Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/391

Rh have elsewhere noted, something like the standard of a public opinion; and this was, no doubt, because his memory contained, as regarded those departments of knowledge, the accumulation of the chief experiences which form public opinion.

Again, his wonderful memory was a great feeder of his humour, not in the sense of the orator who said that his opponent had trusted to his memory for his wit and to his imagination for his facts, but in a much more legitimate sense. The readers of Lord Macaulay's letters will be struck by the abundance of humour in them. Students of his "History" and his "Essays" would recognize that humxmr as a quality which was always latent, though not always active, in him"; but the somewhat set style into which his eloquence and his arguments fall, and especially the painstaking exhaustiveness of his exposition, give the impression of a much tamer man,—of a man of less impulse and more conventional modes of thought, of a man who cared less to flash his meaning on his readers, and cared more to indoctrinate them,—than Macaulay actually was. In fact, he was, as a young man, full of fun. The fun is not in itself of a very high order. One or two jokes recorded here are indeed excellent. When the Cambridge electioneerer discharged a dead cat full in his face, and then apologizing, said that it was not meant for him, it was intended for Mr. Adeane, Macaulay's reply, "I wish you had intended it for me, and hit Mr. Adeane," was full of that presence of mind and good-natured malice which is of the essence of the best humour. Again, there is true fun in a rhyme which one of his sisters quotes. When they were making up verses on all sorts of extempore themes, and some one had given the subject of an acquaintance who had gone out to the West Indies hoping to make money, but had returned with no change in his fortunes except that the complexions of his daughters had been ruined,—Macaulay struck off this:—

Still, on the whole, we believe that Macaulay would never have had any unusual fund of humour in him, but for his wonderful memory. The squibs of which he was fond as a young man are not, on the whole, very good. The account of the noPopery expedition of the country clergymen to Cambridge, to vote against some supposed step in the direction of Popery, is as good, perhaps, as any of them, but it is not all like the squibs of Canning or Frere. The following extract from the anti-Papal manifesto which roused the sleepy clergy to the sense of their dangers, with the account of the conventional politeness to individuals by which it was accompanied, is the best part of it:—

But though that is very fair rattle, it would not have gained Macaulay the reputation for humour which we think he will gain among the ordinary readers of his letters. And we suspect that will be attributable chiefly to the great resources which such humour as he had commanded in consequence of his great memory. Mr. Trevelyan gives a striking account of the crowd of humorous associations which Macaulay and his sisters had accumulated round the quaintnesses of the pedantic, old-fashioned novels of the Grandisonian days, and the delightful irony of Miss Austen's evermemorable stories. The younger