I ever received a line of reproach or complaint." This letter was dispatched on the 19th of January; on the 21st he applied for the Chiltern Hundreds; and on the 2d of February he notes in his journal: "I received a letter from the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, inclosing an address from the electors unanimously voted in a great meeting. I was really touched."

And now Macaulay, yielding a tardy obedience to the advice of every one who had an interest in his welfare, began to enjoy the ease which he had so laboriously earned. He had more than once talked of shifting his quarters to some residence less unsuited to his state of health than a set of chambers on a second floor between Vigo Street and Piccadilly. At one time he amused himself with the idea of renting one of the new villas on Weybridge Common; and at another he was sorely tempted to become the purchaser of a large mansion and grounds at "dear old Clapham." But in January, 1856, Dean Milman wrote to inform him that the lease of a very agreeable house and garden at Kensington was in the market. The immediate effect of this letter was to suggest to Macaulay the propriety of giving his old friend's book another reading. "I began," he says, "Milman's Latin Christianity,' and was more impressed than ever by the contrast between the substance and the style. The substance is excellent. The style very much otherwise." On the morrow he heard from the Duchess of Argyll, who, knowing the place in question as only a next-door neighbor could, urged him not to miss what was indeed an excellent opportunity. Accordingly, on the 23d of January, he says: "I went with Hannah and Margaret to see the house about which the duchess and the dean had written to me. It is in many respects the very thing; but I must know more, and think more, before I decide." He soon made up his mind that he had lighted on the home which he wanted. Without more ado he bought the lease, and with great deliberation, and after many a pleasant

* A few months after this Macaulay writes: "I was glad to hear that a new edition of Milman's History is called for. It is creditable to the age. I began to read it again.”

family discussion, he refurnished his new abode in conformity with his sister's taste and his own notions of comfort.

"May 1st, 1856.-The change draws very near. After fifteen happy years passed in the Albany, I am going to leave it, thrice as rich a man as when I entered it, and far more famous; with health impaired, but with affections as warm and faculties as vigorous as ever. I have lost nothing that was very near my heart while I was here. Kind friends have died, but they were not part of my daily circle. I do not at all expect to live fifteen years more. If I do, I can not hope that they will be so happy as the last fifteen. The removal makes me sad, and would make me sadder but for the extreme discomfort in which I have been living during the last week. The books are gone, and the shelves look like a skeleton. Tomorrow I take final leave of this room where I have spent most of the waking hours of so many years. Already its aspect is changed. It is the corpse of what it was on Sunday. I hate partings. To-day, even while I climbed the endless steps, panting and weary, I thought that it was for the last time, and the tears would come into my eyes. I have been happy at the top of this toilsome stair. Ellis came to dinner-the last of probably four hundred dinners, or more, that we have had in these chambers. Then to bed. Every thing that I do is colored by the thought that it is for the last time. One day there will come a last in good earnest."

I well remember that, about this period, my uncle used to speak of the affinity which existed between our feeling for houses and our feeling for people. "Nothing," he said, "would at one time have reconciled me to the thought of leaving the Albany; but, when I go home, and see the rooms dismantled, and the book-cases empty, and the whole place the ghost of its former self, I acknowledge that the end can not come too soon." And then he spoke of those sad changes, the work of age and illness, which prepare us gradually, and even mercifully, for the loss of those from whom it once seemed as if we could never have borne to part. He was thinking of a very dear friend who was just then passing quietly, and very slowly, through the antechamber of death. On the 13th of February in this year he says: "I went to call on poor Hallam. I found him quite prisoner to his sofa, unable to walk. To write legibly he has long been unable. But in the conversation between us-not, to be sure, a trying conversation-he showed no defect of memory or apprehen

sion. Poor dear fellow! I put a cheerful face on the matter; but I was sad at heart.

Let me not live

After my flame lacks oil, to be the scoff

Of meaner spirits.

Mean they must be indeed who scoff in such a case."*

Macaulay was now lodged as his friends wished to see him. He could not well have bettered his choice. Holly Lodge, now called Airlie Lodge, occupies the most secluded corner of the little labyrinth of by-roads, which, bounded to the east by Palace Gardens and to the west by Holland House, constitutes the district known by the name of Campden Hill. The villa, for a villa it is, stands in a long and winding lane, which, with its high black paling concealing from the passer-by every thing except a mass of dense and varied foliage, presents an appearance as rural as Roehampton and East Sheen presents still, and as Wandsworth and Streatham presented twenty years ago. The only entrance for carriages was at the end of the lane farthest from Holly Lodge; and Macaulay had no one living beyond him except the Duke of Argyll, who loved quiet as much as himself, and for the same reasons.

