every stage in his course, on from the day when as a little boy,
consigned to the care of English relatives and schoolmasters, he
left his mother on the steps of the landing-place at Calcutta.
The dates and names were wanting, but the man was there; while
the most ardent admirers of Macaulay will admit that a minute
study of his literary productions left them, as far as any but an
intellectual knowledge of the writer himself was concerned, very
much as it found them. A consummate master of his craft, he
turned out works which bore the unmistakable marks of the
artificer's hand, but which did not reflect his features. It
would be almost as hard to compose a picture of the author from
the History, the Essays, and the Lays, as to evolve an idea of
Shakespeare from Henry the Fifth and Measure for Measure.

But, besides being a man of letters, Lord Macaulay was a
statesman, a jurist, and a brilliant ornament of society, at a
time when to shine in society was a distinction which a man of
eminence and ability might justly value. In these several
capacities, it will be said, he was known well, and known widely.
But in the first place, as these pages will show, there was one
side of his life (to him, at any rate, the most important,) of
which even the persons with whom he mixed most freely and
confidentially in London drawing-rooms, in the Indian Council
chamber, and in the lobbies and on the benches of the House of
Commons, were only in part aware. And in the next place, those
who have seen his features and heard his voice are few already
and become yearly fewer; while, by a rare fate in literary
annals, the number of those who read his books is still rapidly
increasing. For everyone who sat with him in private company or
at the transaction of public business,--for every ten who have