social nor literary success turned his head or chilled his feelings. Nothing could be more amiable than his behaviour towards children. "He was beyond all comparison," writes his nephew, "the best of playfellows; unrivalled in the invention of games and never weary of repeating them. He had an inexhaustible repertory of small dramas for the benefit of his nieces, in which he sustained an endless variety of parts with a skill that at any rate was sufficient for his audience." For his little companions he wrote innumerable verses, usually droll, though sometimes graceful or pathetic. When they were older he wrote long letters to them, giving them his serious thoughts about life and literature in the form suited to their age. These are small things, but they come out of a loving nature. An extreme sensibility to written or acted representations of woe has often been the mark of hard or frivolous natures. But in Macaulay it was not weakness, for he had a singularly robust understanding, nor yet affectation, for he was prompt to relieve real distress. Although he might be termed upon a review of his whole life a happy man, he had his own share of disappointments and sacrifices which he bore with dignity, never seeming to think that he was ill used or making a grievance of what was unavoidable. Compared with many other writers who have had a wider sympathy with men and a deeper insight into things spiritual, but have been lacking in healthy stoicism, Macaulay makes a manly and a genial figure. The same frank, cheerful temper which is manifest in his life found expression in his books. Macaulay, indeed, is often indiscriminate and unjust in his judgment of men and of parties. But he always means to tell the truth, and his sympathy is always with the right so far as it comes within his ken. He is instinctively on the side of freedom and tolerance and reason and honesty and humanity. He feels an unforced loathing for all that is silly or hypocritical or base or cruel. He is in the best sense a moral writer who imparts to his readers without preaching a livelier sympathy for all that is good and a deeper repugnance for all that is evil.

If we ask what was wanting to this fine character, the answer might be, depth. Macaulay's nature was limited. Almost free from bad passions, but dwelling habitually in

external things, Macaulay escaped much suffering and many sins, and remained always young, but also remained ignorant of much that others learn by their own mistakes and struggles. He seems never to have been in love, he went through no spiritual conflicts, he had not even that mournful sense of man's weakness and the world's instability which haunts all meditative and poetic minds. He took life as he found it, enjoyed what he could honourably gain, and either seldom thought about the rest or held that there was little use in thinking. Perhaps this is the course wisest for ourselves and most beneficial to others, but those who have not felt the burden of humanity must not expect to be loved by men. And so Macaulay's life, although upright and unsullied, is not particularly interesting. We cannot imagine Macaulay inspiring in thousands the deep concern which, despite so many ugly faults, was poured forth upon Rousseau and upon Byron. It seems unfair that this should be so, and that one who acted honestly and kindly throughout should appeal to our sympathy so much less than those who were so often vicious and, what is far worse, vain of their vices. But our feelings on this point are scarcely in our control. A man betrays his own character in his judgments upon other men. Here, no doubt, Macaulay often shows good sense and good feeling. But he is too fond of enforcing truisms, too much dominated by convention, too little exempt from the accidental bias of his age and country. He is perplexed and therefore annoyed in the presence of exceptional characters. His too prompt and emphatic severity is another failing of the same kind. Even when he tried hard to define the essence of a character uncongenial to his own, as in the famous passage about the Puritans in the essay on "Milton," he displayed not so much the delicate insight of the observer as the resounding energy of the rhetorician. A certain defect of imagination which study and experience mitigated, but could not cure, limited his moral sympathy and too often betrayed his moral judgment.

As every great writer is necessarily somewhat of a teacher we are pardonably curious to know how he conceived of the universe and of his own place in it, what was his philosophy, what was his creed; and we feel this curiosity more strongly

