"Wednesday, Dec. 21.-Everything changed; the frost and frozen snow all gone; heavy rain falling; clouds from the south-west driving fast through the sky. The sun came, and it was so mild that I ventured into the verandah; but I was far from well. My two doctors, Watson and Martin, came to consult. They agreed in pronouncing my complaint a heart-complaint simply. If the heart acted with force, all the plagues would vanish together. They may be right. I am certainly very poorly-weak as a child. Yet I am less nervous than usual. I have shed no tears during some days, though with me tears ask only leave to flow, as poor Cowper says. I am sensible of no intellectual decay ;-not the smallest.”

"Friday, December 23.-'In the midst of life.' This morning I had scarcely left my closet when down came the ceiling in large masses. I should certainly have been stunned, probably killed, if I had stayed a few minutes longer. I stayed by my fire, not exerting myself to write, but making Christmas calculations, and reading. An odd declaration by Dickens that he did not mean Leigh Hunt by Harold Skimpole. Yet he owns that he took the light externals of the character from Leigh Hunt, and surely it is by those light externals that the bulk of mankind will always recognise character. Besides, it is to be observed that the vices of Harold Skimpole are vices to which Leigh Hunt had, to say the least, some little leaning, and which the world generally imputed to him most unsparingly. That he had loose notions of meum and tuum, that he had no high feeling of independence, that he had no sense of obligation, that he took money wherever he could get it, that he felt no gratitude for it, that he was just as ready to defame a person who had relieved his distress as a person who had refused him relief,-these were things which, as Dickens must have known, were said, truly or falsely, about Leigh Hunt, and had made a deep impression on the public mind. Indeed, Leigh Hunt had said himself: 'I have some peculiar notions about money. They will be found to involve considerable difference of opinion with the community, particularly in a commercial country. I have not that horror of being under obligation which is thought an essential refinement in money matters.' This is Harold Skimpole all over. How then could D. doubt that H. S. would be supposed to be a portrait of L. H. ?"

At this point Macaulay's journal comes to an abrupt close. Two days afterwards he wrote to Mr. Ellis "The physicians

think me better; but there is little change in my sensations. The day before yesterday I had a regular fainting-fit, and lay quite insensible. I wish that I had continued to be so; for if death be no more. Up I got, however; and the doctors agree that the circumstance is altogether unimportant." Nevertheless, from this time forward there was a marked change for the worse in Macaulay. "I spent Christmas Day with him,' my mother writes. "He talked very little, and was constantly dropping asleep. We had our usual Christmas dinner with him, and the next day I thought him better. Never, as long as I live, can I lose the sense of misery that I ever left him after Christmas Day. But I did not feel alarmed. I thought the accident to the ceiling had caused a shock to his nerves from which he was gradually recovering; and, when we were alone together, he gave way to so much emotion that, while he was so weak, I rather avoided being long with him." It may give occasion for surprise that Macaulay's relatives entertained no apprehension of his being in grave and immediate danger; but the truth is that his evident unhappiness, (the outward manifestations of which, during the last few days of his life, he had no longer the force to suppress,) was so constantly present to the minds of us all that our attention was diverted from his bodily condition. His silence and depression,-due, in reality, to physical causes,-were believed by us to proceed almost entirely from mental distress.

In a contemporary account of Macaulay's last illness1 it is related that on the morning of Wednesday, the 28th of December, he mustered strength to dictate a letter addressed to a poor curate, enclosing twenty-five pounds ;-after signing which letter he never wrote his name again. Late in the afternoon of the same day I called at Holly Lodge, intending to propose myself to dinner; an intention which was abandoned as soon as I entered the library. My uncle was sitting, with his head bent forward on his chest, in a languid and drowsy reverie. The first number of the Cornhill Magazine lay unheeded before him, open at the first page of Thackeray's story of "Lovel the Widower." He did not utter a word, except in answer; and the only one of my observations, that at this distance of time I can recall, suggested to him painful and

1 This account, which is very brief, but apparently authentic, is preserved among the Marquis of Lansdowne's papers. Macaulay writes, on the 19th of August 1859: "I grieve to hear about my dear old friend, Lord Lansdowne. I owe more to him than any man living; and he never seemed to be sensible that I owed him anything. I shall look anxiously for the next accounts." Lord Lansdowne recovered from this illness, and survived Macaulay more than three years.

pathetic reflections which altogether destroyed his selfcommand.

On hearing my report of his state, my mother resolved to spend the night at Holly Lodge. She had just left the drawingroom to make her preparations for the visit, (it being, I 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 honourable 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 Poets' 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 25, 1800.

DIED AT HOLLY LODGE, CAMPDEN HILL,

DECEMBER 28, 1859.

"HIS BODY IS BURIED IN PEACE,

BUT HIS NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE."

APPENDIX.

A FEW EXTRACTS from the notes pencilled in Macaulay's Greek and Latin books may interest any one who is wise enough to have kept up his classics, or young enough for it to be still his happy duty to read them. The number of the dates scribbled at the conclusion of each volume, and their proximity in point of time, are astonishing when we reflect that every such memorandum implies a separate perusal.

"This day I finished Thucydides, after reading him with inexpressible interest and admiration. He is the greatest historian that ever lived.-February 27, 1835."

"I am still of the same mind.-May 30, 1836."

At the end of Xenophon's Anabasis, may be read the words : "Decidedly his best work.-December 17, 1835."

"Most certainly.-February 24, 1837."

"One of the very first works that antiquity has left us.

in its kind.—October 9, 1837."

"I read Plautus four times at Calcutta.

The first in November and December 1834.

Perfect

The second in January and the beginning of February 1835. The third on the Sundays from the 24th of May to the 23rd of August 1835.

The fourth on the Sundays beginning from the 1st of January 1837.

I have since read him in the Isle of Wight (1850), and in the South of France (1858)."

"Finished the second reading of Lucretius this day, March 24, 1835. It is a great pity that the poem is in an unfinished state. The philosophy is for the most part utterly worthless; but in energy, perspicuity, variety of illustration, knowledge of life and manners, talent for description, sense of the beauty of the exter world, and elevation and dignity of moral feeling, he had ever an equal."