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Updated: May 27, 2025
It is rarer than anything you may remember of Macaulay's essay upon the everlastingly execrable Florentine. "Men are a little breed" might have been Machiavelli's motto. Or he might have said "the more I see of men the better I like dogs." He is remorseless in seeing only that men are ungrateful, fickle, deceivers, greedy of gain, run-aways before peril, readier to pay back injury than kindness.
Elliott's bill he finds him "exceeding dear in all the works of Morocco, Turkey, and Russia leather, besides those of velvet," and he is constantly reprimanding both book-binders for their "negligence in executing my Lord's work." Perhaps the best-merited praise that has ever been bestowed on the founder of this celebrated library is Macaulay's tribute to his "sincere kindness for men of genius."
But Macaulay's cheery and robust common sense carried him safe and sound through an ordeal which has broken down sterner natures than his, and embittered as stainless lives.
Niebuhr and Arnold have forever finished Romulus and Remus and the Livian legends, for maturer beliefs; but childhood goes on in the same track. Lord Macaulay's Romance of English History has been riddled by the acute reviewers; but he will be abridged for the use of schools, and not a fiction about William Penn, or John of Marlborough, or Grahame of Claverhouse, be left out.
It was not, however, until his article on Milton appeared in the Edinburgh Review in 1825, that Macaulay's great career began. Like Byron, he woke up one morning to find himself famous. Everybody read and admired an essay the style of which was new and striking. "Where did you pick up that style?" wrote Jeffrey to the briefless barrister.
Anything in the shape of an enquiry would inevitably lead to disclosures seriously affecting the honour of more than one member of the Compact. An indictment, therefore, was out of the question. It has often been asserted that the oligarchy are to be held accountable for the display of ruffianly violence which followed Mackenzie's retort to Macaulay's pamphlet.
The beauty of their style, the merciless portraiture of the Second Empire, the unparalleled diorama of the Alma fight, combined to gain for these first four-and-twenty chapters an immediate vogue as emphatic and as widely spread as that which saluted the opening of Macaulay's "History." None of the later volumes, though highly prized as battle narratives, quite came up to these.
We still share in the editor's wonder; but the more we think, the less we conceive that such a style could be picked up. It was partly the result of a well-stored mind, partly of unconscious imitation of other writers, and partly of that natural talent for clear speaking and writing which is manifest in all Macaulay's work.
Another of Lord Macaulay's Essays may be used with Sir John Malcolm's biography for the life of Lord Clive and the early history of British India, a fuller account of which may of course be found in general histories of India, such as that by James Mill. The earlier part of the "Annual Register," which begins in 1758, has been attributed to Burke.
Curiously enough, as in the case of Carlyle, it was in America that the public appreciation of these essays first took the form of book publication; and Macaulay's "Miscellanies" were published in Boston in 1840, and in Philadelphia in 1842.
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