Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/525

Rh said Macaulay, "that you had meant it for me and hit Mr. Adeane"—a joke worthy of an older politician.

Mr. Trevelyan has described with a tinge of hereditary sympathy the strong attachment of Macaulay for Cambridge, and above all for Trinity. That was in deed the starting-place and the goal, the very Mecca of his life; and it was there he received the impressions which formed and moulded his character and his intellect.

Of all his places of sojourn during his joy ous and shining pilgrimage through the world, Trinity, and Trinity alone, had any share with his home in Macaulay's affection and loyalty. To the last he regarded it as an ancient Greek or a mediaeval Italian felt towards his native city. As long as he had place and standing there, he never left it willingly or returned to it without delight. The only step in his course about the wisdom of which he sometimes expressed misgiving was his preference of a London to a Cambridge life. The only dig— nity that in his later days he was known to covet was an honorary fellowship which would have allowed him again to Took through his window upon the college grass-plots, and to sleep within sound of the splashing of the fountain; again to breakfast on commons, and dine beneath the portraits of Newton and Bacon on the dais of the hall; again to ramble by moonlight round Neville's cloister, discoursing the picturesque but somewhat exoteric philosophy which it pleased him to call by the name of metaphysics. From the door of his rooms, along the wall of the chapel, there runs a flagged pathway which affords an acceptable relief from the rugged pebbles that surround it. Here as a bachelor of arts he would walk, book in hand, morning after morning throughout the long vacation, reading with the same eagerness and the same rapidity whether the volume was the most abstruse of treatises, the loftiest of poems, or the flimsiest of novels. That was the spot where in his failing years he specially loved to renew the feelings of the past, and some there are who can never revisit it without the fancy that there, if anywhere, his dear shade must linger.

The group of men he met there was remarkable—the present Lord Grey, Lord Belper and Lord Romilly, the three brothers Villiers, Praed, Moultrie, Sidney Walker, and above all, Charles Austin,

whose fame would now be more in proportion to his extraordinary abilities had not his unparalleled success as an advocate tempted him before his day to retire from the toils of a career of whose rewards he had already enough. With his vigour and fervour, his depth of knowledge and breadth of humour, his close reasoning illustrated by an expansive imagination, set off, as these gifts were, by the advantage, at that period of life so irresistible, of some experience of the world at home and abroad,—Austin was indeed a king among his fellows.

So writes Moultrie, and the testimony of his verse is borne out by John Stuart Mill's prose. "The impression he gave was that of boundless strength, together with talents which, combined with such apparent force of will and character, seemed capable of dominating the world." He certainly was the only man who ever succeeded in dominating Macaulay. Brimming over with ideas that were soon to be known by the name of utilitarian, a panegyrist of American institutions, and an unsparing assailant of ecclesiastical endowments and hereditary privileges, he effectually cured the young undergraduate of his Tory opinions, which were never more than skin deep, and brought him nearer to Radicalism than he ever was before or since. The report of this conversion, of which the most was made by ill-natured talebearers who met with more encouragement than they deserved, created some consternation in the family circle: while the reading set at Cambridge.was duly scandalized at the influence which one whose classical attainments were rather discursive than exact had gained over a Craven scholar. To this hour men may be found in remote parsonages who mildly resent the fascination which Austin of Jesus exercised over Macaulay of Trinity.

No doubt a life of Lord Macaulay would be incomplete without some allusion to Charles Austin, and we thank Mr. Trevelyan for this courteous allusion to one who may in aftertimes be chiefly remembered as Macaulay's rival and friend. Austin surpassed Macaulay himself in powers of argumentative conversation. He was less discursive, more logical, and he launched shafts barbed with "the scorn of scorn" with a more unsparing hand. But he had infinitely less of poetic fire and human sympathy; less