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In other ways we can trace his "effect on society." He was chosen Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow in 1848. Prince Albert tried, but in vain, to induce him to become Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1849. He was asked, but declined urging the plea that he was not a debater to join the Cabinet in 1852. The same year the people of Edinburgh, ashamed of their failure to reëlect him five years before, chose him to represent them in Parliament. Meantime he had been well and happy. In his journal for October 25, 1850, he wrote: "My birthday. I am fifty. Well, I have had a happy life. I do not know that anybody, whom I have seen close, has had a happier. Some things I regret; but, on the whole, who is better off? I have not children of my own, it is true; but I have children whom I love as if they were my own, and who, I believe, love me. I wish that the next ten years may be as happy as the last ten. But I rather wish it than hope it."

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Macaulay may have surmised that the good health which had been such an important factor in keeping him happy would not last much longer. At any rate his last election to the House of Commons was followed by an illness from which he never fully recovered, but through which, for seven years, "he maintained his industry, his courage, his patience, and his benevolence." Occasionally he treated the House to a “torrent of words," but he understood that he must husband his powers for work on books. To protect himself from a bookseller who advertised an edition of his speeches, he made and published a selection of his own, many of which he had to write from memory. Then he continued his work on the History. Some of the time he had to "be resolute and work doggedly," as Johnson said. "He almost gave up letterwriting; he quite gave up society; and at last he had not leisure even for his diary." Yet of this immense labor he said, "It is the business and the pleasure of my life." 2 Ibid., 321.

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1 Trevelyan, II, 244.

As a result of this steady toil the writer secured an enviable influence abroad. He was made a member of several foreign academies, and translations have turned the History into a dozen tongues. At home, among the numerous honors, he was presented with the degree of Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford, and made a peer-Baron of Rothley. Naturally before receiving this last honor he had withdrawn from Parliament, and from 1856 to the end of his life he enjoyed a retired home, with a fine garden. He had plenty of time to cash the famous check for twenty thousand pounds which the first edition of the History brought him, and to invest and spend it as he pleased. On his fifty-seventh birthday he wrote in his diary, "What is much more important to my happiness than wealth, titles, and even fame, those whom I love are well and happy, and very kind and affectionate to me."

One of the chief sources of his happiness, one to which he was particularly indebted these last days, was his love of reading. He could no longer read fourteen books of the Odyssey at a stretch while out for a walk, but in the quiet of his library he enjoyed the companionship of the author he happened to be reading as perhaps few men could. He who could command. any society in London failed to find any that he preferred, at breakfast or at dinner, to the company of Boswell; and it seems natural and fitting that he should be found on that last December day, in 1859, "in the library, seated in his easy-chair, and dressed as usual, with his book on the table beside him." Equally fitting is it that in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey, the resting place of Johnson, Garrick, Goldsmith, and Addison, there should lie a stone with this inscription:

THOMAS BABINGTON, LORD MACAULAY,
BORN AT ROTHLEY TEMPLE, LEICESTERSHIRE,
OCTOBER 25TH, 1800.

DIED AT HOLLY LODGE, CAMPDEN HILL,
DECEMBER 28TH, 1859.

"His body is buried in peace,

but his name liveth for evermore."

For he left behind him a great and honorable name, and every action of his life was 66 as clear and transparent as one of his own sentences." His biography reveals the dutiful son, the affectionate brother, the true friend, the honorable politician, the practical legislator, the eloquent speaker, the brilliant author. It shows unmistakably that greater than all his works was the man.

II. MACAULAY AND HIS LITERARY CONTEM

PORARIES

The very year in which the last volumes of Johnson's Lives of the Poets were published, 1781, Burns began to do his best work. In 1796 Burns died. In 1798, two years before Macaulay was born, Wordsworth and Coleridge published the first of the Lyrical Ballads, which included The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Like Burns, yet in a way entirely his own, Wordsworth was the poet of Nature and of Man, and this little volume was the beginning of much spontaneous poetry which in the following years proved a refreshing change from the polished couplets which had been in fashion. Instead of Pope and Addison and Johnson, in whose time literary men cared more for books than for social reforms, more for manner than for matter, came Scott, Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, Landor, and Southey with their irrepressible originality.

