He then went on to describe the way in which from his childhood his imagination had been filled by the study of history. "With a person of my turn," he said, "the minute touches are of as great interest, and perhaps greater, than the most important events. Spending so much time as I do in solitude, my mind would have rusted by gazing vacantly at the shop-windows. As it is, I am no sooner in the streets than I am in Greece, in Rome, in the midst of the French Revolution. Precision in dates, the day or hour in which a man was born or died, becomes absolutely necessary. A slight fact, a sentence, a word, are of importance in my romance. Pepys's "Diary" formed almost inexhaustible food for my fancy. I seem to know every inch of Whitehall. I go in at Hans Holbein's gate, and come out through the matted gallery. The conversations which I compose between great people of the time are long, and sufficiently animated: in the style, if not with the merits, of Sir Walter Scott's. The old parts of London, which you are sometimes surprised at my knowing so well, those old gates and houses down by the river, have all played their parts in my stories." He spoke, too, of the manner in which he used to wander about Paris, weaving tales of the Revolution, and he thought that he owed his command of language greatly to this habit.
On October I, 1824, Macaulay was elected fellow of Trinity, which gave him a temporary independence, of essential value to him in the next seven years, and in 1826 he was called to the Bar, and joined the Northern Circuit at Leeds. But his study of law had been as perfunctory as his study of mathematics, and his legal career seems to have been confined to writing Aristophanic jests for the bar mess. Fortunately in 1828 Lord Lyndhurst, just at the close of the Goderich ministry, gave him a commissionership of bankruptcy, which raised his income to about a thousand a year.
Nothing in Macaulay's literary career excites in us more astonishment than his contributions to Knight's Magazine, written when he was only three and four and twenty, whilst he was reading for this fellowship, which, with some little difficulty, he at last obtained. The "Fragment of a Roman Tale" (June 1823) breathes all the fire and tenderness of passionate love—a theme the writer never touched upon again; and perhaps it suggested to Bulwer the most graceful of the scenes in "The Last Days of Pompeii." The scenes from "Athenian Revels" reflect, as in a glass, the dramatic style of Plato and the daring wit of Aristophanes. The essays on the Italian writers show that Macaulay had already sounded the ocean depths of Dante and traced to their source the brighter streams of Petrarch's song. The review of Mitford's "Greece" (November 1824) displays the same marvellous acquaintance with Hellenic politics and literature, and it winds up with a passage of splendid eloquence on the immortal influence of Athens. No doubt, it may be said, that these pages are overcrowded with allusions and images, which a more mature age would have restrained. But what clearness of thought! what abundance and what rhythm of language! That young author might have been addressed in the prophetic words applied by Socrates to Isocrates at about the same age. "He seems to me to have a genius above the oratory of Lysias and altogether to be tempered of nobler elements. And so it would not surprise me if, as years go on, he should make all his predecessors seem like children in the kind of oratory to which he is now addressing himself; or if—supposing this should not content him—some diviner impulse should lead him to greater things. My dear Phædros, a certain philosophy is inborn in him."[1] Already, at four and twenty, Macaulay was incontestably the first rhetorician of an age fertile in literary genius. Well might Jeffrey exclaim, as he did on the receipt of the first article written for this journal, "The more I think the less I can conceive where you picked up that style."
Of the contributions with which Macaulay continued for many years to honour these pages, it would be unbecoming and superfluous for us to speak. Though he regarded them as fugitive productions, they have taken a prominent place in literature, and we know not how many millions of copies have been circulated in Britain and America, throughout the English-speaking world.
The Macaulay family migrated in 1823 to a large rambling house in Great Ormond Street, at the corner of Powis Place, a quarter of London which, though not fashionable, was still in those days inhabited by judges, barristers, and merchants. These were Tom Macaulay's London quarters until 1829 (when he went to live in chambers in Gray's Inn), and here the great critic and future orator and statesman passed, in the bosom of his family, the gayest years of his life. His spirits and his drollery were inexhaustible.
