Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay Part 9

My dear Father,--The other day, as I was changing my neck-cloth which my wig had disfigured, my good landlady knocked at the door of my bedroom, and told me that Mr. Smith wished to see me, and was in my room below.

Of all names by which men are called there is none which conveys a less determinate idea to the mind than that of Smith. Was he on the circuit?

For I do not know half the names of my companions. Was he a special messenger from London? Was he a York attorney coming to be preyed upon, or a beggar coming to prey upon me, a barber to solicit the dressing of my wig, or a collector for the Jews' Society? Down I went, and to my utter amazement beheld the Smith of Smiths, Sydney Smith, alias Peter Plymley. I had forgotten his very existence till I discerned the queer contrast between his black coat and his snow-white head, and the equally curious contrast between the clerical amplitude of his person, and the most unclerical wit, whim, and petulance of his eye. I shook hands with him very heartily; and on the Catholic question we immediately fell, regretted Evans, triumphed over Lord George Beresford, and abused the Bishops. [These allusions refer to the general election which had recently taken place.] He then very kindly urged me to spend the time between the close of the a.s.sizes and the commencement of the Sessions at his house; and was so hospitably pressing that I at last agreed to go thither on Sat.u.r.day afternoon. He is to drive me over again into York on Monday morning. I am very well pleased at having this opportunity of becoming better acquainted with a man who, in spite of innumerable affectations and oddities, is certainly one of the wittiest and most original writers of our times.

Ever yours affectionately

T. B. M.

Bradford: July 26, 1826.

My dear Father,--On Sat.u.r.day I went to Sydney Smith's. His parish lies three or four miles out of any frequented road. He is, however, most pleasantly situated. "Fifteen years ago," said he to me as I alighted at the gate of his shrubbery, "I was taken up in Piccadilly and set down here. There was no house, and no garden; nothing but a bare field." One service this eccentric divine has certainly rendered to the Church.

He has built the very neatest, most commodious, and most appropriate rectory that I ever saw. All its decorations are in a peculiarly clerical style; grave, simple, and gothic. The bed-chambers are excellent, and excellently fitted up; the sitting-rooms handsome; and the grounds sufficiently pretty. Tindal and Parke, (not the judge of course,) two of the best lawyers, best scholars, and best men in England, were there. We pa.s.sed an extremely pleasant evening, had a very good dinner, and many amusing anecdotes.

After breakfast the next morning I walked to church with Sydney Smith.

The edifice is not at all in keeping with the rectory. It is a miserable little hovel with a wooden belfry. It was, however, well filled, and with decent people, who seemed to take very much to their pastor. I understand that he is a very respectable apothecary; and most liberal of his skill, his medicine, his soul, and his wine, among the sick.

He preached a very queer sermon--the former half too familiar and the latter half too florid, but not without some ingenuity of thought and expression.

Sydney Smith brought me to York on Monday morning, in time for the stage-coach which runs to Skipton. We parted with many a.s.surances of goodwill. I have really taken a great liking to him. He is full of wit, humour, and shrewdness. He is not one of those show-talkers who reserve all their good things for special occasions. It seems to be his greatest luxury to keep his wife and daughters laughing for two or three hours every day. His notions of law, government, and trade are surprisingly clear and just. His misfortune is to have chosen a profession at once above him and below him. Zeal would have made him a prodigy; formality and bigotry would have made him a bishop; but he could neither rise to the duties of his order, nor stoop to its degradations.

He praised my articles in the Edinburgh Review with a warmth which I am willing to believe sincere, because he qualified his compliments with several very sensible cautions. My great danger, he said, was that of taking a tone of too much asperity and contempt in controversy. I believe that he is right, and I shall try to mend.

Ever affectionately yours

T. B. M.

Lancaster: September 1, 1827.

My dear Father,--Thank Hannah from me for her pleasant letter. I would answer it if I had anything equally amusing to say in return; but here we have no news, except what comes from London, and is as stale as inland fish before it reaches us. We have circuit anecdotes to be sure; and perhaps you will be pleased to hear that Brougham has been rising through the whole of this struggle. At York Pollock decidedly took the lead. At Durham Brougham overtook him, pa.s.sed him at Newcastle, and got immensely ahead of him at Carlisle and Appleby, which, to be sure, are the places where his own connections lie. We have not been here quite long enough to determine how he will succeed with the Lancastrians.