if he lived at a time when the old foundations of belief were breaking up and men were forced to build anew. But we may well doubt whether Macaulay had any definite philosophical system. He had, indeed, read many philosophical treatises. But when he offers to discuss a purely philosophical problem he too often betrays a downright poverty of mind. His essay on History betrays his incurable preference for rhetoric as opposed to dialectic. In his criticism of James Mill's theory of government he appears to more advantage, for there he brought his practical sense and historical knowledge to bear upon the abstractions of a theorist who, in spite of talent and sincerity, was the veriest slave of system. From the essay on "Bacon" we might conclude that he thought all metaphysical inquiry a waste of time, and the conscious pursuit of a moral ideal, merely because it was reasonable, no better than affectation. In the essay upon "Ranke's History of the Popes" Macaulay is heard with respect so long as he dilates in lofty and sonorous language upon the protracted life and energy of the Church of Rome, but when he goes on to consider why it has survived through so many centuries, and whether it is likely to endure as many more, he raises questions which cannot be answered without reference to a philosophy of religion, and his philosophy proves singularly inadequate. He implies that a creed is a set of propositions not merely incapable of proof or disproof, but so far remote from the general intellectual and moral life of mankind that the simplest barbarian can judge of their truth as well as the most cultivated critic. If this be the case, he ought to have explained how men found it difficult in the sixteenth century to believe what had been accepted in the fifteenth. So too he is surprised that later revolts against the authority of the Church of Rome should all have taken a form so different from Protestantism. been more remarkable had it been otherwise. and Calvin could not regard the doctrines of the Church with the eyes of St. Thomas, later generations could not view those doctrines with the eyes of Luther or Calvin. Every age thinks and must think for itself on those high matters, and this fact should have shown Macaulay the weakness of his original proposition, that in religious inquiry men of the

It would have Just as Luther

most different intelligence and character stand on the same footing. The truth is that Macaulay was one of the least speculative among literary men. He argued practical questions with great vigour, but was apparently incapable of intense meditation.

We are equally at a loss when we try to discover Macaulay's personal feelings about religion. As a historian and a statesman, he knew that religious differences have been of incalculable moment in public affairs. He had read a truly surprising amount of divinity of different ages, and in his controversy with Mr. Gladstone showed that he had as ready a command over this as over all his other acquisitions. He always speaks of things sacred with grave respect, but avoids committing himself to any doctrine with all the caution of a member of Parliament. When we turn from his published writings to the freer utterances of his letters and journals, we note an equal reticence. None of the crises of life, not the loss of any of those whom he loved most dearly, not the sense of his own approaching end seems ever to have called forth a reflection which would illumine for others the depths of his soul. There is, indeed, one touching exception. On his thirty-fifth birthday, successful, honoured and full of life as he was, he interrupts his journal with the mournful lines of Sophocles :

:

But this entry, so far as we know, stands alone. On spiritual as on philosophical themes he was habitually silent. What was most distinctive in his early religious training had evidently been uncongenial and had fallen from him like a garment, leaving little but that unfavourable estimate of philosophy which so often characterised the Evangelical school. Yet it awoke no spirit of rebellion or even of far-reaching inquiry, as distasteful teaching has so often done. On the contrary, swayed perhaps by a deep sense of his father's goodness and

! The best of all is never to have been born; the next best by far, having come to light, is to return as speedily as may be thither whence we came.- -"Edipus at Colonus," lines 1225-8.

self-sacrifice, Macaulay retained a respect and tenderness for the Puritans which break forth in all his writings from the essay on "Milton" to the "Life of Bunyan," and seem a little at variance with his genial and worldly view of life. The same Protestant sympathies were shown in his dislike of the Tractarians. But this is almost all that we can gather about Macaulay's religious opinions. Probably he did not feel the necessity for any sharply defined doctrines. Certainly he did not live in habitual communion with the unseen world.

At first sight Macaulay might appear one of the most versatile of men; a poet, a critic, a historian, an orator, a politician in England and a jurist in India. In the main he was a man with one interest and one pursuit. Circumstances drew Macaulay from his books, made him a member of Parliament, placed him at the Board of Control and in the Governor-General's Council, and finally raised him to be a Cabinet minister, but honourably as he sustained all these public parts, public life interested him less in itself than as seen through the medium of history and literature. Experience rather impaired than confirmed an ambition in its origin so literary. Macaulay did not feel the irresistible instinct of the genuine public man for persuading, controlling and managing other men. He was an eloquent speaker, but his speeches are not essentially different from his essays. They are admirable for clearness, vigour and rapidity, they display a marvellous range of information and often great argumentative power, but they reveal little of the adroitness with which the inspired public speaker plays upon the common mind. Their author seems more concerned to pour out his own thoughts than to make his hearers think as his purpose requires. It is characteristic of Macaulay as an orator that he spoke very fast, with very little variety of cadence and almost without action. Macaulay was an industrious public servant, but no reference in his letters or journals betrays the zest for business of the born administrator. We cannot imagine him rubbing his hands, like the famous Frenchman as he sat down to his desk, with joy at the thought of all the business to be done. His most durable piece of official work, the Indian Penal Code, was in great measure a literary achievement. Literature and history were the true business and

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