Before Macaulay's day Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett had each contributed something to the novel. During his lifetime came practically all of the best work of Miss Austen, Scott, Cooper, Lytton, Disraeli, Hawthorne, the Brontës, Dickens, Thackeray, Mrs. Gaskell, Trollope, and Kingsley. George Eliot's Adam Bede appeared the year he died.

Other prominent prose writers were Hallam, Grote, Milman, Froude, Mill, Ruskin, and Carlyle. In Memoriam and Mrs. Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese were published in 1850, and Browning's The Ring and the Book came out in 1868.

As to Macaulay's relations with his literary contemporaries, it must be understood that he gave practically his whole attention to the times of which he read and wrote, and to the men who made those times interesting. Scientists were making important discoveries day by day, but his concern was not with them, even at a time when Darwin was writing his Origin of Species. It was not clear to him that philosophical speculations like Carlyle's might do much to better the condition of humanity. He finished Wordsworth's Prelude only to be disgusted with "the old flimsy philosophy about the effect of scenery on the mind" and "the endless wildernesses of dull, flat, prosaic twaddle." Although he read an infinite variety of contemporary literature he said he would not attempt to dissect works of imagination. In 1838, when Napier wished him to review Lockhart's Life of Scott for the Edinburgh Review, he replied that he enjoyed many of Scott's performances as keenly as anybody, but that many could criticise them far better. He added: "Surely it would be desirable that some person who knew Sir Walter, who had at least seen him and spoken with him, should be charged with this article. Many people are living who had a most intimate acquaintance with him. I know no more of him than I know of Dryden or Addison, and not a tenth part so much as I know of Swift, Cowper, or Johnson." He turned instinctively to the old books, the books that he had read again and again: to Homer, Aristophanes, Horace, Herodotus, Addison, Swift, Fielding. There was at least one writer of fiction in his time to whom he was always loyal. On one occasion when he had been reading Dickens and Pliny and Miss Austen at the same time, he declared that Northanger Abbey, although "the work of a girl," was in his opinion "worth all Dickens and Pliny together."

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What he did for humanity he did as a practical man of affairs, at home alike in the Cabinet and in popular assemblies. 1 Trevelyan, II, 15.

While Carlyle in the midst of his gloomy life was toiling heroically to banish shams and to get at the True, the Real, Macaulay, who was reasonably satisfied with the past and the present, and hopeful of the future, was sifting from his vast treasury of information about the past what he believed to be significant in history and important in literature. He had none of the feeling that Ruskin had, that it was his duty to turn reformer, but what he did toward educating his readers he did in the way he most enjoyed.

III. THE STUDY OF MACAULAY

Once for all it must be remembered that Macaulay had no intention of being studied as a text-book, and we must deal with him fairly. First we should read the Life through at a sitting without consulting a note, just as we read an article in the Atlantic Monthly or the Encyclopædia Britannica. We should rush on with the "torrent of words" to the end to see what it is all about, and to get an impression of the article as a whole. As Johnson says: "Let him that is yet unacquainted with the powers of Shakespeare, and who desires to feel the highest pleasure that the drama can give, read every play from the first scene to the last with utter negligence of all his commentators. When his fancy is once on the wing, let it not stoop at correction or explanation. When his attention is strongly engaged let it disdain alike to turn aside to the name of Theobald and of Pope. Let him read on through brightness and obscurity, through integrity and corruption; let him preserve his comprehension of the dialogue and his interest in the fable. And when the pleasures of novelty have ceased let him attempt exactness and read the commentators."

Macaulay attracts attention not only to what he says but also to the way in which he says it. In examining his style it will be a good plan to ask ourselves whether the writer ever

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