that so often set the laity quarrelling during the incessant and
involuntary companionship of a sea-voyage. Mr. Macaulay, finding
that the warmth of these debates furnished sport to the captain
and other irreligious characters, was forced seriously to exert
his authority in order to separate and silence the disputants.
His report of these occurrences went in due time to the Chairman
of the Company, who excused himself for an arrangement which had
turned out so ill by telling a story of a servant who, having to
carry a number of gamecocks from one place to another, tied them
up in the same bag, and found on arriving at his journey's end
that they had spent their time in tearing each other to pieces.
When his master called him to account for his stupidity he
replied: "Sir, as they were all your cocks, I thought they would
be all on one side."

Things did not go much more smoothly on shore. Mr. Macaulay's
official correspondence gives a curious picture of his
difficulties in the character of Minister of Public Worship in a
black community. "The Baptists under David George are decent and
orderly, but there is observable in them a great neglect of family
worship, and sometimes an unfairness in their dealings. To Lady
Huntingdon's Methodists, as a body, may with great justice be
addressed the first verse of the third chapter of the Revelation.
The lives of many of them are very disorderly, and rank
antinomianism prevails among them." But his sense of religion and
decency was most sorely tried by Moses Wilkinson, a so-called
Wesleyan Methodist, whose congregation, not a very respectable one
to begin with, had recently been swollen by a Revival which had
been accompanied by circumstances the reverse of edifying. [Lord
Macaulay had in his youth heard too much about negro preachers,