Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/526

518, less of heart, and less of persistent ambition. His radical opinions subsided at last into a mild form of conservatism, and either from indolence or indifference to the world, he never took a pen in hand to leave behind him any trace of his great intellect. Hence he is remembered more for what he might have been than for what he was.

The day and the night together were too short for one who was entering on the journey of life amidst such a band of travellers. So long as a door was open or a light burning in any of the courts Macaulay was always in the mood for conversation and companionship. Unfailing in his attendance at lecture and chapel, blameless with regard to college laws and college discipline, it was well for his virtue that no curfew was in force within the precincts of Trinity. He never tired of recalling the days when he supped at midnight on milk-punch and roast turkey, drank tea in floods at an hour when older men are intent upon anything rather than on the means of keeping themselves awake, and made little of sitting over the fire till the bell rang for morning chapel in order to see a friend off by the early coach. In the license of the summer vacation, after some prolonged and festive gathering, the whole party would pour out into the moonlight and ramble for mile after mile through the country till the noise of their wide-flowing talk mingled with the twittering of the birds in the hedges which bordered the Coton pathway or the Madingley road. On such occasions it must have been well worth the loss of sleep to hear Macaulay plying Austin with sarcasms upon the doctrine of the greatest happiness, which then had still some gloss of novelty; putting into an ever-fresh shape the time-honoured jokes against the Johnians for the benefit of the Villierses; and urging an interminable debate on Wordsworth's merits as a poet, in which the Coleridges, as in duty bound, were ever ready to engage. In this particular field he acquired a skill of fence which rendered him the most redoubtable of antagonists. Many years afterwards, at the time when "The Prelude" was fresh from the press, he was maintaining against the opinion of a large and mixed society that the poem was unreadable. At last, overborne by the united indignation of so many of Wordsworth's admirers, he agreed that the question should be referred to the test of personal experience: and on inquiry it was discovered that the only individual present who had got through "The Prelude" was Macaulay himself.

It is not only that the witnesses of these scenes unanimously declare that they have never since heard such conversation in the most renowned of social circles. The partiality of a generous young man for trusted and admired companions may well colour his judgment over the space of even half a century. But the estimate of university contemporaries was abundantly confirmed by the outer world. While on a visit to Lord Lansdowne at Bowood, Austin and Macaulay happened to get upon college topics one morning at breakfast. When the meal was finished they drew their chairs to either end of the chimney-piece, and talked at each other across the hearth-rug as if they were in a first-floor room in the Old Court of Trinity. The whole company, ladies, artists, politicians, and diners-out formed a silent circle found the two Cantabs, and, with a short break for lunch, never stirred till the bell warned them that it was time to dress for dinner.

It has all irrevocably perished. With life before them, and each intent on his own future, none among that troop of friends had" the mind to play Boswell to the others.

Neither of these friendly disputants, certainly, wanted either roXfia or favq, which were regarded as the two first conditions of Attic oratory; but let posterity be consoled. We are old enough to have heard in our time a great deal of Austin's argumentative conversation, and opportunities were not wanting to us; but brilliant as it undoubtedly was, something of the reputation of these eminent talkers was due to the disposition of their audience. It is true, however, that conversation pitched in so high a key—so animated, so instructive, and so amusing—is not to be heard in modern society.

These literary conversations, followed by the animated debates of the Cambridge Union, in which Austin, Macaulay, Romilly, and Praed took the lead, probably contributed as much to the future success of these men as the lessons of their tutors. Macaulay's definition of a scholar was a man who could read Plato with his feet, on the fender. He had himself no great share of that critical scholarship, then much in fashion, which raised a man to the bench of bishops by editing a Greek tragedy. But he had through life what is far better, a vast and lively acquaintance. with Greek literature. Homer was as familiar to him as "Paradise Lost." During his retirement in India the Greek poets and orators were his constant companions. But at Cambridge his classical attainments earned for him no distinction except a Craven scholarship, to which he added on two occasions the chancellor's medal for English verse. He was not chosen a fellow of his college until his third trial, nominally for the strange reason that his translations from Greek and Latin into English were too bald and unadorned. When the Tripos of 1822 appeared his name was not in it; in short, Macaulay was "gulfed" (as his nephew expresses it), and he was disabled from contending