INTRODUCTION

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF MACAULAY

Birth and Early Years. Thomas Babington Macaulay was the son of Zachary Macaulay and Selina Mills. His father's sister Jean was the wife of Thomas Babington, Esq., a small landowner; and the future poet, essayist, statesman, and historian was born October 25, 1800, while his parents were visiting at Rothley Temple, in Leicestershire, the residence of the Babingtons.

He was the eldest of nine children. A glance at his ancestry may be suggestive.

Selina Mills was the daughter of a man of some importance in his day, a bookseller in Brighton, and a member of the Society of Friends. One of her brothers "edited a Bristol journal exceedingly well, and is said to have made some figure in light literature." She seems to have been a woman of intelligence, bright and attractive, yet devoting her life to her home and family, as may be seen from the words of her daughter, Lady Trevelyan: "In the year 1816 we were at Brighton

for the summer holidays, and he [Macaulay] read to us Sir Charles Grandison. It was always a habit in our family to read aloud every evening. Among the books selected I can recall Clarendon, Burnet, Shakespeare (a great treat when my mother took the volume), Miss Edgeworth, Mackenzie's Lounger and Mirror, and as a standing dish, the Quarterly and the Edinburgh Reviews. Poets, too, especially Scott and Crabbe, were constantly chosen." Mrs. Macaulay must have been an almost ideal mother, and it is easy to find in the preceding extract something of the reason of her son's great inclination toward history and literature.

Zachary Macaulay was the son of John Macaulay, a clergyman; and John was the son of Aulay Macaulay, also a clergyman. The meagre accounts of these seem to indicate that in intelligence and personal character they were fully up to the standard of British clergymen of the day. Zachary Macaulay was a man of clear sense and strong principles. He was prominent in social reforms, and his labors brought him in contact with the great thinkers of the day, including such men as Wilberforce, the great apostle of the abolition of slavery in British territory. In his sixteenth year, he was a bookkeeper for an estate in Jamaica, of which he soon became manager. A little later, he entered the service of the Sierra Leone Company, and was for a considerable time secretary of the

company, with a salary of five hundred pounds per annum. He was also for a long time editor of the Christian Observer.

While young Macaulay was still "the merest child," and while the family was living at Clapham, he was sent to his first school, that of a Mr. Greaves; but here he distinguished himself chiefly by his unwillingness to attend his classes. It was his habit to try to persuade his mother to let him remain away from the afternoon sessions of the school, but to his pleadings her regular reply was, "No, Tom; if it rains cats and dogs, you shall go." His dislike of his school, however, originated in his desire to exchange the drudgery of class study for the delight of reading at his own pleasure. Yet his mother writes that he "gets on wonderfully in all branches of his education, and the extent of his reading, and of the knowledge he has derived from it are truly astonishing in a boy not yet eight years old." About this time or a little earlier, he had written a Compendium of Universal History; a paper to persuade the natives of Travancore to adopt Christianity; about half of a projected poem entitled the Battle of Cheviot, after the manner of Scott; an heroic poem on Olaus Magnus, the Norwegian king from whom the Macaulays were said to have derived their name; and "I know not how many hymns." Somewhat later he began Fingal, a Poem in

XII Books, of which he finished two books, besides writing considerable parts of the rest.

When he was about thirteen years of age, he began attendance at the school of Rev. Mr. Preston, at Little Shelford. Here he was prepared for Trinity College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1818. At the university he distinguished himself in all his studies but mathematics, for which he had once manifested great fondness, followed now by even greater dislike. In 1819, he won the Chancellor's medal for a prize poem entitled Pompeii; and again, in 1821, for one entitled Evening. He received his degree as A.B. in 1822, was elected a fellow of his college in 1824, and was made an M.A. in 1825. His fellowship carried with it an annual income of three hundred pounds, to which he added considerably by tutoring. These revenues came in good stead, for Zachary Macaulay's means were now much reduced. In 1826, he was admitted to the practice of the law, but he seems to have made no great use of this profession until he was sent to India some years later.

His Reading. Macaulay's love of miscellaneous reading came early, and, except that in later years it became somewhat narrowed in scope, continued with him through life. His nephew, Mr. George Otto Trevelyan, tells us that at the early age of three years he was 66 an incessant reader," and that his favorite

position was lying on a rug before the fire, his book outspread on the floor, and a piece of bread and butter in his hands. Hannah More, the teacher and novelist, whose pupil his mother had been, after whom his sister Hannah (Lady Trevelyan) was named, and who was a lifelong friend of the family, was one of the first to appreciate and encourage his genius. He himself tells us that she first called out his literary tastes, and that her presents of well-selected books formed the foundation of his library. When he was only eight years of age, she gave him, among other books, Cowper, Paradise Lost, and Racine. Before he was thirteen years of age, we find him wading through Plutarch's Lives, Milner's Ecclesiastical History, Fénelon's Dialogues of the Dead, and Madame de Genlis' Petits Romans, the last two in French. At the same time he was reading Xenophon, Homer, and Virgil. Before he was fifteen he had added Boccaccio's Decameron, Chaucer, Dryden, Le Sage's Gil Blas, Southey's Thalaba and Kehama, the History of James I, Mrs. Montague's Essay on Shakespeare, and nearly all of Gibbon.

When leaving England for India, in 1834, he got together, for reading on the voyage out, "Richardson, Voltaire's works, Gibbon, Sismondi's History of the French, Davila, the Orlando in Italian, Don Quixote in Spanish, Homer in Greek, and Horace in Latin." Lest this should not be sufficient, he adds, "I must also