In February 1831 he writes to Whewell:  “I am impatient for Praed’s debut.  The House of Commons is a place in which I would not promise success to any man.  I have great doubts even about Jeffrey.  It is the most peculiar audience in the world.  I should say that a man’s being a good writer, a good orator at the bar, a good mob-orator, or a good orator in debating clubs, was rather a reason for expecting him to fail than for expecting him to succeed in the House of Commons.  A place where Walpole succeeded and Addison failed; where Dundas succeeded and Burke failed; where Peel now succeeds and where Mackintosh fails; where Erskine and Scarlett were dinner-bells; where Lawrence and Jekyll, the two wittiest men, or nearly so, of their time, were thought bores, is surely a very strange place.  And yet I feel the whole character of the place growing upon me.  I begin to like what others about me like, and to disapprove what they disapprove.  Canning used to say that the House, as a body, had better taste than the man of best taste in it, and I am very much inclined to think that Canning was right.”

The readers of Macaulay’s letters will, from time to time, find reason to wish that the young Whig of 1830 had more frequently practised that studied respect for political opponents, which now does so much to correct the intolerance of party among men who can be adversaries without ceasing to regard each other as colleagues.  But this honourable sentiment was the growth of later days; and, at an epoch when the system of the past and the system of the future were night after night in deadly wrestle on the floor of St. Stephen’s, the combatants were apt to keep their kindliness, and even their courtesies, for those with whom they stood shoulder to shoulder in the fray.  Politicians, Conservative and Liberal alike, who were themselves young during the Sessions of 1866 and 1867, and who can recall the sensations evoked by a contest of which the issues were far less grave and the passions less strong than of yore, will make allowances for one who, with the imagination of a poet and the temperament of an orator, at thirty years old was sent straight into the thickest of the tumult which then raged round the standard of Reform, and will excuse him for having borne himself in that battle of giants as a determined and a fiery partisan.

If to live intensely be to live happily, Macaulay had an enviable lot during those stirring years; and, if the old songwriters had reason on their side when they celebrated the charms of a light purse, he certainly possessed that element of felicity.  Among the earliest economical reforms undertaken by the new Government was a searching revision of our Bankruptcy jurisdiction, in the course of which his Commissionership was swept away, without leaving him a penny of compensation.  “I voted for the Bankruptcy Court Bill,” he said in answer to an inquisitive constituent.  “There were points in that Bill of which I did