The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay

LIFE AND LETTERS

LORD MACAULA Y.

CHAPTER VII.

1838-1839.

Death of Zachary Macaulay.-Mr. Wallace and Mackintosh.-Letters to Mr. Napier and Mr. Ellis.-Sir Walter Scott.-Lord Brougham.-First Mention of the History.-Macaulay goes abroad.--His Way of regarding Scenery. Châlons-sur-Marne.-Lyons.-Marseilles.-Genoa.-Pisa.--Florence. — Macaulay refuses the Judge-advocateship. — Florence to Rome.-Thrasymene.-St. Peter's.-The New Zealander.-The Vatican. -The Temporal Power.-The Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. -Letter to Lord Lansdowne.-The Canadian Insurrection.-Gibbon.— Rome to Naples.-Bulwer's Novels. -Impressions of Naples.- Virgil's Tomb.-Macaulay sets out Homeward.—Mr. Goulburn.-Versailles.

THE Lord Hungerford justified her reputation of a bad sailer, and the homeward voyage was protracted into the sixth month. This unusual delay, combined with the knowledge that the ship had met with very rough weather after leaving the Cape, gave rise to a report that she had been lost, with all on board, and brought a succession of Whig politicians into the City to inquire at Lloyd's about the safety of her precious freight. But it was in the character of a son and brother, and not of a party orator, that Macaulay was most eagerly and anxiously expected. He had, indeed, been sorely missed.

"You can have no conception," writes one of his sisters, "of the change which has come over this household. It is as if the sun had deserted the earth. The chasm Tom's departure has made can never be supplied. He was so unlike any other being one ever sees, and his visits among us were a sort of refreshment which served not a little to enliven and cheer our monotonous way of life; but now day after day rises and sets without object or interest, so that sometimes I almost feel aweary of this world."

Things did not mend as time went on. With Zachary Macaulay, as had been the case with so many like him, the years which intervened between the time when his work was done and the time when he went to receive his wages were years of trouble, of sorrow, and even of gloom. Failing health; failing eye-sight; the sense of being helpless and useless, after an active and beneficent career; the consciousness of dependence upon others at an age when the moral disadvantages of poverty are felt even more keenly than youth feels its material discomforts-such were the clouds that darkened the close of a life which had never been without its trials. During the months that his children were on their homeward voyage his health was breaking fast; and before the middle of May he died, without having again seen their faces. Sir James Stephen, writing to Fanny Macaulay, says: "I know not how to grieve for the loss of your father, though it removes from this world one of the oldest, and, assuredly, one of the most excellent friends I have ever had. What rational man would not leap for joy at the offer of bearing all his burdens, severe as they were, if he could be assured of the same approving conscience, and of the same blessed reward? He was almost the last survivor of a noble brotherhood now reunited in affection and in employment. Mr. Wilberforce, Henry Thornton, Babington, my father, and other not less dear, though less conspicuous, companions of his many labors, have ere now greeted him as their associate in the world of spirits; and, above all, he has been welcomed by his Redeemer with 'Well done, good and faithful servant.""

Zachary Macaulay's bust in Westminster Abbey bears on

its pedestal a beautiful inscription (which is, and probably will remain, his only biography), in which much more is told than he himself would wish to have been told about a man

WHO DURING FORTY SUCCESSIVE YEARS,
PARTAKING IN THE COUNSELS AND THE LABORS
WHICH, GUIDED BY FAVORING PROVIDENCE,
RESCUED AFRICA FROM THE WOES,

AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE FROM THE GUILT,

OF SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE-TRADE,

MEEKLY ENDURED THE TOIL, THE PRIVATION, AND THE REPROACH, RESIGNING TO OTHERS THE PRAISE AND THE REWARD.

His tomb has for many years past been cut off from the body of the nave by an iron railing equally meaningless and unsightly; which withdraws from the eyes of his fellow-countrymen an epitaph at least as provocative to patriotism as those of the innumerable military and naval heroes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who fell in wars the very objects of which are for the most part forgotten, or remembered only to be regretted.

The first piece of business which Macaulay found waiting to be settled on his return to England was sufficiently disagreeable. As far back as July, 1835, he had reviewed Sir James Mackintosh's "History of the Revolution of 1688." This valuable fragment was edited by a Mr. Wallace, who accompanied it with a biographical sketch of his author, whom he treated throughout with an impertinence which had an air of inexcusable disloyalty; but which, in truth, was due to nothing worse than self-sufficiency, thrown into unpleasant relief by the most glaring bad taste. Macaulay, who from a boy had felt for Mackintosh that reverence which is

Dearer to true young hearts than their own praise,

fell upon the editor with a contemptuous vigor, of which some pretty distinct traces remain in the essay as it at present appears in the collected editions, where the following sentence may still be read: "It is plain that Thomas Burnet and his writings were never heard of by the gentleman who has been employed to edit this volume, and who, not content with de

forming Sir James Mackintosh's text by such blunders, has prefixed to it a bad memoir, has appended to it a bad continuation, and has thus succeeded in expanding the volume into one of the thickest, and debasing it into one of the worst, that we ever saw." What the first vehemence of Macaulay's indignation was may be estimated by the fact that this passage, as it now stands, has been deprived of half its sting.

One extract from the article, in its original form, merits to be reproduced here, because it explains, and in some degree justifies, Macaulay's wrath, and in itself is well worth reading:

"He" (the editor)" affects, and, for aught we know, feels, something like contempt for the celebrated man whose life he has undertaken to write, and whom he was incompetent to serve in the capacity even of a corrector of the press. Our readers may form a notion of the spirit in which the whole narrative is composed from expressions which occur at the beginning. This biographer tells us that Mackintosh, on occasion of taking his medical degree at Edinburgh, 'not only put off the writing of his Thesis to the last moment, but was an hour behind his time on the day of examination, and kept the Academic Senate waiting for him in full conclave.' This irregularity, which no sensible professor would have thought deserving of more than a slight reprimand, is described by the biographer, after a lapse of nearly half a century, as an incredible instance 'not so much of indolence, as of gross negligence and bad taste.' But this is not all. Our biographer has contrived to procure a copy of the Thesis, and has sat down, with his 'As in præsenti' and his 'Propria quæ maribus' at his side, to pick out blunders in a composition written by a youth of twenty-one on the occasion alluded to. He finds one mistake, such a mistake as the greatest scholar might commit when in haste, and as the veriest schoolboy would detect when at leisure. He glories over this precious discovery with all the exultation of a pedagogue. 'Deceived by the passive termination of the verb defungor, Mackintosh misuses it in a passive sense. He is not equally fortunate in his other discovery. 'Laude conspurcare, whatever he may think, is not an improper phrase. Mackintosh meant to

say that there are men whose praise is a disgrace. No person, we are sure, who has read this memoir, will doubt that there are men whose abuse is an honor."

Mr. Wallace did not choose to rest quietly under a castigation which even Macaulay subsequently admitted to have been in excess of his deserts.

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