Macaulay’s residence in India, so far as political ambition was concerned, may have been a mistake.  It withdrew him from an arena in which he could have risen to great distinction and influence as a parliamentary orator.  He might have been a second Fox, whom he resembled in the impetuosity of his rhetoric, if he had also possessed Fox’s talents as a debater.  Yet he was not a born leader of men.  As a parliamentary orator he was simply a speech-maker, like the Unitarian minister Fox, or that still abler man the Quaker Bright, both of whom were great rhetoricians.  It is probable that he himself understood his true sphere, which was that of a literary man,—­an historical critic, appealing to intelligent people rather than to learned pedants in the universities.  His service in India enabled him to write for the remainder of his life with an untrammelled pen, and to live in comfort and ease, enjoying the otium cum dignitate, to which he attached supreme importance,—­so different from Carlyle, who toiled in poverty at Chelsea to declare truth for truth’s sake, grumbling, yet lofty in his meditations, the depth of which Macaulay was incapable of appreciating.

It is, then, as a man of letters rather than as a politician that our author merits his exalted fame.  Respectable as a member of the House of Commons, or as a jurist in India in compiling a code of laws, yet neither as a statesman nor as a jurist was he in his right place.  The leaders of his party may have admired and praised his oratory, but they wanted something more practical than orations,—­they wanted the control of men; and so, too, the government demanded a code which would exact the esteem of lawyers and meet the wants of India rather than a composition which would read well.  But as an historical critic and a luminous writer, Macaulay had no superior,—­a fact which no one knew better than himself.

In 1838, on his return from India,—­where he had regarded himself as in honorable exile,—­Macaulay had accumulated a fortune of L30,000, to him more than a competency.  This, added to the legacy of L10,000 which he had received from his uncle, General Macaulay, secured to him independence and leisure to pursue his literary work, which was paramount to every other consideration.  If both from pleasure and ambition there ever was a man devoted heart and soul and body to a literary career, it was Macaulay.  Nor would he now accept any political office which seriously interfered with the passion of his life.  Still less would he waste his time at the dinner parties of the great, no longer to him a novelty.  He was eminently social by nature, and fond of talk and controversy, with a superb physique capable of digesting the richest dishes, and of enduring the fatigues and ceremonies of fashionable life; but even the pleasures of the banquet and of cultivated society, to many a mere relaxation, were sacrificed to his fondness for books,—­to him the greatest and truest companionship, especially when they introduced him to the life and manners of by-gone ages, and to communion with the master-minds of the world.