Macaulay was a modest man, and yet he knew his power.

The Premiership dangled just beyond his reach. Many claim that if he had
not gone to India he would have moved by strong, steady strides straight
to the highest office that England could bestow. And others aver that when
he was created a Peer in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-seven it was a move toward
the Premiership, and that if his health had not failed he would surely
have won the goal. But how futile it is to speculate on what might have
happened had not this or the other occurred!

Yet certainly the daring caution of Macaulay's mind, his dignity and
luring presence, his patience, self-command, good temper, and all those
manifold graces of his heart, would have made him an almost ideal Premier,
one who might rank with Palmerston, Peel, Disraeli or Gladstone.

But the highest office was not for him.

We die by heart-beats; and Macaulay at fifty-nine had lived as much as
most strong men do if they exist a hundred years.

It is easy to show where Lord Macaulay could have been greater. His life
lies open to us as the ether. We complain because he did not read less and
meditate more; we sigh at his lack of religion and mention the fact that
he never loved a woman, seemingly waiving tautology and the fact that men
who do not love are never religious.

We forget that it takes a good many men to make the Ideal Man.

If Macaulay had been different he would have been some one else. He was a
brave, tender-hearted man who lived one day at a time, packing the moments
with good-cheer, good work and an earnest wish to do better tomorrow than
he had done today. That Nature occasionally produces such a man should be
a cause for gratitude in the hearts of all the rest of us little folk who
jig, mince, mouth, amble, run, peek about and criticize our betters.

LORD BYRON

I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;
A palace and a prison on each hand:
I saw from out the wave her structures rise
As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand:
A thousand years, their cloudy wings expand
Around me, and a dying Glory smiles
O'er the far times, when many a subject land
Look'd to the winged Lion's marble piles,
Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles!
--_Childe Harold_

[Illustration: LORD BYRON]

Man! I wonder what a man really is! Starting from a single cell, this
s