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CHAPTER VIII.

1839-1841.

Macaulay returns to London. He meets Lord Brougham-Letters to Mr. Napier and Mrs. Trevelyan.—Correspondence with Mr. Gladstone. Heated State of Politics.-The Hostility of the Peers to Lord Melbourne's Government.-Macaulay's View of the Situation.-Verses by Praed.— The Bed-chamber Question.-Macaulay is elected for Edinburgh.-Debate on the Ballot.-Macaulay becomes a Cabinet Minister.—The Times. -Windsor Castle.-Vote of Want of Confidence. The Chinese War.— Irish Registration: Scene in the House of Commons. Letters to Napier. -Religious Difficulties in Scotland.—Lord Cardigan.—The Corn Laws. -The Sugar Duties.-Defeat of the Ministry, and Dissolution of Parliament.-Macaulay is re-elected for Edinburgh.-His Love for Street-ballads.-The Change of Government.

At the end of the first week in February, 1839, Macaulay was again in London.

'Friday, February 8th.-I have been reading Lord Durham's Canadian report, and think it exceedingly good and able. I learn, with great concern, that the business has involved Lord Glenelg's resignation. Poor fellow! I love him and feel for him.* I bought Gladstone's book: a capital Shrove-tide cock to throw at. Almost too good a mark."

“February 13th.—I read, while walking, a good deal of Gladstone's book. The Lord hath delivered him into our hand. I think I see my way to a popular, and at the same time gentleman-like, critique. I called on the Miss Berrys, who are very desirous to collect my articles. I gave them a list, and procured some numbers for them at a book-seller's near Leicester Square. Thence to Ellis, and repeated him 'Romulus,' the alterations in 'Horatius,' and the beginning of 'Virginia.' He was much pleased. We walked away together to Lincoln's Inn Fields, and met Brougham: an awkward moment. But he greeted me just as if we had parted yesterday, shook hands, got between us, and walked with us some way. He was in extraordinary force, bodily and mental. He declared vehemently against

* See page 263 of vol. i.

the usage which Lord Glenelg has experienced, and said that it was a case for pistoling, an infamous league of eleven men to ruin one. It will be long enough before he takes to the remedy which he recommends to others. He talked well and bitterly of Lord Durham's report. It was, he said, a second-rate article for the Edinburgh Review. The matter came from a swindler; the style from a coxcomb; and the dictator furnished only six letters, D-U-R-H-A-M.' As we were walking, Allen the Quaker came by. Brougham hallooed to him, and began to urge him to get up the strongest opposition to Lord John Russell's education plan. I was glad when we parted. Home, and thought about Gladstone. In two or three days I shall have the whole in my head, and then my pen will go like fire.”

3 Clarges Street, February 26th, 1839. DEAR NAPIER,—I can now promise you an article in a week, or ten days at furthest. Of its length I can not speak with certainty. I should think it would fill about forty pages; but I find the subject grow on me. I think that I shall dispose completely of Gladstone's theory. I wish that I could see my way clearly to a good counter-theory; but I catch only glimpses here and there of what I take to be truth.

I am leading an easy life; not unwilling to engage in the Parliamentary battle if a fair opportunity should offer, but not in the smallest degree tormented by a desire for the House of Commons, and fully determined against office. I enjoyed Italy intensely; far more than I had expected. By-the-bye, I met Gladstone at Rome. We talked and walked together in St. Peter's during the best part of an afternoon. He is both a clever and an amiable man.

As to politics, the cloud has blown over; the sea has gone down; the barometer is rising. The session is proceeding through what was expected to be its most troubled stage in the same quiet way in which it generally advances through the dog-days toward its close. Every thing and every body is languid, and even Brougham seems to be somewhat mitigated. I met him in Lincoln's Inn Fields, the other day, when I was walking with Ellis. He greeted me as if we had breakfasted together that morning, and went on to declaim against every body with even more than his usual parts, and with all his usual rashness and flightiness. Ever yours,

VOL. II.-4

T. B. MACAULAY.

London, March 20th, 1839.

DEAREST HANNAH,-I have passed some very melancholy days since I wrote last. On Sunday afternoon I left Ellis tolerably cheerful. His wife's disorder was abating. The next day, when I went to him, I found the house shut up. I meant only to have asked after him; but he would see me. He gave way to very violent emotion; but he soon collected himself, and talked to me about her for hours. "I was so proud of her," he said. "I loved so much to show her to any body that I valued. And now, what good will it do me to be a judge or to make ten thousand a year? I shall not have her to go home to with the good news." I could not speak, for I know what that feeling is as well as he. He talked much of the sources of happiness that were left to him-his children, his relations and hers, and my friendship. He ought, he said, to be very grateful that I had not died in India, but was at home to comfort him. Comfort him I could not, except by hearing him talk of her with tears in my eyes. I staid till late. Yesterday I went again, and passed most of the day with him, and I shall go to him again to-day; for he says, and I see, that my company does him good. I would with pleasure give one of my fingers to get him back his wife, which is more than most widowers would give to get back their own.

