ISBN: 9781459005464

Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay,Paperback, English-language edition,Pub by General Books LLC Books Books The-Works-of-Lord-Macaulay~~Baron-Thomas-Babington-Maca… Plus…

Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay,Paperback, English-language edition,Pub by General Books LLC Books Books The-Works-of-Lord-Macaulay~~Baron-Thomas-Babington-Macaulay General Books LLC 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: i67 HISTORY. (MAY, 1828.) The Romance of History. England. By Henry Neele. London: 1828. To write history respectably?that is, to abbreviate despatches, and make extracts from speeches, to intersperse in due proportion epithets of praise and abhorrence, to draw up antithetical characters of great men, setting forth how many contradictory virtues and vices they united, and abounding in withs and wit/touts?all this is very easy. But to be a really great historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions. Many scientific works are, in their kind, absolutely perfect . There are poems which we should be inclined to designate as faultless, or as disfigured only by blemishes which pass unnoticed in the general blaze of excellence. There are speeches, some speeches of Demosthenes particularly, in which it would be impossible to alter a word without altering it for the worse. But we are acquainted with no history which approaches to our notion of what a history ought to be?with no history which does not widely depart, either on the right hand or on the left, from the exact line. The cause may easily be assigned. This province of literature is a debatable land. It lies on the confines of two distinct territories. It is under the jurisdiction of two hostile powers; and, like other districts similarly situated, it is ill defined, ill cultivated, and ill regulated. Instead of being equallyshared between its two rulers, the Reason and the Imagination, it falls alternately under the sole and absolute dominion of each. It is sometimes fiction. It is sometimes theory. History, it has been said, is philosophy teaching by examples. Unhappily, what the philosophy gains in soundness and depth the examples generally lose in vividness. A perfect historian must possess an imagina...<

ISBN: 9781459005464

Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay, Paperback, English-language edition, Pub by General Books LLC Books, , The-Works-of-Lord-Macaulay~~Baron-Thomas-Babington-Macau… Plus…

Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay, Paperback, English-language edition, Pub by General Books LLC Books, , The-Works-of-Lord-Macaulay~~Baron-Thomas-Babington-Macaulay, 999999999, The Works of Lord Macaulay (Volume 7); Essays and Biographies, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1459005465, General Books LLC, , , , , General Books LLC<