Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/529

Rh by itself, the schoolroom and the drawing-room were full of young people; and friends and cousins flocked in numbers to a resort where so much merriment was perpetually on foot. There were seasons during the school holidays when the house overflowed with noise and frolic from morning to night; and Macaulay, who at any period of his life could literally spend whole days in playing with children, was master of the innocent revels. Games of hide-and-seek, that lasted for hours, with shouting and the blowing of horns up and down the stairs and through every room, were varied by ballads, which, like the scalds of old, he composed during the act of recitation, while the others struck in with the chorus. He had no notion whatever of music, but an infallible ear for rhythm. His knack of improvisation he at all times exercised freely. The verses which he thus produced, and which he invariably attributed to an anonymous author whom he styled "the judicious poet," were exclusively for home consumption. Some of these effusions illustrate a sentiment in his disposition which was among the most decided, and the most frequently and loudly expressed. Macaulay was only too easily bored, and those whom he considered fools he by no means suffered gladly. He once amused his sisters by pouring out whole Iliads of extempore doggerel upon the head of an unfortunate country squire of their acquaintance who had a habit of detaining people by the button, and who was especially addicted to the society of the higher order of clergy.

and so on throughout the entire bench, until, after a good half-hour of hearty and spontaneous nonsense, the girls would go laughing back to their Italian and their drawing-boards.

Mr. Trevelyan, who has himself the family taste for this quaint sort of humour, has not scrupled to mix a good many specimens of this amusing doggerel with the graver matters of his book. We see no reason to blame him. They are as characteristic of his uncle as the highest flights of his rhetoric or his eloquence. They are the natural outburst of his amazing spirits, which could extract as much amusement from a street-ballad or a bad novel as from the wit of Boiardo and Aristophanes. And, after all, if many of the jokes are bad jokes, they are not w r orse than the puns and gibes on which the name of Swift has conferred a lasting interest, and they are scrupulously free from Swift's vulgarity and coarseness. There never was a purer mind or more sensitive taste, in these respects, than that of Macaulay; and no doubt he owed this refinement partly to temperament, but far more to the circumstance that he had been brought up and spent his whole life, in the closest intimacy of friendship and sympathy with his sisters. Zachary Macaulay had five daughters and four sons; of whom Lord Macaulay was the eldest. Of the other sons it is unnecessary to speak. The daughters nearest to the age of their illustrious brother were, as far as we know, ladies educated in the strict opinions of the Clapham sect; but their brother always spoke of them with tender affection, and when Jane died he declared his heart was broken, Hannah More Macaulay, afterwards Lady Trevelyan, and Margaret, married to Mr. Edward Cropper, who died in 1834, though respectively ten and twelve years younger than their eldest brother, were his dearest playmates and associates. Lady Trevelyan was, of all the family, the member most congenial to himself. She shared his enthusiastic curiosity; she ranged like him through whole galleries of fiction, until it was said that she and her brother between them could have re-written " Sir Charles Grandison," and probably Miss Austen's novels to boot; she accompanied him to India; she returned with him to share the glory of his later years; and she bequeathed to her son the filial task of compiling this biography. We remember no other instance of so complete and unbroken a union of two persons in that charming relation of life. And the cause of this singularity is this, that Macaulay never, as far as we know, or as this book reveals to us, transferred his affections to any other woman. He seems never to have been in love; there is nowhere the slightest propensity to marriage; he does not appear even to have corresponded, or lived on terms of intimate friendship with any woman, outside his family circle. He liked the society of women—

When, in gilded drawing-rooms, thy breast Swells to the sweeter sound of woman's praise.

He was warmly attached to those who, high in heart and intellect, shed a lustre alike on society and on domestic life, as the late Lady Stanhope and the present Duchess of Argyll; he was grateful to Lady Holland for her kindness, even when she wept and raved at his going to