remarkably self-controlled; while his eager impetuous boy, careless of his dress, always forgetting to wash his hands and brush his hair, writing an execrable hand, and folding his letters with a great blotch for a seal, was a constant care and irritation.  Many letters to your uncle have I read on these subjects.  Sometimes a specimen of the proper way of folding a letter is sent him, (those were the sad days before envelopes were known,) and he is desired to repeat the experiment till he succeeds.  General Macaulay’s fastidious nature led him to take my father’s line regarding your uncle, and my youthful soul was often vexed by the constant reprimands for venial transgressions.  But the great sin was the idle reading, which was a thorn in my father’s side that never was extracted.  In truth, he really acknowledged to the full your uncle’s abilities, and felt that if he could only add his own morale, his unwearied industry, his power of concentrating his energies on the work in hand, his patient painstaking calmness, to the genius and fervour which his son possessed, then a being might be formed who could regenerate the world.  Often in later years I have heard my father, after expressing an earnest desire for some object, exclaim, ‘If I had only Tom’s power of speech!’ But he should have remembered that all gifts are not given to one, and that perhaps such a union as he coveted is even impossible.  Parents must be content to see their children walk in their own path, too happy if through any road they attain the same end, the living for the glory of God and the good of man.”

From a marvellously early date in Macaulay’s life public affairs divided his thoughts with literature, and, as he grew to manhood, began more and more to divide his aspirations.  His father’s house was much used as a centre of consultation by members of Parliament who lived in the suburbs on the Surrey side of London; and the boy could hardly have heard more incessant, and assuredly not more edifying, political talk if he had been brought up in Downing Street.  The future advocate and interpreter of Whig principles was not reared in the Whig faith.  Attached friends of Pitt, who in personal conduct, and habits of life, certainly came nearer to their standard than his great rival,—­and warmly in favour of a war which, to their imagination, never entirely lost its early character of an internecine contest with atheism.—­the Evangelicals in the House of Commons for the most part acted with the Tories.  But it may be doubted whether, in the long run, their party would not have been better without them.  By the zeal, the munificence, the laborious activity, with which they pursued their religious and semi-religious enterprises, they did more to teach the world how to get rid of existing institutions than by their votes and speeches at Westminster they contributed to preserve them. [Macaulay, writing to one of his sisters in 1844, says:  “I think Stephen’s article on the Clapham Sect the