But he will be remembered still longer as a scholar,
writer and historian. While at Cambridge he published his prophetic Ladies in Parliament and Horace at the University of Athens. He had already caught some of the spirit of Aristophanes and could write witty English comparable to Calverley's or to that of his later follower, J. K. Stephen. In India, The Competition Wallah was followed by Cawnpore, an entirely different piece of work ; a short episode of history, by no means a mere copy of Macaulay, but one of the most vivid pieces of writing ever produced by a young man under thirty. Such a passage as that which begins :— " Now from left to right extended the unbroken lino of white
faces, and red cloth, and sparkling steel. . . . But the Sixty-fourth was not to be denied . . . ,
must have stayed in the memories of thousands who have read it. In 1876 appeared the Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. His uncle's life was an ideal subject for the nephew and he made a universally acclaimed success of it. Four years later, in The Early History of Charles James For, he gave the best extant picture of Whig life, thought and politics at the end of the eighteenth century. At intervals after that his biggest work appeared, The American Revolution, admitted, even by those who think it too favourable to the Americans, to be a work of the first rank as a political and military history. The greatest pleasure of his declining years must have been the appointment of his third son to the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Cambridge.
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