situation, and advocated Mr.
Macaulay's cause with firmness and good feeling. Indeed, he must have
been, according to her particular notions, the most irreproachable of
lovers, until her own Coelebs was given to the world. By her help he
carried his point in so far that the engagement was made and recognised;
but the friends of the young lady would not allow her to accompany him
to Africa; and, during his absence from England, which began in the
early months of 1796, by an arrangement that under the circumstances was
very judicious, she spent much of her time in Leicestershire with his
sister Mrs. Babington.

His first business after arriving at Sierra Leone was to sit in judgment
on the ringleaders of a formidable outbreak which had taken place in
the colony; and he had an opportunity of proving by example that negro
disaffection, from the nature of the race, is peculiarly susceptible
to treatment by mild remedies, if only the man in the post of
responsibility has got a heart and can contrive to keep his head. He had
much more trouble with a batch of missionaries, whom he took with him in
the ship, and who were no sooner on board than they began to fall out,
ostensibly on controversial topics, but more probably from the same
motives that so often set the laity quarrelling during the incessant and
involuntary companionship of a sea-voyage. Mr. Macaulay, finding that
the warmth of these debates furnished sport to the captain and other
irreligious characters, was forced seriously to exert his authority
in order to separate and silence the disputants. His report of these
occurrences went in due time to the Chairman of the Company, who excused
himself for an arrangement which had turned out so ill by telling a
story of a servant who, having to carry a number of gamecocks from one
place to another, tied them up in the same bag, and found on arriving at
his journey's end that they had spent their time in tearing each other
to pieces. When his master called him to account for his stupidity he
replied: "Sir, as they were all your cocks, I thought they would be all
on one side."

Things did not go much more smoothly on shore. Mr. Macaulay's official
correspondence gives a curious picture of his difficulties in the
character of Minister of Public Worship in a black community. "The
Baptists under David George are decent and orderly, but there is
observable in them a great neglect of family worship, and sometimes
an unfairness in