BENTLEY'S MISCELLANY. MEMOIR OF THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. WITH A PORTRAIT, FROM A DRAWING BY E. U. EDDIS, ESQ. THIS celebrated essayist, orator, poet, and historian, is the eldest son of the late Zachary Macaulay, the early and veteran labourer for the abolition of Negro slavery. Thomas Babington Macaulay was born in 1800. He received his early education at home under a private tutor, and then read for some years under the guidance of the Rev. Mr. Preston at Shelford, near Cambridge. In 1818 he entered at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he acquired high distinction as a classical scholar; and where he established a still higher reputation among his contemporaries for his oratory in their debating societies, for his ample acquirements in modern history and literature, and for the general brilliancy of his conversational powers. He gained one of the Craven University Scholarships in 1822, and won a Fellowship of Trinity in 1824. His earliest speech in public was delivered in that year. It was on a subject, on which he may be said to have had an hereditary right to shine. He first came forward as a supporter of one of the resolutions moved at an Anti-Slavery meeting in London. It is remarkable that this was the first and almost the last public speech which he ever made out of Parliament, except those delivered by him on the hustings. Some passages of this his first public address have been preserved in the memories of those who heard it, and one passage may be cited as peculiarly characteristic of the style of imagery by which both his oratory and his writings have ever been distinguished. After a fervent description of the misery and degradation of the West Indian slaves at the time when he was speaking, he addressed himself to the future, and "He anticipated the day when the Negro, then crouching beneath the lash, should walk with brow erect from the field which was his freehold, to the house which was his castle." Many of the earliest productions of Mr. Macaulay's pen appeared in "Charles Knight's Quarterly." There are several historical ballads written in youth by the future author of the "Lays of Ancient Rome," which earned a more enduring celebrity than is generally accorded to the poetry of magazines and reviews. Two of these, "The Armada,” and "The Battle of Ivry," have been republished by the author together with "The Lays of Ancient Rome," in the later editions of that work. They well deserve the honour. The description in "The Armada" of the transmission by the beacon fires throughout England of the news of the approach of the Spanish fleet, is full of the martial spirit of Eschylus; and may stand comparison with its prototype, the celebrated passage in "The Agamemnon," that paints the chain of fire-signals VOL. XXXI. B from Mount Ida to Argos, which announced to Clytemnestra the fall of Troy. The prowess of the chivalrous Henri Quatre is glowingly placed before us in the ballad on the Battle of Ivry. Probably the study of Lockhart's Spanish Ballads, which appeared about the time when he was at Cambridge, may have done much towards leading Macaulay to compose these much admired stanzas. Not that he is a mere imitator of the Spanish martial romances. He adds elements that are all his own. He has a power of grouping and concentrating images, and of portraying masses, and the movements of masses, which cannot be found in the Spanish Romanceros, who deal chiefly with the passions, and the deeds of individuals. The foundation of Mr. Macaulay's fame as a prose writer was laid by his essay on Milton, which appeared in the "Edinburgh Review" in 1825 and was followed by other contributions to that periodical during the succeeding twenty-two years. When, in 1843, Mr. Macaulay published a collection of these papers, he spoke in the preface to it, of the criticism on Milton, as "written when the author was fresh from college, and containing scarcely a paragraph such as his matured judgment approved," and as "overloaded with gaudy and ungraceful ornament." Authors are seldom good judges of their own works; and we totally except to Mr. Macaulay's condemnation of this long celebrated essay. Had it been so faulty as he now represents it to be, it never would have pleased the taste of one so classically correct as Jeffrey, or have been admitted into the pages of the Edinburgh while under the management of that great critic. We will take Jeffrey's judgment in preference to Macaulay's, when Macaulay himself is in question, and unhesitatingly profess our belief that the paper on Milton stands deservedly first in the volumes of critical and historical essays with which Mr. Macaulay has enriched our literature. This collection of essays is so well known, both in England and in Anglo-America, that any detailed comment on it would be superfluous. Perhaps the single paper in which most originality and vigour of thought are displayed, is that on Machiavelli. The author's marvellous power of bringing gorgeous groups of imagery together, and of concentrating the striking points of long historic annals into a single page, are most remarkably shown in the essays on Clive and Warren Hastings, which ought to be read together, as forming one magnificent picture of the leading characters and decisive scenes in Anglo-Indian history, during its most eventful period. The description of the trial of Warren Hastings surpasses any other scene of the kind, with which we are acquainted in either ancient or modern literature; and nothing can be more artistic than the solemn pathos of the conclusion, where, after the mind has been excited by the fierce vicissitudes of the strife of statesmen, we are dismissed with a majestic allusion to "that temple of silence and reconciliation, where the enmities of twenty generations lie buried, the great Abbey, which has, during so many ages, afforded a quiet resting-place to those whose minds and bodies have been shattered by the contentions of the great Hall." Mr. Macaulay has, himself, borne no mean part among "the chiefs of the eloquent war." He entered Parliament in 1831, as member for Calne, under the auspices of Lord Lansdowne; and rapidly signalized himself in the debates that accompanied the introduction of the first Reform Bill. We will quote a portion of his first speech, in which the |