I have had much conversation with him, and with several of our leading county members.

They are all staunch; and I will answer for this,--that, if the ministers should throw us over, we will be ready to defend ourselves." The combination of public spirit, political instinct, and legitimate self-assertion, which was conspicuous in Macaulay's character, pointed him out to some whose judgment had been trained by long experience of affairs as a more than possible leader in no remote future; and it is not for his biographer to deny that they had grounds for their conclusion.

The prudence, the energy, the self-reliance, which he displayed in another field, might have been successfully directed to the conduct of an executive policy, and the management of a popular assembly.

Macaulay never showed himself deficient in the qualities which enable a man to trust his own sense; to feel responsibility, but not to fear it; to venture where others shrink; to decide while others waver; with all else that belongs to the vocation of a ruler in a free country.
But it was not his fate; it was not his work; and the rank which he might have claimed among the statesmen of Britain was not ill exchanged for the place which he occupies in the literature of the world.
To Macvey Napier, Esq.
York: March 22, 1830.
My dear Sir,--I was in some doubt as to what I should be able to do for Number 101, and I deferred writing till I could make up my mind.

If my friend Ellis's article on Greek History, of which I have formed high expectations, could have been ready, I should have taken a holiday.