In that company of indefatigable workers none equalled the labours of Zachary Macaulay.  Even now, when he has been in his grave for more than the third of a century, it seems almost an act of disloyalty to record the public services of a man who thought that he had done less than nothing if his exertions met with praise, or even with recognition.  The nature and value of those services may be estimated from the terms in which a very competent judge, who knew how to weigh his words, spoke of the part which Mr. Macaulay played in one only of his numerous enterprises,—­the suppression of slavery and the slave-trade.  “That God had called him into being to wage war with this gigantic evil became his immutable conviction.  During forty successive years he was ever burdened with this thought.  It was the subject of his visions by day and of his dreams by night.  To give them reality he laboured as men labour for the honours of a profession or for the subsistence of their children.  In that service he sacrificed all that a man may lawfully sacrifice—­ health, fortune, repose, favour, and celebrity.  He died a poor man, though wealth was within his reach.  He devoted himself to the severest toil, amidst allurements to luxuriate in the delights of domestic and social intercourse, such as few indeed have encountered.  He silently permitted some to usurp his hardly-earned honours, that no selfish controversy might desecrate their common cause.  He made no effort to obtain the praises of the world, though he had talents to command, and a temper peculiarly disposed to enjoy them.  He drew upon himself the poisoned shafts of calumny, and, while feeling their sting as generous spirits only can feel it, never turned a single step aside from his path to propitiate or to crush the slanderers.”

Zachary Macaulay was no mere man of action.  It is difficult to understand when it was that he had time to pick up his knowledge of general literature; or how he made room for it in a mind so crammed with facts and statistics relating to questions of the day that when Wilberforce was at a loss for a piece of information he used to say, “Let us look it out in Macaulay.”  His private papers, which are one long register of unbroken toil, do nothing to clear up the problem.  Highly cultivated, however, he certainly was, and his society was in request with many who cared little for the objects which to him were everything.  That he should have been esteemed and regarded by Lord Brougham, Francis Homer, and Sir James Mackintosh, seems natural enough, but there is something surprising in finding him in friendly and frequent intercourse with some of his most distinguished French contemporaries.  Chateaubriand, Sismondi, the Duc de Broglie, Madame de Stael, and Dumont, the interpreter of Bentham, corresponded with him freely in their own language, which he wrote to admiration.  The gratification that his foreign acquaintance felt at the sight of his letters would have been unalloyed