Sculptors-Travellers.

15

Minerva. By means of touch he had seized with precision the forms and proportions of the original. The Duke of Bracciano, who had seen him working, doubted whether he was completely blind, and, in order to put the matter to the test, he caused the artist to take his portrait in a dark cave. It proved a striking likeness. We are also told of Giovanni Gambasio, of Volteno, who became an excellent statuary, and was employed by the highest personages in Italy. He executed a statue of Pope Urban VIII. for the Grand-Duke of Tuscany. John, one of the kings of Bohemia, and the present King of Hanover, rank among blind monarchs; and Zisca, the Bohemian general, performed great acts of valour after the loss of his sight.

Many most entertaining stories might be told of the facility with which the blind can travel from place to place, but these are familiar to all our readers by means of living illustrations in their immediate localities. What we have stated of the number of blind persons in the world, the means of instruction now being employed, the institutions erected on their behalf, the abilities which so many of them have displayed, may enlist the sympathy and draw forth the aid of all our readers in ameliorating the condition of this class of persons. By means of home teaching, ladies with leisure at their disposal may find an appropriate sphere of usefulness.

ART. II.-1. Critical and Historical Essays. Contributed to the Edinburgh Review.

2. The History of England from the Accession of James II. 3. The Lays of Ancient Rome.

4. Speeches by the Right Hon. Lord Macaulay. Longman and Co.

JUDG

London:

JUDGING from such notices as we have read, it would seem difficult for the critics of the day to speak of this eminent man in other terms than those of extreme admiration, or of not much less extreme dislike. The way in which the whole stock quiver of superlatives has, on this occasion, been precipitately emptied, and its contents indiscriminately applied, reminds us of a passage of Lord Macaulay's own. He remarks, in reference to a certain successful speech, that it was said of it, that it was more ornamented than the speeches of Demosthenes, and less diffuse than those of Cicero.' This unmeaning phrase,' he continues, has been quoted a hundred times; that it should ever have been quoted except to be laughed at, is strange: the vogue which it has obtained may serve to show in how slovenly a way most people are content to think.' A truer observation has very seldom been made; and we

dare

dare say the recollection of our readers has not any very difficult or distant journey to travel back for the discovery of illustrations in professional criticisms on Lord Macaulay himself. Where there are no bounds, neither is there any centre, and there reigns only a futile and impracticable vague. This we, for our part, would fain eschew. In short, a characterization that, with precision of limit, shall possess a coherent, reasoned interior of discernment and discrimination-this is our object; and, if we fail in its accomplishment, we can assure our readers that it will be against our own best efforts.

To those who look forward to the triumphs of literary or political life, the career of Macaulay is no less instructive than interesting. What elements of success were given him, and, still more, what elements of success he himself brought, deserve, on the part of all such aspirants, the very closest attention. If it be true, as regards the former of these considerations, that he seems, from the very first, to have been borne, as it were, on supporting hands, steadily onwards, from place to place, and from honour to honour, till ambition the very greediest would have called content-no less true is it that, but for the second consideration, but for the elements of success which he himself brought, these places would never have been held, and these honours could never have been accorded. Had the youth displayed no talent, had he written no prize poems, had he not shone in the Union Debating Club, all the wealth of Zachary Macaulay, his father, and all the influence of Wilberforce, his friend, would have been powerless to aidwould have been powerless to extract from Lord Brougham one single word of that long letter of advice which, received in young Macaulay's twenty-third year, must have exercised a most valuable influence on his whole character and subsequent progress. But more, in addition to talent, and in addition to study, had not the youth possessed a rare sobriety of judgment, a rare perseverance of effort, and a rare concentration of purpose, all the other elements would have still been futile. It is to the union of these elements that we must attribute both the steadily progressive advance, and the splendid ultimate result that crowned it. The irregularities, the impetuosities, the passions, even the conscientious scruples of genius, have often rendered nugatory the wisest plans of parental experience; and we doubt very much that old Zachary's scheme would have attained an equal success, had his son been such as Burns or Byron, as Shelley or Coleridge, or even as the steady and persevering but keen-tempered Carlyle.

In truth, it is very rare to see the means of parents, the influence of friends, the powers of talent, the application of study, and the pertinacity of effort so long and so unintermittedly exerted on a single object. The reader, perhaps, has a difficulty in realizing to

himself

His one object of Life.

17

himself our meaning here. It wants, however, but one word to make the whole case plain to him. Throughout the entire course of his life, even from very early student days, Thomas Babington Macaulay did nothing but,-in its own first words, write the history of England from the accession of James II. down to a time which is within the memory of men now living.' He directly admits this: he speaks of his history as a work which is the business and the pleasure of his life.' His Essays are no less explicit. With exceptions that hardly need be noticed, the whole of them relate to that object, and several of them are actual draughts of that whole history. Consider them-Milton, Hallam's Constitutional History of England,' Bunyan, Hampden, Burleigh and his Times, The War of the Spanish Succession, Horace Walpole, Sir James Mackintosh's History of the Revolution,' William Pitt, Bacon, Sir William Temple, Lord Clive, Warren Hastings, The Comic Dramatists of the Restoration,' Samuel Johnson, Frederick the Great, Madame d'Arblay, Addison, and the Earl of Chatham; -do not they relate, all of them, to the historical period in question, and have we not perhaps been too fastidious in omitting from the list Ranke's History of the Popes,' and even Southey's 'Colloquies,' and Gladstone 'On Church and State?' Again, to stoop closer, may not the Milton, the Hallam, the Hampden, the Burleigh, the Mackintosh, and others, be regarded as successive sketches and réchauffées of the whole theme? It may be said, indeed, that it was not literature that his parents and friends, at all events, most probably aimed at; but our readers will have no difficulty in perceiving that even Macaulay's political life subserved, in reality, the same plan: it supplied him with means, and it extended to him the special experience necessary for the peculiar history he contemplated.

