THE WORKS OF

LORD MACAULAY

VOLUME NINETEEN

THE

MISCELLANEOUS

WORKS

PART NINE

EDITED BY HIS SISTER

LADY TREVELYAN

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK

GEORGE D. SPROUL

MCMVIII

ΤΟ

HENRY

MARQUESS OF LANSDOWNE

These Speeches are Dedicated

BY HIS GRATEFUL AND AFFECTIONATE FRIEND

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY

I'

PREFACE

T was most reluctantly that I determined to suspend, during the last autumn, a work which is the business and the pleasure of my life, in order to prepare these Speeches for publication; and it is most reluctantly that I now give them to the world. Even if I estimated their oratorical merit much more highly than I do, I should not willingly have revived, in the quiet times in which we are so happy as to live, the memory of those fierce contentions in which too many years of my public life were passed. Many expressions which, when society was convulsed by political dissension, and when the foundations of government were shaking, were heard by an excited audience with sympathy and applause, may, now that the passions of all parties have subsided, be thought intemperate and acrimonious. It was especially painful to me to find myself under the necessity of recalling to my own recollection, and to the recollection of others, the keen encounters which took place between the late Sir Robert Peel and myself. Some parts of the conduct of that eminent man I must always think deserving of serious blame. But, on a calm review of his long and checkered public life, I acknowledge, with sincere pleasure, that his faults were much more than redeemed by great virtues, great sacri