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extend Copyright. He runs over the principal men in Eng'ish literature, and examines how the law would have operated with them. Would it have induced Dr Johnson to labour more assiduously had he known that a bookseller, whose grandfather had purchased the copyright of his works from his residuary legatee Black Frank, would be in 1841 drawing large profits from the monopoly? Would it have induced him to give one more allegory, one more life of a poet, one more imitation of Juvenal?

Very often his concrete comparisons are of the nature of arguments by analogy. His speech on the war with China, defending the Government from the charge of having brought on the war by mismanagement, abounds in comparisons of this sort. One of the charges was that the instructions sent to the superintendent were vague and meagre, to which Macaulay replied that it would be pernicious meddling to attempt to direct in detail the action of a functionary fifteen thousand miles off:

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"How indeed is it possible that they should send him directions as to the details of his administration? Consider in what a state the affairs of this country would be if they were to be conducted according to directions framed by the ablest statesman residing in Bengal. A despatch goes hence asking for instructions while London is illuminating for the peace of Amiens. The instructions arrive when the French army is encamped at Boulogne, and when the whole island is up in arms to repel invasion. A despatch is written asking for instructions when Buonaparte is at Elba. The instructions come when he is at the Tuilleries. A despatch is written asking for instructions when he is at the Tuilleries. The instructions come when he is at St Helena. It would be just as impossible to govern India in London as to govern England at Calcutta."

Here we have substantially an argument by analogy. Another of the charges brought against Government was, that they made no exertion to suppress the opium trade. This Macaulay met with the assertion that it was impossible, supporting his assertion with the following plausible parallel :—

"In England we have a preventive service which costs us half a million a-year. We employ more than fifty cruisers to guard our coasts. We have six thousand effective men whose business is to intercept smugglers. And yet the quantity of brandy which comes in without paying duty is known to be not less than six hundred thousand gallons a-year. Some people think that the quantity of tobacco which is imported clandestinely is as great as the quantity which goes through the custom-house. And all this, observe, has been done in spite of the most effective preventive service that, I believe, ever existed in the world. If we know any

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thing about the Chinese government, we know this, that its coast-guard is neither trusty nor efficient; and we know that a coast-guard as trusty and as efficient as our own would not be able to cut off communication between the merchant longing for silver and the smoker longing for his pipe."

Any attempt at prevention, he says further, would turn the smugglers into pirates

"Have not similar causes repeatedly produced similar effects? Do we not know that the jealous vigilance with which Spain excluded the ships of other nations from her transatlantic possessions turned men who would otherwise have been honest merchant adventurers into buccaneers? The same causes which raised up one race of buccaneers in the Gulf of Mexico would soon have raised up another in the China sea.

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The same sense of the effect of dealing with propositions in the concrete appears in another form. He is anxious to reduce vague and general charges to a statement of facts, with a view to show the insufficiency of the real grounds. Thus he reduces Sir James Graham's charge of Government maladministration in China to the following:

"The charge against them therefore is this, that they did not give such copious and particular directions as were sufficient, in every possible emergency, for the guidance of a functionary who was fifteen thousand miles off."

His habit of immediately looking to the facts when a generality was asserted, often enabled him to point out that certain circumstances had not been taken into account. Thus, in the Reform debate, a member argued that it was unjust to disfranchise Aldborough, because the borough was as populous now as in the days of Edward III., when it was constituted an elective borough. True, replied Macaulay, but it ought to be much more populous now than then, if it would keep its position. Other towns have been growing enormously, while Aldborough has been standing still.

(4) Though habitually gladiatorial, and always eager to convince by argument, he shows considerable tact in recommending his own view to the feelings of the persons addressed.

Throughout his History he seeks favour for his own favourites by representing them as the champions of English glory. His account of Cromwell may be studied for artful touches of this sort. One of his most splendid paragraphs is his account of the supremacy of England during the Protectorate. In equally enthusiastic terms he celebrates the superiority of Cromwell's pikemen :

"The banished Cavaliers felt an emotion of national pride when they saw a brigade of their countrymen, outnumbered by foes and abandoned by allies, drive before it in headlong rout the finest infantry of Spain, and force a passage into a counterscarp which had just been pronounced impregnable by the ablest of the marshals of France."

In the Reform debates his principal card was the fear of provoking the people to a revolution. Again and again he reiterated that there were grounds for such a fear. When Lord John Russell hinted at the danger of disappointing the expectations of the nation, he was accused of threatening the House. Macaulay defended the obnoxious expression as quite "parliamentary and decorous," and repeated his own belief in the reality of the danger :

"I, sir, do entertain great apprehension for the fate of my country. I do in my conscience believe that unless the plan proposed, or some similar plan, be speedily adopted, great and terrible calamities will befall us. Entertaining this opinion, I think myself bound to state it, not as a threat, but

as a reason.

