the vacant thrones in the realm of literature. It announced a writer whose tone of lofty confidence indicated, perhaps, pretentions equal to his genius; while the grace and brilliancy of his style, and the careless profusion with which he lavished his stores of culture and of knowledge, seemed to mark a genius abundantly equal to his pretensions. And the promise of that brilliant opening has-to a greater extent than ordinarily holds of earthly promises-been realized. Rapidly, and unchallenged, Mr. Macaulay ascended to the highest eminence of contemporary literature, the self-confident assurance with which he asserted and held his position being half lost sight of, and half excused in the extraordinary intellectual qualities which rendered him the pride and delight of his age; and the shock produced by the tidings of his death was felt in every land where the English language is spoken, or rather in every country where genius and culture command the homage of men. The death of such a man claims more than a passing notice from the Christian public, and we avail ourselves of the appearance of the present edition of his works to offer a few comments on his literary character and merits.

The American publishers could have hardly made a more acceptable present to the public than this elegant reprint of the writings of the great essayist. It contains the first complete collection of his prose miscellanies that has been made, we think, on either side of the Atlantic. It presents in chronological order, not only his later essays, but his earlier contributions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine, and gives in the last volume his biographical sketches written for the new edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and several earlier papers published in the Edinburgh Review, not comprised in any previous collection. The whole is followed by a general index, and introduced by an admirable biography from the pen of Mr. E. P. Whipple, who has discharged the office of editor, and than whom no American writer is probably more competent to give a just analysis and estimate of Macaulay's peculiar powers. We may add, that in its typography the work is all that the most fastidious taste could desire, and is a credit alike to the enterprise of the publishers and to the

American press. We have here the writings of the most attractive of British essayists, in an outward form correspondingly attractive, and we doubt not that an edition so luxuriously elegant will tempt multitudes into a closer and most instructive intimacy with the most delightful, if not the most profound, literary and historical critic and biographer of our time. We shall condense mainly from Mr. Whipple's introduction, an outline of the incidents of his not very eventful life.

He was born at Rothley Temple, Leicestershire, on the 25th of October, 1800. His father, Zachary Macaulay, the son of a Scotch Presbyterian clergyman, was a man of high intelligence, of pure and lofty religious principle, and unwearied benevolence, and a distinguished and influential associate in the philanthrophic labors of Wilberforce and Clarkson. His mother was from Bristol, and a member of the Society of Friends. Macaulay's hereditary affinities were not, therefore, with the Established Church, although he never practically united himself with any of the Evangelical dissenting bodies, and failed, we fear, to give evidence of a life thoroughly controlled by the principles of the Gospel. The religiousness of his education, however, and especially his early familiarity with the scriptures, are attested by almost every page of his writings. Their frequent scriptural allusions show that alike the thrilling narrative, the sublime morality, and the simple but energetic diction of the English Bible had made an ineffaceable impression on his youthful mind. The care bestowed by his excellent parents on his early training was met by answering talents of extraordinary precocity. He was distinguished from earliest boyhood by an intellectual appetite which devoured everything that came in its way; by the wide extent of his reading, the retentiveness of his memory, and the wit and vivacity of his conversation. He displayed also early that mingled self-confidence and docility—a tone of dogmatism veiling a real intellectual candor and openness to evidence, which followed him through all after life. Poetry was among his earliest passions, and he poured it forth in unlimited quantity; but with a precocity of judgment even rarer

than precocity of genius, he was ready, as soon as he had disburthened his teeming mind of its thick-coming fancies, to commit his productions to the flames. He wrote and recited in obedience to the impulses of an almost preternatural mental activity, and the product experienced the natural neglect of one who knew that any amount of the same kind of article was always within his power.