This has always. .h.i.therto been his least favourable place. He appears to improve in industry and prudence. He learns his story more thoroughly, and tells it more clearly, than formerly. If he continues to manage causes as well as he has done of late he must rise to the summit of the profession. I cannot say quite so much for his temper, which this close and constant rivalry does not improve. He squabbles with Pollock more than, in generosity or policy, he ought to do. I have heard several of our younger men wondering that he does not show more magnanimity. He yawns while Pollock is speaking; a sign of weariness which, in their present relation to each other, he would do well to suppress. He has said some very good, but very bitter, things. There was a case of a lead-mine. Pollock was for the proprietors, and complained bitterly of the encroachments which Brougham's clients had made upon this property, which he represented as of immense value. Brougham said that the estimate which his learned friend formed of the property was vastly exaggerated, but that it was no wonder that a person who found it so easy to get gold for his lead should appreciate that heavy metal so highly. The other day Pollock laid down a point of law rather dogmatically. "Mr. Pollock," said Brougham, "perhaps, before you rule the point, you will suffer his Lords.h.i.+p to submit a few observations on it to your consideration."

I received the Edinburgh paper which you sent me. Silly and spiteful as it is, there is a little truth in it. In such cases I always remember those excellent lines of Boileau

"Moi, qu'une humeur trop libre, un esprit peu soumis, De bonne heure a pourvo d'utiles ennemis, Je dois plus a leur haine (il faut que je l'avoue) Qu'au faible et vain talent dont la France me loue.

Sitot que sur un vice un pensent me confondre, C'est en me guerissant que je sais leur repondre."

This place disagrees so much with me that I shall leave it as soon as the dispersion of the circuit commences,--that is, after the delivery of the last batch of briefs; always supposing, which may be supposed without much risk of mistake, that there are none for me.

Ever yours affectionately

T. B. M.

It was about this period that the Cambridge Senate came to a resolution to pet.i.tion against the Catholic Claims. The minority demanded a poll, and conveyed a hint to their friends in London. Macaulay, with one or two more to help him, beat up the Inns of Court for recruits, chartered a stage-coach, packed it inside and out with young Whig Masters of Arts, and drove up King's Parade just in time to turn the scale in favour of Emanc.i.p.ation. The whole party dined in triumph at Trinity, and got back to town the same evening; and the Tory journalists were emphatic in their indignation at the deliberate opinion of the University having been overridden by a coachful of "G.o.dless and briefless barristers."

Court House, Pomfret: April 15, 1828.

My dear Mother,--I address this epistle to you as the least undeserving of a very undeserving family. You, I think, have sent me one letter since I left London. I have nothing here to do but to write letters; and, what is not very often the case, I have members of Parliament in abundance to frank them, and abundance of matter to fill them with. My Edinburgh expedition has given me so much to say that, unless I write off some of it before I come home, I shall talk you all to death, and be voted a bore in every house which I visit. I will commence with Jeffrey himself. I had almost forgotten his person; and, indeed, I should not wonder if even now I were to forget it again. He has twenty faces almost as unlike each other as my father's to Mr. Wilberforce's, and infinitely more unlike to each other than those of near relatives often are; infinitely more unlike, for example, than those of the two Grants. When absolutely quiescent, reading a paper, or hearing a conversation in which he takes no interest, his countenance shows no indication whatever of intellectual superiority of any kind. But as soon as he is interested, and opens his eyes upon you, the change is like magic.

There is a flash in his glance, a violent contortion in his frown, an exquisite humour in his sneer, and a sweetness and brilliancy in his smile, beyond anything that ever I witnessed. A person who had seen him in only one state would not know him if he saw him in another. For he has not, like Brougham, marked features which in all moods of mind remain unaltered. The mere outline of his face is insignificant. The expression is everything; and such power and variety of expression I never saw in any human countenance, not even in that of the most celebrated actors. I can conceive that Garrick may have been like him.

