It is to the French 'Code Penal,' and, I may add, to the North German Code of 1871, what a finished picture is to a sketch.
It is far simpler, and much better expressed, than Livingstone's Code for Louisiana; and its practical success has been complete.

The clearest proof of this is that hardly any questions have arisen upon it which have had to be determined by the courts; and that few and slight amendments have had to be made in it by the Legislature." Without troubling himself unduly about the matter, Macaulay was conscious that the world's estimate of his public services would be injuriously affected by the popular notion, which he has described as "so flattering to mediocrity," that a great writer cannot be a great administrator; and it is possible that this consciousness had something to do with the heartiness and fervour which he threw into his defence of the author of "Cato" against the charge of having been an inefficient Secretary of State.

There was much in common between his own lot and that of the other famous essayist who had been likewise a Whig statesman; and this similarity in their fortunes may account in part for the indulgence, and almost tenderness, with which he reviewed the career and character of Addison.

Addison himself, at his villa in Chelsea, and still more amidst the gilded slavery of Holland House, might have envied the literary seclusion, ample for so rapid a reader, which the usages of Indian life permitted Macaulay to enjoy.

"I have a very pretty garden," he writes, "not unlike our little grass-plot at Clapham, but larger.
It consists of a fine sheet of turf, with a gravel walk round it, and flower-beds scattered over it.