I have had my proofs from Napier. He magnifies the article prodigiously. In a letter to Empson he calls it exquisite and admirable, and to me he writes that it is the finest piece of logic that ever was printed. I do not think it so; but I do think that I have disposed of all Gladstone's theories unanswerably; and there is not a line of the paper with which even so strict a judge as Sir Robert Inglis or my uncle Babington could quarrel at as at all indecorous. How is my dear little girl? Is she old enough to take care of a canary bird or two. From her tenderness for the little fish, I think I may venture to trust her with live animals.

I have this instant a note from Lord Lansdowne, who was in the chair of the Club* yesterday night, to say that I am

* The Club, as it was invariably called (for its members would not stoop

unanimously elected. Poor Ellis's loss had quite put it out of my head. Ever yours, T. B. M.

per

On the 10th of April Macaulay received a letter from Mr. Gladstone, who in generous terms acknowledged the courtesy, and, with some reservations, the fairness of his article. "I have been favored," Mr. Gladstone wrote, "with a copy of the forthcoming number of the Edinburgh Review; and I haps too much presume upon the bare acquaintance with you, of which alone I can boast, in thus unceremoniously assuming you to be the author of the article entitled 'Church and State,' and in offering you my very warm and cordial thanks for the manner in which you have treated both the work, and the author on whom you deigned to bestow your attention. In whatever you write, you can hardly hope for the privilege of most anonymous productions, a real concealment; but, if it had been possible not to recognize you, I should have questioned your authorship in this particular case, because the candor and single-mindedness which it exhibits are, in one who has long been connected in the most distinguished manner with political party, so rare as to be almost incredible..... In these lacerating times one clings to every thing of personal kindness in the past, to husband it for the future; and, if you will allow me, I shall earnestly desire to carry with me such a recollection of your mode of dealing with a subject upon which the attainment of truth, we shall agree, so materially depends upon the temper in which the search for it is instituted and conducted."

How much this letter pleased Macaulay is indicated by the

to identify it by any distinctive title) was the club of Johnson, Gibbon, Burke, Goldsmith, Garrick, and Reynolds. Under the date April 9th, 1839, the following entry occurs in Macaulay's diary: "I went to the Thatched House, and was well pleased to meet the Club for the first time. We had Lord Holland in the chair, the Bishop of London, Lord Mahon, Phillips the painter, Milman, Elphinstone, Sir Charles Grey, and Hudson Gurney. I was amused, in turning over the records of the Club, to come upon poor Bozzy's signature, evidently affixed when he was too drunk to guide his pen."

fact of his having kept it unburned; a compliment which, except in this single instance, he never paid to any of his correspondents. "I have very seldom," he writes in reply to Mr. Gladstone, "been more gratified than by the very kind note which I have just received from you. Your book itself, and every thing that I heard about you, though almost all my information came to the honor, I must say, of our troubled times-from people very strongly opposed to you in politics, led me to regard you with respect and good-will, and I am truly glad that I have succeeded in marking those feelings. I was half afraid, when I read myself over again in print, that the button, as is too common in controversial fencing even between friends, had once or twice come off the foil."

The emphatic allusions which both these letters contain to the prevailing bitterness and injustice of party feeling may well sound strangely to us, who have already for two sessions been living in that atmosphere of good temper and good manners which pervades the House of Commons whenever the Conservatives are contented and the Liberals despondent. It was a different matter in 1839. The closing years of the Whig Administration were one long political crisis, with all the disagreeable and discreditable accompaniments from which no political crisis is free. Public animosity and personal virulence had risen to a higher, or, at any rate, to a more sustained temperature than had ever been reached since the period when, amidst threats of impeachment and accusations of treason, perfidy, and corruption, Sir Robert Walpole was tottering

to his fall.

Lord Melbourne's Cabinet had rendered immense services to the country, and the greatest of those services was the fact of its own existence. In November, 1834, the king, of his own will and pleasure, had imposed a Tory government on a House of Commons which contained a large Whig majority. The fierce onslaught upon that government, so gallantly and skillfully led by Lord John Russell, while it presented (as it could not fail to present) a superficial appearance of factious self-seeking, was in truth a struggle fought to establish, once and forever, the most vital of all constitutional principles.

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