THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY

(1800-1859)

BY JOHN BACH MCMASTER

HOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY, the most widely read of English essayists and historians, was born near London on the 25th of October, 1800. His early education was received at private schools; but in 1818 he went into residence at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduated with honor, and was elected a fellow in 1824. Out of deference to the wishes of his father he thought for a while of becoming an attorney, read law, and was called to the bar in 1826. But the labors of the profession were little to his liking; no business of consequence came to him, and he was soon deep in literature and politics, for the pursuit of which his tastes, his habits, and his parts pre-eminently fitted him.

His nephew and biographer has gathered a mass of anecdotes and reminiscences, which go far to show that while still a lad Macaulay displayed in a high degree many of the mental characteristics which later in life made him famous. The eagerness with which he devoured books of every sort; the marvelous memory which enabled him to recall for years whole pages and poems, read but once; the quickness of perception by the aid of which he could at a glance. extract the contents of a printed page; his love of novels and poetry; his volubility, his positiveness of assertion, and the astonishing amount of information he could pour out on matters of even trivial importance, - were as characteristic of the boy as of the man.

As might have been expected from one so gifted, Macaulay began to write while a mere child; but his first printed piece was an anonymous letter defending novel-reading and lauding Fielding and Smollett. It was written at the age of sixteen; was addressed to his father, then editor of the Christian Observer, was inserted in utter ignorance of the author, and brought down on the periodical the wrath of a host of subscribers. One declared that he had given the obnoxious number to the flames, and should never again read the magazine. At twenty-three Macaulay began to write for Knight's Quarterly Magazine, and contributed to it articles some of which as The Conversation between Mr. Abraham Cowley and Mr. John Milton touching the Great Civil War'; his criticism of Dante and Petrarch; that on Athenian Orators; and the Fragments of a Roman Tale'are still