he induced the Indian Government to decide that whatever funds the State could spare for education should be spent in teaching Western science through the medium of the English language. A little later he was named President of the Commission of Public Instruction, where he could give effect to his own opinions regarding education in India. He was also appointed President of the Commission to inquire into the Jurisprudence and Jurisdiction of the Indian Empire. While holding this position he advised the codification of the criminal law of India, and drafted, doubtless with some help from lawyers of a larger practical experience than his own, that penal code which, after many years and certain amendments, was enacted and is still in force. The Indian Penal Code has always been regarded as one of Macaulay's greatest achievements. Macaulay, indeed, had many qualifications for the office of a legislator, strong common sense, a memory which could hold and combine countless particulars, a style of expression somewhat lacking in grace and subtlety, but clear, precise and penetrating. His public duties at this time might seem enough to tax a vigorous mind and body, yet he contrived to read more books than would have taken up all the leisure of professed literary men and to write his elaborate essays upon "Mackintosh" and "Bacon."

Macaulay was not happy in India. He never had a strong passion for travel or a minute faculty for the observation of outward things. Slow and laborious as were Indian journeys seventy years ago, it excites some surprise that Macaulay should never have spared a few weeks to visit even the best known and most accessible of Indian cities. He seems to have reserved his interest for the history of the English in India, and even this he was content to study in books alone. "I have no words," he wrote to a friend, "to tell you how I pine for England or how intensely bitter exile has been to me, though I hope that I have borne it well. I feel as if I had no other wish than to see my country again and die." This feeling of home-sickness was made more poignant by events in his family. Not long after leaving England he lost a beloved sister, Mrs. Cropper; and his sister Hannah who accompanied him to India married there a distinguished civilian, Mr. Charles Trevelyan. It is true that the parting

b

of brother from sister could hardly have been more gentle, for the Trevelyans lived under Macaulay's roof and returned with him to England. But circumstances had so centred Macaulay's warm affection upon his sisters that changes which other men accept as a matter of course and which he acknowledged to be inevitable clouded his life and all but broke his spirit. The constant decline of his father gave a fresh sting to the desire to be at home once more. At the close of 1837 he felt justified in returning to his native country. He sailed in January of 1838, but the voyage was tedious, and before he could touch land his father had expired.

He was now somewhat lonely, but he had purchased that independence which is inestimable to the true man of letters. He had saved a large sum, he had no expensive tastes, he was a bachelor and, so far as is known, had no serious wish to be otherwise. For some time past he had thought of writing a great historical work. In the year of his return, if not earlier, he fixed upon the subject. "The first part," he wrote to Macvey Napier, "(which, I think, will take five octavo volumes), will extend from the Revolution to the commencement of Sir Robert Walpole's long Administration; a period of three or four and thirty very eventful years. From the commencement of Walpole's Administration to the commencement of the American War, events may be despatched more concisely. From the commencement of the American War, it will again become necessary to be copious. These at least are my present notions. How far I shall bring the narrative down I have not determined. The death of George IV. would be the best halting-place. The History would then be an entire view of all the transactions which took place between the Revolution which brought the Crown into harmony with the Parliament and the Revolution which brought the Parliament into harmony with the nation." We can only regret that he did not immediately bend all his energies to the execution of this vast design. An Italian tour in the autumn and winter of 1838 was a well-earned holiday; but his return to political life, his Lays of Ancient Rome and his later essays were so many distractions from his true occupation. While living in India he had written :—

"In the quiet of my own little grass-plot when the moon

at its rising finds me with the Philoctetes or the De Finibus in my hand-I often wonder what strange infatuation leads men who can do something better to squander their intellect, their health, their energy on such objects as those which most statesmen are engaged in pursuing. . . That a man, before whom the two paths of literature and politics lie open, and who might hope for eminence in either, should choose politics and quit literature seems to me madness."

But when he was at home again the contagious excitement of politics was too much for his philosophy. He let himself be nominated for Edinburgh in the summer of 1839, and in the autumn was Secretary at War with a place in the Melbourne Cabinet. Hence, although he had begun his History of England, he could make only slow and interrupted progress. The fall of a weak ministry in 1841 relieved him from regular political duty. But in 1842 he turned aside to write the Lays of Ancient Rome, and thus the History was thrown back again. Even after the publication of the Lays he paused occasionally to write an article for the Edinburgh Review. These later essays are among his best, yet we can hardly help regretting the time they cost.

