Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, vol 1 by George Otto Trevelyan (reading the story of the TXT) 📕

Henry Nelson, who was destined to be the son-in-law of the poet; and how exceptional that destiny was the readers of Sara Coleridge’s letters are now aware. Hyde Villiers, whom an untimely death alone prevented from taking an equal place in a trio of distinguished brothers, was of his year, though not of his college. [Lord Clarendon, and his brothers, were all Johnians.]

In the year below were the young men who now bear the titles of Lord Grey, Lord Belper, and Lord Romilly; [This paragraph was written in the summer of 1874. Three of Macaulay’s old college friends, Lord Romilly, Moultrie, and Charles Austin, died, in the hard winter that followed, within a few days of each other.] and after the same interval came Moultrie, who in his “Dream of Life,” with a fidelity which he himself pronounced to have been obtained at some sacrifice of grace, has told us how the heroes of his time looked and lived, and Charles Villiers, who still delights our generation by showing us how they talked. Then there was Praed, fresh from editing the Etonian, as a product of collective boyish effort unique in its literary excellence and variety; and Sidney Walker, Praed’s gifted school fellow, whose promise was blighted by premature decay of powers; and Charles Austin, whose fame would now be more in proportion to his extraordinary abilities, had not his unparalleled success as an advocate tempted him before his day to retire from the toils of a career of whose rewards he already had enough.

With his vigour and fervour, his depth of knowledge and breadth of humour, his close reasoning illustrated by an expansive imagination,—set off, as these gifts were, by the advantage, at that period of life so irresistible, of some experience of the world at home and abroad,—Austin was indeed a king among his fellows.

“Grave, sedate, And (if the looks may indicate the age,) Our senior some few years; no keener wit, No intellect more subtle, none more bold, Was found in all our host.”

So writes Moultrie, and the testimony of his verse is borne out by John Stuart Mill’s prose. “The impression he gave was that of boundless strength, together with talents which, combined with such apparent force of will and character, seemed capable of dominating the world.” He certainly was the only man who ever succeeded in dominating Macaulay. Brimming over with ideas that were soon to be known by the name of Utilitarian, a panegyrist of American institutions, and an unsparing assailant of ecclesiastical endowments and hereditary privileges, he effectually cured the young undergraduate of his Tory opinions, which were never more than skin deep, and brought him nearer to Radicalism than he ever was before or since. The report of this conversion, of which the most was made by ill-natured tale-bearers who met with more encouragement than they deserved, created some consternation in the family circle; while the reading set at Cambridge was duly scandalised at the influence which one, whose classical attainments were rather discursive than exact, had gained over a Craven scholar. To this hour men may be found in remote parsonages who mildly resent the fascination which Austin of Jesus exercised over Macaulay of Trinity. [It was at this period of his career that Macaulay said to the late Mr. Hampden Gurney: “Gurney, I have been a Tory, I am a Radical; but I never will be a Whig.”]

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, years after they had left Cambridge, 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 round 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. One repartee survives, thrown off in the heat of discussion, but exquisitely perfect in all its parts. Acknowledged without dissent to be the best applied quotation that ever was made within five miles of the Fitzwilliam Museum, it is unfortunately too strictly classical for reproduction in these pages.

We are more easily consoled for the loss of the eloquence which then flowed so full and free in the debates of the Cambridge Union. In 1820 that Society was emerging from a period of tribulation and repression. The authorities of the university, who, as old constituents of Mr. Pitt and warm supporters of Lord Liverpool, had never been very much inclined to countenance the practice of political discussion among the undergraduates, set their faces against it more than ever at an epoch when the temper of the time increased the tendency of young men to run into extremes of partisanship. At length a compromise was extorted from the reluctant hands of the Vice-Chancellor, and the Club was allowed to take into consideration public affairs of a date anterior to the century. It required less ingenuity than the leaders of the Union had at their command to hit upon a method of dealing with the present under the guise of the past. Motions were framed that reflected upon the existing Government under cover of a censure on the Cabinets of the previous generation.

Resolutions which called upon the meeting to declare that the boon of Catholic Emancipation should have been granted in the year 1795, or that our Commercial Policy previous to 1800 should have been founded on the basis of Free Trade, were clearly susceptible of great latitude of treatment. And, again, in its character of a reading club, the Society, when assembled for the conduct of private business, was at liberty to review the political creed of the journals of the day in order to decide which of them it should take in, and which it should discontinue.

The Examiner newspaper was the flag of many a hard-fought battle; the Morning Chronicle was voted in and out of the rooms half-a-dozen times within a single twelvemonth; while a series of impassioned speeches on the burning question of interference in behalf of Greek Independence were occasioned by a proposition of Malden’s “that ‘e Ellenike salpigks’ do lie upon the table.”

At the close of the debates, which were held in a large room at the back of the Red Lion in Petty Cury, the most prominent members met for supper in the Hotel, or at Moultrie’s lodgings, which were situated close at hand. They acted as a self-appointed Standing Committee, which watched over the general interests of the Union, and selected candidates whom they put in nomination for its offices. The Society did not boast a Hansard;—an omission which, as time went on, some among its orators had no reason to regret. Faint recollections still survive of a discussion upon the august topic of the character of George the Third. “To whom do we owe it,” asked Macaulay, “that while Europe was convulsed with anarchy and desolated with war, England alone remained tranquil, prosperous, and secure? To whom but the Good Old King? Why was it that, when neighbouring capitals were perishing in the flames, our own was illuminated only for triumphs? [This debate evidently made some noise in the university world. There is an allusion to it in a squib of Praed’s, very finished and elegant, and beyond all doubt contemporary. The passage relating to Macaulay begins with the lines—“Then the favourite comes with his trumpets and drums, And his arms and his metaphors crossed.”] You may find the cause in the same three words: the Good Old King.” Praed, on the other hand, would allow his late monarch neither public merits nor private virtues. “A good man! If he had been a plain country gentleman with no wider opportunities for mischief, he would at least have bullied his footmen and cheated his steward.”

Macaulay’s intense enjoyment of all that was stirring and vivid around him undoubtedly hindered him in the race for university honours; though his success was sufficient to inspirit him at the time, and to give him abiding pleasure in the retrospect. He twice gained the Chancellor’s medal for English verse, with poems admirably planned, and containing passages of real beauty, but which may not be republished in the teeth of the panegyric which, within ten years after they were written, he pronounced upon Sir Roger Newdigate. Sir Roger had laid down the rule that no exercise sent in for the prize which he established at Oxford was to exceed fifty lines. This law, says Macaulay, seems to have more foundation in reason than is generally the case with a literary canon, “for the world, we believe, is pretty well agreed in thinking that the shorter a prize poem is, the better.”

Trinity men find it difficult to understand how it was that he missed getting one of the three silver goblets given for the best English Declamations of the year. If there is one