Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/543

Rh sure, with which he met all the changes and chances of his public career; and that spirit of cheerful and patient endurance, which sustained him through years of broken health and enforced seclusion.

There are people who conceive themselves to be fond of reading and conversant with literature, because they devour the nerveless publications of the day, and exhaust the circulating libraries. They forget, or they do not know, that the broadest and richest fields of literature lie in more remote regions. Macaulay, with his boundless appetite for books, had but scant indulgence for the writers of his own time. Measured by his standard they appeared to him paradoxical, fantastical, and even contemptible. He rushed past these ephemeral productions, to dwell more constantly and more frequently with the imperishable remains of former ages. That which really charmed him in letters was not their novelty but their antiquity, their vitality, their duration. His biographer admits, apparently with regret, that writers of the stamp of Mr. Buckle, Mr. Carlyle, and Mr. Ruskin had not the power to command his attention. Perhaps if they could have come down to him with the authority of a thousand years, and a dead language, he would have appreciated them more highly.

The gloom of the winter of 1859 was heightened to him by the dread of an approaching separation from his beloved sister and one of his nieces, who were to join Sir Charles Trevelyan at Madras in February: but from the terrible pang of that departure he was mercifully spared. On Christmas-day his family once more gathered round his hearth—but he talked little and continually fell asleep. On the morning of December 28, he dictated a letter to a poor curate, enclosing a cheque for twenty-five pounds. That was the last time he signed his name. That same evening, sitting in his library, with a book before him, still open at the last-read page, he ceased to breathe. "He died as he had always wished to die;—without pain, without any formal farewell; preceding to the grave all whom he loved; and leaving behind him a great and honourable name, and the memory of a life every action of which was as clear and transparent as one of his own sentences." On January 9, 1860, they laid him in Westminster Abbey, at the foot of the statue of Addison, and he was joined to that illustrious company of scholars and statesmen whom it had been the study and the glory of his life to emulate.

What Lord Macaulay was his own writings and these volumes sufficiently attest. We shall not attempt to retrace the outlines of his genius and his character, for we have already recorded in these pages our own sense of his greatness His extraordinary powers of intellect and memory were already known to the world. But the world had yet to learn with how fine a poetic temperament and with what warmth of heart these gifts were combined.

In conclusion, it only remains to us to acknowledge the skill and candour with which Mr. Trevelyan has executed a very delicate and difficult task. So much of the life of his illustrious uncle was spent within the sanctuary of domestic life, that it was impossible to make it entirely known to posterity without lifting those veils of privacy which are commonly drawn closer by the ties of kindred and personal affection. But it was his good fortune to have nothing to conceal, and nothing to relate that was not amiable, honourable, and true. Details, sometimes trivial in themselves, add to the reality of the picture, and we do not doubt that these volumes will be read throughout the world with a curiosity and an interest, only to be surpassed by the success of Lord Macaulay's own writings.

 

on whose prospects success seemed to shine most sunnily was Justin Vitali, of the Bar of M. At the age of thirty he had already achieved a reputation as a learned lawyer and an eloquent pleader. Without influential connections to help him on—labouring under the drawback of being a Corsican, which is not a title of merit in the eyes of French barristers who dislike the politics of their insular brethren, addicted, moreover, to solitary study which kept him from chumming with his fellows or going out into society and making friends of the sort who often do more for a barrister than professional merit does, Justin Vitali had, nevertheless, attracted attention much quicker than if he had had recourse to ambitious acts. He was just the sort of man whom solicitors appreciate. He had the gift of