At the early age of eighteen young Macaulay entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where his capacity, scholarship, and love of general literature were equally apparent. His dislike of mathematics prevented his being a candidate for honors. But if his "weakness was science". we wrest the phrase a little from its original import" his forte "was already 66 omniscience." His active mind careered over every field of history and literature, and his powers of digestion answered to the vigor of his appetite. His logical and generalizing power enabled him to give order and consistency to his immense acquisitions, and make them rather minister to, than obstruct, his capacities of original thinking. He became thoroughly at home in the ancient classics, while he read in the original nearly all the great works of modern literature. He was elected Craven University Scholar; gained the Chancellor's medal for two prize poems, and was subsequently elected to a fellowship. Prize poetry was a species of literature on which he professed to look with contempt, declaring a little after that prize poems are like prize sheep, of which the one “are good for nothing but to make tallow candles," and the others are good for nothing but to light them." He took his Bachelor's degree in 1822, and between this and the latter part of 1824, he contributed a series of sketches to Knight's Quarterly Magazine, on subjects of literary and historical criticism, in which, with somewhat less of breadth and power, he yet evinces substantially the same qualities which soon distinguished him on a wider theatre. The fragments of Roman and Grecian tales show how thoroughly he had familiarized himself with ancient life; while his criticisms on the Italian poets, on the Athenian orators, and on Mitford, are separated by no very distinguishable line from his subsequent disquisitions upon kindred subjects.

In 1825 appeared his Essay on Milton in the Edinburgh Review, the first publicly recognized article (he had previously contributed to that journal a powerful paper on West Indian Slavery) of a series which were destined not only to reflect lasting credit on their author, but to raise the whole tone, and in no slight measure modify the character of modern literary journalism. The article commanded universal attention. Its subject was the great epic bard of the English tongue, and the intellectual representative and exponent of the most eventful and critical period in the march of British freedom; while the fluent grace with which the writer discussed his theme, the assured tone of his half paradoxical utterances, the originality, if not the profoundness of his views, the affluence of learning which he lavished upon their illustration, the sparkling glitter of his rhetoric, and the rythmical march of his magnificent periods, made the article a phenomenon in English periodical literature.

The career of Macaulay from this time, was a series of splendid successes in the most varied fields. His next acknowledged paper, published in 1827, was an essay on Machiavelli, in which he seeks to explain the enigmatical contradictions of the individual from the peculiar state of society in which they originated. The attempt is in a great measure successful, though the author seems to let the individual culprit off too easily, when he has placed his obliquities under the shelter of the general moral perversion of his age. The article, although much less generally read than that on Milton, is, in reality, in nearly all respects its superior, and in vigor and brilliancy of style, if not in amplitude of historical illustration, stands at the head, we think, of all the productions of its author. Were we, in fact, called upon to single out from the compass of English periodical literature, the article in which the author revels in the most unrestrained and triumphant consciousness of power, moving with the exultant bound of the war-horse rushing to the battle:

κυδιόων· ὑψοῦ δὲ κάρη έχει, ἀμφὶ δὲ χαῖται

ὤμοις αίσσονται· ὁ δ ̓ ἀγλαίηφι πεποιθώς

ῥίμφα ἑ γοῦνα φέρει μετά τ' ήθεα καὶ νομὸν ἵππωγ
έ

in which he ranges with freest foot over the whole realm of history and fiction, pressing their united resources into the illustration of his subject; in which the style sinks and swells in the most absolute obedience to the breath of the passing emotion, now glittering with the corruscations of rhetoric, now deepening into the lightning blaze of eloquence — we should fix unhesitatingly, we think, on this discussion of the character of Machiavelli. The comparative remoteness and narrowness of its immediate subject, the half paradoxical nature of its leading proposition, its consisting rather in generalization than in narrative, and perhaps a degree of obscurity in the conduct of the argument, may be reasons why it is less read and less often alluded to than papers of more obvious and wider interest, like those on Bacon, Clive, and Hastings. We will not say, too, that the author does not in some of his later articles display a higher artistic skill in the management of his materials; that the lights and shades of his pictures may not be more skilfully disposed, and the rush and fervor of his style subdued into a more chastened movement. But if there is a more felicitous management of materials, there is not in the several parts so much imaginative power, nor any more philosophical depth; and it is a reflection half-humbling to the pride of our nature, that the perhaps decidedly most brilliant effort of Macaulay's genius, was produced before he had passed his twenty-seventh year. Yet Macaulay was no hot-house plant. His genius had not the unsoundness which often attends unnatural precocity. If he flourished early he also flourished long, and the years which did not add to the splendor of his imaginative power, yet contributed undoubtedly to the largeness of his intellectual resources.

Macaulay was now established as a regular contributor to the Edinburgh Review, and there followed in succession papers on Dryden, History, Hallam's Constitutional History, Southey's Colloquies on Society, and several articles assailing vigorously the utilitarian theory of government. His political as well as his literary merits could not be overlooked by the Whig party, whose principles he embraced, and in 1830 he was