bill as we who debated it. I believe that there are fifty members of the House of Commons who have done irreparable in

* Mr. Ellis was one of the commissioners appointed to arrange the boundaries of parliamentary boroughs in connection with the Reform Bill.

jury to their health by attendance on the discussions of this session. I have got through pretty well, but I look forward, I confess, with great dismay to the thought of recommencing; particularly as Wetherell's cursed lungs seem to be in as good condition as ever.

I have every reason to be gratified by the manner in which my speeches have been received. To say the truth, the station which I now hold in the House is such that I should not be inclined to quit it for any place which was not of considerable importance. What you saw about my having a place was a blunder of a stupid reporter's. Croker was taunting the Government with leaving me to fight their battle and to rally their followers; and said that the honorable and learned member for Calne, though only a practicing barrister in title, seemed to be in reality the most efficient member of the Government. By-the-bye, my article on Croker has not only smashed his book, but has hit the Westminster Review incidentally. The Utilitarians took on themselves to praise the accuracy of the most inaccurate writer that ever lived, and gave as an instance of it a note in which, as I have shown, he makes a mistake of twenty years and more. John Mill is in a rage, and says that they are in a worse scrape than Croker; John Murray says that it is a d-d nuisance; and Croker looks across the House of Commons at me with a leer of hatred which I repay with a gracious smile of pity.

I am ashamed to have said so much about myself. But you asked for news about me. No request is so certain to be granted, or so certain to be a curse to him who makes it, as that which you have made to me. Ever yours,

T. B. MACAULAY.

London, January 9th, 1832.

DEAR NAPIER,—I have been so much engaged by bankrupt business, as we are winding up the affairs of many estates, that I shall not be able to send off my article about Hampden till Thursday, the 12th. It will be, I fear, more than forty pages long. As Pascal said of his eighteenth letter, I would have made it shorter if I could have kept it longer. VOL. I.-15

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 Ovηroì 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 e p.' Ꮎ 'These letters,' says the editor (which Dr. Strahan seems not to have understood), 'probably mean Ovηroi píλoi, 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