His sister (who later became Lady Trevelyan) went with him as the mistress of his Calcutta household; and his affectionate and most tender relations with this, as well as with his younger sister, are beautifully set forth in the charming biography by his nephew, Otto Trevelyan. It is a biography that everybody should read; and none can read it, I am sure, without coming to a kindlier estimate of its subject. The home-letters with which it abounds run over with affectionate playfulness. We are brought to no ugly post mortem in the book, and no opening of old sores. It is modest, courteous, discreet, and full.
Macaulay did monumental work in India upon the Penal Code. He also kept up there his voracious habits of reading and study. Listen for a moment to his story of this:
“During the last thirteen months I have read Eschylus, twice; Sophocles, twice; Euripides, once; Pindar, twice; Callimachus, Apollonius Rhodius, Theocritus, twice; Herodotus, Thucydides, almost all of Xenophon’s works, almost all of Plato, Aristotle’s Politics, and a good deal of his Organon; the whole of Plutarch’s Lives; half of Lucian; two or three books of Athenæus; Plautus, twice; Terence, twice; Lucretius, twice; Catullus, Propertius, Lucan, Statius, Silius Italicus, Livy, Velleius Paterculus, Sallust, Cæsar, and lastly, Cicero.”
This is his classical list. Of his modern reading he does not tell; yet he was plotting the History of England, and the bouncing balladry of the Lays of Rome was even then taking shape in the intervals of his study.
His father died while Macaulay was upon his voyage home from India—a father wholly unlike the son, in his rigidities and his Calvinistic asperities; but always venerated by him, and in the latter years of the old gentleman’s life treated with a noble and beautiful generosity.
A short visit to Italy was made after the return from India; and it was in Rome itself that he put some of the last touches to the Lays—staying the work until he could confirm by personal observation the relative sites of the bridge across the Tiber and the home of Horatius upon the Palatine.
You remember the words perhaps; if not, ’twere well you should,—
“Alone stood brave Horatius,
But constant still in mind;