INTRODUCTION

burgh Review.

When, in 1825, Francis Jeffrey, Editor of the Edinburgh Review, searching for "some clever 1. Macaulay's Ad- young man who would write for vent in the Edin- us,” laid his hands upon Thomas

Babington Macaulay, he did not know that he was marking a red-letter day in the calendar of English journalism. Through the two decades and more of its existence, the Review had gone on serving its patrons with the respectable dulness of Lord Brougham and the respectable vivacity of its editor, and the patrons had apparently dreamed of nothing better until the momentous August when the young Fellow of Trinity, not yet twenty-five, flashed upon its pages with his essay on Milton. And for the next two decades the essays that followed from the same pen became so far the mainstay of the magazine that booksellers declared it "sold, or did not sell, according as there were, or were not, articles by Mr. Macaulay." Yet Jeffrey was not without some inkling of the significance of the event, for upon receipt of the first manuscript he wrote to its author the words so often quoted: "The more I think, the less I can conceive where you picked

2. Effect on Prose.

up that style." Thus early was the finger of criticism pointed toward the one thing that has always been most conspicuously associated with Macaulay's name.

English prose, at this date, was still clinging to the traditions of its measured eighteenth-century

stateliness. But the life had

nearly gone out of it, and the formalism which sat so elegantly upon Addison and not uneasily upon Johnson had stiffened into pedantry, scarcely relieved by the awkward attempts of the younger journalists to give it spirit and freedom. It was this languishing prose which Macaulay, perhaps more than any other one writer, deserves the credit of rejuvenating with that wonderful something which Jeffrey was pleased to call "style." Macaulay himself would certainly have deprecated the association of his fame with a mere synonym for rhetoric, and we should be wronging him if we did not hasten to add that style, rightly understood, is a very large and significant thing, comprehending, indeed, a man's whole intellectual and emotional attitude toward those phases of life with which he comes into contact. It is the man's manner of reacting upon the world, his manner of expressing himself to the world; and the world has little beyond the manner of a man's expression by which to judge of the man himself.

But a good style, even in its narrow sense of a good command of language, of a

3. The Man.

masterly and individual manner of presenting thought, is yet no mean accomplishment, and if Macaulay had done nothing else than revivify English prose, which is, just possibly, his most enduring achievement, he would have little reason to complain. What he accomplished in this direction and how, it is our chief purpose here to explain. In the meantime we shall do well to glance at his other achievements and take some note of his equipment. Praed has left this description of him: “There

" came up a short, manly figure, marvelously upright,

with a bad neckcloth, and one

hand in his waistcoat-pocket." We read here, easily enough, brusqueness, precision without fastidiousness, and self-confidence. These are all prominent traits of the man, and they all show in his work. Add kindness and moral rectitude, which scarcely show there, and humor, which shows only in a somewhat unpleasant light, and you have a fair portrait. Now these are

. manifestly the attributes of a man who knows what worldly comfort and physical well-being are, a man of good digestive and assimilative powers, well-fed, incapable of worry, born to succeed.

In truth, Macaulay was a man of remarkable vitality and energy, and though he died too early -at the beginning of his sixtieth year-he began his work young and continued it with almost unabated vigor to the end. But his “work” (as

we are in the habit of naming that which a man leaves behind him), voluminous as it is, represents only one side of his activity. There was the early-assumed burden of repairing his father's broken fortunes, and providing for the family of younger brothers and sisters. The burden, it is true, was assumed with characteristic cheerfulness -it could not destroy for him the worldly comfort we have spoken of—but it entailed heavy responsibilities for a young man.

It forced him to seek salaried positions, such as the post of commissioner of bankruptcy, when he might have been more congenially employed. Then there were the many years spent in the service of the government as a Whig member of the House of Commons and as Cabinet Minister during the exciting period of the Reform Bill and the Anti-Corn-Law League, with all that such service involved-study of politics, canvassing, countless dinners, public and private, speech-making in Parliament and out, reading and making reports, endless committee meetings, endless sessions. There were the three years and a half spent in India, drafting a penal code. And there was, first and last, the acquisition of the knowledge that made possible this varied activity, -the years at the University, the study of law and jurisprudence, the reading, not of books, but of entire national literatures, the ransacking of libraries and the laborious deciphering of hundreds of manuscripts in the