Appendix CASE ONE - Collection Point® | The Total Digital Asset ...

148 Legal History in the Making
occasion indicative of these powers was the four-year-old's response to a
concerned enquiry after having hot coffee spilt over of his legs: Thank
you, madam, the agony is abated'. 8 This infant phenonomen grew into an
adult phenonomen possessed of considerable linguistic skills, an astonishing
memory fed by a voracious eclecticism which produced great broad-fronted
erudition. Equipped with such talents, the adult Macaulay quickly established
himself as a spectacular conversationalist and, by his contributions to the
Edinburgh Review, as a distinctly stylish and promising man of letters. By the
age of thirty-three Macaulay had become a man of mark in society, literature
and politics. His writing style, and what his friend Sydney Smith called great
'waterspouts of talk', both fascinated, intimidated and exhausted readers and
listeners. Again, Smith tells us, Macaulay 'not only overflowed with learning
but stood in the slops'. 9 According to another contemporary: 10
His voice is one of the most monotonous and least agreeable of those which usually
belong to our countrymen north of the Tweed: pitched in alto and rather shrill,
pouring forth words in inconceivable velocity: never stopping for words, never
stopping for thoughts, never halting for an instant even to take breath, hauling
the subject after him with the strength of a giant, till the hearer is left prostrate
and powerless by the whirlwind of ideas and emotions that has swept over him.
Complementary to this high speed delivery was a deep reserve of literary and
historical learning which Macaulay constantly and naturally drew on. The
technique was eventually seen at work in House of Commons performances,
something well described by G.M. Young: 11
Between the beginning and end of a very short speech [on the Anatomy Bill]
Macaulay has touched on the habits of murderers, France, Germany, Italy, the
peasants of Russia and their Tsar,. . . barbers, old women and charms, the squaring
of the circle and the transit of Venus, Richard of England, Leopold of Austria, and
the bricklayer who falls from a ladder. The listener has been borne at exhilarating
speed, but in perfect security, through a variegated landscape and deposited at his
destination before he has time to wonder where he is going.
As to political allegiance, he had entered Cambridge a Tory and left a
Whig. Macaulay's political career began in 1830 as member of parliament for
Calne, Wiltshire, a pocket borough within the gift of the Whig grandee Lord
Lansdowne. His legendary reputation as a parliamentary debater got under
way a year later with a speech supporting the second reading of the Reform Bill;
a performance which, as well as opening the doors of Holland House, gained
8 Recently quoted by Owen Dudley Edwards, Macaulay (1988), 6.
9 Quoted by Hesketh Pearson, The Smith of Smiths (1984 ed.), 180. Smith also relates: Macaulay
'breakfasted both with me this morning in company with three other very clever men much disposed to
talk, but it was not Macaulay's disposition that they should say a word, I might as well have had three
Mutes from a funeral', Selected Letters of Sydney Smith, Nowell C. Smith, ed. (1956), 198.
10 G.F. Francis quoted by G.M. Young in 'Macaulay', Daylight and Champaign (1937), 12-13.
11 Ibid., 13, 'The speaker is thinking in images drawn from an inexhaustible store of historic
reminiscence, and flashed on the mind of the listener with the force and dexterity of a born story-teller',
14.