House of Lords, for though he had once prepared an answer to Lord Ellenborough on some Indian question, the opportunity passed and the speech was not delivered.
Scarcely any portion of these volumes will be read with greater interest than the record of the years (chiefly under Macaulay's own hand), which were spent in the steady prosecution of his historical labours. Yet there are no events to record—nothing but the play of his own mind and fancy, the pursuit of a noble object, and numberless touches of humour, tenderness, and generosity, which endear him more and more to us. These we must rapidly pass by: but the success of the second instalment of his great work must be commemorated, for it was the most extraordinary occurrence of the kind not only in his own life, but in all literary history.
On the 21st of November 1855, he writes: "I looked over and sent off the last twenty pages. My work is done, thank God; and now for the result. On the whole, I think that it cannot be very unfavourable. At dinner I finished 'Melpomene.'" The first effect upon Macaulay of having completed an instalment of his own "History" was now, as in 1848, to set him reading Herodotus.
"November 23.—Longman came. All the twenty-five thousand copies are ordered. Monday, the 27th of December, is to be the day; but on the evening of the preceding Saturday those booksellers who take more than a thousand are to have their books. The stock lying at the bookbinders' is insured for ten thousand pounds. The whole weight is fifty-six tons. It seems that no such edition was ever published of any work of the same bulk. I earnestly hope that neither age nor riches will narrow my heart."
"November 29.—I was again confined to my room all day, and again dawdled over my book. I wish that the next month were over. I am more anxious than I was about the first part, for then I had no highly-raised expectations to satisfy, and now people expect so much that the seventh book of Thucydides would hardly content them. On the other hand, the general sterility, the miserably enervated state of literature, is all in my favour. We shall see. It is odd that I should care so very little about the money, though it is full as much. as I made by banishing myself for four and a half of the best years of my life to India."
On the last day of February 1856, Macaulay writes in his journal: "Longman called. It is necessary to reprint. This is wonderful. Twenty-six thousand five hundred copies sold in ten weeks! I should not wonder if I made twenty thousand pounds clear this year by literature. Pretty well, considering that, twenty years ago, I had just nothing when my debts were paid; and all that I have, with the exception of a small part left me by my uncle, the general, has been made by myself, and made easily and honestly, by pursuits which were a pleasure to me, and without one insinuation from any slanderer that I was not even liberal in all my pecuniary dealings."
"March 7.—Longman came, with a very pleasant announcement. He and his partners find that they are overflowing with money; and think that they cannot invest it better than by advancing to me, on the usual terms of course, part of what will be due to me in December. We agreed that they shall pay twenty thousand pounds into Williams's bank next week. What a sum to be gained by one edition of a book! I may say, gained in one day. But that was harvest-day. The work had been near seven years in hand. I went to Westbourne Terrace by a Paddington omnibus, and passed an hour there, laughing and laughed at. They are all much pleased. They have, indeed, as much reason to be pleased as I, who am pleased on their account rather than on my own, though I am glad that my last years will be comfortable. Comfortable, however, I could have been on a sixth part of the income which I shall now have."
The cheque is still preserved as a curiosity among the archives of Messrs. Longman's firm.
To this statement Mr. Trevelyan adds the following details, which are an appropriate answer to the predictions of the Quarterly Review.
Messrs. Longman's books show that, in an ordinary year, when nothing is done to stimulate the public appetite by novelty of form or reduction of price, their stock of the "History" goes out of their hands at the rate of seventy complete copies a week. But a computation founded on this basis would give a very inadequate notion of the extent to which Macaulay's most important work is bought and read; for no account would have been taken of the years in which large masses of new and cheap editions were sold off in the course of a few months. 12,024 copies of a single volume of the "History" were put into circulation in 1858, and 22,925 copies of a single volume in 1864. During the nine years ending with the 25th of June 1857, Messrs. Longman disposed of 30,478 copies of the first volume of the "History;" 50,783 copies during the nine years ending with June 1866; and 52,392 copies during the nine years ending with June 1875. Within a generation of its first appearance, upwards of a hundred and forty thousand copies of the "History" will have been printed and sold in the United Kingdom alone.
Caring little for money, except in so far as he was able to make a liberal and generous use of it, Macaulay enjoyed the power his new opulence had conferred on him. Until he was fifty-two years of age, he had never had a carriage of his own, except when in office; indeed he had
