above detraction.

"North. He's a clever lad, James.

"Shepherd. Evidently; and a clever lad he'll remain, depend ye upon
that, a' the days of his life. A clever lad thirty years auld and some
odds is to ma mind the maist melancholy sight in nature. Only think of a
clever lad o' three-score-and-ten, on his deathbed, wha can look back on
nae greater achievement than having aince, or aiblins ten times, abused
Mr. Southey in the Embro' Review."

The prophecies of jealousy seldom come true. Southey's book died before
its author, with the exception of the passages extracted by Macaulay,
which have been reproduced in his essay a hundred times, and more, for
once that they were printed in the volumes from which he selected them
for his animadversion.

The chambers in which he ought to have been spending his days, and did
actually spend his nights between the years 1829 and 1834, were within
five minutes' walk of the house in Great Ormond Street. The building of
which those chambers formed a part,--8 South Square, Gray's Inn,--has
since been pulled down to make room for an extension of the Library; a
purpose which, in Macaulay's eyes, would amply compensate for the loss
of such associations as might otherwise have attached themselves to the
locality. His Trinity fellowship brought him in nearly three hundred
pounds annually, and the Edinburgh Review nearly two hundred. In January
1828, during the interregnum that separated the resignation of
Lord Goderich and the acceptance of the Premiership by the Duke of
Wellington, Lord Lyndhurst made him a Commissioner of Bankruptcy; a rare
piece of luck at a time when, as Lord Cockburn tells us, "a youth of a
Tory family, who was discovered to have a leaning towards the doctrines
of the opposition, was considered as a lost son." "The Commission is
welcome," Macaulay writes to his father, "and I am particularly glad
that it has been given at a time when there is no ministry, and when the
acceptance of it implies no political obligation. To Lord Lyndhurst I of
course feel personal gratitude, and I shall always take care how I speak
of him."

The emoluments of the office made up his income, for the three or four
years during which he held it, to about nine hundred pounds per annum.
His means were more than sufficient for his wants, but too small, and
far too precarious, for the furtherance of the political aspirations
which now were uppermost in his mind. "Public affairs," writes Lady