es
were ample. He had a memory which made everything he read his own,
ready to be drawn upon at a moment's notice. He was famous as an
author at the early age of twenty-five; he was already a distinguished
Parliamentary orator at thirty; at thirty-three he had gained a place
in the East Indian Council. He never married, but he had an ideal
domestic life in the home of his sister, and one of his nephews,
George Otto Trevelyan, wrote his biography, one of the best in the
language, which reveals the sweetness of nature that lay under the
hard surface of Macaulay's character. He made a fortune out of his
books, and in ten years' service in India he gained another fortune,
with the leisure for wide reading, which he utilized in writing his
history of England. He died at the height of his fame, before his
great mental powers had shown any sign of decay. Take it all in all,
his was a happy life, brimful of work and enjoyment.

Thomas Babington Macaulay was born October 25, 1800, the son of a
wealthy merchant who was active in securing the abolition of the slave
trade. His precocity is almost beyond belief. He read at three years
of age, gave signs of his marvelous memory at four, and when only
eight years old wrote a theological discourse. He entered Trinity
College, Cambridge, at eighteen, but his aversion to mathematics cost
him college honors. He showed at Cambridge great fondness for Latin
declamation and for poetry. At twenty-four he became a fellow of
Trinity. He studied law, but did not practice. Literature and politics
absorbed his attention. At twenty-five he made his first hit with his
essay on Milton in the EDINBURGH REVIEW.

This was followed in rapid succession by the series of essays on which
his fame mainly rests. In 1830 he was elected to Parliament, and in
the following year he established his reputation as an orator by a
great speech on the reform bill. But financial reverses came when he
lost the lucrative post of Commissioner in Bankruptcy and his
fellowship at Trinity lapsed. To gain an income he accepted the
position of secretary of the Board of Control of Indian Affairs, and
soon after was offered a seat in the Supreme Council of India at
Calcutta at $50,000 a year. He lived in India four years, and it was
mainly in these years that he did the reading which afterward bore
fruit in his _History of England_.

[Illustration: THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY AT THE AGE OF
FORTY-NINE--AFTER AN ENGRAVING BY W