In the early days of Queen Victoria’s reign—when Sir Robert Peel was winning his way to the proud position he later held—when American and English politicians were getting into the toils of the “Maine Boundary” dispute (afterward settled by Ashburton and Webster), and when the Countess of Blessington was making “Gore House” lively with her little suppers, and the banker Rogers entertaining all beaux esprits at his home near the Green Park, there may have been found as guest at one of the banker’s famous breakfasts—somewhere we will say in the year 1838—a man, well-preserved, still under forty—with a shaggy brow, with clothes very likely ill-adjusted and ill-fitting, and with gloves which are never buttoned—who has just come back from India, where he has held lucrative official position. He is cogitating, it is said, a history of England, and his talk has a fulness and richness that seem inexhaustible.
You know to whom I must refer—Thomas Babington Macaulay[84]—not a new man at Rogers’s table, not a new man to bookish people; for he had won his honors in literature, especially by a first paper on Milton, published in the year 1825 in the Edinburgh Review. This bore a new stamp and had qualities that could not be overlooked. There are scores of us who read that paper for the first time in the impressionable days of youth, who are carried back now by the mere mention of it to the times of the old Puritan poet.
“We can almost fancy that we are visiting him in his small lodging; that we see him sitting at the old organ beneath the faded green hangings; that we can catch the quick twinkle of his eyes, rolling in vain to find the day; that we are reading in the lines of his noble countenance the proud and mournful history of his glory and his affliction!”
Macaulay came of good old Scotch stock—his forefathers counting up patriarchal families in Coll and Inverary; but his father, Zachary Macaulay, well known for his anti-slavery action and influence, and for his association with Wilberforce, married an English Quaker girl from Bristol—said to have been a protégée of our old friend, Mistress Hannah More. Of this marriage was born, in 1800, at the charming country house of an aunt, named Babington, in the pleasant county of Leicestershire, the future historian.
The father’s first London home was near by Lombard Street, where he managed an African agency under the firm name of Macaulay & Babington; and the baby Macaulay used to be wheeled into an open square near by, for the enjoyment of such winter’s sunshine as fell there at far-away intervals. His boyish memories, however, belonged to a later home at Clapham, then a suburban village. There, was his first schooling, and there he budded out—to the wonderment of all his father’s guests—into young poems and the drollest of precocious talk. His pleasant biographer (Trevelyan) tells of a visit the bright boy made at Strawberry Hill—Walpole’s old showplace. There was a spilling of hot drink of some sort, during the visitation, which came near to scalding the lad; and when the sympathizing hostess asked after his suffering: “Thank you, madam,” said he, “the agony is abated!” The story is delightfully credible; and so are other pleasant ones of his reciting some of his doggerel verses to Hannah More and getting a gracious and approving nod of her gray curls and of her mob-cap.
At Cambridge, where he went at the usual student age, he studied what he would, and discarded what he would—as he did all through his life. For mathematics he had a distinguished repugnance, then and always; and if brought to task by them in those student days—trying hard to twist their certainties into probabilities, and so make them subject to that world of “ifs and buts” which he loved to start buzzing about the ears of those who loved the exact sciences better than he. He missed thus some of the University honors, it is true; yet, up and down in those Cambridge coteries he was a man looked for, and listened to, eagerly and bravely applauded. Certain scholastic honors, too, he did reap, in spite of his lunges outside the traces; there was a medal for his poem of Pompeii; and a Fellowship, at last, which gave him a needed, though small income—his father’s Afric business having proved a failure, and no home moneys coming to him thereafter.
The first writings of Macaulay which had public issue were printed in Knight’s Quarterly Magazine—among them were criticisms on Italian writers, a remarkable imaginary conversation between “Cowley and Milton,” and the glittering, jingling battle verses about the War of the League and stout “Henry of Navarre”—full to the brim of that rush and martial splendor which he loved all his life, and which he brought in later years to his famous re-heralding of the Lays of Ancient Rome. A few lines are cited:—
“The King is come to marshal us, in all his armor drest;
And he has bound a snow-white plume upon his gallant crest.
He looked upon his people, and a tear was in his eye;