ardour of youthful enthusiasm for learning, elected him to the office of Lord Rector; and on the 21st March, 1849, he delivered that eloquent Inaugural Address, which equals Cicero's noblest efforts in copiousness, brilliancy, sparkle, and excels them in scope, sweep, grandeur, and comprehensiveness. In this speech, too, he quietly rebuked the Anti-Maynoothites, by giving a grand panoramic sketch of the three centuries of time which had intervened between the hour when Pope Nicholas affixed his seal to the instrument which called that college into existence, and spoke of the stability of our national institutions as such, that they would still stand august and immoveable, while dynasties and churches are lying in heaps of ruins around us."

In that same year (1849) he was chosen a bencher of Lincoln's Inn; honoured with LL.D. by his university; and elected Professor of Ancient History in the Royal Academy. In 1852, as we have already noted, repentant Edinburgh doffed her "sackcloth" and brushed away her "ashes," and recalled their former haughty, honest, and magnanimous representative to his place in the House of Commons; and in the autumn of that year he delivered there a most effective oration, which confessedly paved the way for the Aberdeen-Russell-Palmerston coalition, which was formed at the close of that year. In 1853, the King of Prussia conferred on him the Order of Merit of that nation; and on the demise of Professor John Wilson, in 1854, he was chosen President of the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh-of which association he was always a liberal patron, and to which he was in many respects a benefactor; in that same year too he issued a revised edition of twenty-nine of his most elaborate speeches-of which his inaugural address, at the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh, forms one.

A lapse of seven years, a great portion of which was passed in unforced retirement from political life and strife-for many constituencies would gladly have reponed the brilliant historian, the marvellous essayist, and the choice orator, on the benches of the House of Commons-enabled him to produce two other volumes of that History which had filled the world with admiration by its harmonious and perspicuous blending of minute, varied, and important materials and details, with warmth of fancy, sequence of reasoning, and vigorous reproductivity of imagination. These were much more rigorously reviewed, more carefully studied, more closely and fastidiously examined, and more thoroughly as well as more perseveringly submitted to the microscopic inquisitiveness of professional critics; more sharply censured; more lustily decried, and yet more widely circulated and more enthusiastically read, discussed, and marvelled at. And we are told that a cheque for £20,000 at one time gave him the most unmistakable evidence of the success of his new venture.

In February, 1856, Mr. Macaulay resigned the trust reposed in him as member for Edinburgh to the hands of its donors, and formally announced his withdrawal from the perilous vortex of a parliamentary career, and his determination to devote such impaired

energy as was now left him to the hastening on of the great task for which he had been, during many years, sedulously preparing himself. From this he only occasionally turned aside to contribute a few pleasing, useful, and admirable contributions, e. g., Atterbury, Bunyan, Goldsmith, Johnson, Pitt, &c. to the "Encyclopedia Britannica." On 10th Sept., 1857, a royal patent, elevating him to the peerage of the United Kingdom, with the title of Baron Macaulay of Rothwell, was issued, and the nation not unwillingly recognized the appropriateness of thus rounding off an illustrious career with the highest distinction conferable on one who had so well won it, by many and valuable political and literary services.

His Indian residence, political disappointment, and the intense sedentary labour of literary research, combined with the effects of some of those vicissitudes from which human life is seldom entirely exempt, had brought him within very close view of the grave, in 1852. The circulation of his blood was then extremely languid, and organic disease had begun to manifest itself in the tissues of the heart; but a chronic cough, from which he suffered much, annoyed and distressed him most, as it interrupted him both in public and in private speech. From a paroxysm of this cough, which seized him unexpectedly, he expired, Dec. 28th, 1859, with no one to see his last moments, or to catch his latest whispers. His sister, Lady Charles Trevelyan, had been with him during the greater part of the day, had left him in little worse than his ordinary health at four o'clock P.M., and on her return, at eight, having been suddenly called to see him, she beheld him in his chair-dead. The throbbing brain was idle, and the vital heart-beat was still. The sad event only became known late in the succeeding day, and few heard of his demise without an effort at disbelief. He had little more than entered his sixtieth year; and he had so much to tell that all men longed to hear! It would be a difficult task, here and now, to estimate and characterize fairly the several efforts-poetical, oratorical, critical, political, and historical-on which his name and fame must now rest. He was exceedingly chary of republication, especially of his earlier and apprentice papers. From the Etonian and Knight's Quarterly Magazine he has redeemed only one or two stray gems; from the Edinburgh Review he has hardly rescued any of his most vigorous and effective political papers-he expressly withdrew those on the Utilitarian Philosophy-and from the daily press he has not recalled and acknowledged aught save a few of those perplexing puzzles of oratory which men scarcely know whether to recognize as essays in disguise, or harangues of such peculiar and delicate elaboration as to lose their very nature by becoming political treatises, historical pamphlets, or moral and literary disquisitions. His own selection of Essays," and the edition of his Speeches, which was "revised by himself," must always be held as authentic, and as forming a portion of his "Works." His literary contributions to the Encyclopedia-which may most probably be soon separately republished-bearing, as they do, his name in the publishers' lists, must likewise be deemed part and parcel of these productions of his of

