when children become easily wearied of any subject which engrosses the family attention or conversation; or rather, on going out into the world they find that the home topic is only one of a wide range, and are tempted to neglect it in proportion to the previous over-estimate. Thus it seems to have been with Thomas Babington Macaulay, who once, when he was four-and-twenty, gratified his father by an eloquent and vehement anti-slavery speech, and then turned away from the subject for ever. It may be a good thing for society that he showed no sympathy with philanthropic aims and efforts. We have men enough to carry out that tendency of our time; and some of us may think that we are riding the hobby of the age too hard, and getting our minds into nets, and injuring the independence of other people’s minds and affairs. Macaulay turned his back on that phase of society, very early; and it was not long before he won away his generation from an exclusive attention to it.
His pursuits were literature and law, with a distant purpose of statesmanship. He had strong ambition; and the statesmanship was to gratify this. He must have a profession; and the law was to provide one. He had the literary faculties in rare excellence, and literature was therefore his passion at first, and his true calling and supreme glory afterwards. His oratory was literature; his conversation was literature, and if his most idolatrous admirers were wont to declare that he had early distinguished himself in every walk he could try,—in college study, as an orator, an essayist, a poet, an historian, a politician, and a lawyer, the claim might be admitted if it was understood that all this was done by treating each case in a literary method. By his college studies his marvellous memory was exercised to its full capacity, and his active but not profound or comprehensive imagination was gratified, and trained to singular flexibility. His poetry, then, and later, was no work of an imagination which had been born and fostered amidst deep thought and openness to the influences of nature; but rather a recitation of impressions derived from classical study. His speeches in parliament were historical or literary essays, and his conversation was full of every kind of material derivable from books. As to his law, the less said about it the better, except as an auxiliary to his study of history. He went to India to make laws for the people there, and the attempt was a failure. He could not have succeeded better in the administration than in the making of laws, for he had not the requisite accuracy of mind.
With all his activity of imagination, and stores of knowledge, and rapidity of utterance, he had an indolence of mind which impaired his wondrous powers, and spoiled his highest achievements. He accepted and used whatever his prodigious memory offered to his use; and thus was the greatest plagiarist of his time. If a notion struck his imagination, he adopted it, without scruple, and without testing it: hence his unsoundness in statement of cases, his misrepresentations of character (as in the notorious case of William Penn), and his daring preference of effect to truth, as in the story of the Glencoe massacre. The same indolence probably went a long way in deterring him from a fair acknowledgment of mistake, as in the Penn case, where candour would have given him much trouble in altering his history to suit the facts of the great Quaker’s real character. The same indolence manifested itself in the slovenly definitions and loose prescriptions of his Indian Code, which bears the impress of the rhetorician rather than the legislator. His brilliant historical speculations, suggestive to all, and fresh to most readers, are to be read as suggestion, and by no means as truth or philosophy. On close examination, each one is probably found wanting in the statement of some essential consideration which would modify the whole. Indolence here again hindered the necessary work of testing, which every speculation should undergo, to the extent of a man’s whole faculty, before it is committed to the general minds. Macaulay enjoyed the speculation, and knew that others would enjoy it; and he did not care to inquire whether it was sound. In parliament, the same want of a sound basis was more conspicuous than in his writings; as in the instance of his speech on the Copyright question, when, in defiance at once of equity, of reason, of sympathy with the literary class, and of the plainest common sense, he assailed the rights of literary property, in a speech which was an insult to the understandings of all listeners. As a hearer said at the time, it remained to be explained what motive could be sufficient to induce a man to stultify himself as Macaulay did on that occasion. The levity with which, on the next occasion, he shifted to another ground, and hailed an opposite conclusion, was an equal mystery. Probably he spoke on both occasions from fleeting impressions.
It is impossible to avoid seeing that the heart, which is usually an attribute of genius, would have prevented both the indolence of mind and the looseness of conscience which these transactions prove only too clearly. But Macaulay lay under a disadvantage there. He heard too much of religious and benevolent sentiment at an untimely period of his life. He took refuge from weariness and satiety in these matters in literature and secular studies; and the life of sympathy was thenceforth closed to him. He was a man of a kindly nature when no special jealousy intervened; but he seemed not to need much human affection, within himself or towards himself. He never married; and he lived an intellectual life, except in as far as his ambition, and his somewhat Epicurean tendencies, were compatible with it. Hence his deficiency in the coherence of his reasoning, and in his interpretation of much of human conduct in history. The central fire which in such an intellectual constitution should have well fused the faculties, and rendered their work substantial, and its influences vital, was low and flickering. The organisation seemed to work rapidly and easily; but it was loose, and its produce, however brilliant, was superficial.
Singularly brilliant it was, however. The interest and charm of his Essays, especially, are quite out of the line of comparison with any others. While we had them as the exponent of the man, the fascination was irresistible; and we