power of making an eloquent speech. He was too
impetuous and dogmatic to be a great debater, like Fox or Pitt or Peel
or Gladstone; but he might have reached a more exalted and influential
position as a statesman had he confined his remarkable talents
to politics.

But letters were the passion of Macaulay, from his youth up; and his
remarkably tenacious memory--abnormal, as it seems to me--enabled him to
bring his vast store of facts to support plausibly any position he chose
to take. At fifty years of age, he had probably read more books than any
man in Europe since Gibbon and Niebuhr; he literally devoured everything
he could put his hands upon, without cramming for a special
object,--especially the Greek and Latin Classics, which he read over and
over again, not so much for knowledge as for the pleasure it gave him as
a literary critic and a student of artistic excellence.

Macaulay was of Scotch descent, like so many eminent historians, poets,
critics, and statesmen who adorned the early and middle part of the
nineteenth century,--Scott, Burns, Carlyle, Jeffrey, Dundas, Playfair,
Wilson, Napier, Mackintosh, Robertson, Alison; a group of geniuses that
lived in Edinburgh, and made its society famous,--to say nothing of
great divines and philosophers like Chalmers and Stewart and Hamilton.
Macaulay belonged to a good family, the most distinguished members of
which were clergymen,--with the exception of his uncle, General
Macaulay, who made a fortune in India; and his father, the celebrated
merchant and philanthropist, Zachary Macaulay, who did more than any
other man, Wilberforce excepted, to do away with the slave-trade, and
to abolish slavery in the West India Islands.

Zachary Macaulay was the most modest and religious of men, and after an
eventful life in Africa as governor of the colony of Sierra Leone,
settled in Clapham, near London, with a handsome fortune. He belonged to
that famous evangelical set who made Clapham famous, and whose
extraordinary piety and philanthropy are commemorated by Sir James
Stephen in one of his most interesting essays. They resembled in
peculiarities the early Quakers and primitive Methodists, and though
very narrow were much respected for their unostentatious benevolence,
blended with public spirit.

Macaulay was born at Rothley Temple, in Leicestershire, Oct. 25, 1800,
but it was at Clapham that his boyhood was chiefly spent. His precocity
startled every one who visited his fat