I hope that you will be on your guard as to what you may say to Brougham about this business.  He is so angry at it that he cannot keep his anger to himself.  I know that he has blamed Lord Lansdowne in the robing-room of the Court of King’s Bench.  The seat ought, he says, to have been given to another man.  If he means Denman, I can forgive, and even respect him, for the feeling which he entertains.

Believe me ever yours most affectionately

T. B. M.

CHAPTER IV.

1830-1832.

State of public affairs when Macaulay entered Parliament—­His maiden speech—­The French Revolution of July 1830—­Macaulay’s letters from Paris—­The Palais Royal—­Lafayette—­Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia—­The new Parliament meets—­Fall of the Duke of Wellington—­Scene with Croker—­The Reform Bill—­Political success—­House of Commons life—­Macaulay’s party spirit—­Loudon Society—­Mr. Thomas Flower Ellis—­Visit to Cambridge—­Rothley Temple—­Margaret Macaulay’s Journal—­Lord Brougham—­Hopes of Office—­Macaulay as a politician—­Letters to Hannah Macaulay, Mr. Napier, and Mr. Ellis.

Throughout the last two centuries of our history there never was a period when a man conscious of power, impatient of public wrongs, and still young enough to love a fight for its own sake, could have entered Parliament with a fairer prospect of leading a life worth living, and doing work that would requite the pains, than at the commencement of the year 1830.

In this volume, which only touches politics in order to show to what extent Macaulay was a politician, and for how long, controversies cannot appropriately be started or revived.  This is not the place to enter into a discussion on the vexed question as to whether Mr. Pitt and his successors, in pursuing their system of repression, were justified by the necessities of the long French war.  It is enough to assert, what few or none will deny, that, for the space of more than a generation from 1790 onwards, our country had, with a short interval, been governed on declared reactionary principles.  We, in whose days Whigs and Tories have often exchanged office, and still more often interchanged policies, find it difficult to imagine what must have been the condition of the kingdom, when one and the same party almost continuously held not only place, but power, throughout a period when, to an unexampled degree, “public life was exasperated by hatred, and the charities of private life soured by political aversion.” [These expressions occur in Lord Cockburn’s Memorials of his Time.] Fear, religion, ambition, and self-interest,—­ everything that could tempt and everything that could deter,—­ were enlisted on the side of the dominant opinions.  To profess Liberal views was to be excluded from all posts of emolument, from all functions of dignity, and from all opportunities of public usefulness.  The Whig leaders, while enjoying that security for