of Macaulay's celebrated essays. His reputation was immediately established. From that time his popularity, as well as that of the Review, increased with every new essay from his pen. He became one of its regular contributors, and continued to write for it during the greater part of his life.

In 1828 Macaulay was made Commissioner in Bankruptcy, and two years later was elected a member of Parliament for Calne. In this year he delivered his first speech in the House of Commons; but it was not until 1831, when speaking upon the second reading of the Reform Bill, in opposition to Peel, that he manifested his abilities as an orator. This speech created such a sensation that even his adversaries compared him with the celebrated orators of the palmy days of Parliament.

Macaulay was now a lion of the day, courted and admired by the social and political celebrities of London; and his wide reading, his phenomenal memory, his brilliant conversation, sparkling with spoils from many literatures," helped to make him a literary as well as social leader. He thoroughly enjoyed the world and the many substantial comforts within his reach. His annual income from his fellowship at Trinity College, from his contributions to the Review, and from his commissionership, amounting in all to about £900 ($4500), enabled him to live well and amid congenial spirits. But this income soon began to diminish; for his fellowship, tenable for seven years, was just expiring, and the commissionership

in bankruptcy was abolished.

Macaulay was thus in rather straitened circumstances when he was offered a seat on the Supreme Council of India, as legal adviser. The salary attached to the post was large, £10,000 ($50,000) a year, for five years. Although he was averse to going to India, and thus lessening his chances for advancement at home, he saw that the offer was not one to be neglected by a man in his circumstances. He, therefore, accepted the position, and sailed for India in February, 1834.

During his stay in India, Macaulay, by his ability and good sense, accomplished much for the welfare of the country. He showed himself a powerful advocate of the freedom of the Indian press; he composed an admirable digest of criminal law, known as the Indian Penal Code; and he advocated and put into practice an enlightened system of education, introducing among the natives the study of English and of English methods.

Upon his return to England, Macaulay again settled in London. While still contributing to the Edinburgh Review, he began the work which, until his death, occupied the greater part of his leisure time, his famous History of England. This history he purposed to bring down from the accession of James II. to the death of George III. ; but politics, writing for the Review, and failing health prevented his completing it. In 1839, shortly after his return from India, he was elected a member of Parliament for Edinburgh, and in September of the same year was

given a seat in the Cabinet as Secretary at War. In 1841, on the fall of the ministry, he was again returned to Parliament by Edinburgh; but for a time spoke only occasionally, preferring to spend his leisure hours upon his History and his essays. It was during this lull in his political exertions that he wrote for the Review the celebrated essays on Clive, Warren Hastings, and Chatham, and that he raised by his love, his marvelous skill, and his genius that " magnificent statue of the great writer and moralist of the last age". Joseph Addison. where throughout Macaulay's writings is the gift of his stupendous memory more clearly discernible than in this essay. His wonderful fund of illustration cannot fail to strike even the most hasty and superficial reader.

No

Macaulay's connection with the Edinburgh Review ceased in 1844. From that time on he devoted himself wholly to his History and to politics. In 1846 he was once more elected to Parliament for Edinburgh and was made Paymaster-General of the Army. The following year, for the first time, he met defeat at the Parliamentary elections. This, though he was afterwards returned to Parliament by Edinburgh, was the real end of his political career. Nor did he regret it; for it gave him much more time to work on the subject that was now absorbing all his leisure moments - his History of England. So diligently did he work at this, that in 1848 he was able to publish the first two volumes. The same year he was elected Lord Rector of Glasgow University; and was

offered the professorship of Modern History at Cambridge, which he declined.

At the price of health and strength, Macaulay succeeded in publishing the third and fourth volumes of his History in December, 1855. Now, too late, he resigned his seat in Parliament, and promised himself the rest and quiet he had so truly earned by his life of almost ceaseless mental labor. Lord Palmerston, in 1857, created him a peer, and he took the title of Baron Macaulay of Rothley. His last distinction, however, he did not live long to enjoy. Though he still continued to work at his History, and occasionally contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica, his strength was gradually failing. On the twenty-eighth of December, 1859, he died suddenly, but quietly," sitting in his library in an easy chair." He was buried in the Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, at the foot of the statue of his admired and beloved Addison.

II. SKETCH OF MILTON'S LIFE.

Although Macaulay's essay on Milton “ excited greater attention than any article which had appeared not immediately connected with the politics of the day;" though its rhetoric is brilliant, its language and structure clear, it is, for some reasons, not considered one of his best productions. He himself said, "This essay . . . which was written when the author was fresh from college, and which contains scarcely a paragraph such as his matured judg

ment approves, still remains overloaded with gaudy and ungraceful ornament." Mr. Frederick Harrison has charged Macaulay's description of the Restoration with extravagance, and others have detected various faults and inaccu

racies in the essay. It is indeed strange that Macaulay, fired by the splendor and beauty of Milton's poetry, devotes less than half a dozen lines to those exquisite poems, the Ode on the Nativity and the elegy Lycidas. The gravest fault of the essay, however, is that it lacks the true spirit of unbiassed historical investigation and criticism. Macaulay was a man of strong prejudices. He has drawn a portrait of Milton which represents the man as we all love to admire him, but which is distorted and untrue. His Milton is too ideal. Carried away by his admiration for Milton's poetry and the beauty of the Areopagitica, as well as by his esteem for the man himself, with whose political ideas he sympathized, Macaulay has drawn the poet as an earnest and consistent advocate and lover of human liberty and freedom of thought. Such, indeed, he was, but it was freedom for his own religious and political partisans only. Towards his adversaries he was bitter and intolerant. Nowhere does Milton condemn Cromwell's tyranny and oppression of the Roman Catholics and the Presbyterians. A much truer idea of Milton's real nature and of his supposed love of liberty can be found in his prose writings, especially in his essay on Peace with the Irish Rebels. It should, however, be borne in mind that Macaulay was a Whig, and that this essay on Milton had