pilgrimage" of their author through the world, and we rejoice that these volumes record in the familiar language of common life the warmth of heart, the enthusiasm, and the simplicity of character which were united in Lord Macaulay to the most marvellous attainments. No man was ever less anxious to obtrude his personal claims to distinction on the world. He cultivated literature as an art, but the artist was kept out of sight. His work was purely objective. Even in his speeches and in his conversation, and still more in his writings, the nature of his discourse, the subject of his descriptions, absorbed him altogether. His biographer justly remarks that it would be almost as hard to compose a picture of the author from his "History," his "Essays," and his "Lays," as to evolve an idea of Shakespeare from "Henry the Fifth" and "Measure for Measure." His manner of life, his habits of thought, his lively affections, were really known to those only who enjoyed his intimacy. With a vast acquaintance his bosom friends were few in number, and of these by far the nearest and dearest were the members of his own family. By them, or by their descendants, the veil of privacy which it pleased him to retain over his inner life is now removed, and this publication presents to his admirers a living picture of himself, traced to a considerable extent by his own hand.
Scotland may claim both John Mill and Macaulay as her descendants, but not as her children—or, if children, they were, in some respects, undutiful sons. Yet Macaulay paid his debt to the land of his forefathers by his splendid contributions to a journal which is identified with Scotland by its best and dearest traditions; and the most brilliant of his Parliamentary speeches were delivered by him as the representative of our Scottish capital. Something, no doubt, he owed to the fervour and daring of the old Highland spirit, shown in former generations by the ministers of the Kirk, his ancestors, whom Dr. Johnson met in the Hebrides; and Zachary Macaulay, his father, retained the type of his descent unaltered. Never lived there a man of a sterner or more undoubting faith, of a higher sense of duty, of more indomitable industry in the great cause to which he devoted his existence—but he was absolutely devoid of those genial, imaginative, and humorous sympathies which, in despite of himself, shed such light and gaiety over his Cameronian household. Macaulay used to say that he derived his "joviality" from his mother, on the principle, we suppose, that it certainly did not come to him from his father. But his mother was a Quakeress, of Bristol extraction; his early education was conducted under the prim but benevolent eyes of Mrs. Hannah More. We must leave the champions of the rival influence of hereditary gifts and of educational authority to explain as best they may, the existence of a man who owed so little to his parents or to the position in which he was born.
We shall pass summarily over the period of baby hymns and juvenile epics, which streamed from the brain of this young prodigy almost as soon as he could speak or write. Mr. Trevelyan has wisely contented himself with a brief account of these performances, and has not given them to the public—a thing Macaulay himself would especially have abhorred, for he held that nothing ought to be brought to table but the ripe fruit of care and thought, and he held very cheap the crude efforts of his early life. Be it enough to say that when he went to Cambridge at eighteen, we already find him writing a vigorous and picturesque style, treating all subjects, himself included, with clear good sense, conversant with an astonishing amount of literature of all ages and languages, and thirsting for distinction in the liberal arts. He had not been sent to a public school, a circumstance which had perhaps allowed him a greater latitude and freedom in his studies, and when he entered Trinity College he entered upon the world. His first appearance in public life seems to have been at a Cambridge election, when the mob were hustling the successful candidates. His ardour was cooled by receiving a dead cat full in the face. The man who had thrown the missile assured him that it was by mistake, and that the cat was meant for Mr. Adeane. "I wish,"
