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

There was a case of a lead-mine. Pollock was for the proprietors, and complained bitterly of the encroachments which Brougham’s clients had made upon this property, which he represented as of immense value. Brougham said that the estimate which his learned friend formed of the property was vastly exaggerated, but that it was no wonder that a person who found it so easy to get gold for his lead should appreciate that heavy metal so highly. The other day Pollock laid down a point of law rather dogmatically. “Mr.

Pollock,” said Brougham, “perhaps, before you rule the point, you will suffer his Lordship to submit a few observations on it to your consideration.”

I received the Edinburgh paper which you sent me. Silly and spiteful as it is, there is a little truth in it. In such cases I always remember those excellent lines of Boileau “Moi, qu’une humeur trop libre, un esprit peu soumis, De bonne heure a pourvo d’utiles ennemis, Je dois plus a leur haine (il faut que je l’avoue) Qu’au faible et vain talent dont la France me loue.

Sitot que sur un vice un pensent me confondre, C’est en me guerissant que je sais leur repondre.”

This place disagrees so much with me that I shall leave it as soon as the dispersion of the circuit commences,—that is, after the delivery of the last batch of briefs; always supposing, which may be supposed without much risk of mistake, that there are none for me.

Ever yours affectionately

T. B. M.

It was about this period that the Cambridge Senate came to a resolution to petition against the Catholic Claims. The minority demanded a poll, and conveyed a hint to their friends in London.

Macaulay, with one or two more to help him, beat up the Inns of Court for recruits, chartered a stage-coach, packed it inside and out with young Whig Masters of Arts, and drove up King’s Parade just in time to turn the scale in favour of Emancipation. The whole party dined in triumph at Trinity, and got back to town the same evening; and the Tory journalists were emphatic in their indignation at the deliberate opinion of the University having been overridden by a coachful of “godless and briefless barristers.”

Court House, Pomfret: April 15, 1828.

My dear Mother,—I address this epistle to you as the least undeserving of a very undeserving family. You, I think, have sent me one letter since I left London. I have nothing here to do but to write letters; and, what is not very often the case, I have members of Parliament in abundance to frank them, and abundance of matter to fill them with. My Edinburgh expedition has given me so much to say that, unless I write off some of it before I come home, I shall talk you all to death, and be voted a bore in every house which I visit. I will commence with Jeffrey himself. I had almost forgotten his person; and, indeed, I should not wonder if even now I were to forget it again. He has twenty faces almost as unlike each other as my father’s to Mr. Wilberforce’s, and infinitely more unlike to each other than those of near relatives often are; infinitely more unlike, for example, than those of the two Grants. When absolutely quiescent, reading a paper, or hearing a conversation in which he takes no interest, his countenance shows no indication whatever of intellectual superiority of any kind. But as soon as he is interested, and opens his eyes upon you, the change is like magic. There is a flash in his glance, a violent contortion in his frown, an exquisite humour in his sneer, and a sweetness and brilliancy in his smile, beyond anything that ever I witnessed. A person who had seen him in only one state would not know him if he saw him in another. For he has not, like Brougham, marked features which in all moods of mind remain unaltered. The mere outline of his face is insignificant. The expression is everything; and such power and variety of expression I never saw in any human countenance, not even in that of the most celebrated actors. I can conceive that Garrick may have been like him. I have seen several pictures of Garrick, none resembling another, and I have heard Hannah More speak of the extraordinary variety of countenance by which he was distinguished, and of the unequalled radiance and penetration of his eye. The voice and delivery of Jeffrey resemble his face. He possesses considerable power of mimicry, and rarely tells a story without imitating several different accents. His familiar tone, his declamatory tone, and his pathetic tone are quite different things. Sometimes Scotch predominates in his pronunciation; sometimes it is imperceptible.

Sometimes his utterance is snappish and quick to the last degree; sometimes it is remarkable for rotundity and mellowness. I can easily conceive that two people who had seen him on different days might dispute about him as the travellers in the fable disputed about the chameleon.

In one thing, as far as I observed, he is always the same and that is the warmth of his domestic affections. Neither Mr.

Wilberforce, nor my uncle Babington, come up to him in this respect. The flow of his kindness is quite inexhaustible. Not five minutes pass without some fond expression, or caressing gesture, to his wife or his daughter. He has fitted up a study for himself; but he never goes into it. Law papers, reviews, whatever he has to write, he writes in the drawing-room, or in his wife’s boudoir. When he goes to other parts of the country on a retainer he takes them in the carriage with him. I do not wonder that he should be a good husband, for his wife is a very amiable woman. But I was surprised to see a man so keen and sarcastic, so much of a scoffer, pouring himself out with such simplicity and tenderness in all sorts of affectionate nonsense.