I have seen several pictures of Garrick, none resembling another, and I have heard Hannah More speak of the extraordinary variety of countenance by which he was distinguished, and of the unequalled radiance and penetration of his eye. The voice and delivery of Jeffrey resemble his face. He possesses considerable power of mimicry, and rarely tells a story without imitating several different accents. His familiar tone, his declamatory tone, and his pathetic tone are quite different things.

Sometimes Scotch predominates in his p.r.o.nunciation; sometimes it is imperceptible. Sometimes his utterance is snappish and quick to the last degree; sometimes it is remarkable for rotundity and mellowness. I can easily conceive that two people who had seen him on different days might dispute about him as the travellers in the fable disputed about the chameleon.

In one thing, as far as I observed, he is always the same and that is the warmth of his domestic affections. Neither Mr. Wilberforce, nor my uncle Babington, come up to him in this respect. The flow of his kindness is quite inexhaustible. Not five minutes pa.s.s without some fond expression, or caressing gesture, to his wife or his daughter. He has fitted up a study for himself; but he never goes into it. Law papers, reviews, whatever he has to write, he writes in the drawing-room, or in his wife's boudoir. When he goes to other parts of the country on a retainer he takes them in the carriage with him. I do not wonder that he should be a good husband, for his wife is a very amiable woman. But I was surprised to see a man so keen and sarcastic, so much of a scoffer, pouring himself out with such simplicity and tenderness in all sorts of affectionate nonsense. Through our whole journey to Perth he kept up a sort of mock quarrel with his daughter; attacked her about novel-reading, laughed her into a pet, kissed her out of it, and laughed her into it again. She and her mother absolutely idolise him, and I do not wonder at it.

His conversation is very much like his countenance and his voice, of immense variety; sometimes plain and unpretending even to flatness; sometimes whimsically brilliant and rhetorical almost beyond the license of private discourse. He has many interesting anecdotes, and tells them very well. He is a shrewd observer; and so fastidious that I am not surprised at the awe in which many people seem to stand when in his company. Though not altogether free from affectation himself, he has a peculiar loathing for it in other people, and a great talent for discovering and exposing it. He has a particular contempt, in which I most heartily concur with him, for the fadaises of bluestocking literature, for the mutual flatteries of coteries, the handing about of vers de societe, the alb.u.ms, the conversaziones, and all the other nauseous trickeries of the Sewards, Hayleys, and Sothebys. I am not quite sure that he has escaped the opposite extreme, and that he is not a little too desirous to appear rather a man of the world, an active lawyer, or an easy careless gentleman, than a distinguished writer. I must own that, when Jeffrey and I were by ourselves, he talked much and very well on literary topics. His kindness and hospitality to me were, indeed, beyond description, and his wife was as pleasant and friendly as possible. I liked everything but the hours. We were never up till ten, and never retired till two hours at least after midnight. Jeffrey, indeed, never goes to bed till sleep comes on him overpoweringly, and never rises till forced up by business or hunger. He is extremely well in health; so that I could not help suspecting him of being very hypochondriac; for all his late letters to me have been filled with lamentations about his various maladies. His wife told me, when I congratulated her on his recovery, that I must not absolutely rely on all his accounts of his own diseases. I really think that he is, on the whole, the youngest-looking man of fifty that I know, at least when he is animated.

His house is magnificent. It is in Moray Place, the newest pile of buildings in the town, looking out to the Forth on one side, and to a green garden on the other. It is really equal to the houses in Grosvenor Square. Fine, however, as is the new quarter of Edinburgh, I decidedly prefer the Old Town. There is nothing like it in the island. You have been there, but you have not seen the town, and no lady ever sees a town. It is only by walking on foot through all corners at all hours that cities can be really studied to good purpose. There is a new pillar to the memory of Lord Melville; very elegant, and very much better than the man deserved. His statue is at the top, with a wreath on the head very like a nightcap drawn over the eyes. It is impossible to look at it without being reminded of the fate which the original most richly merited. But my letter will overflow even the ample limits of a frank, if I do not conclude. I hope that you will be properly penitent for neglecting such a correspondent when you receive so long a dispatch, written amidst the bellowing of justices, lawyers, criers, witnesses, prisoners, and prisoners' wives and mothers.

