One of the chief sources of his happiness, one to which he was particularly indebted these last days, was his love of reading. He could no longer read fourteen books of the _Odyssey_ at a stretch while out for a walk, but in the quiet of his library he enjoyed the companionship of the author he happened to be reading as perhaps few men could. He who could command any society in London failed to find any that he preferred, at breakfast or at dinner, to the company of Boswell; and it seems natural and fitting that he should be found on that last December day, in 1859, "in the library, seated in his easy-chair, and dressed as usual, with his book on the table beside him." Equally fitting is it that in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey, the resting place of Johnson, Garrick, Goldsmith, and Addison, there should lie a stone with this inscription: THOMAS BABINGTON, LORD MACAULAY, BORN AT ROTHLEY TEMPLE, LEICESTERSHIRE, OCTOBER 25TH, 1800. DIED AT HOLLY LODGE, CAMPDEN HILL. DECEMBER 28TH, 1859. "His body is buried in peace, but his name liveth for evermore." For he left behind him a great and honorable name, and every action of his life was "as clear and transparent as one of his own sentences." His biography reveals the dutiful son, the affectionate brother, the true friend, the honorable politician, the practical legislator, the eloquent speaker, the brilliant author. It shows unmistakably that greater than all his works was the man. II. MACAULAY AND HIS LITERARY CONTEMPORARIES The very year in which the last volumes of Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_ were published, 1781, Burns began to do his best work. In 1796 Burns died. In 1798, two years before Macaulay was born, Wordsworth and Coleridge published the first of the _Lyrical Ballads_, which included _The Rime of the Ancient Mariner_. Like Burns, yet in a way entirely his own, Wordsworth was the poet of Nature and of Man, and this little volume was the beginning of much spontaneous poetry which in the following years proved a refreshing change from the polished couplets which had been in fashion. Instead of Pope and Addison and Johnson, in whose time literary men cared more for books than for social reforms, more for manner than for matter, came Scott, Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, Landor, and Southey with their irrepressible originality. Before Macaulay's day Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett had each contributed something to the novel. During his lifetime came practically all of the best work of Miss Austen, Scott, Cooper, Lytton, Disraeli, Hawthorne, the Brontës, Dickens, Thackeray, Mrs. Gaskell, Trollope, and Kingsley. George Eliot's _Adam Bede_ appeared the year he died. Other prominent prose writers were Hallam, Grote, Milman, Froude, Mill, Ruskin, and Carlyle. _In Memoriam_ and Mrs. Browning's _Sonnets from the Portuguese_ were published in 1850, and Browning's _The Ring and the Book_ came out in 1868.