Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/527

Rh for the chancellor's classical medals. This failure, for such it was, was mainly due to his hatred of mathematics. Thus he exclaims to his mother in a letter written in 1818:—

I can scarcely bear to write on mathematics or mathematicians. Oh for words to express my abomination of that science, if a name sacred to the useful and embellishing arts may be applied to the perception and recollection of certain properties in numbers and figures! Oh that l had to learn astrology, or demonology, or school divinity! Oh that I were to pore over Thomas Aquinas, and to adjust the relation of entity with the two predicaments, so that I were exempted from this miserable study! "Discipline" of the mind! Say rather starvation, confinement, torture, annihilation! But it must be. I feel myself becoming a personification of algebra, a living trigonometrical canon, a walking table of logarithms. All my perceptions of elegance and beauty gone, or at least going. By the end of the term my brain will be "as dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage." Oh to change Cam for Isis!

Perhaps the recollection of these disappointments tended to give him a low estimate of university honours, much as he loved his university. In his later years he wrote, "After all, what a man does at Cambridge is, in itself, nothing. If he makes a poor figure in life, his having been senior wrangler, or university scholar, is never mentioned but with derision. If he makes a distinguished figure, his early honours merge in those of later date." This opinion is, however, inconsistent with the arguments of his celebrated speech (delivered in 1855), in favour of competitive examination, when he entertained and amazed the House of Commons by a rapid enumeration of the performances of a score of senior wranglers. It was said of Macaulay by his most intimate and dearest friend, that he never really applied himself to any pursuit that was against the grain. Had he set his mind on taking high honours, he probably could have accomplished it. But his mind wanted those habits of severe application, governed by a strong will, without which no man can conquer the reluctantes dracones of life. For this same reason it was not in his destiny to become a great lawyer or a great statesman. He wanted for his growth the liberty of the broad fields of literature. There without an effort he could roam and rule. At this very time, in 1822, he competed with success for a prize of ten pounds, bequeathed by Mr. Greaves of Fulbourn for the best essay on the conduct and character of William III. There was struck the keynote of his life. The essay is still in existence, and it shows that the junior bachelor of two and twenty, thought and wrote with the same spirit as the grave historian of forty-eight.

In a passage that occurs towards the close of the essay may be traced something more than an outline of the peroration in which, a quarter of a century later on, he summed up the character and results of the Revolution of 1688. "To have been a sovereign, yet the champion of liberty; a revolutionary leader, yet the supporter of social order, is the peculiar glory of William. He knew where to pause. He outraged no national prejudice. He abolished no ancient form. He altered no venerable name. He saw that the existing institutions possessed the greatest capabilities of excellence, and that stronger sanctions and clearer definitions were alone required to make the practice of the British constitution as admirable as the theory. Thus he imparted to innovation the dignity and stability of antiquity. He transferred to a happier order of things the associations which had attached the people to their former government. As the Roman warrior, before he assaulted Veii, invoked its guardian gods to leave its walls, and to accept the worship and patronize the cause of the besiegers, this great prince, in attacking a system of oppression, summoned to his aid the venerable principles and deeply-seated feelings to which that system was indebted for protection."

There was in truth in Macaulay, though to judge by the results of his life no one would suppose it, a vast amount of indolence. His reading was universal, but he wandered like a bee over every blossom in the garden, and the wonder is that any honey was made. The following passage from a journal kept by his sister Margaret is extremely curious:—

March 30, 1831.—Tom has just left me, after a very interesting conversation. He spoke of his extreme idleness. He said: "I never knew such an idle man as I am. When I go in to Empson or Ellis their tables are always covered with books and papers. I cannot stick at anything for above a day or two. I mustered industry enough to teach myself Italian. I wish to speak Spanish. I know I could master the difficulties in a week, and read any book in the language at the end of a month, but I have not the courage to attempt it. If there had not been really something in me, idleness would have ruined me."

I said that I was surprised at the great accuracy of his information, considering how desultory his reading had been. "My accuracy as to facts," he said, " I owe to a cause which many men would not confess. It is due to my love of castle-building. The past is in my mind soon constructed into a romance."