which the critic should take account. His "History," so far as it is advanced, and free from editorial supervision, and his "Lays,” will also form items-large, valuable, and difficult to adjudicate uponfor the formation of a judgment. But it is obvious that no final decision can be arrived at yet-the pulsations of sorrow are too recent to leave the reason unaffected. Some approximation to an honest criticism may, however, be made, and, indeed, seems needful; for the interest felt in the author's personal, political, and literary position is so great, as to occasion on all hands inquiries such as cannot be fittingly answered except by some endeavour to look-though it should be even through tears-at the achievements of the man whose demise has occasioned a grief so wide-felt and so serious. And this we shall briefly yet deferentially essay.

By uniform and universal consent he has been described as kindly, loveable, and frank in ordinary intercourse; as highly gifted with the power of fascinating and informing in conversation; as ready in alms-deeds, and studiously solicitous of befriending his less fortunate co-members of the republic of letters. In statesmanship he was a sincere, if not an earnest, well-wisher to public liberty -fearless in the advocacy of what he regarded as the rights of the people, though possessing but little fellow-feeling with the crowd. His name is associated with several political ameliorations, but consociated with none. He was useful to his party, and yet never rose to high office in its ranks-though this may have resulted from his greater devotion to literature than to politics. Though a profound theoretical legist, he seems to have failed in the crucial department of practical legislation. His learning was vast, yet neither ponderous nor heterogeneous; his vivid fancy interpenetrated it all with life, and the activity of his associative faculties made it all subservient alike to the wants of the moment or the labour of years. The treasures of his mind were almost sumless, yet he could remember and use at once the most trivial or the most important item of them all. The sceptre of his memory seemed to be an all-compelling wand, which no slave-thought could either escape or disobey. He held them, each and all, in the subordination of perspective; and suffered none to bulk too largely or to loom in haze. The consummate artistic skill and graphic imaginativeness, the vivid vigour, apposite picturesqueness, and antique simplicity of phrase displayed in his poems; the age-moulded ornamentation with which they are encrusted; the masculine force and majesty of the thoughts contrasted with the severe simplicity of the style, and the chastely chosen terms in which the spirit of the old Roman life is uttered and embalmed, make them extraordinary productions in themselves; but they become more strikingly so when con.. sidered as repoetizations from mere historic hints-as glimpses of the life of the past, caught through a mere chink by a seer but not an onlooker-as readings of the under-writing of the palimpsest of History.

His oratory is less fluent than affluent. His speeches instruct rather than move; impress rather than convince; sparkle, and glow,

and astonish more than they persuade. Admirable in arrangement, lucidly reasoned and rhetorically expressed, they lack only the abandonment and frenzy which flashes the electricity of oratory from heart to heart. They dazzled but did not decide; they were burnished, but they did not burn; they were prolific in fancy and power, but not in effect; yet there was a statesque grandeur and attractiveness in his manner which controlled respect, and often compelled acquiescence. He wanted the flexible grace, the ready energy, which communicate life, from moment to moment, to the marvelous outflow of thought to which a real orator gives utterance. In his orations he neglected his own axiom, "The mother tongue of the passions is the best style."

