IYMAIYI¿YMIYIMIŠI benefits on any but my own nearest relations and friends." "H-called. I gave him three guineas for his library subscription. I lay out very little money with so much satisfaction. For three guineas a year, I keep a very good, intelligent young fellow out of a great deal of harm, and do him a great deal of good." "I suppose," he writes to one of his sisters, "That you told Mrs. Z———— that I was not angry with her; for to-day Í have a letter from her begging for money most vehemently, and saying that, if I am obdurate, her husband must go to prison. I have sent her twenty pounds, making up what she has had from me within a few months to a hundred and thirty pounds. But I have told her that her husband must take the consequences of his own acts, and that she must expect no further assistance from me. This importunity has provoked me not a little." His Last Illness. In a contemporary account of Macaulay's last illness it is related that on the morning of Wednesday, the 28th of December, he mustered strength to dictate a letter addressed to a poor curate, inclosing twenty-five pounds; after signing which letter he never wrote his name again. Late in the afternoon of the same day I called at Holly Lodge, intending to propose myself to dinner, an intention which was abandoned as soon as I entered the library. My uncle was sitting, with his head bent forward on his chest, in a languid and drowsy reverie. The first number of the Cornhill Magazine lay unheeded before him, open at the first page of Thackeray's story of "Lovel the Widower." He did not utter a word, except in answer; and the only one of my observations that at this distance of time I can recall suggested to him painful and pathetic reflections, which altogether destroyed his self-command. On hearing my report of his state, my mother resolved to spend the night at Holly Lodge. She had just left the drawing-room to make her preparations for the visit (it being, I suppose, a little before seven in the evening), when a servant IVIIIAIAIAIAI日 He Died Without Pain. arrived with an urgent summons. As we drove up to the porch of my uncle's house, the maids ran, crying, out into the darkness to meet us, and we knew that all was over. We found him in the library, seated in his easy-chair, and dressed as usual; with his book on the table beside him, still open at the same page. He had told his butler that he should go to bed early, as he was very tired. The man proposed his lying on the sofa. He rose as if to move, sat down again, and ceased to breathe. He died as he had always wished to die-without pain; without any formal farewell; preceding to the grave all whom he loved; and leaving behind him a great and honorable name, and the memory of a life every action of which was as clear and transparent as one of his own sentences. It would be unbecoming in me to dwell upon the regretful astonishment with which the tidings of his death were received wherever the English language is read; and quite unnecessary to describe the enduring grief of those upon whom he had lavished his affection, and for whom life had been brightened by daily converse with his genius, and ennobled by familiarity with his lofty and upright example. "We have lost (so my mother wrote) the light of our home, the most tender, loving, generous, unselfish, devoted of friends. What he was to me for fifty years how can I tell? What a world of love he poured out upon me and mine! The blank, the void, he has left-filling, as he did, so entirely both heart and intelno one can understand. For who ever knew such a life as mine passed as the cherished companion of such a man?” Left a Stainless lect He was buried in Westminster Abbey, on the 9th of January, 1860. The pall was borne by the Duke of Argyll, Lord John Russell, Lord Stanhope, Lord Carlisle, Bishop Wilberforce, Sir David Dundas, Sir Henry Holland, Dean Milman, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, the Lord Chancellor, and the Speaker of the House of Commons. "A beautiful sunrise," wrote Lord Carlisle. "The pall-bearers met in the Jerusalem Chamber. The last time I had been there on a like errand was IYAIYIYIYIMIYI at Canning's funeral. The whole service and ceremony were in the highest degree solemn and impressive. All befitted the man and the occasion." His Funeral. He rests with his peers in Poet's Corner, near the west wall of the south transept. There, amidst the tombs of Johnson, and Garrick, and Handel, and Goldsmith, and Gay, stands conspicuous the statue of Addison; and at the feet of Addison lies the stone which bears this inscription: THOMAS BABINGTON, LORD MACAULAY. Born at Rothley Temple, Leicestershire, Died at Holly Lodge, Campden Hill, "His body is buried in peace, But his name liveth for evermore." YAYIMIYIAIYIMIYI WILLIAM MATHEWS. All of the great poets have at some time been accused of being great thieves; but nothing can be more foolish than most of these attempts to rob them of their fame. Every great writer is necessarily indebted both to his contemporaries and to his predecessors. The finest passages in prose and poetry All of the Poets are often but embellished recollections of other men's productions. Thought and memory, it has been no less finely than justly said, are the Alpheus and the Arethusa of metaphysics; commit any material to the latter, and after a long period of forgetfulness, by some subterranean transition, it will appear floating on the surface of the former, as though it had been thrown up from no other sources than those of pure invention. Had Shakespeare, thousand-souled as he was, been confined from childhood to a desert island, could he have written the poorest of his matchless dramas; or could Newton, unaided by the preceding mathematicians, have discovered the law of gravitation? What, indeed, is every great poem but a compendium of the imagination of centuries? What the masterpieces of painting, but a combination of the finest lines and the most exquisite touches of earlier and inferior artists,—or the noblest works of statuary, but a blending into one form of angelic beauty of the loveliest features and most graceful lineaments wrought by hands and chisels long ago crumbled into dust? In all ages, the greatest literary geniuses have been the greatest borrowers. Omniverous devourers of books, with memories like hooks of steel, they have not scrupled to seize and to turn to account every good thought they could pick up in their readings. Milton, who has been called "the celestial thief," boldly plagiarized from Dante and Tasso, and all of The Celestial IYMAIYIMIYIYIMIYI them from Homer; and who believes that Homer had no reservoir of learning to draw from, no mysterious lake of knowledge, into which he could now and then throw a bucket? Goethe laughed the idea of absolute originality to scorn, and declared that it was an author's duty to use all that was suggested to him from any quarter. "What is a great man," asks Emerson, "but one of great affinities, who takes up into himself all arts, sciences, all knowables, as his food? Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors." There are some minds, and those, too, really productive, that require the provocation of more suggestive and stimulating ones to make them work. They need the fertilizing pollen of other men's thoughts to make them productive. To attract every available thing to itself is a natural characteristic of the magnetic ardor genius. Everything is a Quotation. Literary All these great poets had enormous powers of assimilation; and it is evident to every scholar who reads their works, that the metal in which they wrought was not dug newly from the earth, but, like the Corinthian brass of the ancients, was melted up from the spoils of a city. Occasional accidental coincidences of thought and expression will not detract from a writer's just fame. It is only the habitual and conscious thief, the man who lives by plunder, and who thus shows himself to be both weak and wicked, that merits the pillory. Literal, bald borrowing, whether of the plan or treatment-the substance to form, the thoughts or expressions, of a work, is absolutely indefensible; but he is not a thief who borrows the ideas of a hundred other men and repays them with compound interest. It is one thing to purloin finely tempered steel, and another to take a pound of literary old iron, and convert it in the furnace of one's mind into a hundred watch-springs, worth each a thousand times as much as the iron. When Genius borrows, it borrows grandly, giving to the borrowed matter a |