e are
only concerned with the speeches which he delivered in the House of
Commons during the debates on the Reform Bills. Macaulay's appearance
was not impressive, and he had a gift of fluency, a rapidity of
utterance which continued, from first to last, to be a most serious
difficulty in the way of his success as a Parliamentary orator. He
appears to have committed his speeches to memory, and his memory was
one of the most amazing of all his gifts; and when he rose to deliver
an oration he rattled it off at such a rate of speed that the sense
ached in trying to follow him, and the reporters for the newspapers
found it almost impossible to get a full note of what he said. This
was all the more embarrassing because his speeches abounded in
illustrations and citations from all manner of authorities, authors,
and historical incidents, and the bewildered {185} reporter found
himself entangled in proper names which shorthand in the pre-phonetic
days could but slowly reproduce. The speeches, when revised by the
author, were read with intense delight by the educated public, and with
all the defects of the orator's utterance he soon acquired such a fame
in the House of Commons that no one ever attracted a more crowded and
eager audience than he did when it became known that he was about to
make a speech. We may quote here a characteristic description given by
Greville of his first meeting with Macaulay in the early February of
1833, while the struggle over Lord Russell's third Reform Bill was
still going on. "Dined yesterday," says Greville, "with Lord Holland;
came very late and found a vacant place between Sir George Robinson and
a common-looking man in black. As soon as I had time to look at my
neighbor, I began to speculate, as one usually does, as to who he might
be, and as he did not for some time open his lips except to eat, I
settled that he was some obscure man of letters, or of medicine,
perhaps a cholera doctor. In a short time the conversation turned on
early and late education, and Lord Holland said he had always remarked
that self-educated men were peculiarly conceited and arrogant, and apt
to look down on the generality of mankind from their being ignorant of
how much other people knew; not having been at public schools, they are
uninformed of the course of general education. My neighbor observed
that he thought the most remarkable example of self-education that of
Alfieri, who had reached the age of thir