Through our whole journey to Perth he kept up a sort of mock quarrel with his daughter; attacked her about novel-reading, laughed her into a pet, kissed her out of it, and laughed her into it again. She and her mother absolutely idolise him, and I do not wonder at it.

His conversation is very much like his countenance and his voice, of immense variety; sometimes plain and unpretending even to flatness; sometimes whimsically brilliant and rhetorical almost beyond the license of private discourse. He has many interesting anecdotes, and tells them very well. He is a shrewd observer; and so fastidious that I am not surprised at the awe in which many people seem to stand when in his company. Though not altogether free from affectation himself, he has a peculiar loathing for it in other people, and a great talent for discovering and exposing it. He has a particular contempt, in which I most heartily concur with him, for the fadaises of bluestocking literature, for the mutual flatteries of coteries, the handing about of vers de societe, the albums, the conversaziones, and all the other nauseous trickeries of the Sewards, Hayleys, and Sothebys. I am not quite sure that he has escaped the opposite extreme, and that he is not a little too desirous to appear rather a man of the world, an active lawyer, or an easy careless gentleman, than a distinguished writer. I must own that, when Jeffrey and I were by ourselves, he talked much and very well on literary topics. His kindness and hospitality to me were, indeed, beyond description, and his wife was as pleasant and friendly as possible. I liked everything but the hours. We were never up till ten, and never retired till two hours at least after midnight. Jeffrey, indeed, never goes to bed till sleep comes on him overpoweringly, and never rises till forced up by business or hunger. He is extremely well in health; so that I could not help suspecting him of being very hypochondriac; for all his late letters to me have been filled with lamentations about his various maladies. His wife told me, when I congratulated her on his recovery, that I must not absolutely rely on all his accounts of his own diseases. I really think that he is, on the whole, the youngest-looking man of fifty that I know, at least when he is animated.

His house is magnificent. It is in Moray Place, the newest pile of buildings in the town, looking out to the Forth on one side, and to a green garden on the other. It is really equal to the houses in Grosvenor Square. Fine, however, as is the new quarter of Edinburgh, I decidedly prefer the Old Town. There is nothing like it in the island. You have been there, but you have not seen the town, and no lady ever sees a town. It is only by walking on foot through all corners at all hours that cities can be really studied to good purpose. There is a new pillar to the memory of Lord Melville; very elegant, and very much better than the man deserved. His statue is at the top, with a wreath on the head very like a nightcap drawn over the eyes. It is impossible to look at it without being reminded of the fate which the original most richly merited. But my letter will overflow even the ample limits of a frank, if I do not conclude. I hope that you will be properly penitent for neglecting such a correspondent when you receive so long a dispatch, written amidst the bellowing of justices, lawyers, criers, witnesses, prisoners, and prisoners’

wives and mothers.

Ever yours affectionately

T. B. M.

Lancaster: March 24, 1829.

My dear Father,—A single line to say that I am at Lancaster.

Where you all are I have not the very slightest notion. Pray let me hear. That dispersion of the Gentiles which our friends the prophets foretell seems to have commenced with our family.

Everything here is going on in the common routine. The only things of peculiar interest are those which we get from the London papers. All minds seem to be perfectly made up as to the certainty of Catholic Emancipation having come at last. The feeling of approbation among the barristers is all but unanimous.

The quiet townspeople here, as far as I can see, are very well contented. As soon as I arrived I was asked by my landlady how things had gone. I told her the division, which I had learned from Brougham at Garstang. She seemed surprised at the majority.

I asked her if she was against the measure. “No; she only wished that all Christians would live in peace and charity together.” A very sensible speech, and better than one at least of the members for the county ever made in his life.

I implore you above everything, my dear Father, to keep up your health and spirits. Come what may, the conveniences of life, independence, our personal respectability, and the exercise of the intellect and the affections, we are almost certain of retaining; and everything else is a mere superfluity, to be enjoyed, but not to be missed. But I ought to be ashamed of reading you a lecture on qualities which you are so much more competent to teach than myself.

Ever yours very affectionately

T. B. M.

To Macvey Napier, Esq.

50 Great Ormond