III.

I

MACAULAY.

AM in difficulties to-night. There are three pictures vivid to my mental eye, which will haply illustrate those difficulties better than any long array of words. The first is that of a gleaner, by the dim light of the moon, searching painfully among the unwealthy stubble, in a harvest-field from which the corn has been reaped, and from which the reapers have withdrawn. I am that gleaner. About the great man who is my subject to-night, there has been as much said as would suffice for a long course of lectures, and as much written as would almost furnish a library. Where is the tongue which has not been loosened to utter his eulogy? Where is the pen which has not been swift in his praise? I have, therefore, to deal with matters which are already treasured as national property. If I am to furnish for you any but thin and blasted ears, I must of necessity enrich myself from the full sheaves of others. The second picture is that of an unfortunate individual, who has to write an art-criticism upon a celebrated picture, but who finds himself, with a small physique and with a horror of crowds, jammed hopelessly into the front rank of the spectators at the Academy, with the sun dazzling his eyes, and so near to the picture that he sees little

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upon the canvas but a vague and shapeless outline of colour. I am that unhappy critic, dazzled as I look upon my subject—and both you and I are too near for perfect vision. Macaulay, as every one knows, was through life identified with a political party. Even his literary efforts were prompted by political impulses, and tinged necessarily with political hues. It would seem, therefore, that to be accurately judged he must be looked at through the haze of years, when the strife of passion has subsided, and prepossession and prejudice have alike faded in the lapse of time. The third picture is that of a son, keenly affectionate, but of high integrity, clinging with almost reverent fondness to the memory of a father, but who has become conscious of one detraction from that father's excellence, which he may not conscientiously conceal. I am that mourning

son. There are few of you who hold that marvellous Englishman more dear, or who are more jealous for the renown which, on his human side, he merits, and which has made his name a word of pride wherever AngloSaxons talk in their grand, free mother-tongue. If this world were all, I could admire and worship with the best of you, and no warning accompaniment should mingle with the music of the praise; but I should be recreant to the duty which I owe to those who listen to me, and traitorous to my higher stewardship as a minister of Christ, if I forbore to warn you that without godliness in the heart and in the life the most brilliant career has missed of its allotted purpose, and there comes a paleness upon the lustre of the very proudest fame. It is enough. Your discernment perceives my difficulties, and your sympathy will

accord me its indulgence while we speak together of the man who was the marvel of other lands, and who occupies no obscure place upon the bright bead-roll of his own the rhetorician, the essayist, the poet, the statesman, the historian-Thomas Babington, first and last Baron Macaulay.

From a middle-class family, in a Midland county in England, was born the man whom England delighteth to honour. The place of his birth was Rothley Temple, in Leicestershire, at the house of his uncle, Mr. Thomas Babington, after whom he was named; and the time the month of October, when the century was not many moons old. His grandfather was a minister of the Kirk of Scotland, who dwelt quietly in his manse at Cardross on the Clyde. His father, after the manner of Scotchmen, travelled in early life toward the south, that he might find wider scope for his enterprise and industry than the country of Macallum More could yield. His mother was the daughter of a bookseller in Bristol, who was a member of the Society of Friends. Some of his critics, on the post hoc propter hoc principle, have discovered in these two facts the reasons of his subsequent severity against Scotchmen and Quakers. When, in these times, we ask after a man's parentage, it is not that we may know by how many removes he is allied to the Plantagenets, nor how many quarterings he is entitled to grave upon his shield. It is morally certain that most of us had ancestors who distinguished themselves in the Wars of the Roses, and that most of us will have posterity who shall be engaged in the last strife of Armageddon. But estates and names are not the only inheritances of children. They inherit the

qualities by which estates are acquired or scattered, and by which men carve out names for themselves, the prouder because they are self-won. Influences which

are thrown around them in the years of early life are vital, almost creative, in their power upon the future of their being. You look upon a child in the rounded dimples of its happiness, with large wonder in its eyes, and brow across which sun and shadow chase each other ceaselessly. It is all unconscious of its solemn stewardship, and of the fine or fatal destiny which it may achieve; but you take the thoughts of responsibility and of influence into account, and you feel that of all known and terrible forces, short of Omnipotence, the mightiest may slumber in that cradle, or look wistfully from out those childish eyes. You look at it again when the possible of the child has developed into the actual of the man. The life-purpose has been chosen, and there is the steady strife for its accomplishment. The babe who once slumbered so helplessly has become the village Hampden, or the cruel Claverhouse; the dark blasphemer, or the ready helper of the friendless; the poet, in his brief felony of the music of Paradise, or the missionary in his labour to restore its lost blessings to mankind. You might almost have predicted the result, because you knew the influences, subtle but mighty, which helped to confirm him in the right, or which helped to warp him to the wrong. And who shall say in the character of each of us, how much we are indebted to hereditary endowments, to early association, to the philosophy of parental rule, and to that retinue of circumstances which guarded us as we emerged from the dream-land of childhood into the

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actual experiences of life? In the character and habits of Macaulay, the results of these influences may be very largely discovered. Those of you who are familiar with the wicked wit of Sydney Smith will remember his reference to "the patent Christianity of Clapham;" and in Sir James Stephen's inimitable essay, the worthies of the Clapham sect are portrayed with such fidelity and power, that we feel their presence, and they are familiar to us as the faces of to-day. us look in upon them on a summer's eve some fifty years ago. We are in the house of Henry Thornton, the wealthy banker, and for many years the independent representative of the faithful constituency of Southwark. The guests assemble in such numbers, that it might almost be a gathering of the clan. They have disported on the spacious lawn, beneath the shadow of venerable elms, until the evening warns them inside, and they are in the oval saloon, projected and decorated, in his brief leisure, by William Pitt, and filled, to every available inch, with a well-selected library. Take notice of the company, for men of mark are here. There is Henry Thornton himself, lord of the innocent and happy revels, with open brow and searching eye; with a mind subtle to perceive and bright to harmonize the varied aspects of a question; with a tranquil soul, and a calm, judicial, persevering wisdom, which, if it never rose into heroism, was always ready to counsel and sustain the impulses of the heroism of others. That slight, agile, restless little man, with a crowd about him, whose rich voice rolls like music upon charmed listeners, as if he were a harper who played upon all hearts at his pleasure ;