He did not play upon words as a habit, nor did he interlard his talk with far-fetched or overstrained witticisms. His humour, like his rhetoric, was full of force and substance, and arose naturally from the complexion of the conversation or the circumstance of the moment. But when alone with his sisters, and, in after years, with his nieces, he was fond of setting himself deliberately to manufacture conceits resembling those on the heroes of the Trojan War which have been thought worthy of publication in the collected works of Swift. When walking in London he would undertake to give some droll turn to the name of every shopkeeper in the street, and, when travelling, to the name of every station along the line. At home he would run through the countries of Europe, the States of the Union, the chief cities of our Indian Empire, the provinces of France, the Prime Ministers of England, or the chief writers and artists of any given century; striking off puns, admirable, endurable, and execrable, but all irresistibly laughable, which followed each other in showers like sparks from flint. Capping verses was a game of which he never tired. "In the spring of 1829," says his cousin Mrs. Conybeare, "we were staying in Ormond Street. My chief recollection of your uncle during that visit is on the evenings when we capped verses. All the family were quick at it, but his astounding memory made him supereminent. When the time came for him to be off to bed at his chambers, he would rush out of the room after uttering some long-sought line, and would be pursued to the top of the stairs by one of the others who had contrived to recall a verse which served the purpose, in order that he might not leave the house victorious; but he, with the hall-door open in his hand, would shriek back a crowning effort, and go off triumphant."
Nothing of all this can be traced in his letters before the year 1830. Up to that period he corresponded regularly with no one but his father, between whom and himself there existed a strong regard, but scanty sympathy or similarity of pursuits. It was not until he poured out his mind almost daily to those who approached him more nearly in age, and in tastes, that the lighter side of his nature began to display itself on paper. Most of what he addressed to his parents between the time when he left Cambridge, and the time when he entered the House of Commons, may be characterised as belonging to the type of duty-letters, treating of politics, legal gossip, personal adventures, and domestic incidents, with some reticence and little warmth or ease of expression, The periodical insertion on the son's part of anecdotes and observations bearing upon the question of Slavery reminds the reader of those presents of tall recruits with which, at judiciously chosen intervals, Frederic the Great used to conciliate his terrible father. As between the Macaulays, these little filial attentions acquire a certain gracefulness from the fact that, in the circumstances of the family, they could be prompted by no other motive than a dutiful and disinterested affection.
It must not be supposed,—no one who examines the dates of his successive essays will for a moment suppose,—that his attention was distracted, or his energy dissipated, by trifles. Besides the finished study of Machiavelli, and the masterly sketch of our great civil troubles known as the article on Hallam's Constitutional History, he produced much which his mature judgment would willingly have allowed to die, but which had plenty of life in it when it first appeared between the blue and yellow covers. His most formidable enterprise, during the five earliest years of his connection with the great Review, was that passage of arms against the champions of the Utilitarian philosophy in which he touched the mighty shields of James Mill and Jeremy Bentham, and rode slashing to right and left through the ranks of their less distinguished followers. Indeed, while he sincerely admired the chiefs of the school, he had a young man's prejudice against their disciples, many of whom he regarded as "persons who, having read little or nothing, are delighted to be rescued from the sense of their own inferiority by some teacher who assures them that the studies which they have neglected are of no value, puts five or six phrases into their mouths, lends them an odd number of the Westminster Review, and in a month transforms them into philosophers." It must be allowed that there was some colour for his opinion. The Benthamite training may have stimulated the finer intellects, (and they were not few,) which came within its influence; but it is impossible to conceive anything more dreary than must have been the condition of a shallow mind, with a native predisposition to sciolism, after its owner had joined a society "composed of young men agreeing in fundamental principles, acknowledging Utility as their standard in ethics and politics," "meeting once a fortnight to read essays and discuss questions conformably to the premises thus agreed on," and "expecting the regeneration of mankind, not from any direct action on the sentiments of unselfish benevolence and love of justice, but from the effect of educated intellect enlightening the selfish feelings." John Stuart Mill, with that candour which is the rarest of his great qualities, gave a generous and authoritative testimony to the merit of these attacks upon his father, and his father's creed, which Macaulay himself lived to wish that he had left unwritten.
