if not the debaters, of the House.”  And again, on the 17th of December:  “Macaulay made, I think, the best speech he has yet delivered; the most condensed, at least, and with the greatest weight of matter.  It contained, indeed, the only argument to which any of the speakers who followed him applied themselves.”  Lord Cockburn, who sat under the gallery for twenty-seven hours during the last three nights of the Bill, pronounced Macaulay’s speech to have been “by far the best;” though, like a good Scotchman, he asserts that he heard nothing at Westminster which could compare with Dr. Chalmers in the General Assembly.  Sir James Mackintosh writes from the Library of the House of Commons:  “Macaulay and Stanley have made two of the finest speeches ever spoken in Parliament;” and a little further on he classes together the two young orators as “the chiefs of the next, or rather of this, generation.”

To gain and keep the position that Mackintosh assigned him Macaulay possessed the power, and in early days did not lack the will.  He was prominent on the Parliamentary stage, and active behind the scenes;—­the soul of every honourable project which might promote the triumph of his principles, and the ascendency of his party.  One among many passages in his correspondence may be quoted without a very serious breach of ancient and time-worn confidences.  On the 17th of September, 1831, he writes to his sister Hannah:  “I have been very busy since I wrote last, moving heaven and earth to render it certain that, if our ministers are so foolish as to resign in the event of a defeat in the Lords, the Commons may be firm and united; and I think that I have arranged a plan which will secure a bold and instant declaration on our part, if necessary.  Lord Ebrington is the man whom I have in my eye as our leader.  I have had much conversation with him, and with several of our leading county members.  They are all staunch; and I will answer for this,—­that, if the ministers should throw us over, we will be ready to defend ourselves.”

The combination of public spirit, political instinct, and legitimate self-assertion, which was conspicuous in Macaulay’s character, pointed him out to some whose judgment had been trained by long experience of affairs as a more than possible leader in no remote future; and it is not for his biographer to deny that they had grounds for their conclusion.  The prudence, the energy, the self-reliance, which he displayed in another field, might have been successfully directed to the conduct of an executive policy, and the management of a popular assembly.  Macaulay never showed himself deficient in the qualities which enable a man to trust his own sense; to feel responsibility, but not to fear it; to venture where others shrink; to decide while others waver; with all else that belongs to the vocation of a ruler in a free country.  But it was not his fate; it was not his work; and the rank which he might have claimed among the statesmen of Britain was not ill exchanged for the place which he occupies in the literature of the world.