Gardens, within a hundred yards of the Stock Exchange. Mere baby as he was when his parents removed, he retained an impression of the place; and so strong was the power of association upon his mind, and so deep his love for old familiar scenes, that in succeeding years, long after he was grown to man's estate, he would roam for hours in this enclosure, and through the adjoining City streets. At Clapham, where Mr. Macaulay took a house, which is still visible in the High Street, the lad of three years might be seen stretched on a rug before the fire, a piece of bread and butter in his hand, and a volume as big as himself on the floor, reading incessantly. Even then he talked, as the maid said, "quite printed words." One day the father took him on a visit to Lady Waldegrave at Strawberry Hill, during which a servant who was waiting on the company in the great gallery, spilt some hot coffee over his legs. The tender heart of the hostess was full of compassion for the sufferings of the bright, light-haired boy.

After a while she asked him how he was feeling, whereupon the little fellow looked up into her face and replied, quite gravely, "Thank you, madam,

the agony is abated." On another occasion, when his mother found it needful to explain that he must learn to study without the solace of bread and butter, his ready answer

was, "Yes, mamma, industry shall be my bread and attention my butter."

But his old-fashioned talk did not attract so much notice as his mar

vellous memory. In the swiftness, the certainty and the retentiveness of this faculty he must surely have had few equals, and can have had no superiors. Social gossip had set afloat many capital stories of his amazing powers of acquisition, but

we must confess that until this biography appeared, the half had not been told. It was as natural and easy for him to remember the contents of a book as for other people to read it. Nothing came amiss to him; whatever took his fancy was caught up by the memory without the slightest consciousness of getting it by heart. But his biographer shall tell the stories for himself:

"As a child, during one of the numer ous seasons when the social duties devolved upon Mr. Macaulay, he accom panied his father on an afternoon call, and found on a table the 'Lay of the Last Minstrel,' which he had never before met with. He kept himself quiet with his prize while the elders were talking, and on his return home sat down on his mother's bed and repeated as many cantos as she had the patience or the strength to listen to. At one period of his life he was known to say that, if by some act of Vandalism all copies of 'Paradise Lost' and 'The Pilgrim's Progress' were destroyed off the face of the earth, he would undertake to reproduce them both from recollection when. ever a revival of learning came. In 1813, while waiting in a Cambridge coffee-room for a post-chaise which was to take him to his school, he picked up a country newspaper containing two such specimens of provincial poetical talent as in those days might be read in the corner of any weekly journal. One piece was headed, 'Reflections of an Exile,' while the other was a trumpery parody on the Welsh ballad, 'Ar hyd y nos,' referring to some local anecdote of an ostler whose nose had been bitten off by a filly. He looked them once through, and never gave them a thought for forty years, at the end of which time he repeated them both without missing, or as far as he knew, changing a single word."

His eyes, his mental perception, and his power of thought seem to have been as rapid and sure as his memory. Not only had he the power of making immense acquisitions, but he had also "the capacity of taking in at a glance the contents of a printed page.' "All through his life," remarks his biographer,

"he read books faster than other people skimmed them, and skimmed them as fast as any one else could turn the leaves." One who had often watched the process with amazement and amusement says, "He seemed to read through the skin." Accordingly his reading before he was fifteen years old was prodigious; and, though not nearly so solid and uniformly classical as that of John Stuart Mill at the same age, yet it was at least as varied and extensive. When he was only six years old Miss Hannah More complained that she hardly knew what book to give him for a present. I think," she says, we have nearly exhausted the Epics. You must go to Hatchard's and choose for yourself." After this, Macaulay's "school-boy" will hardly be thought such an inexplicable phenomenon as he has seemed to many people since his appearance on the pages of the Essays.

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In another and yet more notable respect, "the child was father to the man." Most men who have left their mark upon the world have given unmistakable evidence of the bent of their mind and the power of their genius whilst they were young. Sir Isaac Newton showed the greatest taste and aptitude for mechanical inventions, when only nine years old; Lord Bacon, in his childhood, had such readiness of wit and gravity of deportment that he immensely amused the Queen, who used to call him her young Lord Keeper; Milton wrote verse, "with signs of life in it," in his thirteenth year; and gravely told a playmate he was going to be a great

man.

The young Macaulay was no exception to this rule. His juvenile letters to his parents from school have all the chief characteristics of his later style. There is the same cast of sentence, the same effect

of contrast, the same balancing of clauses. His felicity of allusion and illustration from all sources is equally striking. Critics of style might well be pardoned who, coming across the following passage in a letter without a date, should show some hesitation in saying to what period of his life it ought to be assigned: "Poets may talk of the beauties of nature, the enjoyments of a country life and rural innocence; but there is another kind of life which, though unsung by bards, is yet to me infinitely superior to the dull uniformity of country life. London is the place for me. Its smoky atmosphere and its muddy river charm me more than the pure air of Hertfordshire, and the crystal currents of the river Rib. Nothing is equal to the splendid varieties of London life,' the fine flow of London talk,' and the dazzling brilliancy of London spectacles." And yet the votary of city life who can thus sound its praises had not yet attained his fifteenth year!

