XV11 



as he thought, of adding some great work to the treasures of English 

 thought and English literature. In the office at Whitehall or the 

 Horse Guards, on the benches of the House of Commons, amrd the 

 applauses or admiring silence of the House, his heart was in his 

 library, and among his books. He yearned for a place not so much 

 among the great parliamentary leaders and the famous statesmen of the 

 land, the Chathams, Burkes, Foxs, as among the immortal writers 

 in verse and prose, the Miltons, Clarendons, Addisons, Gibbons. 

 The auditory which he coveted was that vast expanding world 

 throughout which the English language is spoken ; the fame, that 

 which will only die with the death of English letters. Throughout 

 the whole time of his absence from England, on his voyage to India 

 and on his return, in India, as far as leisure would allow, and during 

 his parliamentary and official career, he was still with his indefatigable 

 industry heaping up stores of knowledge, stores which could not 

 overload his capacious and retentive memory, memory, whose grasp 

 and self-command seemed to expand with its accumulating treasures, 

 memory, which disdained nothing as beneath it, and was never per- 

 plexed or burdened by its incalculable possessions. As a curious 

 instance of his range and activity of reading, among the books which 

 he took with him to India, were the many huge volumes of St. 

 Chrysostom's works. Their still almost pure and harmonious Greek, 

 and their importance in the history of religious opinion (always a 

 subject of deep interest), carried him through a task which has been 

 achieved by few professional theologians. As an illustration of his 

 powers of memory, he has said, and he was a most unboastful man, 

 that if Milton's great poem were lost, he thought that he could ac- 

 curately commit to writing at least all the first books of Paradise 

 Lost. 



This life-long inward strife, which perhaps might have remained 

 unreconciled till towards the close of his days, came to a sudden and 

 unexpected issue. At the election in 1847, Macaulay was the 

 rejected candidate for the City of Edinburgh. Nor can it be denied, 

 though those who admire Macaulay will not admire him the less, 

 that he was accessory to his own failure. The event turned on a 

 religious question, in which Edinburgh, true to its old Scotch pre- 

 judices, adhered to the less liberal view. Macaulay could not be 

 persuaded to humour, to temporize, even to conciliate. He took the 



VOL. xi. b 



