Modern English Books of Power | Page 4

MACAULAY'S ESSAYS IN EUROPEAN HISTORY
THE FOREMOST ESSAYIST IN ENGLISH LITERATURE--HIS
STYLE AND LEARNING HAVE MADE MACAULAY A
FAVORITE FOR OVER A HALF CENTURY.
Macaulay belonged to the nineteenth century, as he was born in 1800,
but in his cast of mind, in his literary tastes and in his intense
partisanship he belonged to the century that includes Swift, Johnson
and Goldsmith. He stands alone among famous English authors by
reason of his prodigious memory, his wide reading, his oratorical style
and his singular ascendancy over the minds of young students. The
only writers of modern times who can be classed with him as great
personal forces in the development of young minds are Carlyle and
Emerson, and of the three Macaulay must be given first place because
of a certain dynamic quality in the man and his style which forces
conviction on the mind of the immature reader. The same thing to a less
extent is true of Carlyle, who suffers in his influence as one grows
older. Emerson is in a class by himself. His appeal is that of pure
reason and of high enthusiasm--an appeal that never loses its force with
those who love the intellectual life.
Many famous men have testified to the mental stimulus which they
received from Macaulay's essays. Upon these essays, contributed to the
EDINBURGH REVIEW in its prime, Macaulay lavished all the
resources of his vast scholarship, his discursive reading in the ancient
and modern classics, his immense enthusiasm and his strong desire to

prove his case. He was a great advocate before he was a great writer,
and he never loses sight of the jury of his readers. He blackens the
shadows and heightens the lights in order to make heroes out of Clive
and Warren Hastings; he hammers Boswell and Boswell's editor,
Croker, over the sacred head of old Dr. Johnson; he lampoons every
eminent Tory, as he idealizes every prominent Whig in English
political history. Macaulay's style is declamatory; he wrote as though
he were to deliver his essays from the rostrum; he abounds in antithesis;
he works up your interest in the course of a long paragraph until he
reaches his smashing climax, in which he fixes indelibly in your mind
the impression which he desires to create. It is all like a great piece of
legerdemain; your eyes cannot follow the processes, but your mind is
amazed and then convinced by the triumphant proof of the conjuror's
skill.
Macaulay had one of the most successful of lives. His early advantages
were ample. He had a memory which made everything he read his own,
ready to be drawn upon at a moment's notice. He was famous as an
author at the early age of twenty-five; he was already a distinguished
Parliamentary orator at thirty; at thirty-three he had gained a place in
the East Indian Council. He never married, but he had an ideal
domestic life in the home of his sister, and one of his nephews, George
Otto Trevelyan, wrote his biography, one of the best in the language,
which reveals the sweetness of nature that lay under the hard surface of
Macaulay's character. He made a fortune out of his books, and in ten
years' service in India he gained another fortune, with the leisure for
wide reading, which he utilized in writing his history of England. He
died at the height of his fame, before his great mental powers had
shown any sign of decay. Take it all in all, his was a happy life, brimful
of work and enjoyment.
Thomas Babington Macaulay was born October 25, 1800, the son of a
wealthy merchant who was active in securing the abolition of the slave
trade. His precocity is almost beyond belief. He read at three years of
age, gave signs of his marvelous memory at four, and when only eight
years old wrote a theological discourse. He entered Trinity College,
Cambridge, at eighteen, but his aversion to mathematics cost him

college honors. He showed at Cambridge great fondness for Latin
declamation and for poetry. At twenty-four he became a fellow of
Trinity. He studied law, but did not practice. Literature and politics
absorbed his attention. At twenty-five he made his first hit with his
essay on Milton in the EDINBURGH REVIEW.
This was followed in rapid succession by the series of essays on which
his fame mainly rests. In 1830 he was elected to Parliament, and in the
following year he established his reputation as an orator by a great
speech on the reform bill. But financial reverses came when he lost the
lucrative post of Commissioner in Bankruptcy and his fellowship at
Trinity lapsed. To gain an income he accepted the position of secretary
of the Board of Control of Indian Affairs, and soon after