All sorts of literary projects floated through his brain during his school days, and his biographer says the period of his greatest literary activity was about 1808, when the author had reached the astounding age of eight years. In 1807, he undertook a "Compendium of Universal History," which filled a quire of paper, and which traced the course of the generations "from a new king who knew not Joseph,'-down through Rameses and Dido, and Tydeus, and Tarquin, and Crassus, and Gallienus, and Edward the Martyr,-to Louis who 'set off on a crusade against the Albigenses,' and Oliver Cromwell, who was an unjust and wicked man.' About a year later he wrote a summary of Christian facts and doctrines, which was to be translated into Malabar, in order to persuade the people of

Travancore to embrace Christianity. Poems of all metres flowed from his versatile brain. Scott's " Lay" and "Marmion" so fired him that he straightway wrote a poem of three cantos of a hundred and twenty lines each, called the " Battle of Cheviot." Next followed a heroic poem named, "Olaus the Great; or, The Conquest of Mona." This extended to two cantos, dashed off at headlong speed in odds and ends of leisure; and certainly it is not wanting in spirit, smoothness and plentiful allusion. Here is one of the opening stanzas:

"Long,' said the Prince, 'shall Olave's

name

Live in the high records of fame.
Fair Mona now shall trembling stand,
That ne'er before feared mortal hand.
Mona, that isle where Ceres' flower,
In plenteous autumn's golden hour,
Hides all the fields from man's survey
As locusts hid old Egypt's day."

His sisters have preserved a mass of blank and other verse, the product of his earliest years, which Mr. Trevelyan has wisely decided to leave in the family archives.

The training of such a youth involved no common responsibilities. Happily his parents were well fitted for their task, and knew how to cultivate the boy's power without making him vain of his mental possessions. It says much for their self-control and excellent judgment that, proud as they undoubtedly were of his budding genius, they never handed his productions about or made a parade of his wonderful powers of conversation. Moreover, whilst ruling the family with a pretty strict discipline, they had the blessed art of making home to their children the brightest and most attractive spot in all the world. Macaulay loved his father's house with an ardent and never failing affection. "There is nothing which I would

not give for one instant's sight of home," he wrote to his mother in a pathetic letter after the summer holidays of 1813. The best things, however, about the home-training were its strong religious influences and the noble associates whom the father gathered round him. The impress of his father's character was deep and enduring. Zachary Macaulay was every inch a man, and every inch a Christian. The life and the lip with him were in perfect unity. He was governed in all things by the fear of God, and the strictest principles of Christian integrity. Generous, self-sacrificing and manly, distrustful to a fault of his own powers, but ever mighty in his faith toward God, he fought a long battle of forty years on behalf of the oppressed slave, without flinching and without wearying. Sir James Stephen has given the key to his character in one eloquent

sentence:

"His earthward affections, active and all-enduring as they were, could yet thrive without the support of human sympathy, because they were sustained by so abiding a sense of the Divine presence, and so absolute a submission to the Divine will, as raised him habitually to that higher region where the reproach of man could not reach, and the praise of man might not presume to follow him."

Closely linked with the father was that remarkable and distinguished set of men, known everywhere as the "Clapham Sect." We are delighted to find that in these volumes Mr. Trevelyan has done full justice to this influential and notable band of men. Sydney Smith flung his half-profane jest at their "patent Christianity;" Thackeray, in" The Newcombes," drew a picture of them which stood in about the same relation to the real men that a bad photograph does to a portrait by a master. But assuredly

in it could be reconciled with sound theology or good taste. For, be it remembered, it is not the believer's death either as an event, or as a state, that is dwelt upon with such passionate admiration. It is death as a phenomenon: the" appearance of death" that is pronounced so "lovely." It is death, not as seen by the eye of faith, but as a spectacle to the bodily vision: "What sight upon earth is so fair?" It is " a dead body" with which the poet professes to be so enamoured: In love with the beautiful clay." Henry Vaughan exclaims,

With these concessions to nature and to fact, we may indeed mark "the mild, angelic air,

The rapture of repose that's there,
The fixed, yet tender traits that streak
The languor of the placid cheek."

It was the state of the dead which "the preacher" had in view when in his unenlivened mood, he pathetically "praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive." (Eccles. iv. 2.) In appearance, "death is dreadful." "Corruption... dishonour... weakness are the attributes which Scripture assigns to "that body" which "is sown in the grave. One chief charm of Charles Wesley's poetry is its intensity; but intensity is one thing, and exaggeration another; intensity is an element of strength and beauty; exaggeration entails feebleness and distortion. Besides, whilst "a desire to depart, and to be with Christ" is a healthy and a holy feeling; to the new nature, natural; yet the sentiment "whose relics with I see" is hectic and extravaenvy gant. The history of the composition, gathered from Charles Wesley's Journal, shows that the author himself was not altogether unconscious of the morbidity of the mood which it describes: "We were all in tears; mine, I fear, flowed from envy and impatience of life, etc."

*Jackson's "Life of the Rev. Charles Wesley, M.A." Vol. I. P. 401.