6

Thus then, parents, friends, position, study, and inclination, all working together to a common end, triumph was their due, and triumph came.

But the concentration of endeavour is, on the part of Macaulay, even greater than we have yet named. A favourite position of Thomas Carlyle, in some of his earlier essays, is, that David Hume constitutes the intellectual king of these days. By this he means that the opinions, the ideas, the system of thought, the general mode and manner of intellectually looking at, and judging matters, which characterized that philosopher, had become the common thinking property, the common thinking furniture of the majority of leading men. Of course Carlyle by no means intends to intimate that all these leading men are of necessity sceptics, or infidels, or bound to each and every special opinion of David Hume, but simply that a certain general cast of mind, which, in the case of this celebrated man, had attained to great completeness Vol. 3.-No. 9.

C

and

and distinctness of development, had been inherited and adopted by them. In this sense, we find ourselves constrained to say that the intellectual father of Lord Macaulay was eminently David Hume. We fancy it is always with a sense of secret satisfaction and inward complacency that Macaulay mentions the very name of Hume. He talks of him with unction as a great historian,' and seems to linger with fond admiration over his narrative which is likely to last as long as the English tongue.' The present generation is perhaps, on the whole, not quite disposed to extend so much of its favour to David Hume, and may question the position we assume. But one glance at the last generation, with its Godwins, Benthams, Molesworths, with even its Sir James Mackintoshes and Lord Jeffreys, will suffice for the perception of an anterior probability in regard to our opinion; and a consideration of the mental points of view common to such men as Mill and Buckle in our own day will probably confirm it.

What we would allege then is, that the young ambition of Macaulay nay, that the enduring, life-long ambition of Macaulay -was to find himself side by side with David Hume, as the continuator of his history, and as an inseparably conjunct and equal classic. For this he amassed, even while at college, and year after year industriously afterwards, all those great stores of reading and information that bore directly or indirectly on his one subject. For this he tried himself in relevant periodical papers, and feared no waste; for he said to himself cheerily and proudly: 'One day, in the long evening of my life, I will throw over these, connecting them into oneness, the bulk of an entire history, and this history, over these essays, shall be as the great dome of a cathedral that closes unitingly over its many rich and splendid chapels.' But the will of man on earth can never assure itself of identity with the will of God in heaven; and Macaulay, when he had executed, with unintermitted exactitude and complete success, three-fourths of the programme he had set himself, vanished from among us, leaving in consternation before the gap of an unparalleled fragment the largest assembly of spectators that any single historian had ever seen around him.

In our view, then, the life-long aim that determined the general action of Lord Macaulay was eminently simple. A like simplicity, and of identical origin, distinguished his character, as well as all his principles, literary, political, philosophical, and religious. In fact, all that to analysis is summed up in the name David Hume, is centrally operative in these also. And yet, at first view, the two men seem directly antagonistic. Hume was a Tory, Macaulay is a Whig; Hume was a sceptical metaphysician, Macaulay has abandoned metaphysics; Hume ridiculed the church, Macaulay attends the church; Hume swore by Pope and sniffed at Shak

speare,

The Hume of the Nineteenth Century.

19

speare, Macaulay swears by Shakspeare and sniffs at Pope. Positions more diametrically opposite, and on the most important concerns of humanity, political, philosophical, religious, literary, it is impossible to find. Still it is our deep belief that no single phrase can more completely and comprehensively describe Thomas Babington Macaulay than this: he is David Hume in the nineteenth century, conformed to the church, and author of the continuation of The History of England.'

In truth, Hume was a Tory by Jacobitic predilection only: he was a Whig in principle-so far, at least, as we are to name that principle from the practice of the present day. What, in fact, is the system of thought that David Hume is held to represent? In one word, it is the philosophy of the eighteenth century. Now, to most of us, that one word is suggestive only of infidelity, freethinking, deism, atheism, of scepticism in religion, of sensualism in philosophy, and of republicanism in politics. Still to apply any of these terms to the philosophy of the eighteenth century would be to name it badly, for, though the doctrines and opinions implied in such expressions are certainly concomitants and attendants of that philosophy, they are, in reality, only phenomenal and temporary forms. English thinkers, whichever side they have taken, have been content to remain with a very indistinct, obscure, and confused consciousness on these points; and the consequence is, that at this moment we know of no single really intelligent and fully enlightened discussion of this subject in the English language. The Germans, on the contrary, have coolly turned upon it, lifted it, looked at it, and examined it piecemeal, till now, having at length fairly filled and satisfied themselves with what of instruction, negative or positive, they could extract from it, they have long since packed it up, and laid it on the shelf labelled Aufklärung, a word which, meaning in its ordinary use simply enlightenment-up-lighting or lighting-up-and badly rendered éclaircissement by Mr. Sibree, may be here translated, with reference at once to the special up-lighting implied, and a certain notorious exposition of that up-lighting, the Age of Reason.' Now, into this subject it is not our cue to enter; it suffices our objects to say at once that the fundamental principle of the Aufklärung, of the up-lighting, of the age of reason,' of the philosophy of the eighteenth century is, in one of Lord Macaulay's favourite phrases, the right of private judgment. This really constituted the spiritual attitude of humanity-its principle-in the eighteenth century; and the majority of the reproaches usual in this connexion concern not that attitude, not that principle, but a variety of secondary or temporary phenomena, necessarily or contingently concomitant.

It will have already suggested itself perhaps, then, to our readers, that this phrase, right of private judgment, still tinged, be