“The point which always has surprised me most in connection with the Penal Code is, that it proves that Lord Macaulay must have had a knowledge of English criminal law which, considering how little he had practised it, may fairly be called extraordinary. [Macaulay’s practice at the bar had been less than little, according to an account which he gave of it at a public dinner:  “My own forensic experience, gentlemen, has been extremely small; for my only recollection of an achievement that way is that at quarter sessions I once convicted a boy of stealing a parcel of cocks and hens.”] He must have possessed the gift of going at once to the very root of the matter, and of sifting the corn from the chaff to a most unusual degree; for his Draft gives the substance of the criminal law of England, down to its minute working details, in a compass which, by comparison with the original, may be regarded as almost absurdly small.  The Indian Penal Code is to the English criminal law what a manufactured article ready for use is to the materials out of which it is made.  It is to the French ‘Code Penal,’ and, I may add, to the North German Code of 1871, what a finished picture is to a sketch.  It is far simpler, and much better expressed, than Livingstone’s Code for Louisiana; and its practical success has been complete.  The clearest proof of this is that hardly any questions have arisen upon it which have had to be determined by the courts; and that few and slight amendments have had to be made in it by the Legislature.”

Without troubling himself unduly about the matter, Macaulay was conscious that the world’s estimate of his public services would be injuriously affected by the popular notion, which he has described as “so flattering to mediocrity,” that a great writer cannot be a great administrator; and it is possible that this consciousness had something to do with the heartiness and fervour which he threw into his defence of the author of “Cato” against the charge of having been an inefficient Secretary of State.  There was much in common between his own lot and that of the other famous essayist who had been likewise a Whig statesman; and this similarity in their fortunes may account in part for the indulgence, and almost tenderness, with which he reviewed the career and character of Addison.  Addison himself, at his villa in Chelsea, and still more amidst the gilded slavery of Holland House, might have envied the literary seclusion, ample for so rapid a reader, which the usages of Indian life permitted Macaulay to enjoy.  “I have a very pretty garden,” he writes, “not unlike our little grass-plot at Clapham, but larger.  It consists of a fine sheet of turf, with a gravel walk round it, and flower-beds scattered over it.  It looks beautiful just now after the rains, and I hear that it keeps its verdure during a great part of the year.  A flight of steps leads down from my library into the garden, and it is so well shaded that you may walk there till ten o’clock in the morning.”