["The author has been strongly urged to insert three papers on the Utilitarian Philosophy, which, when they first appeared, attracted some notice. * * * He has, however, determined to omit these papers, not because he is disposed to retract a single doctrine which they contain, but because he is unwilling to offer what might be regarded as an affront to the memory of one from whose opinions he still widely dissents, but to whose talents and virtues he admits that he formerly did not do justice. * * It ought to be known that Mr. Mill had the generosity, not only to forgive, but to forget the unbecoming acrimony with which he had been assailed, and was, when his valuable life closed, on terms of cordial friendship with his assailant."—Preface to Macaulay's Collected Essays.]
He was already famous enough to have incurred the inevitable penalty of success in the shape of the pronounced hostility of Blackwood's Magazine. The feelings which the leading contributors to that periodical habitually entertained towards a young and promising writer were in his case sharpened by political partisanship; and the just and measured severity which he infused into his criticism on Southey's "Colloquies of Society" brought down upon him the bludgeon to whose strokes poetic tradition has attributed the death of Keats. Macaulay was made of harder stuff, and gave little heed to a string of unsavoury invectives compounded out of such epithets as "ugly," "splay-footed," and "shapeless;" such phrases as "stuff and nonsense," "malignant trash," "impertinent puppy," and "audacity of impudence;" and other samples from the polemical vocabulary of the personage who, by the irony of fate, filled the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. The substance of Professor Wilson's attacks consisted in little more than the reiteration of that charge of intellectual juvenility, which never fails to be employed as the last resource against a man whose abilities are undoubted, and whose character is above detraction.
"North. He's a clever lad, James.
"Shepherd. Evidently; and a clever lad he'll remain, depend ye upon that, a' the days of his life. A clever lad thirty years auld and some odds is to ma mind the maist melancholy sight in nature. Only think of a clever lad o' three-score-and-ten, on his deathbed, wha can look back on nae greater achievement than having aince, or aiblins ten times, abused Mr. Southey in the Embro' Review."
The prophecies of jealousy seldom come true. Southey's book died before its author, with the exception of the passages extracted by Macaulay, which have been reproduced in his essay a hundred times, and more, for once that they were printed in the volumes from which he selected them for his animadversion.
The chambers in which he ought to have been spending his days, and did actually spend his nights between the years 1829 and 1834, were within five minutes' walk of the house in Great Ormond Street. The building of which those chambers formed a part,—8 South Square, Gray's Inn,—has since been pulled down to make room for an extension of the Library; a purpose which, in Macaulay's eyes, would amply compensate for the loss of such associations as might otherwise have attached themselves to the locality. His Trinity fellowship brought him in nearly three hundred pounds annually, and the Edinburgh Review nearly two hundred. In January 1828, during the interregnum that separated the resignation of Lord Goderich and the acceptance of the Premiership by the Duke of Wellington, Lord Lyndhurst made him a Commissioner of Bankruptcy; a rare piece of luck at a time when, as Lord Cockburn tells us, "a youth of a Tory family, who was discovered to have a leaning towards the doctrines of the opposition, was considered as a lost son." "The Commission is welcome," Macaulay writes to his father, "and I am particularly glad that it has been given at a time when there is no ministry, and when the acceptance of it implies no political obligation. To Lord Lyndhurst I of course feel personal gratitude, and I shall always take care how I speak of him."
The emoluments of the office made up his income, for the three or four years during which he held it, to about nine hundred pounds per annum. His means were more than sufficient for his wants, but too small, and far too precarious, for the furtherance of the political aspirations which now were uppermost in his mind. "Public affairs," writes Lady Trevelyan, "were become intensely interesting to him. Canning's accession to power, then his death, the repeal of the Test Act, the Emancipation of the Catholics, all in their turn filled his heart and soul. He himself longed to be taking his part in Parliament, but with a very hopeless longing.