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his temperament ever could be a really great orator. Indignation is even more effective as an element in the making of great speeches than in the making of small verses.

The closing days of the year were made memorable by the death of Macaulay. He had been raised to the peerage, and had had some hopes of being able to take occasional part in the stately debates of the House of Lords. But his health almost suddenly broke down, and his voice was never heard in the Upper Chamber. He died prematurely, having only entered on his sixtieth year. We have already studied the literary character of this most successful literary man. Macaulay had had, as he often said himself, a singularly happy life, although it was not without its severe losses and its griefs. His career was one of uninterrupted success. His books brought him fame, influence, social position, and wealth, all at once. He never made a failure. The world only applauded one book more than the other, the second speech more than the first. Macaulay the essayist, Macaulay the historian, Macaulay the ballad-writer, Macaulay the Parliamentary orator, Macaulay the brilliant inexhaustible talker-he was alike, it might appear, supreme in everything he chose to do or to attempt. After his death there came a natural reaction; and the reaction, as is always the case, was inclined to go too far. People began to find out that Macaulay had done too many things; that he did not do anything as it might have been done; that he was too brilliant; that he was only brilliant; that he was

not really brilliant at all, but only superficial and showy. The disparagement was more unjust by far than even the extravagant estimate. Macaulay was not the paragon, the ninth wonder of the world, for which people once set him down; but he was undoubtedly a great literary man. He was also a man of singularly noble character. He was, in a literary sense, egotistic; that is to say, he thought and talked and wrote a great deal about his works and himself; but he was one of the most unselfish men that ever lived. He appears to have enjoyed advancement, success, fame, and money only because these enabled him to give pleasure and support to the members of his family. He was attached to his family, especially to his sisters, with the tenderest affection. His real nature seems only to have thoroughly shone out when in their society. There he was loving, sportive even to joyous frolicsomeness; a glad schoolboy almost to the very end. He was remarkably generous and charitable, even to strangers; his hand was almost always open; but he gave so unostentatiously that it was not until after his death half his kindly deeds became known. He had a spirit which was absolutely above any of the corrupting temptations of money and rank. He was very poor at one time; and during his poverty he was beginning to make his reputation in the House of Commons. It is often

said that a poor man feels nowhere so much out of place, nowhere so much at a disadvantage, nowhere so much humiliated, as in the House of Commons. Macaulay felt nothing of the kind. He

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bore himself as easily and steadfastly as though he had been the eldest son of a proud and wealthy family. It did not seem to have occurred to him, when he was poor, that money was lacking to the dignity of his intellect and his manhood; or when he was rich that money added to it. Certain defects of temper and manner, rather than of character, he had which caused men often to misunderstand him, and sometimes to dislike him. He was apt to be overbearing in tone, and to show himself a little too confident of his splendid gifts and acquirements: his marvellous memory, his varied reading, his overwhelming power of argument. He trampled on men's prejudices too heedlessly, was inclined to treat ignorance as if it were a crime, and to make dulness feel that it had cause to be ashamed of itself. Such defects as these are hardly worth mentioning, and would not be mentioned here but that they serve to explain some of the misconceptions which were formed of Macaulay by many during his lifetime, and some of the antagonisms which he unconsciously created. Absolutely without literary affectation, undepressed by early poverty, unspoiled by later and almost unequalled success, he was an independent, quiet, self-relying man who, in all his noon of fame, found most happiness in the companionship and the sympathy of those he loved, and who, from first to last, was loved most tenderly by those who knew him best. He was buried in Westminster Abbey in the first week of the new year, and there truly took his place among his peers.

VOL. III.

CHAPTER XLI.

THE FRENCH TREATY AND THE PAPER DUTIES.

LORD PALMERSTON'S Ministry came into power in troublous times. All over the world there seemed to be an upheaving of old systems. Since 1848 there had not been such a period of political and social commotion. A new war had broken out in China. The peace of Villafranca had only patched up the Italian system. Everyone saw that there was much convulsion to come yet before Italy was likely to settle down into order. From across the Atlantic came the first murmurings of civil war. John Brown had made his famous raid into Harper's Ferry, a town on the borders of Virginia and Maryland, for the purpose of helping slaves to escape, and he was captured, tried for the attempt, and executed. He met his death with the composure of an antique hero. Victor Hugo declared in one of his most impassioned sentences, that the gibbet of John Brown was the Calvary of the anti-slavery movement; and assuredly the execution of the brave old man was the death sentence of slavery. Abraham Lincoln had just been adopted by the National Republican Convention at Chicago as candidate for the Presidency, and even here in England people were beginning to understand

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what that meant. At home there were distractions of other kinds. Some of the greatest strikes ever known in England had just broken out; and a political panic was further perplexed by the quarrels of class with class. A profound distrust of Louis Napoleon prevailed almost everywhere. The fact that he had been recently our ally did not do much to diminish this distrust. On the contrary, it helped in a certain sense to increase it. Against what State, it was asked, did he enter into alliance with us? Against Russia. To defend Turkey? Not at all; Louis Napoleon always acknowledged that he despised the Turks, and felt sure nothing could ever be made of them. It was to have his revenge for Moscow and the Beresina, people said, that he struck at Russia; and he made us his mere tools in the enterprise. Now he turns upon Austria, to make her atone for other wrongs done against the ambition of the Bonapartes; and he has conquered. Austria, believed by all men to have the greatest military organisation in Europe, lies crushed at his feet. What next? Prussia perhaps or England? The official classes in this country had from the first been in sympathy with Austria, and would if they could have had England take up her quarrel. The Tories were Austrian for the most part. Not much of the feeling for Italy which was afterwards so enthusiastic and effusive had yet sprung up in England among the Liberals and the bulk of the population. People did not admit that it was an affair of Italy at all; they saw in it rather an evidence of the ambition of Piedmont.