INTRODUCTION

LIFE OF MACAULAY (1800-1850)

ZACHARY MACAULAY, the father of Thomas Babington Macaulay, was one of England's great heroes of peace. His biography is briefly inscribed on the pedestal which supports his bust in Westminster Abbey. There you may read that he was a man

who during forty successive years, partaking in the counsels and the labors which, guided by favoring Providence, rescued Africa from the woes, and the British Empire from the guilt of slavery and the slave-trade, meekly endured the toil, the privation, and the reproach, resigning to others the praise and the reward."

In 1793 a company under a charter from the king established a colony of liberated slaves in Sierra Leone, Africa. Zachary Macaulay was the first governor and spent six years with the colony midst hardships and difficulties of the keenest sort. When the settlement had begun to thrive, Zachary Macaulay returned to England. In 1799 he married Selina Mills, an extremely attractive lady and the daughter of a prosperous Quaker. It is interesting to know that the teacher and lifelong friend of Miss Mills was Hannah More, who took the deepest interest in the children of her former pupil, particularly in the boy Tom, who did his earliest reading and writing under her direction.

Thomas Babington Macaulay, the eldest of the nine children, was born at Rothley Temple, October 25, 1800. Any one who strives to appreciate the extraordinary attain

ments of Macaulay both as a statesman and as a man of letters will turn with interest to the account of his childhood, and it will not be a matter of much surprise to find that he who showed such brilliancy and maturity of mind before he was thirty, was a veritable prodigy when he was three. Before he was four he learned to read. His supreme delight was to lie on the rug before the fire with his book spread open upon the floor and a piece of bread-and-butter in his hand. One of the servants told how he used to sit perched on the table near her as she worked, expounding to her out of a volume as big as himself. While still the merest child he was sent as a day-scholar to a Mr. Greaves. Mrs. Macaulay explained to Tom that he would have to learn to study without the solace of bread-and-butter, to which he replied, "Yes, mamma, industry shall be my bread and attention my butter." At another time he accompanied his father to a friend's house for dinner. A cup of hot coffee was accidentally overturned on his legs. The hostess was much worried over the possible injury, but the lad relieved her anxiety by calmly observing, "Thank you, madam, the agony is abated."

The boy's incessant reading not only gave him a vocabulary which he used with astonishing accuracy and effect, but it fired him with an ambition to become a writer himself. His childhood compositions included, besides many hymns, A Compendium of Universal History, a poem in three cantos called The Battle of Cheviot, and the unfinished epic poem immortalizing Olaus Magnus, King of Norway, from whom the Macaulay family was supposed to have derived its name. A significant quality belonging to these early writings was their excellence of form. The magic pen was unquestionably the servant of good judgment, for those who read the productions find perfect spelling, accurate punctuation, and lucid expression everywhere employed.

With all this cleverness, he was not conceited. His parents, and especially his mother, were most judicious in their treat

ment. They never encouraged him to display his powers of conversation, and they abstained from every kind of remark that might lead him to think himself different from other boys. One result of this wise restraint was that throughout life he was free from literary vanity; another, that he habitually overestimated the knowledge of others. When he said in his essays that every schoolboy knew this and that fact in history, he was judging their information by his own vast intellectual stores.

At the age of twelve Macaulay was sent to a private school in the neighborhood of Cambridge. There he laid the foundation of his future scholarship. One who recognized the promise of the boy at this time was Dean Milner, the president of Queen's College, who frequently entertained him at his college residence on "terms of friendship and almost of equality." This venerable scholar paid a high tribute to his young friend when he wrote his father, "Your lad is a fine fellow. He shall stand before kings. He shall not stand before mean men."

Though faithful in his school work chiefly Latin, Greek, and mathematics the boy found time to gratify his insatiable thirst for general literature. He read at random and without restraint, but with an apparent partiality for the lighter and more attractive books. Poetry and prose fiction remained throughout life his favorite reading. He had a marvelous capacity for taking in at a glance the contents of a printed page; and whatever pleased his fancy he remembered, as well as though he had consciously got it by heart. He once said that if all the copies of Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim's Progress were to be destroyed, he would from memory alone undertake to reproduce both.

But the gratification of his passion for reading did not remove the burden of grief which he felt in being separated from the family at Clapham. In a letter to his mother begging the privilege of making a visit home, he wrote as follows: "You told me I should be happy when I once ca

here, but not an hour passes in which I do not shed tears at thinking of home. Every hope, however unlikely to be realized, affords me some small consolation. Tell me in your next, expressly, if you can, whether or no there is any likelihood of my coming home before the holiday. If I could gain papa's leave, I should select my birthday on October 25th as the time which I should wish to spend at that home which absence renders still dearer to me. lf your approbation of my request depends upon my advancing in study, I will work like a cart-horse. If you should refuse it, you will deprive me of the most pleasing illusion which I ever experienced in life.”

In 1818 Macaulay entered Trinity College, Cambridge. His inclination was wholly for literature and he gained much distinction as a writer and debater. Twice he won

the chancellor's medal for English verse - in 1819 by a poem entitled Pompeii and in 1820 by a poem entitled Evening. A scholarship was granted him in 1821 for excellence in classical study. Mathematics seemed to be especially distasteful to him. His aversion to this subject as well as to the sciences was not overlooked by the authorities, and he was obliged to try the third time before he was elected a fellow. The fellowship was awarded in 1824. During this same year he contributed several articles of merit to Knight's Quarterly Magazine, a periodical which was largely supported by undergraduates and bachelors of arts at Oxford. Chief among these contributions were the poems Ivry and Naseby and the Conversation between Mr. Abraham Cowley and Mr. John Milton touching the Great Civil War.

For two years The two great

had already

Macaulay was admitted to the bar in 1826. he made no more than a pretense at practice. interests of his life - politics and literature begun to occupy his time and thought. The rise of the young man in the short interval of the next five or six years, bringing honors which might be prized by one twice his age, was indeed remarkable. There was more than a sister's