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In more than one of the debates he held up the French Revolution as a warning:

"The French nobles delayed too long any concession to the popular demands. Because they resisted reform in 1783, they had to resist revolution in 1789. They would not endure Turgot, and they had to endure Robespierre.

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In one speech he drew a vivid picture of the destruction of the nobility, and asked—

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'Why were they scattered over the face of the earth, their titles abolished, their escutcheons defaced, their parks wasted, their palaces dismantled, their heritages given to strangers? Because they had no sympathy with the people, no discernment of the signs of their time; because, in the pride and narrowness of their hearts, they called those whose warnings might have saved them theorists and speculators; because they refused all concession until the time had arrived when no concession would avail."

CHAPTER IIL

THOMAS CARLYLE,

1795-1880.

THOMAS CARLYLE, "The Censor of the Age," as he has been called, was an author by profession. In his famous petition on the Copyright Bill, written in 1839, he described himself as "a writer of books."

He was born at Ecclefechan, in Dumfriesshire, on the 24th of December 1795. His father was a mason in that village, afterwards a peasant farmer near it; sprung from strong and turbulent Borderers, himself respected for his uprightness, thoroughness of industry, and a certain sarcastic energy of speech. Of this cold, stern, upright father, whose "heart seemed as if walled in," and of his mother, to whom he was warmly attached, Carlyle has left a vivid picture in his 'Reminiscences.'

Thomas, the eldest son of a family of nine, received the book education common to hundreds of young Scotchmen in the same condition of life. He was taught to read by his mother and the village schoolmaster; taught the rudiments of Latin by the minister of his sect: then, after some training in the higher branches of learning at the burgh school of Annan, he proceeded to the University of Edinburgh.

When he entered the University, he had not quite completed his fifteenth year. Some of his professors were men of note: Dunbar, Professor of Greek; Leslie, Professor of Mathematics; Playfair, Professor of Natural Philosophy; Thomas Brown, Professor of Logic and Moral Philosophy. Young Carlyle was a hard student. He applied himself diligently to classics. To Brown's lectures he gave little attention, having a strong distaste for the analytic mode of dealing with mind, but the lectures in science he mastered thor

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onghly natural liking for the subject, or the professor's enthusiasm, or accident, led him to make mathematics his principal study. He prosecuted the high mathematics for a long time with the greatest ardour. It was in his devotion to this subject that he first injured his naturally robust health. He became a mathematical teacher, and at one time was a candidate for the Professorship of Astronomy in Glasgow. Traces of these studies appear not only in his figurative allusions, but in an amount of scientific method far beyond what is generally found in writers of high imagination.

But it was outside the range of academical studies that the young student's principal and most profitable work lay. He was the oracle of a small band of youths, poor like himself, and ambitious of literary distinction, who read extensively in the University library, and discussed what they read with free enthusiasm. All of them seem to have predicted future greatness for Carlyle. To one "foolish flattering" prediction of this kind he replied, in his nineteenth year, in the following characteristic strain: "Think not, because I talk thus, I am careless of literary fame. No; heaven knows that, ever since I have been able to form a wish, the wish of being known has been the foremost. Oh, Fortune! thou that givest unto each his portion in this dirty planet, bestow (if it shall please thee) coronets, and crowns, and principalities, and purses, and pudding, and powers, upon the great and noble and fat ones of the earth. Grant me, that with a heart of independence, unyielding to thy favours and unbending to thy frowns, I may attain to literary fame; and though starvation be my lot, I will smile that I have not been born a king."

Although, thirty years later, Carlyle wrote scornfully about "the goose goddess which they call Fame! Ach Gott!"—this youthful rhodomontade gives the key to the spirit of his future struggles. For nearly a quarter of a century he laboured till his ambition was attained; but he held to it with fierce energy, even when starvation stared him in the face; and he obtained fame at last on his own terms, without any sacrifice of his independence.

It was to teaching that he first turned himself for a livelihood. In the end of May 1814 he quitted Edinburgh, having gone through the usual curriculum in arts; and, by competitive trial at Dumfries, got the teachership of mathematics in the burgh school of Annan, where, as we have mentioned, he had himself been a scholar. After two years' service in that post, he was, through the recommendation of his Edinburgh professors, offered the teachership of mathematics and classics in the burgh school of Kirkcaldy, and held that appointment also for about two years. In Kirkcaldy he made the intimate acquaintance of Edward Irving, who, like himself, had been a schoolboy at Annan, and who for some years

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