Zachary Macaulay objected to his son being educated in one of the great schools in England, like Westminster and Harrow, and he was therefore sent to a private school kept by an evangelical divine who had been a fellow at Cambridge,—­a good scholar, but narrow in his theological views.  Indeed, Macaulay got enough of Calvinism before he went to college, and was so unwisely crammed with it at home and at school, that through life he had a repugnance to the evangelical doctrines of the Low Church, with which, much to the grief of his father, he associated cant, always his especial abhorrence and disgust.  While Macaulay venerated his father, he had little sympathy with his views, and never loved him as he did his own sisters.  He did his filial duty, and that was all,—­contributed largely to his father’s support in later life, treated him with profound respect, but was never drawn to him in affectionate frankness and confidence.

It cannot be disguised that Macaulay was worldly in his turn of mind, intensely practical, and ambitious of distinction as soon as he became conscious of his great powers, although in his school-days he was very modest and retiring.  He was not religiously inclined, nor at all spiritually minded.  An omnivorous reader seldom is narrow, and seldom is profound.  Macaulay was no exception.  He admired Pascal, but only for his exquisite style and his trenchant irony.  He saw little in Augustine except his vast acquaintance with Latin authors.  He carefully avoided writing on the Schoolmen, or Calvin, or the great divines of the seventeenth century.  Bunyan he admired for his genius and perspicuous style rather than for his sentiments.  Even his famous article on Bacon is deficient in spiritual insight; it is a description of the man rather than a dissertation on his philosophy.  Macaulay’s greatness was intellectual rather than moral; and his mental power was that of the scholar and the rhetorical artist rather than the thinker.  In his masterly way of arraying facts he has never been surpassed; and in this he was so skilful that it mattered little which side he took.  Like Daniel Webster, he could make any side appear plausible.  Doubtless in the law he might have become a great advocate, had he not preferred literary composition instead.  Had he lived in the times of the Grecian Sophists, he might have baffled Socrates,—­not by his logic, but by his learning and his aptness of illustration.

Macaulay entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1818, being a healthy, robust young man of eighteen, after five years’ training in Greek and Latin, having the eldest son of Wilberforce for a school companion.  Among his contemporaries and friends at Cambridge were Charles Austin, Praed, Derwent Coleridge, Hyde Villiers, and Romilly; but I infer from his Life by Trevelyan that his circle of intimate friends was not so large as it would have been had he been fitted for college at Westminster or Eton.  Nor at this time were