om of the age. If we measure the effective
demand for biography by the supply, the person commemorated need possess
but a very moderate reputation, and have played no exceptional part,
in order to carry the reader through many hundred pages of anecdote,
dissertation, and correspondence. To judge from the advertisements of
our circulating libraries, the public curiosity is keen with regard to
some who did nothing worthy of special note, and others who acted so
continuously in the face of the world that, when their course was
run, there was little left for the world to learn about them. It may,
therefore, be taken for granted that a desire exists to hear something
authentic about the life of a man who has produced works which are
universally known, but which bear little or no indication of the private
history and the personal qualities of the author.

This was in a marked degree the case with Lord Macaulay. His two famous
contemporaries in English literature have, consciously or unconsciously,
told their own story in their books. Those who could see between the
lines in "David Copperfield" were aware that they had before them a
delightful autobiography; and all who knew how to read Thackeray could
trace him in his novels through every stage in his course, on from the
day when as a little boy, consigned to the care of English relatives and
schoolmasters, he left his mother on the steps of the landing-place at
Calcutta. The dates and names were wanting, but the man was there; while
the most ardent admirers of Macaulay will admit that a minute study of
his literary productions left them, as far as any but an intellectual
knowledge of the writer himself was concerned, very much as it found
them. A consummate master of his craft, he turned out works which
bore the unmistakable marks of the artificer's hand, but which did not
reflect his features. It would be almost as hard to compose a picture of
the author from the History, the Essays, and the Lays, as to evolve an
idea of Shakespeare from Henry the Fifth and Measure for Measure.

But, besides being a man of letters, Lord Macaulay was a statesman, a
jurist, and a brilliant ornament of society, at a time when to shine
in society was a distinction which a man of eminence and ability might
justly value. In these several capacities, it will be said, he was known
well, and known widely. But in the first place, as these pages will
show, there was one side of his life (to him, at an