Among his contributions to Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, the Fragment of a Roman Tale and The Athenian Revels, indicate that at college he had studied the ancient classics so thoroughly as to gain no little insight into Greek and Roman life. Alcibiades, Cæsar, and Catiline, seem as real to him as Canning and Wellington. In the papers on Mitford’s History of Greece and The Athenian Orators, the same tendency of mind is displayed in a critical direction. His intellect penetrates to the realities of the society and the individuals he assumes to judge, and the independence, originality, and decision of his thinking, correspond to the clearness of his perceptions. The Conversation between Cowley and Milton is an example of the same sympathetic historic imagination exercised in the discussion of great historical questions, yet angrily debated; and in the poem of The Battle of Naseby, which purports to be written by Obadiah Bind-their-Kings-in-Chains-and-their-Nobles-with- links-of-Iron, Serjeant in Ireton’s Regiment, an attempt is made to reproduce the fiercest and gloomiest religious passions which raged in the breasts of the military fanatics among the Puritans. The critical papers on Dante and Petrarch exhibit the general characteristic of the writer’s later literary criticism--intellectual sympathy superior to rules, but submissive to laws; praising warmly, but at the same time, judging keenly; and as intolerant of faults as sensitive to merits. The style, both of the historical and critical articles, is substantially the style of Macaulay’s more celebrated essays. There is less energy and freedom of movement, a larger use of ornament for the sake of ornament, and a more obvious rhetorical artifice in the declamatory passages, but in essential elements it is the same.

In the choice of a profession, Macaulay fixed upon the law. He was called to the bar in February, 1826, but we hear of no clients; and it is doubtful if he ever mastered the details of his profession. Sydney Smith, who knew him at this time, said afterwards--“I always prophesied his greatness from the first moment I saw him, then a very young and unknown man, on the Northern Circuit. There are no limits to his knowledge, on small subjects as well as great: he is like a book in breeches.” Indeed, politics and literature had, from the first, attractions too strong for him to resist; and before he entered on the practice of his profession, he had, by one article in a review, passed at a bound to a conspicuous place among the writers of the time.

It might have been expected, from his family connections, that he would be a zealous whig and abolitionist, and his first contribution to the Edinburgh Review was on the subject of West India Slavery. It was published in the number for January, 1825, and in extent of information, force and acuteness of argument, severity of denunciation and sarcasm, and fervor and brilliancy of style, it ranks high among the many vigorous productions in which Macaulay has recorded his love of freedom and hatred of oppression, and exhibited his power of making tyranny ridiculous as well as odious. It is curious that this paper, so full of the peculiar traits of his character and style, should not have been generally recognized as his, after his subsequent articles had familiarized the public with his manner of expression. But the date of his first contribution to the Review is still commonly considered to be the month of August, 1825, when his article on Milton appeared, and at once attained a wide popularity. Though when, in 1848, the author collected his Essays, he declared that this article “hardly contained a paragraph that his matured judgment approved,” and regretted that he had to leave it unpruned of the “gaudy and ungraceful ornament” with which it was overloaded, its popularity has survived its author’s harsh judgment.

Whatever were its youthful faults of taste, impertinences of statement, and errors of theory, few articles which had ever before appeared in a British journal contained so much solid matter in so compact and readable a form. If it did not touch the depths of the various topics it so confidently discussed, it certainly contained a sufficient number of strong and striking thoughts to rescue its brilliancy from the charge of superficiality. If the splendor of its rhetoric seemed consciously designed for display, this defect applies in great measure to Macaulay’s rhetoric in general. He popularizes everything. He converts his acquirements into accomplishments, and contrives that their show shall always equal their substance; but in this essay, as in the dazzling-series of essays which succeeded it, a discerning eye can hardly fail to perceive beneath the external glitter of the periods, the presence of two qualities which are sound and wholesome, namely, broad common sense, and earnest enthusiasm.

