Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay Volume 1

Excerpt

CHAPTER I. 1800-1818.

Plan and scope of the work—History of the Macaulay family—
Aulay—Kenneth—Johnson and Boswell—John Macaulay and his
children—Zachary Macaulay—His career in the West Indies
and in Africa—His character—Visit of the French squadron
to Sierra Leone—Zachary Macaulay's marriage—Birth of his
eldest son—Lord Macaulay's early years—His childish
productions—Mrs. Hannah More—General Macaulay—Choice of a
school—Shelford—Dean Milner—Macaulay's early letters—
Aspenden hall—The boy's habits and mental endowments—His
home—The Clapham set—The boy's relations with his father—
The political ideas amongst which he was brought up, and
their influence on the work of his life.

HE who undertakes to publish the memoirs of a distinguished man may find a ready apology in the custom of the age. If we measure the effective demand for biography by the supply, the person commemorated need possess but a very moderate reputation, and have played no exceptional part, in order to carry the reader through many hundred pages of anecdote, dissertation, and correspondence. To judge from the advertisements of our circulating libraries, the public curiosity is keen with regard to some who did nothing worthy of special note, and others who acted so continuously in the face of the world that, when their course was run, there was little left for the world to learn about them. It may, therefore, be taken for granted that a desire exists to hear something authentic about the life of a man who has produced works which are universally known, but which bear little or no indication of the private history and the personal qualities of the author.

This was in a marked degree the case with Lord Macaulay. His two famous contemporaries in English literature have, consciously or unconsciously, told their own story in their books. Those who could see between the lines in "David Copperfield" were aware that they had before them a delightful autobiography; and all who knew how to read Thackeray could trace him in his novels through every stage in his course, on from the day when as a little boy, consigned to the care of English relatives and schoolmasters, he left his mother on the steps of the landing-place at Calcutta. The dates and names were wanting, but the man was there; while the most ardent admirers of Macaulay will admit that a minute study of his literary productions left them, as far as any but an intellectual knowledge of the writer himself was concerned, very much as it found them. A consummate master of his craft, he turned out works which bore the unmistakable marks of the artificer's hand, but which did not reflect his features. It would be almost as hard to compose a picture of the author from the History, the Essays, and the Lays, as to evolve an idea of Shakespeare from Henry the Fifth and Measure for Measure.

But, besides being a man of letters, Lord Macaulay was a statesman, a jurist, and a brilliant ornament of society, at a time when to shine in society was a distinction which a man of eminence and ability might justly value....