Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. Volume 1

by George Otto Trevelyan

Education in the Macaulay family was not on system. Of what are ordinarily called accomplishments the daughters had but few, and Hannah fewest of any; but, ever since she could remember anything, she had enjoyed the run of a good standard library, and had been allowed to read at her own time, and according to her own fancy. There were two traits in her nature which are seldom united in the same person: a vivid practical interest in the realities which surrounded her, joined with the power of passing at will into a world of literature and romance in which she found herself entirely at home. The feeling with which Macaulay and his sister regarded books differed from that of other people in kind rather than in degree. When they were discoursing together about a work of history or biography, a bystander would have supposed that they had lived in the times of which the author treated, and had a personal acquaintance with every human being who was mentioned in his pages. Pepys, Addison, Horace Walpole, Dr. Johnson, Madame de Genlis, the Duc de St. Simon, and the several societies in which those worthies moved, excited in their minds precisely the same sort of concern, and gave matter for discussions of exactly the same type, as most people bestow upon the proceedings of their own contemporaries. The past was to them as the present, and the fictitious as the actual. The older novels, which had been the food of their early years, had become part of themselves to such an extent that, in speaking to each other, they frequently employed sentences from dialogues in those novels to express the idea, or even the business, of the moment. On matters of the street or of the household they would use the very language of Mrs. Elton and Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Woodhouse, Mr. Collins, and John Thorpe, and the other inimitable actors on Jane Austen's unpretending stage: while they would debate the love affairs and the social relations of their own circle in a series of quotations from Sir Charles Grandison or Evelina.

The effect was at times nothing less than bewildering. When Lady Trevelyan married, her husband, whose reading had lain anywhere rather than among the circulating libraries, used at first to wonder who the extraordinary people could be with whom his wife and his brother-in-law appeared to have lived. This style of thought and conversation had for young minds a singular and a not unhealthy fascination. Lady Trevelyan's children were brought up among books, (to use the homely simile of an American author), as a stable-boy among horses. The shelves of the library, instead of frowning on us as we played and talked, seemed alive with kindly and familiar faces. But death came, and came again, and then all was changed, and changed as in an instant. There were many favourite volumes out of which the spirit seemed to vanish at once and for ever. We endeavoured unsuccessfully to revive by our own efforts the amusement which we had been taught to find in the faded flatteries and absurdities that passed between Miss Seward and her admirers, or to retrace for ourselves the complications of female jealousy which played round Cowper's tea-table at Olney. We awoke to the discovery that the charm was not in us, nor altogether in the books themselves. The talisman, which endowed with life and meaning all that it touched, had passed away from among us, leaving recollections which are our most cherished, as they must ever be our proudest, possession.

Macaulay thought it probable that he could re-write Sir Charles Grandison from memory, and certainly he might have done so with his sister's help. But his intimate acquaintance with a work was no proof of its merit. "There was a certain prolific author," says Lady Trevelyan, "named Mrs. Meeke, whose romances he all but knew by heart; though he quite agreed in my criticism that they were one just like another, turning on the fortunes of some young man in a very low rank of life who eventually proves to be the son of a Duke. Then there was a set of books by a Mrs. Kitty Cuthbertson, most silly though readable productions, the nature of which may be guessed from their titles:—'Santo Sebastiano, or the Young Protector,' 'The Forest of Montalbano,' 'The Romance of the Pyrenees,' and 'Adelaide, or the Countercharm.' I remember how, when 'Santo Sebastiano' was sold by auction in India, he and Miss Eden bid against each other till he secured it at a fabulous price; and I possess it still."

As an indication of the thoroughness with which this literary treasure has been studied, there appears on the last page an elaborate computation of the number of fainting-fits that occur in the course of the five volumes.

Julia de Clifford..... 11
Lady Delamore....... 4
Lady Theodosia....... 4
Lord Glenbrook...... 2
Lord Delamore...... 2
Lady Enderfield...... 1
Lord Ashgrove....... 1
Lord St. Orville..... 1
Henry Mildmay....... 1

A single passage, selected for no other reason than because it is the shortest, will serve as a specimen of these catastrophes "One of the sweetest smiles that ever animated the face of mortal now diffused itself over the countenance of Lord St. Orville, as he fell at the feet of Julia in a death-like swoon."

The fun that went on in Great Ormond Street was of a jovial, and sometimes uproarious, description. Even when the family was by itself, the school-room and the drawing-room were full of young people; and friends and cousins flocked in numbers to a resort where so much merriment was perpetually on foot. There were seasons during the school holidays when the house overflowed with noise and frolic from morning to night; and Macaulay, who at any period of his life could literally spend whole days in playing with children, was master of the innocent revels. Games of hide-and-seek, that lasted for hours, with shouting and the blowing of horns up and down the stairs and through every room, were varied by ballads, which, like the Scalds of old, he composed during the act of recitation, while the others struck in with the chorus. He had no notion whatever of music, but an infallible ear for rhythm. His knack of improvisation he at all times exercised freely. The verses which he thus produced, and which he invariably attributed to an anonymous author whom he styled "the Judicious Poet," were exclusively for home consumption. Some of these effusions illustrate a sentiment in his disposition which was among the most decided, and the most frequently and loudly expressed. Macaulay was only too easily bored, and those whom he considered fools he by no means suffered gladly. He once amused his sisters by pouring out whole Iliads of extempore doggrel upon the head of an unfortunate country squire of their acquaintance, who had a habit of detaining people by the button, and who was especially addicted to the society of the higher order of clergy

"His Grace Archbishop Manners Sutton
Could not keep on a single button.
As for Right Reverend John of Chester,
His waistcoats open at the breast are.
Our friend* has filled a mighty trunk
With trophies torn from Doctor Monk
And he has really tattered foully
The vestments of Archbishop Howley
No button could I late discern on
The garments of Archbishop Vernon,
And never had his fingers mercy
Upon the garb of Bishop Percy.
The buttons fly from Bishop Ryder
Like corks that spring from bottled cyder,—"

[*The name of this gentleman has been concealed, as not being sufficiently known by all to give point, but well enough remembered by some to give pain.]

and so on, throughout the entire bench, until, after a good half-hour of hearty and spontaneous nonsense, the girls would go laughing back to their Italian and their drawing-boards.