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MAC nervous, eloquent, pointed prose, and of an insight above the common, he made his first public appearance as an orator. In the June of 1824, at a meeting, in Freemason's Hall, of the Society for the mitigation and abolition of shivery, he seconded an anti-slavery resolution proposed by Baptist Noel, in a speech full of the characteristics, though somewhat exaggerated, of the later and maturer oratory which the house of commons crowded to hear.

It was in the August of 1825 that appeared the first of Macaulay's contributions to the Edinburgh Review, the celebrated article on Milton. Long afterwards its author wrote of it as containing scarcely a paragraph "such as his matured judgment approves," and as "overloaded with gaudy and ungraceful ornament." Not such, however, was the verdict of the public, and the essayist at once took rank among the foremost writers in one of the first periodicals of the kingdom. It was not merely the brilliancy and vigour of the style that attracted, but the handling of the subject-matter. In one respect the essay on Milton has never been equalled by Macaulay himself. No other of his essays combines with the same singular success vivid literary criticism with acute political disquisition. Here was a writer who could pass from criticism at once vigorous and subtle on the relations of Dante and Milton, from a discriminating contrast between the lazar-house in Paradise Lost and the last ward of Malebolge, to combat Clarendon and Hume on their own ground, and who seemed equally at home in Æschylus and in the Petition of Right. To one section of the reading public, for which the vivacity of Jeffrey and the wit of Sydney Smith had no charm, the essay on Milton was especially welcome. The noble rhetoric of the passage in which the puritans were defended, went to the hearts of many who were afterwards among Macaulay's opponents; and his courageous vindication of the character and career of Oliver Cromwell was, at least with such prominence and success, by far the earliest of the kind. On Macaulay's personal fortunes his first triumphs as a contributor to the Edinburgh Review had a speedy and decisive effect. At Cambridge he had entered himself as a student of law. He was called to the bar at Lincoln's inn in the February of 1826, and he so far practised his profession as to join the northern circuit. But it was on the Edinburgh reviewer, not on the barrister of the northern circuit, that Lord Lyndhurst conferred in 1827 a commissionership of bankrupts. It was to the rising genius, the critic of Milton and Machiavelli, of Hallam and Southey, that Lord Lansdowne offered in 1830 the representation of the borough of Calne, which, with political opinions already proved to be those of his patron, Macaulay could gracefully accept.

He entered the house of commons in 1830, on the eve of the reform bill agitation. The greatest, though not the first of his early parliamentary speeches, were delivered in the discussion on the reform bill. The question and the crisis were of the very kind to draw forth his powers of oratory, the results of his political philosophy, and his stores of historical knowledge. He handled them with a peculiar eloquence, which since the death of Burke had been unknown in the house of commons. Without neglecting the interests and passions of the day, Macaulay brought to bear on the absorbing question the history of two hundred years; and few modern speeches have produced a greater effect than that in which, appealing to the fears as well as to the reason of his opponents, he described the ruin in which for want of timely concession the once powerful and glittering aristocracy of France had involved itself The effect of these speeches was even greater on the public who read them, than on the auditors who heard them. Macaulay's voice was monotonous, his delivery was like a rapid torrent, and his political philosophy and historical lore were still more attractive on the printed page than in the oral strife of an excited assembly. His speeches on the reform bill procured him at the general election of 1832 the honour of representing Leeds, the manufacturing metropolis of Yorkshire; and in the same year he was appointed secretary to the board of control—an office which strengthened his study of India under English rule by a knowledge of the details of its home administration. Thus prepared, he delivered in the July of 1833, on the second reading of the bill for the renewal of the East India Company's charter, one of the most remarkable of his speeches, the Indian policy developed in which has been slowly but surely embodied in subsequent legislation. Specially noticeable in it is the courageous defence of the application of the competitive system to the filling up vacancies in the Indian civil service—an application which he lived to see triumphant, and of which he many years afterwards aided in adjusting the difficult details One of the provisions of the government scheme was for the appointment of a commission to digest and reform the laws of India, with a view to embody them in a code. And one of the most effective passages of Macaulay's speech was his denunciation of the then no system which made Indian law a lottery, and his exposition of the necessity for a new Indian code as the work which peculiarly belonged to a government like that of India, an enlightened and paternal despotism. By this speech Macaulay's rose above the reputation of a brilliant essayist and debater—he showed that he could grapple with one of the greatest of imperial problems, the government of India. He was offered and he accepted the presidency of the law commission, to draw up the code which he had advocated, and with this was combined the fifth membership of the supreme council of Calcutta. Besides the obvious advantages of a personal acquaintance with India, and the distinguished employment of legislating for so vast an empire, his new office secured to Macaulay the pecuniary independence, the want of which has sometimes degraded the man of genius, if a politician into an an adventurer, if an author into a hack, "It has been supposed, and indeed asserted," says Dean Milman in his memoir of Lord Macaulay (1862), "that his legislative mission was barren and without result; now, however, it is bearing its mature fruits. After much, perhaps inevitable delay, and repeated revisions, the Indian criminal code, in the formation of which he took a leading part, and which he had enriched with most valuable explanatory notes, will with some alterations, and those not substantial, from January next have the force of law throughout British India. Macaulay's share in this great work, especially his notes, is declared by those who have a right to judge on such subjects, to have placed his reputation as a jurist on a solid foundation. It is the first, and therefore the most important, of a series of operations upon the judicial system of India, which will have a great effect upon the state of society in that country, and will not be without influence upon the jurisprudence of England." Macaulay went to India in 1835. He returned to England in 1837. Intellectually, his residence in India had enriched his mind with a personal knowledge of the actual workings of the English rule, of the aspects of Indian life and scenery, of native character and manners; thus qualifying him for the composition of his brilliant biographies of Lord Clive and Warren Hastings. Financially, it secured him an income sufficient for the wants of a scholar and a bachelor, and rendered him completely independent of parties and publishers, whether he devoted himself to politics or to literature, to neither or to both.

Through all these years from the publication of the essay on Milton to his return from India—at the bar, in parliament, in Cannon Row, during the work of codification at Calcutta—Macaulay had been steadily cultivating literature and contributing to the Edinburgh Review. His contributions were continued until the October of 1844, when, with a second article on Chatham, he closed the series of famous "Essays;" each of them read more eagerly than its predecessor, yet the value of which he himself estimated so lightly that America preceded England in republishing them collectively. They embraced literary criticism, and the biographies of men of letters in connection with the literature of their times—as in the essays on Byron, Johnson, the comic dramatists of the Restoration, Addison, and Fanny Burney; political and politico-theological disquisitions, as in those on the civil disabilities of the Jews, Southey's Colloquies, the utilitarian philosophy of government, Ranke's Reformation, and Gladstone's Church and State; foreign history and biography, as in the sketches on Machiavelli, Frederick the Great, and Barrère. But the most valuable of the series are those on the history and political biography of England—from the times of Elizabeth, for which Burleigh furnished the theme, through the reign of James I., the Caroline, Commonwealth, Restoration, and Revolution periods, to the accession of George III.—in the essays on Bacon, Lord Nugent's Hampden, Sir James Mackintosh's History, Sir William Temple, Horace Walpole's Letters, and Chatham. Of the grandest episode in the section of George III.'s reign anterior to the French revolution—the conquest and settlement of India—the essays on Clive and Hastings are memorials worthy of the subject. All of Macaulay's essays are full of the good sense which surprises in the epigrammatic point and exotic glow of its expression. Apart, however, from