In the year 1841 Macaulay had taken chambers in the Albany, where he could combine much more than the quiet of a college with such social intercourse as he desired. At the same time he was able to enjoy the genial atmosphere of domestic life, for his brother-in-law, Mr. Trevelyan, had been appointed Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, so that Mrs. Trevelyan and her children were fixed in London. He now led for many years an uneventful life of strenuous but pleasant labour, varied by an occasional tour in the British Isles or on the continent. Although he had not quite done with politics, political ambition was nearly extinct in his mind, and he lived for his book, for his sister and for his nephews and nieces, who were as dear to his affectionate nature as his own children could have been. His favourite pleasures were simple, an exploration of the London bookstalls or a long walk in the country, usually with a book in his hand. He wrote steadily but not rapidly, and in 1848 he published the first two volumes of the History of England,

which carry the narrative down to the accession of William and Mary. They were received with general though not unqualified praise by the critics, and with unequalled enthusiasm by the multitude of readers. Since the appearance of the Waverley novels no prose work had so fully satisfied at once the fastidious and the popular taste. Since the appearance of the Decline and Fall such a mass of historical knowledge had never been presented in a form so brilliant and captivating. Prince Albert, who came from a country where the professorial office is held in honour, amazed the successful historian with an offer of the Chair of Modern History at Cambridge. Macaulay respectfully declined to exchange the freedom of his library and the sense of living in London for the task of lecturing to undergraduates in a provincial city.

He now returned to his task with added zest and confidence and fuller leisure than he had yet known, for he had ceased to be a public man. On the fall of Sir Robert Peel's Administration he had been made Paymaster in Lord John Russell's Cabinet, but in the general election of the following year he lost his seat at Edinburgh. He owed this repulse partly to a neglect of the little compliances by which members of Parliament conciliate support, and partly to the liberal views which he had expressed on the Maynooth grant and on other ecclesiastical questions. He commemorated it in a poem which scarcely adds to his literary fame. His time was now all his own. But his fate is one of innumerable warnings to those who unduly defer the appointed business of their lives. In 1852 his health, hitherto excellent, gave way. Extreme languor and oppression, with painful difficulty in breathing, announced a failure of the heart. "I have become twenty years older in a week," he wrote. "A mile is more to me now than ten miles a year ago." Although he always disclaimed the character of an industrious man, it is certain that he had long overtasked his powers, and that his habit of ceaseless reading, even at meals and on his walks, had hastened the time of bodily decay. But with admirable courage, good temper and resignation, he collected all his remaining strength to push forward the History, even while he surrendered the dear hope of its completion. Two more

1

volumes appeared in 1855. "Praise greatly preponderates," he noted, "but there is a strong admixture of censure." This was inevitable. The great and real merits of the History were on the surface, and when the first volumes appeared had carried all before them. Since then the public had had leisure to re-read and to criticise, and in the new volumes the defects, also real and serious, attracted more attention.

What remains of his life can be shortly told. The citizens of Edinburgh, repenting their injustice, had elected him again in 1852. After a vain struggle to discharge the duties of a member of the House of Commons, he applied for the Chiltern Hundreds in the beginning of 1856 and bade farewell to public life. About the same time he left his chambers in the Albany to settle in Holly Lodge, Campden Hill, where he spent his last years. In 1857 he was created a peer by the title of Baron Macaulay of Rothley. His life was now very quiet, but not unhappy. He scarcely ever went into society, but made a few intimate friends welcome at his house, and, cheered by those close kindred upon whom he had spent so much affection, worked on as steadily as dwindling strength would permit. The lives of Atterbury, Bunyan, Goldsmith, Johnson and the younger Pitt which he contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica, and which in some respects excel even the best of the Essays, prove that his literary power and skill had suffered no abatement. He almost finished a fifth volume of the History. Gradually he became so weak that the least shock might prove fatal. When Sir Charles Trevelyan was appointed Governor of Madras, the prospect of parting from his sister and her children gave Macaulay a pang which may have hastened the end by a few weeks or even months. He died on the 28th of December, 1859, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Few distinguished authors have been so transparent in nature as Macaulay. He was a good, honest man, simple in his tastes, blameless in his pleasures, kind-hearted and affectionate, a most dutiful son, a more than exemplary brother, a faithful friend, honourable and patriotic in public life and in private life generous and charitable. Neither