became an act. As a reward the great orator was appointed a commissioner of the Board of Control, which represented the crown in its relations to the East Indian directors. He held this commissionership only eighteen months, however, for as a means of reducing expenses the Whig Government suppressed it. It is to Macaulay's everlasting credit that he voted for this economic measure at a time when his Trinity fellowship was about to expire, and when the removal from office left him penniless.

Impatient to choose the first Reformed Parliament, the great cities were looking about that autumn for worthy representatives. The Whigs of Leeds got Macaulay's promise to stand for that town as soon as it became a parliamentary borough. His attitude toward the electors whose votes meant bread to him was as refreshing as it was striking. His frank opinions they should have at all times, but pledges never. They should choose their representative cautiously and then confide in him liberally. Such independence was not relished in many quarters, but Macaulay answered the remonstrants with even more vigor: "It is not necessary to my happiness that I should sit in Parliament; but it is necessary to my happiness that I should possess, in Parliament or out of Parliament, the consciousness of having done what is right."1

His appointment as Secretary to the Board of Control was a help financially, and his return to Parliament by Leeds proved to be of very great assistance. Matters were going smoothly when the Government introduced their Slavery Bill. To Το Zachary Macaulay, who had always been a zealous abolitionist, the measure was not satisfactory. To please him the son opposed it. In order that he might be free to criticise the bill, simply as a member of Parliament, he resigned his position in the Cabinet, although both he and his father thought this course of action would be fatal to his career. A son whose

1 Trevelyan, I, 249–253.

devotion to his father leads him to such lengths is not always so promptly rewarded as Macaulay was in this instance, for the resignation was not accepted, the bill was amended, and the Ministers were as friendly as ever.

Up to this time he had earned little money by his writing. After giving his days to India and his nights to improving the condition of the Treasury, he could get only snatches of time for turning off the essays which we read with so much care. With a family depending on him he now realized fully the need not of riches but of a competence. He could live by his pen or by office; but he could not think seriously of writing to "relieve the emptiness of the pocket " rather than "the fullness of the mind," and if he must earn this competence through office, the sooner he was through with the business the better. So it was largely for the sake of his aged father, his younger brother, and his dearly loved sisters, that he accepted an appointment as legal adviser to the Supreme Council of India.

He and his sister Hannah sailed for India in February, 1834. He tells us that he read during the whole voyage: the Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil, Horace, Cæsar's Commentaries, Bacon's De Augmentis, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Don Quixote, Gibbon's Rome, Mill's India, all the seventy volumes of Voltaire, Sismondi's History of France, and the seven thick folios of the Biographia Britannica. On his arrival he plunged into the new work. Not satisfied with the immense amount already assigned him, he saw two large opportunities to do more by serving on two committees. As president of the Committee of Public Instruction he substituted for Oriental learning the introduction and promotion of European literature and science among the natives; as president of the Law Commission he took the initiative in framing the famous Penal Code, the value of which must be judged from the facts that "hardly any questions have arisen upon it which have had to be determined by the courts, and that few and slight amendments

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have had to be made by the Legislature." He worked patiently, yet he longed to be back in England, and it was a great relief when in 1838, his work done, his competence saved, he was able to return. He was too late to see his father again, for Zachary Macaulay had died while the son was on the way home.

In the fall he went to Italy with his mind full of associations and traditions. His biographer says that every line of good poetry which the fame or the beauty of this country had inspired "rose almost involuntarily to his lips." On this occasion he gave some of those geographical and topographical touches to the Lays of Ancient Rome "which set his spirited stanzas ringing in the ear of a traveller in Rome at every turn.". Much as he enjoyed Italy, he soon began to long for his regular work, and the following February found him in London again. In March he was unanimously elected to the Club, and he was making the most of his leisure for books when he felt it his duty to enter Parliament for Edinburgh. "Office was never, within my memory, so little attractive," he writes, "and therefore, I fear, I cannot, as a man of spirit, flinch, if it is offered to me." Without any show of reluctance he was made Secretary at War and given a seat in the Cabinet. To this position the man who had begun life "without rank, fortune, or private interest" had risen before his fortieth birthday. On March 14, 1840, he wrote his intimate friend, Mr. Ellis, a good account of his life at that time.2

"I have got through my estimates [for army expenses] with flying colors; made a long speech of figures and details without hesitation or mistake of any sort; stood catechising on all sorts of questions; and got six millions of public money in the course of an hour or two. I rather like the sort of work, and I have some aptitude for it. I find business pretty nearly enough to occupy all my time; and if I have a few minutes to myself, I spend them with my sister and niece; so that,

except while I am dressing and undressing, I get no reading at all. I do not know but that it is as well for me to live thus for a time. I became too mere a bookworm in India, and on my voyage home. Exercise, they say, assists digestion; and it may be that some months of hard official and Parliamentary work may make my studies more nourishing."

But the Queen's advisers did not have the confidence of the country, there was a change of government, and Macaulay lost his office. How the loss affected him we may gather from a part of his letter to Mr. Napier, at that time the editor of the Edinburgh Review.

“I can truly say that I have not, for many years, been so happy as I am at present. ... I am free. I am independent. I am in Parliament, as honorably seated as man can be. My family is comfortably off. I have leisure for literature, yet I am not reduced to the necessity of writing for money. If I had to choose a lot from all that there are in human life, I am not sure that I should prefer any to that which has fallen to me. I am sincerely and thoroughly contented."1

Carlyle says that a biography should answer two questions: (1) what and how produced was the effect of society on the man; and (2) what and how produced was his effect on society. To the careful reader of Trevelyan's Life the words just quoted from Macaulay will give a pretty fair notion of what, up to this time, Macaulay had got from society. The other question, what he gave to society, is perhaps best answered in the account of the remaining years of his life. In Parliament, in society, and in literary and political circles throughout the country there was the feeling that he had won the respect and good will of all, and that he was to do something still greater. What this greater thing was to be was the question that confronted Macaulay for the next few years. 1 Trevelyan, II, 89.

2 Carlyle's Essay on Burns, p. 5, Ginn's edition.

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Certainly it was not the publishing of his Lays, although one hundred thousand copies of them were sold by the year 1875. Nor was it the collecting and reprinting of his Essays, although they have given hundreds of thousands of minds a taste for letters and a desire for knowledge. One could hardly call it the delivery of those vehement and effective parliamentary speeches with which he held his audience spellbound, even if one of them did secure the passing of the Copyright Bill in 1842 in practically its present form. But while attending to these other matters, Macaulay had on his mind an undertaking which was destined to satisfy, as far as he carried it toward completion, the hopes of his most enthusiastic admirers. In 1841 he had written to Napier, "I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies." In order that he might give all his attention to this one project he soon stopped writing for the Edinburgh Review; he denied himself no little of the pleasure he had been getting from society; he gave up more parliamentary honors than most others could ever hope to win. At last, in 1848, he published the first volumes of a work that met with a heartier welcome than the English-speaking world had given to any historical work since the coming of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. That these volumes of The History of England were the result of a very different kind of effort from that with which Macaulay had dashed off the essays, may be inferred from a sentence of Thackeray's, which Trevelyan says is no exaggeration: "He reads twenty books to write a sentence; he travels a hundred miles to make a line of description." 2 After all critics may say for or against the History, it remains to note that Macaulay did what he undertook: he wrote a history that is more readable than most novels.

1 Trevelyan, II, 96. 2 For Trevelyan's evidence, see II, 191.