teachers of advanced work; yet he may, perhaps, be permitted to suggest that a student who wishes to study closely Addison and his time may find it worth while to take to pieces, as it were, such an essay as Macaulay's, and hunt up the evidence on which each statement rests. A close comparison of the present essay with the corresponding ones of Thackeray and Johnson, and with Mr. Courthope's Life of Addison' in the English Men of Letters Series, followed by a tracing back of the various facts recorded in these to their origins, may serve to somewhat advanced students as an introduction to a thorough and intimate knowledge of the writers who flourished in the days of Queen Anne.

LIFE OF MACAULAY.

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY was born at the home of his father's brother-in-law, Thomas Babington, at Rothley, in Leicestershire, on Oct. 25, 1800. His early home was in the suburbs of London. His father, the son of a Scotch minister, had lived for some years in the British West Indies. Having learned from practical experience what slavery meant, he resigned the lucrative position which his abilities had won, and returned to England to join the little band of devoted philanthropists who were fighting to put an end to the slave-trade, and to abolish slavery in the English dependencies. Macaulay was his oldest child.

The boy gave early evidence of unusual powers. From the age of three years he was a voracious reader, before he was eight he began to amuse himself with such literary labors as the composition of epic and narrative poems, hymns, epitomes of history, arguments for Christianity. To a wonderfully exact and ready memory was joined intellectual restlessness and imaginative activity. His productions were of course worthless as literature, but they show the bent of the child's mind. He talked the language of books; the world in which he lived was quite apart from that of the ordinary schoolboy.

In the outdoor sports and games of schoolboys he was never proficient. "He could neither swim, nor row, nor drive, nor skate, nor shoot." To the end of his life he remained one of the clumsiest of men. His gloves never

fitted; his clothes were ill put on; he could not strop a razor, and when he shaved he usually cut himself. Even with this physical awkwardness he might in a large school have been drawn into the life around him. But his preparation for the university was at small private schools, so that he was never really a boy among boys. He was not unpopular, but he cared little for anything but reading; in this his activity was prodigious. He read with great rapidity, and yet accurately; and the power of his memory is almost incredible. He could repeat long poems word for word after a single reading; he knew Paradise Lost and Pilgrim's Progress by heart. Forty years later he recalled and recited two worthless newspaper poems which he had happened to read one day while waiting in a coffee-room, and had never thought of in the interval.

On his entrance upon university life, which was at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1818, the social side of the greatest talker of his generation began to develop. Macaulay had never been a mere bookworm; even at school he had been distinguished for the vehemence and self-confidence of his conversation, and the pleasure he took in it; and contemporary politics had always had the keenest interest for him. At his father's house he had been accustomed to hear public affairs discussed by men of distinguished ability, who were themselves intimately concerned in them, and who were at the same time actuated only by high and unselfish motives, moral earnestness, and devotion to duty. In this school Macaulay had received his early training, and he never forgot its principles. Important questions were now pressing forward in English politics. Hostility to the excesses of the French Revolution and the struggle against Napoleon had given a lease of life to British conservatism which was now nearly run out. Roman Catholics were still disqualified from holding office; Parliament was unrepresentative and

under the control of the landowners the aristocracy; grain was kept dear in the interests of a class, by unjust taxation. But the agitation for reforms had already begun. And in literature and religion as well a liberalizing spirit was at work. Everywhere new ideas were in conflict with old forms the nineteenth century against the eighteenth. Surrounded as he was by a society of brilliant contemporaries, and in the ferment of the new life which was working in the universities, Macaulay, with his well-stored mind and his exhaustless intellectual energy, found here opportunity for the free play and full expansion of his powers. Macaulay was eminently a sociable man. He loved to talk almost as Iwell as he loved to read. He could talk all day and all night. No hour which found him a listener was ever too late; and if his companion wished his share of the time, they both talked at once. It was not until many years later that he acquired the habit of intermittent "flashes of silence," which Sydney Smith noted as so delightful. His extraordinary fertility of mind and readiness of memory made him incomparable. He was never at a loss for an argument. Everything that he had ever read seemed at the end of his tongue; his mind could range in an instant through his vast storehouse of information, and bring to the front whatever bore on the question in hand. If he wished to illustrate the use of a word, he seemed to be able to quote offhand every passage containing that word which he had ever read, it made no difference whether it was Latin, Greek, or English. It was no wonder that a man of such powers should have won for himself a foremost place as a conversationalist and an orator, as well as in literature.

His career at the university was signalized by the academic honors which he won. His scholarship, it is true, was not of the kind which loves to delve in details or range about abstractions. He disliked and neglected mathematics, and

he defined a scholar as one who reads Plato with his feet on the fender. But in 1821 he proved the quality of his classical attainments by carrying off a Craven scholarship, and twice he won the Chancellor's medal for English verse. Finally, in 1824, he was elected, after the usual competitive examination, one of the Fellows of his college.

His first distinguished literary success was in 1825, and it was obtained by the publication of the Essay on Milton. Already he had begun to appear in print, having contributed a number of articles and some verse to a newly started and short-lived London quarterly. But the Edinburgh Review, which printed the Essay on Milton, was the most important periodical in the country. The Essay was immediately recognized as the work of a new and brilliant writer, and Macaulay became a regular contributor to the Review. At the same time he was pursuing the study of the law, though with little interest and no expectation of making it seriously his profession. It is said that "he never really applied himself to any pursuit that was against the grain," and the law was not to his taste. But politics were; and in 1830 he entered the House of Commons as member for Calne.

For the next seventeen years literature held only a second place in his thoughts. His speeches on the Reform Bill in 1831 placed him at once in the front rank of parliamentary orators, and contributed largely to the success of the measure. Had he been free to follow the bent of his own inclinations, he might perhaps have risen to a position second to none of the great leaders of his party. But his poverty hampered him. His father's business, good when Macaulay entered the university, had gone from bad to worse, until at last there was nothing of it left but debts, which Macaulay most honorably assumed and at last completely paid. His writing could be depended on for a small income, but, it drew upon his time. As long as his