word.  Gentlemen, I am a Christian.”  At this declaration the delighted audience began to cheer; but Macaulay would have none of their applause.  “This is no subject,” he said, “for acclamation.  I will say no more.  No man shall speak of me as the person who, when this disgraceful inquisition was entered upon in an assembly of Englishmen, brought forward the most sacred subjects to be canvassed here, and be turned into a matter for hissing or for cheering.  If on any future occasion it should happen that Mr. Carlile should favour any large meeting with his infidel attacks upon the Gospel, he shall not have it to say that I set the example.  Gentlemen, I have done; I tell you, I will say no more; and if the person who has thought fit to ask this question has the feelings worthy of a teacher of religion, he will not, I think, rejoice that he has called me forth.”

This ill-fated question had been prompted by a report, diligently spread through the town, that the Whig candidates were Unitarians; a report which, even if correct, would probably have done little to damage their electioneering prospects.  There are few general remarks which so uniformly hold good as the observation that men are not willing to attend the religious worship of people who believe less than themselves, or to vote at elections for people who believe more than themselves.  While the congregations at a high Anglican service are in part composed of Low churchmen and Broad churchmen; while Presbyterians and Wesleyans have no objection to a sound discourse from a divine of the Establishment; it is seldom the case that any but Unitarians are seen inside a Unitarian chapel.  On the other hand, at the general election of 1874, when not a solitary Roman Catholic was returned throughout the length and breadth of the island of Great Britain, the Unitarians retained their long acknowledged pre-eminence as the most over-represented sect in the kingdom.

While Macaulay was stern in his refusal to gratify his electors with the customary blandishments, he gave them plenty of excellent political instruction; which he conveyed to them in rhetoric, not premeditated with the care that alone makes speeches readable after a lapse of years, but for this very reason all the more effective when the passion of the moment was pouring itself from his lips in a stream of faultless, but unstudied, sentences.  A course of mobs, which turned Cobden into an orator, made of Macaulay a Parliamentary debater; and the ear and eye of the House of Commons soon detected, in his replies from the Treasury bench, welcome signs of the invaluable training that can be got nowhere except on the hustings and the platform.  There is no better sample of Macaulay’s extempore speaking than the first words which he addressed to his committee at Leeds after the Reform Bill had received the Royal assent.  “I find it difficult to express my gratification at seeing such an assembly convened at such a time.  All the history of our