Men are continually “retiring” from business and active life, all unaware of the grim humor of the proceedings.  It was not so very long before Edinburgh, in an endeavor to undo the slight she had put upon Macaulay, again elected him to Parliament, without his being near, or raising his hand either for or against the measure.

And again his voice was heard in the House of Commons.

Macaulay was a modest man, and yet he knew his power.

The Premiership dangled just beyond his reach.  Many claim that if he had not gone to India he would have moved by strong, steady strides straight to the highest office that England could bestow.  And others aver that when he was created a Peer in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-seven it was a move toward the Premiership, and that if his health had not failed he would surely have won the goal.  But how futile it is to speculate on what might have happened had not this or the other occurred!

Yet certainly the daring caution of Macaulay’s mind, his dignity and luring presence, his patience, self-command, good temper, and all those manifold graces of his heart, would have made him an almost ideal Premier, one who might rank with Palmerston, Peel, Disraeli or Gladstone.

But the highest office was not for him.

We die by heart-beats; and Macaulay at fifty-nine had lived as much as most strong men do if they exist a hundred years.

It is easy to show where Lord Macaulay could have been greater.  His life lies open to us as the ether.  We complain because he did not read less and meditate more; we sigh at his lack of religion and mention the fact that he never loved a woman, seemingly waiving tautology and the fact that men who do not love are never religious.

We forget that it takes a good many men to make the Ideal Man.

If Macaulay had been different he would have been some one else.  He was a brave, tender-hearted man who lived one day at a time, packing the moments with good-cheer, good work and an earnest wish to do better tomorrow than he had done today.  That Nature occasionally produces such a man should be a cause for gratitude in the hearts of all the rest of us little folk who jig, mince, mouth, amble, run, peek about and criticize our betters.

LORD BYRON

I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;
A palace and a prison on each hand: 
I saw from out the wave her structures rise
As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand: 
A thousand years, their cloudy wings expand
Around me, and a dying Glory smiles
O’er the far times, when many a subject land
Look’d to the winged Lion’s marble piles,
Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles!
—­Childe Harold

[Illustration:  Lord Byron]

Man!  I wonder what a man really is!  Starting from a single cell, this seized upon by another, and out of the Eternal comes a particle of the Divine Energy that makes these cells its home.  Growth follows, cell is added to cell, and there develops a man—­a man whose body, two-thirds water, can be emptied by a single dagger-thrust and the spirit given back to its Maker.