Following the article on Milton, came, in the Edin burgh Review for February, 1826, the month in which he was called to the bar, a paper on the London University. This was succeeded in March, 1827, by a powerful and well-reasoned, but exceedingly bitter and sarcastic antislavery article on the Social and Industrial Capacities of Negroes. In June of the same year, appeared a paper, evidently written by him, entitled “The Present Administration,” one of the most acrimonious and audacious political articles ever published in the Edinburgh Review. Its tone was so violent and virulent, and excited so much opposition, that, in the next number of the Review, a kind of apology was offered for it under the form of explaining its real meaning. Macaulay’s real meaning is evident; he “meant mischief;” but in the confused sentences of his apologist hardly any meaning is perceptible; and there is something ludicrous in the very supposition that the meaning of the clearest and most decisive of writers could be mistaken by the public he addressed, and especially by the Tories he assailed.

In all editions of his Essays, the admirable article on Machiavelli, one of the ablest, most elaborate, and most thoughtful productions of his mind, succeeds the article on Milton. It was published in the number of the Review for March, 1827. Between 1827 and 1830 appeared the articles on Dryden, History, Hallam’s Constitutional History, Southey’s Colloquies on Society, and the three articles on the Utilitarian Theory of Government. These proved the capacity of the author to discuss both political and literary questions with a boldness, brilliancy, and effectiveness, hardly known before in periodical literature. Each essay included an amount of digested and generalized knowledge which might easily have been expanded into a volume, but which, in its condensed form and sparkling positiveness of expression, was all the more efficient. To the Whig party as well as to the Whig Review, such an ally had claims which could not be disregarded; and in 1830, through the interest of Lord Lansdowne, he was elected a member of Parliament for the borough of Caine. His reputation was so well established that no idea of patronage entered into this arrangement; and he could afterwards boast, with honest pride, that he was as independent when he sat in Parliament as the nominee of Lord Lansdowne as when he represented the popular constituencies of Leeds and Edinburgh.

As an orator, he won a reputation second only to his reputation as a man of letters. From all accounts he owed little to his manner of speaking. “His head,” we are told, “was set stiff on his shoulders, and his feet were planted immovable on the floor. One hand was fixed behind him across his back, and in this rigid attitude, with only a slight movement of his right hand, he poured forth, with inconceivable velocity, his sentences.” His first speech was on the Jews’ Disabilities Bill, on the fifth of April, 1830, followed in December by one on Slavery in the West Indies. Both evinced the broad views of the statesman as well as the generous warmth of the reformer. He threw himself with characteristic ardor into the great struggle for Parliamentary Reform, and his speeches on that measure, not only drew forth unbounded applause from his party and unwilling admiration from his opponents, but, as read now, after the excitement of the occasion has subsided, justify in a great degree the enthusiastic praise of those who heard them delivered. Clear and logical in arrangement, abundant in precedents and arguments, fearless in tone, and animated in movement, they are particularly marked by that fusion of intelligence and sensibility which makes passion intelligent and reason impassioned. The rush of the declamation is kept carefully within the channels of the argument; they convince through the very process by which they kindle. Their style is that of splendid and animated conversation; though carefully premeditated they have the appearance of being spontaneous; and indeed were not, as is commonly supposed, originally written out and committed to memory, but thought out and committed to memory. Without writing a word, he could prepare an hour’s speech, in his mind, carefully attending even to the most minute felicities of expression, and then deliver it with a rapidity so great that no reporter could follow him. The effect on the House of these declaimed disquisitions can perhaps be best estimated by quoting a passage from one of his political opponents, whose pen, in the heat of faction, was unrestrained by any of the proprieties of controversy. In the number of the Noctes Ambrosiano, for August, 1831, Macaulay is sneered at as a person whom it is the fashion among a small coterie to call “the Burke of the age.” After admitting him to be “the cleverest declaimer on the Whig side of the House,” the account thus proceeds: “He is an ugly, cross-made, splay-footed, shapeless little dumpling of a fellow, with a featureless face, too--except indeed a good expansive forehead--sleek, puritanical, sandy hair, large glimmering eyes--and a mouth from ear to ear. He has a lisp and burr, moreover, and speaks thickly and huskily for several minutes before he gets into the swing of his discourse; but after that nothing can be more dazzling than his whole execution. What he says is substantially, of course, stuff and nonsense; but it is so well-worded, and so volubly and forcibly delivered--there is such an endless string of epigram and antithesis--such a flashing of epithets--such an accumulation of images--and the voice is so trumpetlike, and the action so grotesquely emphatic, that you might hear a pin drop in the House. Even Manners Sutton himself listens.”