His essays may for the most part be regarded as sketches and preliminary preparations for his history-as experiments on and tentatives of public taste-as foreshadowings and pioneers of that work which ultimately became "the business and the pleasure of his life." They are remarkable for fullness, suggestiveness, epigrammatic piquaney, deliberate and artistic grouping and pictoriality -an objective and impressive power of concrete representation, and a perfect profusion of allusive illustration and insinuated thought. The language is choice, well polished, exquisitely arranged, modulated and attuned to the very thought with which it co-operates, and from which it takes its form; and yet these essays are much more narrative than reflective, and tell more than they define or criticize. Extending as they do over twenty years, they show, if read aright, the gradual ripening of the author's powers, and enable us to observe the processes by which the historian was nurtured and trained.

It is in this latter character that he has aimed highest and achieved most, indeed, acquired a popularity and fame more extensive and true than most authors of our day, and gained the unchallengeable admiration of all readers, whether friends or foes of the opinions he expresses, and espouses. The freshness and vigour, the rush and passion of life, the manly and flashing ardour which he poured into historic literature, were alike wonderful and praiseworthy. He seems to have imitated the sagacious selectiveness of Thucydides more than the sketchy garrulity of Herodotus or the romanticism of Xenophon; and to have relished the skilful delineativeness of Tacitus more than the pamphleteering cleverness of Sallust, or the exuberant imaginativeness of Livy. Without the cold, terse, passionless logic of Hume, the austere straitness and close-eyed accuracy of Robertson, the far-fathoming philosophy of Grote, the judge-like impartiality and quietude of Mill; the frenzied earnestness and one-sidedness of Carlyle; the prim dignity of Milman; the legal acumen and keen critical faculty of Hallam; the suffusive religiousness of Arnold; or the exotic luxuriance and grandeur of Gibbon, he has so much of the true historic instinet, tact, culture, sympathy, and studiousness, as to have a full right to be numbered among the greatest of the wooers of Clio.

It is true, as Carlyle asserts, that "history is the essence of in

numerable biographies;" but we do not think that Macaulay is right in asserting that "facts are the dross of history." We think he is far more accurate when he says, "The dramatist creates, the historian disposes," and we perfectly coincide with the opinion that "history, at least in its state of ideal perfection, is a compound of poetry and philosophy," though we see the danger that opens before the writer who adopts this view ;-on the one hand, he may construe it into fiction, on the other, into theory. We certainly believe that history may-nay, ought,-to be "as pleasant as a novel, and as exciting as a drama," and that the intense interest of a nation's history may be heightened by luminous expansion and perspicuous suggestiveness; but we suspect that the flux and reflux of events is too potent and subtle to be successfully exhibited in the preRaphaelite style in which Macaulay has endeavoured to show it. Its brilliancy, attractiveness, fascination, unparalleled picturesqueness, we admit, but the genuine truthfulness of relation is, in our opinion, somewhat lost sight of when the chief aim is to produce blaze, bustle, epigram, caricature, and the restless and unflagging interest of fiction. In this we think Macaulay erred; but inasmuch as he drew men's thoughts to the glorious deeds done by men like ourselves in not distant though "ancient days," he was a mighty benefactor to "our noble England," and deserves no cavil at our hands. Read reverently and thoughtfully, his works cannot fail to transfuse wholesome patriotism and nationality into the soul. The whole history must be characterized as a grand theoretical essay on the post-Cromwellian history of England; but it is so imbued with genius, permeated with love of country, graphic in detail, sumptuously prodigal in learning, that a nation's admiration is a tribute scarcely sufficient to attest its value and utility.

Let us reverently regard him, "whose coffin was lately borne to a grave in that renowned transept which contains the dust of Chaucer, of Spenser, and of Dryden," as one of the glories of our race-as one of the great lessons our history teaches-that to culture, industry, persevering worth, copious intelligence, and fidelity to the deep-felt convictions of our nature, no position in life, literature, or human respect is closed; and that "the tears and praises of all time" await, as a reward, those noble souls who, by the glorious martyrdom of intelligence, enrich and vivify the universe with such examples, efforts, and results as touch the souls of others to sympathetic strivings, and cause the hearts of after-generations to glow with the heat of a new life, and pulsate with the ardour of a fecund exemplariness, to enrich the past, affect the present, and bless the future.

If we are endowed with the sweet danger-dulce periculum-of superior power of wealth, position, intellect, or faith, may we so use our gifts as to acquire the sorrow of friends, the regret of our fellows, the peaceful recognition of all who know us, and the favour and friendship of God.

S. N.