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EDITOR'S PREFACE

T would not be easy to edit Macaulay's Essays to the general satisfaction. Such is Macaulay's range of allusion that a full commentary would far outrun the length of the text. But nothing could be more unjust to the Essays than to bury them under a mass of dull explanation. They are works of literature rather than of science, and the pleasure of reading them should not be converted into a task. Few books have a public so wide, or differing so much in degrees of literary and historical knowledge. Information which a man engaged in active pursuits would accept from a commentator without offence, if without gratitude, may seem impertinent and ridiculous to a man who leads a life of study. The highest ambition of an editor should be to pass unnoticed. But an editor of these Essays gives too many openings for censure to be warranted in such an expectation.

What it seemed advisable to say about Macaulay's habits of thought and expression, and his place among historians and men of letters has been said once for all in the general Introduction. What the editor regards as the chief characteristics of each essay, its excellences and defects, have been suggested in the prefatory Note. Whilst endeavouring to give such corrections or explanations of particular statements as seemed unavoidable, the editor has refrained from rewriting the Essays under the pretext of commenting upon them. He has not thought it his duty to repeat incessantly that the modern conception of history differs in several respects from Macaulay's, that Macaulay was a staunch party man, or that Macaulay often used strong and emphatic language. It is a kind of bad manners to be for ever harping on the faults of a great writer, to be always interjecting that a luminous description is not precise in every detail, or that a

fine burst of rhetoric betrays excessive warmth of feeling. A commentator spends his time and pains but ill in lessening the Jadmiration felt for any work of real excellence, however real may also be its imperfections.

The editor has much pleasure in acknowledging a heavy debt of gratitude to that monumental work, the Dictionary of National Biography. He wishes also to return his best thanks to several friends who have helped him in tracing some of Macaulay's more recondite allusions, especially to his colleague Professor Ker, to Dr. Firth whose knowledge of English history and literature is only equalled by the generosity with which it is put at the disposal of others, and to Mr. Holden, the learned assistant librarian of All Souls College, Oxford. He has also to return thanks for assistance afforded in the columns of Notes and Queries. For all oversights and mistakes the editor is, it need scarcely be said, responsible.

F. C. MONTAGUE.

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INTRODUCTION

HOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY was born on the 25th of October, 1800, at Rothley Temple, in Leicestershire. His father, Zachary Macaulay, the son of a Scotch minister, had begun life as an overseer on a plantation in Jamaica, but learnt there so deep an abhorrence of slavery that he threw up his employment and became one of the most zealous apostles of emancipation. A puritan and eminent in the group of Low Churchmen sometimes styled, almost in ridicule, the Clapham sect, Zachary was not free from the narrowness which is too often found in high and earnest natures. Although an intelligent and cultivated man, he cared little for literature and less for society. If the taste for letters be hereditary, it came to Macaulay rather from his mother than from his father. Mrs. Macaulay was the daughter of a Quaker bookseller in Bristol named Mills. She had been a favourite pupil and always remained the friend of Hannah More. We are accustomed to regard that age as one of female ignorance, yet it may be doubted whether the proportion of really well-read women was so much smaller than now. Mrs. Macaulay at all events read a great deal, preferring a book that interested her to any company however distinguished or agreeable. Little Macaulay profited betimes by her example."From the time that he was three years old he read incessantly, for the most part lying on the rug before the fire with his book on the ground and a piece of bread and butter in his hand." For toys he cared little, and he seems hardly to have played with other children. But he liked walking with his mother or nurse while he repeated what he had been reading or told stories of his own invention. Then the creative impulse began to stir in his breast. When seven years old he bravely undertook to write an abridgment of universal history. "Marmion" and

"The Lay of the Last Minstrel" set him upon a poem which he called "The Battle of Cheviot." Next he essayed an epic, "Olaus the Great; or, The Conquest of Mona," with episodes leading up to prophecies of the future fortunes of his own family. Sir George Trevelyan tells us that the manuscripts which have been preserved from these years of childhood are not only correct in spelling and in grammar, but display the same lucidity of meaning and scrupulous accuracy in punctuation and other details of the literary art which distinguish his mature writings.

To such a child it was of little consequence how much formal teaching he received. The books and sympathy which he found at home sufficed for his earliest education. Young Macaulay went first to a private school at Clapham kept by a Mr. Greaves, and afterwards to a Mr. Preston's school at Little Shelford, near Cambridge. As athletic exercises had not then become the tyranny which they now are, he was allowed to remain sedentary and studious. It is remarkable that, with fair health and more than common sensibility, he never showed any taste for the country or found much pleasure in rural landscape. "London is the place for me," he wrote in his fifteenth year. Study at all events did not dry up the springs of natural affection. He was always fondly attached to father and mother, brothers and sisters, and always returned with joy to his serious home. His elders interfered little with his passion for reading. When we consider the severity of Low Church opinions in the early part of the nineteenth century, we are surprised to find Macaulay writing to his mother from Mr. Preston's in eager praise of the Decameron, and referring her to Dryden's adaptations of Boccaccio's stories. His father disapproved, it is true, of novel-reading, but seems hardly to have resisted, certainly did not succeed in checking, the boy's appetite for novels. As time went on, indeed, father and son were less and less in sympathy. The spirit of ascetic piety and the love of letters are not easily reconciled. Zachary must often have thought his son's pursuits frivolous, and sometimes tried to hinder his son's cleverness from breeding self-conceit. boy, affectionate and loyal as he was, felt his father's treatment a little unkind. He respected, but certainly did not

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share, the feelings which were the stay and consolation of his father's life. He fulfilled his duty as a son most nobly, and, it should seem, without even the consciousness that he was doing anything uncommon, but he ceased to be in perfect intelligence with his father.

In October, 1818, Macaulay entered at Trinity College, Cambridge. Here, amid the happiest surroundings, he could indulge his habits of incessant reading and eager conversation. For the peculiar study of Cambridge, the study of mathematics, he had a violent distaste and probably no great capacity. Although Macaulay could argue forcibly upon a practical issue, abstract reasoning was always distasteful to him. He brooded much over what he had read, but rather in order to construct pictures than to analyse ideas. At all periods of life he spent many hours over Plato, but much more for the eloquence, the wit, the irony, than for the dialectic. It was unfortunate that, being ill-suited to mathematics, he had no chance of a discipline in logic and metaphysics, which could never have made him a philosopher, but might have saved him from writing some very unphilosophical tirades. What literary taste and talent could do was accomplished by Macaulay as an undergraduate. He was elected Craven University Scholar in 1821. He twice gained the Chancellor's medal for English verse. He also gained the prize, founded by a certain Mr. Greaves, for the best essay on the conduct and character of William III., a success to which we possibly owe the first suggestion of the History of England. He spoke with applause in the debates of the Cambridge Union. But he shone most in those endless, delightful discussions of all great subjects with clever friends which afford the best part of a university education and the truest pleasures of university life. One of these friends, Charles Austin, afterwards so eminent at the parliamentary bar, had the honour of converting Macaulay from Toryism. For a moment Macaulay thought himself a Radical, and it is clear that his father was seriously alarmed. But he speedily became an irreproachable Whig, and seems thenceforwards to have varied as little in his political opinions as is possible to any able man who mixes in the world and reaches middle life. While he cultivated his mind in the way he liked best, he took so little pains to