“When as first I did come back from ploughing the salt water
  They paid me off at Salamis, three minae and a quarter,—­”

is highly Aristophanic in every sense of the word.

He did not seriously look to the bar as a profession.  No persuasion would induce him to return to his chambers in the evening, according to the practice then in vogue.  After the first year or two of the period during which he called himself a barrister he gave up even the pretence of reading law, and spent many more hours under the gallery of the House of Commons, than in all the Courts together.  The person who knew him best said of him:  “Throughout life he never really applied himself to any pursuit that was against the grain.”  Nothing is more characteristic of the man than the contrast between his unconquerable aversion to the science of jurisprudence at the time when he was ostensibly preparing himself to be an advocate, and the zest with which, on his voyage to India, he mastered that science in principle and detail as soon as his imagination was fired by the prospect of the responsibilities of a law-giver.

He got no business worth mention, either in London or on circuit.  Zachary Macaulay, who was not a man of the world, did what he could to make interest with the attorneys, and, as a last resource, proposed to his son to take a brief in a suit which he himself had instituted against the journal that had so grossly libelled him.  “I am rather glad,” writes Macaulay from York in March 1827, “that I was not in London, if your advisers thought it right that I should have appeared as your counsel.  Whether it be contrary to professional etiquette I do not know; but I am sure that it would be shocking to public feeling, and particularly imprudent against adversaries whose main strength lies in detecting and exposing indecorum or eccentricity.  It would have been difficult to avoid a quarrel with Sugden, with Wetherell, and with old Lord Eldon himself.  Then the John Bull would have been upon us with every advantage.  The personal part of the consideration it would have been my duty, and my pleasure and pride also, to overlook; but your interests must have suffered.”

Meanwhile he was busy enough in fields better adapted than the law to his talents and his temperament.  He took a part in a meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society held at Freemasons’ Tavern, on the 25th of June 1824, with the Duke of Gloucester in the chair.  The Edinburgh Review described his speech as “a display of eloquence so signal for rare and matured excellence that the most practised orator may well admire how it should have come from one who then for the first time addressed a public assembly.”

Those who know what the annual meeting of a well-organised and disciplined association is, may imagine the whirlwind of cheers which greeted the declaration that the hour was at hand when “the peasant of the Antilles will no longer crawl in listless and trembling dejection round a plantation from whose fruits he must derive no advantage, and a hut whose door yields him no protection; but, when his cheerful and voluntary labour is performed, he will return with the firm step and erect brow of a British citizen from the field which is his freehold to the cottage which is his castle.”