The
periodical insertion on the son's part of anecdotes and observations
bearing upon the question of Slavery reminds the reader of those
presents of tall recruits with which, at judiciously chosen intervals,
Frederic the Great used to conciliate his terrible father. As between
the Macaulays, these little filial attentions acquire a certain
gracefulness from the fact that, in the circumstances of the
family, they could be prompted by no other motive than a dutiful and
disinterested affection.

It must not be supposed,--no one who examines the dates of his
successive essays will for a moment suppose,--that his attention was
distracted, or his energy dissipated, by trifles. Besides the finished
study of Machiavelli, and the masterly sketch of our great civil
troubles known as the article on Hallam's Constitutional History, he
produced much which his mature judgment would willingly have allowed to
die, but which had plenty of life in it when it first appeared between
the blue and yellow covers. His most formidable enterprise, during the
five earliest years of his connection with the great Review, was that
passage of arms against the champions of the Utilitarian philosophy in
which he touched the mighty shields of James Mill and Jeremy Bentham,
and rode slashing to right and left through the ranks of their less
distinguished followers. Indeed, while he sincerely admired the chiefs
of the school, he had a young man's prejudice against their disciples,
many of whom he regarded as "persons who, having read little or nothing,
are delighted to be rescued from the sense of their own inferiority by
some teacher who assures them that the studies which they have neglected
are of no value, puts five or six phrases into their mouths, lends them
an odd number of the Westminster Review, and in a month transforms them
into philosophers." It must be allowed that there was some colour for
his opinion. The Benthamite training may have stimulated the finer
intellects, (and they were not few,) which came within its influence;
but it is impossible to conceive anything more dreary than must have
been the condition of a shallow mind, with a native predisposition to
sciolism, after its owner had joined a society "composed of young men
agreeing in fundamental principles, acknowledging Utility as their
standard in ethics and politics," "meeting once a fortnight to read
essays and discuss questions conformably to the premises thus agreed
on," and "