o uniform as to be almost monotonous. He
speaks of himself as idle; but his idleness was more active, and carried
with it hour by hour a greater expenditure of brain power, than what
most men regard as their serious employments. He might well have been,
in his mental career, the spoiled child of fortune; for all he tried
succeeded, all he touched turned into gems and gold. In a happy
childhood he evinced extreme precocity. His academical career gave
sufficient, though not redundant, promise of after celebrity. The new
Golden Age he imparted to the Edinburgh Review, and his first and most
important, if not best, Parliamentary speeches in the grand crisis of
the first Reform Bill, achieved for him, years before he had reached the
middle point of life, what may justly be termed an immense distinction.

For a century and more, perhaps no man in this country, with the
exceptions of Mr. Pitt and of Lord Byron, had attained at thirty-two the
fame of Macaulay. His Parliamentary success and his literary eminence
were each of them enough, as they stood at this date, to intoxicate any
brain and heart of a meaner order. But to these was added, in his case,
an amount and quality of social attentions such as invariably partake of
adulation and idolatry, and as perhaps the high circles of London never
before or since have lavished on a man whose claims lay only in himself,
and not in his descent, his rank, or his possessions....

One of the very first things that must strike the observer of this man
is, that he was very unlike to any other man. And yet this unlikeness,
this monopoly of the model in which he was made, did not spring from
violent or eccentric features of originality, for eccentricity he had
none whatever, but from the peculiar mode in which the ingredients were
put together to make up the composition. In one sense, beyond doubt,
such powers as his famous memory, his rare power of illustration, his
command of language, separated him broadly from others: but gifts like
these do not make the man; and we now for the first time know that he
possessed, in a far larger sense, the stamp of a real and strong
individuality. The most splendid and complete assemblage of intellectual
endowments does not of itself suffice to create an interest of the kind
that is, and will be, now felt in Macaulay. It is from ethical gifts
alone that such an interest can spring.

These existed in him not only in abundance, but in forms distant from