1. A PECULIAR faculty, and one approaching to the dramatic order, belongs to the successful painter of historical portraits, and belongs also to the true biographer. It is that of representing personality. In the picture, what we want is not merely a collection of unexceptionable lines and colours so presented as readily to identify their original. Such a work is not the man, but is only a duly attested certificate of the man. What we require, however, is the man and not merely the certificate. In the same way, what we want in a biography, and what, despite the etymology of the title, we very seldom find, is life. The very best transcript is a failure, if it be a transcript only. To fulfil its idea, it must have in it the essential quality of movement; must realise the lofty fiction of the divine Shield of Achilles, where the upturning earth, though wrought in metal, darkened as the plough went on; and the figures of the battle-piece dealt their strokes and parried them, and dragged out from the turmoil the bodies of their dead.

2. To write the biography of Lord Macaulay was a most arduous task. Such seems to have been the conception, with which it was approached; nor is it belied by the

*Reprinted from the Quarterly Review for July 1876. Art. I.The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. By his Nephew, George Otto Trevelyan, M.P. In Two Volumes. London, 1876.

happy faculty with which it has been accomplished. Mr. Trevelyan had already achieved a reputation for conspicuous ability; and the honour of near relationship was in this case at least a guarantee for reverent and devoted love. But neither love, which is indeed a danger as well as an ally, nor intelligence, nor assiduity, nor forgetfulness of self, will make a thoroughly good biography, without this subtle gift of imparting life. By this it was that Boswell established himself as the prince of all biographers; by this Mr. Trevelyan has, we believe, earned for himself a place on what is still a somewhat scanty roll.

3. Beyond doubt, his subject has supplied him with great, and, to the general reader, unexpected advantages. The world was familiar in a high degree with the name of Lord Macaulay, and thought it knew the man, as one transcendent in much, and greatly eminent in all, that he undertook. With the essayist, the orator, the historian, the poet, the great social star, and even the legist, we were all prepared, in our anticipations of this biography, to renew an admiring acquaintance. But there lay behind all these what was in truth richer and better than them all, a marked and noble human character; and it has not been the well-known aspects, and the betterknown works, of the man which Mr. Trevelyan has made it his main purpose to exhibit. He has executed a more congenial and delightful office in exhibiting ad vivum this personality, of which the world knew little, and of which its estimate, though never low, was, as has now been shown, very far beneath the mark of truth. This is the pledge which he gives to his readers at the outset (vol. i. p. 3):

"For every one who sat with him in private company, or at the transaction of public business, for every ten who have listened to

nis oratory in Parliament, or on the hustings, there must be tens of thousands whose interest in history and literature he has awakened and informed by his pen, and who would gladly know what manner of man it was that has done them so great a service. To gratify that most legitimate wish is the duty of those, who have the means at their command His own letters will supply

the deficiencies of the biographer."

And the promise thus conveyed he redeems in some nine hundred and fifty pages, which are too few rather than too many. In the greater part of the work, he causes Lord Macaulay to speak for himself. In the rest he is, probably for the reason that it was Lord Macaulay's custom to destroy the letters of his correspondents, nearly the sole interlocutor; and the setting will not disappoint. those who admired, and are jealous for, the stones.

4. Lord Macaulay lived a life of no more than fifty-nine years and three months. But it was an extraordinarily full life, of sustained exertion; a high table-land, without depressions. If in its outer aspect there be anything wearisome, it is only the wearisomeness of reiterated splendours, and of success so uniform as to be almost monotonous. He speaks of himself as idle; but his idleness was more active, and carried with it hour by hour a greater expenditure of brain-power, than what most men regard as their serious employments. He might well have been, in his mental career, the spoiled child of fortune; for all he tried succeeded, all he touched turned into gems and gold. In a happy childhood he evinced extreme precocity. His academical career gave sufficient, though not redundant, promise of after celebrity. The new golden age he imparted to the Edinburgh Review,' and his first and most important, if not best, parliamentary speeches in the grand crisis of the first Reform Bill, achieved for him, years before he had

reached the middle point of life, what may justly be termed an immense distinction.

5. For a century and more, perhaps no man in this country, with the exceptions of Mr. Pitt and of Lord Byron, had attained at thirty-two the fame of Macaulay. His parliamentary success, and his literary eminence, were each of them enough, as they stood at this date, to intoxicate any brain and heart of a meaner order. But to these was added, in his case, an amount and quality of social attentions such as invariably partake of adulation and idolatry, and as perhaps the high circles of London never before or since have lavished on a man whose claims lay only in himself, and not in his descent, his rank, or his possessions. Perhaps it was good for his mental and moral health, that the enervating action of this process was suspended for four years. Although after his return from India in 1839 it could not but revive, he was of an age to bear it with less peril to his manhood. He seems at all times to have held his head high above the stir and the fascination, which excite and enslave the weak. His masculine intelligence, and his ardent and single-minded devotion to literature probably derived in this respect essential aid from that depth and warmth of domestic affections, which lay nearer yet to the centre of his being.

6. Mr. Trevelyan has further promised us (i. 4) that he "will suppress no trait in his disposition, or incident in his career, which might provoke blame or question.. Those who best love him do not fear the consequences of freely submitting his character and his actions to the public verdict." The pledge is one which it was safe to give. It is with Macaulay the man that the biographer undertakes to deal, and not with Macaulay the author.

Upon the structure of his mind, upon its extraordinary endowments and its besetting dangers, there is much that must or may be said, in tones of question and of warning, as well as of admiration and applause. But as regards the character and life of the man, small indeed is the space for animadversion; and the world must be more censorious than we take it to be if, after reading these volumes, it does not conclude with thankfulness and pleasure that the writer, who had so long ranked among its marvels, has also earned a high place among its worthies.

7. He was, indeed, prosperous and brilliant; a prodigy, a meteor, almost a portent, in literary history. But his course was laborious, truthful, simple, independent, noble; and all these in an eminent degree. Of the inward battle of life he seems to have known nothing: his mind was (so to speak) self-contained, coherent, and harmonious. His experience of the outward battle, which had reference to money, was not inconsiderable, but it was confined to his earlier manhood. The general outline of his career has long been familiar, and offers neither need nor scope for detail. After four years of high parliamentary distinction, and his first assumption of office, he accepted a lucrative appointment in India, with a wise view to his own pecuniary independence, and a generous regard to what might be, as they had been, the demands of his nearest relations upon his affectionate bounty. Another term of four years brought him back, the least Indian, despite of his active labours upon the legislative code, of all the civilians who had ever served the Company. He soon re-entered Parliament; but his zest for the political arena seems never to have regained the temperature of his virgin love at the time of the Reform Bill. He had offered his resignation of office during the