INTRODUCTION

IN the preparation of the following introductory matter an effort has been made to present only that which will be available and useful to the average student. Critical analyses and discussions have been studiously avoided.

Generally the introduction to a work of this class is carefully skipped by students, and sometimes, no doubt, wisely. Yet there is a certain kind and amount of introductory work which needs to be done in order to prepare the way for the proper study of any author, and it is hoped that the following pages will not altogether fail to meet this necessity.

"His heart was pure and simple as a child's
Unbreathed on by the world: in friendship warm,
Confiding, generous, constant; and now

He ranks among the great ones of the earth,
And hath achieved such glory as will last

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY, the son of Zachary and Selina Mills Macaulay, was born at Rothley Temple, October 25, 1800. His father, a man of strict principles and stern and unyielding integrity, was associated with Wilberforce in his anti-slavery agitation, and spent the larger part of his life in works of charity and philanthropy.

Young Macaulay was a child of such marked maturity of thought and expression that he became noted among the friends of the family for his quaintness and precocity, yet his nature was so frank and wholesome that he escaped the slightest taint of priggishness. Those qualities of person and mind which were marked in his later years appeared very early in life and developed rapidly.

"Madame, the agony has already begun to abate," was the answer of the four-year-old boy to the solicitous inquiry of a lady, when a careless servant spilled some hot coffee on his legs. Not long afterwards he edified a group of visitors in the drawing-room by walking into the room and exclaiming:

"Cursed be Sallie; for it is written, 'Cursed be he that removeth his neighbor's landmark.'" This scriptural malediction was directed against a serving

maid who had removed a row of oyster shells with which he had marked out the limits of his playground.

He early formed the habit of holding a piece of bread and butter in his hand, from which he would occasionally take a bite, when he was engaged in study. His mother one day told him he must break up the habit. "Yes, mamma," he replied, "industry shall be my bread and attention my butter."

At the age of eight he had covered a wide range of reading, and had accumulated a large store of knowledge, which his wonderfully retentive memory enabled him to use with considerable facility and force. He soon became accustomed to express his thoughts in both prose and poetry. His marvellously fertile mind began to pour forth its treasures at an age when the average child has not yet learned even to read; and though his earlier productions have not been deemed worthy of preservation, they gave abundant promise of the maturer work with which he was destined to enrich literature for all time.

One of his productions was a paper which was intended to persuade the people of Travancore to embrace the Christian religion, of which his mother says: "On reading it, I found it to contain a very clear idea of the leading facts and doctrines of that religion, with some strong arguments for its adoption. Heroic poems, epics, odes, and histories flowed from his

pen like waters from a mountain spring; and while they were often crude and boyish, they were the spontaneous expressions of a mind which was rapidly growing into a consciousness of its own productive power."

His elementary education was secured at a small private school near Cambridge, where his individual peculiarities were allowed much freedom in their development, yet with sufficient guidance to coördinate them wisely. At the age of thirteen he wrote:

"The books which I am at present employed in reading to myself are, in English, Plutarch's Lives and Milner's Ecclesiastical History; in French, Fénelon's Dialogues of the Dead. I shall send you back the volumes of Madame de Genlis's petit romans as soon as possible, and should be very much obliged for one or two more of them."

He also formed a taste for fiction, which he read with such eagerness that very few novels in the English language escaped his eye.

Notwithstanding his literary tastes and his absorption in his reading and studies, he never allowed school duties to encroach upon his love of home and friends, or to reconcile him to his "exile." At the beginning of his second half-year at school he writes to his mother:

My spirits are far more depressed by leaving home than they were last half-year. Everything brings

home to my recollection. You told me I should be happy when I once came here, but not an hour passes in which I do not shed tears at thinking of home."

His biographer gives an illustration of his wonderful memory, which is referred to this period. While sitting in a Cambridge coffee-house he picked up a paper and read two poetical effusions which were printed in it, one called "Reflections of an Exile," and the other a parody on a Welsh ballad. He looked them once through, and his mind did not recur to them again for forty years, at the end of which period he was able to repeat them without changing a word. Joined with these retentive powers was the ability to assimilate the contents of a printed page almost at a glance. He would read a whole book while the average reader would be covering a chapter. Nor was this merely "skimming," as he could always repeat the substance of the book from memory afterwards.

He entered upon all branches of study with equal avidity, excepting only mathematics, which he always regarded with intense aversion and pursued only under protest. In regard to this subject he writes home from the University:

"I can scarcely bear to write on mathematics or mathematicians. Oh for words to express my abomination for that science, if a name sacred to the useful and embellishing arts may be applied to the percep