



Produced by Mike Alder and Sue Asscher





THE MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS AND SPEECHES OF LORD MACAULAY.

Lord Macaulay's Speeches

By Thomas Babington Macaulay


VOLUME IV.






LORD MACAULAY'S SPEECHES.


     TO HENRY, MARQUESS OF LANSDOWNE

     THESE SPEECHES ARE DEDICATED BY HIS GRATEFUL
     AND AFFECTIONATE FRIEND

     THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY.




PREFACE.

It was most reluctantly that I determined to suspend, during the last
autumn, a work which is the business and the pleasure of my life,
in order to prepare these Speeches for publication; and it is most
reluctantly that I now give them to the world. Even if I estimated their
oratorical merit much more highly than I do, I should not willingly have
revived, in the quiet times in which we are so happy as to live, the
memory of those fierce contentions in which too many years of my public
life were passed. Many expressions which, when society was convulsed
by political dissensions, and when the foundations of government were
shaking, were heard by an excited audience with sympathy and applause,
may, now that the passions of all parties have subsided, be thought
intemperate and acrimonious. It was especially painful to me to find
myself under the necessity of recalling to my own recollection, and to
the recollection of others, the keen encounters which took place between
the late Sir Robert Peel and myself. Some parts of the conduct of that
eminent man I must always think deserving of serious blame. But, on a
calm review of his long and chequered public life, I acknowledge, with
sincere pleasure, that his faults were much more than redeemed by great