[22] [Sir Stratford Canning, afterwards Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, was at this time a Member of the House of Commons.]
The bishops were at loggerheads in the House of Lords the other night on the Ecclesiastical Discipline Bill. Exeter (Phillpotts), in a most venomous speech, attacked the Archbishop, whose mildness was stimulated into an angry reply; but Exeter gained his point, for both Brougham and the Duke were for postponing the Bill. Phillpotts would have made a great bishop in the days of Bonner and Gardiner, or he would have been a Becket, or, still better, a Pope either in the palmy days of papal power or during the important period of reaction which succeeded the Reformation. He seems cast in the mould of a Sixtus.
August 3rd, 1838
The following panegyric on the sixth volume of the Duke’s Despatches, evidently written by no common hand, was given by Dr. Ferguson to Edward Villiers,[23] the Doctor not knowing the author:—
MACAULAY’S LIFE IN INDIA. ‘The sixth volume appears to me among the most extraordinary of human productions, ancient or modern. It is not the mere power of sagacity, vigilance, acute and comprehensive reasoning, or, in short, the intellectual perfection of the book, various and wonderful as it is, which affects my mind most deeply: it is the love of justice, the love of truth, the love of humanity, the love of country, the fine temper, the tolerance of error, the mildness of reproof, the superb morality of the great and masculine spirit displayed throughout it, which it is impossible for an honest man to observe without affection and admiration.’
[23] [The Hon. Edward Ernest Villiers, a younger brother of Lord Clarendon, filled at this time the office of Clerk of the Clergy Returns to the Privy Council.]
August 8th, 1838
James Stephen yesterday was talking to me about Macaulay. He came to him soon after his return from India, and told him that when there he used to get up at five every morning (as everybody else did), and till nine or ten he read Greek and Latin, and went through the whole range of classical literature of every sort and kind; that one day in the Government library he had met with the works of Chrysostom, fourteen Greek folios, and that he had taken home first one volume and then another, till he had read the whole through, that is, he had not read every word, because he had found that it contained a great deal of stuff not worth reading, but he had carefully looked at every page, and had actually read the greater part. His object now is to devote himself to literature, and his present project, to write a History of England for the last 150 years, in which Stephen says he would give scope to his fine imagination in the delineation of character, and bring his vast stores of knowledge to the composition of the narrative, and would, without doubt, produce a work of astonishing power and interest. Macaulay says if he had the power of recalling everything he has ever written and published and of destroying it all, he would do so, for he thinks that his time has been thrown away upon opuscula unworthy of his talents. This is, however, a very preposterous squeamishness and piece of pride or humility, whichever it may be called, for no man need be ashamed of producing anything perfect in its kind, however the kind may not be the highest, and his reviews are perfect in their way. I asked Stephen by what mental process Macaulay had contrived to accumulate such boundless stores of information, and how it was all so sorted and arranged in his head that it was always producible at will. He said that he had first of all the power of abstraction, of giving his undivided attention to the book and the subject on which he was occupied; then, as other men read by syllables or by words, he had the faculty, acquired by use, of reading by whole sentences, of swallowing, as it were, whole paragraphs at once, and thus he infinitely abbreviated the mere mechanical part of study; that as an educated man would read any number of pages much more quickly than an uneducated man, so much more quickly would Macaulay read than any ordinary man. Therefore it is first and foremost the power of abstraction, that faculty of attention and of rendering up his mind to the matter before him, which makes all his reading profitable, and leaves nothing to be wasted and frittered away. Then the acquired habit of devouring at a glance a vast surface of print, so that, like the dragon of Wantley, to whom
Houses and churches
Were like geese and turkeys,
he can discuss a Greek folio while an ordinary man is dawdling or boggling over a pamphlet or a newspaper.