Nineteenth Century English Prose; Critical Essays - Livres de poche

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY [Thomas Babington Macaulay was born in 1800 at Rothley Temple, Leicestershire. He was a child of remarkable precocity both in literature and in English composition. In 1818 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he twice won first honors in the English prize-poem contest. In 1822 he was graduated and two years later was chosen a fellow of Trinity, when he began to devote himself to literature. For a short time he contributed articles to Knighfs Quarterly Magazine. His famous essay on Milton appeared in 1825, in the Edinburgh Review, the great Whig periodical to which Macaulay was a prominent contributor for the next twenty years. In 1830 he entered Parliament and ardently shared in the reform movement. From 1834 to 1838 he was in India as a member of the Supreme Council. On his return to England he again entered Parliament and for a time was active in public affairs. He was raised to the peerage in 1857. His Lays of Ancient Rome appeared in 1842, and the next year three volumes of Essays. The work to which Macaulay's later years were devoted was the History of England from the Accession of James II. Two volumes were published in 1848, and two more in 1855. Volume five of the series was published posthumously. Macaulay died in 1859.] Macaulay never regarded himself as a critic of literature in the special sense. He had not the mind of a critic, the judicial temper, the detachment, the serious, philosophical view of life. Nor had he a method of criticism, as Carlyle, Arnold, and Pater had. His ambition as a writer and his greatest labor were given to his History, upon which he confidently invited the judgment of posterity. His essays, on the contrary, he wrote with no thought of a generation beyond his own. " They are not expected to be highly f...