The prophecies of jealousy seldom come true.  Southey’s book died before its author, with the exception of the passages extracted by Macaulay, which have been reproduced in his essay a hundred times, and more, for once that they were printed in the volumes from which he selected them for his animadversion.

The chambers in which he ought to have been spending his days, and did actually spend his nights between the years 1829 and 1834, were within five minutes’ walk of the house in Great Ormond Street.  The building of which those chambers formed a part,—­8 South Square, Gray’s Inn,—­has since been pulled down to make room for an extension of the Library; a purpose which, in Macaulay’s eyes, would amply compensate for the loss of such associations as might otherwise have attached themselves to the locality.  His Trinity fellowship brought him in nearly three hundred pounds annually, and the Edinburgh Review nearly two hundred.  In January 1828, during the interregnum that separated the resignation of Lord Goderich and the acceptance of the Premiership by the Duke of Wellington, Lord Lyndhurst made him a Commissioner of Bankruptcy; a rare piece of luck at a time when, as Lord Cockburn tells us, “a youth of a Tory family, who was discovered to have a leaning towards the doctrines of the opposition, was considered as a lost son.”  “The Commission is welcome,” Macaulay writes to his father, “and I am particularly glad that it has been given at a time when there is no ministry, and when the acceptance of it implies no political obligation.  To Lord Lyndhurst I of course feel personal gratitude, and I shall always take care how I speak of him.”

The emoluments of the office made up his income, for the three or four years during which he held it, to about nine hundred pounds per annum.  His means were more than sufficient for his wants, but too small, and far too precarious, for the furtherance of the political aspirations which now were uppermost in his mind.  “Public affairs,” writes Lady Trevelyan, “were become intensely interesting to him.  Canning’s accession to power, then his death, the repeal of the Test Act, the Emancipation of the Catholics, all in their turn filled his heart and soul.  He himself longed to be taking his part in Parliament, but with a very hopeless longing.

“In February 1830 I was staying at Mr. Wilberforce’s at Highwood Hill when I got a letter from your uncle, enclosing one from Lord Lansdowne, who told him that he had been much struck by the articles on Mill, and that he wished to be the means of first introducing their author to public life by proposing to him to stand for the vacant seat at Calne.  Lord Lansdowne expressly added that it was your uncle’s high moral and private character which had determined him to make the offer, and that he wished in no respect to influence his votes, but to leave him quite at liberty to act according to his conscience.  I remember flying into Mr. Wilberforce’s study,