Ever yours affectionately

T. B. M.

Lancaster: March 24, 1829.

My dear Father,--A single line to say that I am at Lancaster. Where you all are I have not the very slightest notion. Pray let me hear. That dispersion of the Gentiles which our friends the prophets foretell seems to have commenced with our family.

Everything here is going on in the common routine. The only things of peculiar interest are those which we get from the London papers. All minds seem to be perfectly made up as to the certainty of Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation having come at last. The feeling of approbation among the barristers is all but unanimous. The quiet townspeople here, as far as I can see, are very well contented. As soon as I arrived I was asked by my landlady how things had gone. I told her the division, which I had learned from Brougham at Garstang. She seemed surprised at the majority.

I asked her if she was against the measure. "No; she only wished that all Christians would live in peace and charity together." A very sensible speech, and better than one at least of the members for the county ever made in his life.

I implore you above everything, my dear Father, to keep up your health and spirits. Come what may, the conveniences of life, independence, our personal respectability, and the exercise of the intellect and the affections, we are almost certain of retaining; and everything else is a mere superfluity, to be enjoyed, but not to be missed. But I ought to be ashamed of reading you a lecture on qualities which you are so much more competent to teach than myself.

Ever yours very affectionately

T. B. M.

To Macvey Napier, Esq.

50 Great Ormond Street, London:

January 25, 1830.

My dear Sir,--I send off by the mail of to-day an article on Southey,--too long, I fear, to meet your wishes, but as short as I could make it.

There were, by the bye, in my last article a few omissions made, of no great consequence in themselves; the longest, I think, a paragraph of twelve or fourteen lines. I should scarcely have thought this worth mentioning, as it certainly by no means exceeds the limits of that editorial prerogative which I most willingly recognise, but that the omissions seemed to me, and to one or two persons who had seen the article in its original state, to be made on a principle which, however sound in itself, does not I think apply to compositions of this description. The pa.s.sages omitted were the most pointed and ornamented sentences in the review. Now, for high and grave works, a history for example, or a system of political or moral philosophy, Doctor Johnson's rule,--that every sentence which the writer thinks fine ought to be cut out,--is excellent. But periodical works like ours, which unless they strike at the first reading are not likely to strike at all, whose whole life is a month or two, may, I think, be allowed to be sometimes even viciously florid. Probably, in estimating the real value of any tinsel which I may put upon my articles, you and I should not materially differ. But it is not by his own taste, but by the taste of the fish, that the angler is determined in his choice of bait.

Perhaps after all I am ascribing to system what is mere accident. Be a.s.sured, at all events, that what I have said is said in perfect good humour, and indicates no mutinous disposition.

The Jews are about to pet.i.tion Parliament for relief from the absurd restrictions which lie on them,--the last relique of the old system of intolerance. I have been applied to by some of them in the name of the managers of the scheme to write for them in the Edinburgh Review. I would gladly further a cause so good, and you, I think, could have no objection.

Ever yours truly

T. B. MACAULAY.

Bowood: February 20, 1830.

My dear Father,--I am here in a very nice room, with perfect liberty, and a splendid library at my command. It seems to be thought desirable that I should stay in the neighbourhood, and pay my compliments to my future const.i.tuents every other day.

The house is splendid and elegant, yet more remarkable for comfort than for either elegance or splendour. I never saw any great place so thoroughly desirable for a residence. Lord Kerry tells me that his uncle left everything in ruin,--trees cut down, and rooms unfurnished,--and sold the library, which was extremely fine. Every book and picture in Bowood has been bought by the present Lord, and certainly the collection does him great honour.

I am glad that I stayed here. A burgess of some influence, who, at the last election, attempted to get up an opposition to the Lansdowne interest, has just arrived. I called on him this morning, and, though he was a little ungracious at first, succeeded in obtaining his promise.

Without him, indeed, my return would have been secure; but both from motives of interest and from a sense of grat.i.tude I think it best to leave nothing undone which may tend to keep Lord Lansdowne's influence here unimpaired against future elections.