“Macaulay’s own controversial habits were finer; he fought
the mind with the mind, and he never used insults instead of argument . . . He
arranged with the editors of the Edinburgh
[Review] to be paid for his articles, while he was away, not in money but in
books. He bought and read books on India
-- and (as always) on everything else . . . his resources were the reserves of
his mind and the preserves of his books.
He read the Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil, Horace, Caesar’s Commentaries, Bacon’s De Argumentis, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto,
Tasso, Don Quixote, Gibbon’s Rome, Mill’s India, all the seventy volumes of Voltaire, Sismondi’s History of France, and the seven thick folio
volumes of the Biographia Britannica
. . .
In 1849 he was
going to Ireland. Between London and
Bangor he had read the lives of the Roman emperors, but on the boat at night he
could not see to read. There was
magnificent starlight; he sat on deck and repeated to himself Paradise Lost. ‘I could still repeat half of it, and that
the best half. I really never enjoyed it
so much.’ When Macaulay is remembered
for blame, that scene should be remembered also to his honour; the short stocky
figure, wrapped in a greatcoat, sitting alone on deck under the gory of the
stars, and abandoning himself to the unutterable other glory of the most
sublime verse English genius has ever made.”
No comments:
Post a Comment