In February, 1839, he returned to London; and now the pressure on him by his political friends to re-enter public life was greater than he could resist.  He was elected to Parliament as one of the members from Edinburgh, and gave his usual support to his party.  In September he became War Secretary, with a seat in the Whig Cabinet under Lord Melbourne.  Consequently he suspended for a while his literary tasks, conducting the business of his department with commendable industry, but without enthusiasm.  In the session of 1840 and 1841, during the angry discussions pertaining to the registration of votes in Ireland, he gave proof of having profited by the severe legal training he had received from his labors in India.  During these years he found time to write a few reviews, the one on Lord Olive being the most prominent.

The great subject of political agitation at this period was the repeal of the Corn Laws.  The Whig leaders had lost the earnestness which had marked their grand efforts when they carried the Reform Bill of 1832, and were more indifferent to further reforms than suited their constituents; so that, at a dangerous financial crisis in 1841, the direction of public affairs fell into the hands of the Tories, under Sir Robert Peel.  This great man not only rescued the nation from its fiscal embarrassments, but having been convinced by the arguments of Cobden of the necessity of repealing the Corn Laws, he carried through that great reform, to the disgust of his party and to his own undying fame.  I have treated of this period more at large in another volume of this series.[2]

[Footnote 2:  Beacon Lights of History:  European Leaders.]

Macaulay was not much moved by the fall of the ministry to which he belonged, and gladly resumed his literary labors,—­the first fruits of his leisure being an essay on Warren Hastings, a companion piece to the one on Clive.

These East Indian essays constitute the most picturesque and graphic account of British conquests in that ancient land that has been given to the public.  Macaulay’s intimate knowledge of the ground, and his literary resources, enabled him to picture the dazzling successes of Clive and Hastings; so that the careers of those superb military chieftains and commercial robber-statesmen, in securing for their country the control of a distant province larger than France, and in enriching the British Empire and themselves beyond all precedent in conquest, stand splendidly portrayed forever.

Macaulay had now taken apartments in The Albany, on the second floor, to which he removed his large library, and in which he comfortably lived for fifteen years.  His article on Warren Hastings was followed by that on Frederic the Great.  His numerous articles in the Edinburgh Review had now become so popular that there was a great demand for them in a separate form.  Curiously enough, as in the case of Carlyle, it was in America that the public appreciation of these essays