The rooms in Holly Lodge were for the most part small. The dining-room was that of a bachelor who was likewise something of an invalid; and the drawing-room, which, from old habit, my uncle could seldom bring himself to use, was little more than a vestibule to the dining-room. But the house afforded in perfection the two requisites for an author's ideal of happiness, a library and a garden. The library was a spacious and commodiously shaped room, enlarged, after the old fashion, by a pillared recess. It was a warm and airy retreat in winter; and in summer it afforded a student only too

* Mr. Hallam lived into 1859. In the January of that year Macaulay wrote: "Poor Hallam! To be sure, to me he died some years ago. I then 'missed him much and often. Now the loss is hardly felt. I am inclined to think that there is scarcely any separation, even of those separations which break hearts and cause suicides, which might not be made endurable by gradual weaning. In the course of that weaning there will be much suffering, but it will at no moment be very acute."

irresistible an inducement to step from among his book-shelves on to a lawn whose unbroken slope of verdure was worthy of the country-house of a lord-lieutenant. Nothing in the garden exceeded thirty feet in height; but there was in abundance all that hollies, and laurels, and hawthorns, and groves of standard roses, and bowers of lilacs and laburnums could give of shade and scent and color. The charms of the spot were not thrown away upon its owner. "How I love," he says, "my little paradise of shrubs and turf!" "I remember no such May," he writes in 1857. "It is delicious. The lilacs are now completely out; the laburnums almost completely. The brilliant red flowers of my favorite thorn-tree began to show themselves yesterday. To-day they are beautiful. To morrow, I dare say, the whole tree will be in a blaze." And again, a few days later: "The rhododendrons are coming out; the mulberry-tree, which, though small, is a principal object in the view of the garden from my library window, is staring into leaf." In the following September, when fresh from a tour down the Moselle and up the Rhine, through the glen of Vaucluse and across the pastures of the Italian Alps, he writes in high content, after his return to Holly Lodge: "My garden is really charming. The flowers are less brilliant than when I went away, but the turf is perfect emerald. All the countries through which I have been traveling could not show such a carpet of soft, rich green herbage as mine.”

The beauty of the objects around him, combined with the novel sense of possession, inspired Macaulay with an interest in small every-day matters to which he had hitherto been a stranger. He began to feel the proprietor's passion for seeing things in order within doors and without. He says in one place: "To-day I cleared my tables of a vast accumulation of books and pamphlets. This process I must carry a good deal further. The time so spent is not time lost. It is, as Bacon would say, luciferum, if not directly fructiferum." One of the most fortunate consequences arising from his change of residence was that, if it were for only ten minutes in the day, he accustomed himself to do something besides write and talk and read. It must be admitted that his efforts at gardening

were sufficiently humble. Far beneath any thing which is recorded of such scientific horticulturists as Pope and Shenstone, his first attempts might have aroused the mild scorn even of Wordsworth and of Cowper. "I have ordered," he says, "the dead sprigs to be cleared from the lilacs, and the grass to be weeded of dandelions ;" and, shortly after, "I had an hour's walk, and exterminated all the dandelions which had sprouted up since yesterday."* But he soon became more ambitious. "I chose places for rhododendron-beds, and directed the workmen to set creepers in my xystus.† On Christmas-day, 1856, he writes to his sister Fanny: "The holiday interrupts my gardening. I have turned gardener; not indeed working-gardener, but master-gardener. I have just been putting creepers round my windows, and forming beds of rhododendrons round my fountain. In three or four summers, if I live so long, I may expect to see the results of my care."

The hospitality at Holly Lodge had about it a flavor of pleasant peculiarity. Macaulay was no epicure on his own

* These unlucky weeds play a leading part in Macaulay's correspondence with his youngest niece. "My dear little Alice," he writes, "I quite forgot my promised letter, but I assure you that you were never out of my mind for three waking hours together. I have, indeed, had little to put you and yours out of my thoughts; for I have been living, these last ten days, like Robinson Crusoe in his desert island. I have had no friends near me but my books and my flowers, and no enemies but those execrable dandelions. I thought that I was rid of the villains; but the day before yesterday, when I got up and looked out of my window, I could see five or six of their great, impudent, flaring, yellow faces turned up at me. 'Only you wait till I come down,' I said. How I grubbed them up! How I enjoyed their destruction! Is it Christian-like to hate a dandelion so savagely? That is a curious question of casuistry."

The word "xystus" was a reminiscence from the letters of Cicero and Pliny. According to Dr. William Smith it signifies an "open colonnade or portico, for recreation, conversation, and philosophical discussion." The easier life which Macaulay henceforward led gave him a fresh lease of health, or, at any rate, of comfort. "I am wonderfully well," he writes; "my sleep is deeper and sweeter than it has been for years." And again: "I had an excellent night. What a blessing to regain, so late, the refreshing sleep of early years! I am altogether better than I have been since