INTRODUCTION

ONE of the three or four most fascinating biographies in the English language is that of Thomas Babington Macaulay written by his nephew, George Otto Trevelyan, with consummate tact and taste and literary art. The story is as full of interest as any that Macaulay himself ever told during a lifetime devoted to historical narration. It contains the record of a great and honorable career, a manly and generous character, a versatile and variously attractive personality. That career and those exceptional endowments were devoted to tasks that meant the enrichment of the intellectual life, not only of his own country and generation, but of many other countries and of generations not yet counted. Nothing could be more instructive or more stimulating than this story of how Macaulay became England's most widely read historian, of how his talents and his time were fused in a great intellectual enterprise, the success of which rendered him a classic while yet he was alive, the continued and universal popularity of which attests the enduring quality of his work, the permanency of his influence and his fame. Macaulay knew how to invest his work with the magic that preserves, that defies oblivion and neglect, the magic of style, the immortality of art.

What a remarkable life was Macaulay's, what variety, what achievement, what enjoyment, what renown! He moved ever in a blaze of success from early youth to the end of his life. One of the world's precocious children, he quickly became one of the world's celebrities, universally respected and admired. His career compels us to revise our apothegm that only through adversity do we rise to the heights, for, from beginning to end, fortune never veiled her face for him but smiled graciously and benignantly, was never fickle but was constancy itself. And another engaging feature of the story is this, that

his successes were due to his own efforts and talents and not to powerful connections or lucky patronage or adventitious circumstance. He made and paid his own way in life. His achievements were the product of hard work, of clear thought, of intense application to the task. Indeed all the supposed requirements of our democratic and popular morality were as well satisfied by Macaulay's career as by most of the home-made heroes of the modern age.

Macaulay was born in 1800 and he died in 1859. A brilliant university career was capped immediately after by an essay on Milton, written at the age of twenty-five, an essay of such beauty and power that England became instantly aware that a new and incalculable literary light was blazing in the firmament of English letters. At the age of thirty we find him a member of the House of Commons playing a notable part in the desperate and memorable struggle for the reform of Parliament, and establishing a reputation as an orator as easily as he had established one as an author. Soon followed four years as a high official in India, the vast, mysterious, imposing empire so strangely brought under the sovereignty of Britain. There in that ancient land Macaulay accomplished an enduring and difficult task, in participating in the great improvement of the criminal law of India and in providing for the education of the Indian people. Back again in England in 1838 he spent the next twenty years, until his death in 1859, in politics, in which his interest was recurrent but on the whole steadily decreasing; and in varied, prolific and memorable literary activity, of such attractive quality, of such compelling interest, of such vital appeal, that he became inevitably England's most widely read man of letters. For his writings which had made him both famous and wealthy and which had given entertainment and instruction to millions of his fellow men he was made a peer of England, Lord Macaulay, in 1856, and when he died three years later he was buried in the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey, at the feet of Addison and near Goldsmith and Garrick and Handel and Johnson, honored in death as in life with the high prizes of his calling.

About this life, so rich and so honorable, whether in

Parliament or Council or whether in the field of letters, there hung a charm and radiance more personal, more intimate, more winning, which came from the very human and engaging nature of the man, from his buoyancy, his good humor and manly vigor, his helpfulness to others, his lack of affection or vanity. His head remained clear in spite of the heavy volume of incense that arose in his direction. In the private relations of his life, in his steadfast devotion to clean and upright principles of conduct, in the virility and high spirits which characterized both his thoughts and actions Macaulay was altogether admirable and attractive. He was not only an imposing personage in the politics and literature of the nineteenth century. He was every inch a man. His rare gifts were not those only which shine in public places and before a multitude of men. If the reader wishes to know more of all this he will find it pleasantly set forth in Mr. Trevelyan's bright and blithe biography.

"During his joyous and shining pilgrimage through the world," as Trevelyan calls it, Macaulay did many things and did them all well. But among them was not included eminence in any sport. Macaulay, says his biographer, was utterly destitute of bodily accomplishments and he viewed his deficiencies with supreme indifference. "He could neither swim, nor row, nor drive, nor skate, nor shoot. He seldom crossed a saddle, and never willingly. When in attendance at Windsor as a cabinet minister he was informed that a horse was at his disposal, he said: 'If her Majesty wishes to see me ride she must order out an elephant.' The only exercise in which he can be said to have excelled was that of threading crowded streets with his eyes fixed upon a book. He might be seen in such thoroughfares as Oxford Street and Cheapside, walking as fast as other people walked, and reading a great deal faster than anybody else could read."

But this young man whose athletic exploits were limited to these literary peripatetics was destined to write books which thousands and tens of thousands of his fellowmen were to read as eagerly as he read the works of others while threading the streets and lanes of London, and with quite as much absorption owing to the powerful spell which he wielded through his pen. Macaulay's Essays,

Macaulay's History are works which have been accounted treasures by three generations of men and whose course shows few signs of having yet been run.

It is with the former that we are here concerned. Lord Morley in his well-known study of Macaulay written about a half a century ago mentions the fact a traveler recently returned from Australia declared that the three books which he found on every squatter's shelf and which at least he knew before he crossed the threshold that he would be sure to find were Shakespeare, the Bible and Macaulay's Essays. "And this," says Morley, "is only an illustration of a feeling about Macaulay which has been almost universal among the English-speaking peoples." "We may safely say," he adds, "that no man obtains and keeps for a great many years such a position as this, unless he is possessed of some very extraordinary qualities, or else of common qualities in a very uncommon and extraordinary degree." "If Macaulay did not invent the historical essay," writes Mr. Gooch, the critical and penetrating historian of the historical writing of the nineteenth century, "he found it of brick and left it of marble. His articles glitter like diamonds in the dusty pages of the Edinburgh Review. . . . What Shakespeare's plays achieved for the fifteenth century, Macaulay's essays accomplished for the seventeenth and eighteenth. He was the first English writer to make history universally interesting and it is from him that most of his countrymen still derive their enduring impressions. . . . A work which appeals to men of all races, and which has held its own for three generations must possess extraordinary merits.”

Another comment worthy of quotation is that of Morison, like Morley and Gooch, a discriminating and severe critic of literature and of Macaulay himself: "The originality of form and treatment which Macaulay gave to the historical essay has not, perhaps, received due consideration. Without having invented it, he so greatly expanded. and improved it that he deserves nearly as much credit. as if he had. He did for the historical essay what Haydn did for the sonata, and Watt for the steam-engine; he found it rudimentary and unimportant, and he left it complete and a thing of power. Before his time there was the ponderous history-generally in quarto—and there: