Representative British Orations Volume 3; With Introductions and Explanatory Notes (Paperback)

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: LORD MACAULAY. In August of 1825 there appeared in the Edinburgh Review an article on Milton which attracted instantaneous and universal attention. Though it did not, perhaps, go to the bottom of the various topics it had to deal with, it displayed so wonderful a range of knowledge, so great a variety of strong and striking thoughts, and such a splendor of rhetoric, that it dazzled and drew into an earnest enthusiasm the host of readers of that already famous journal. When it came to be known that the author of this marvellous piece of literary workmanship was a young man of only twenty-five, it was at once perceived that a new luminary had made its appearance in the galaxy of English authorship. From that time till the day when, nearly thirty years later, his services in behalf of let- so ters were rewarded with a grave in the Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey, Thomas Bab- ington Macaulay wielded a literary influence not surpassed by that of any other master of English prose. He was the son of Zachary Macaulay, a man who had distinguished himself as an anti-slavery philanthropist even among men like Stephen, Clarkson, and Wilberforce. His mother was a daughter of Thomas Mills, a bookseller, and a Quaker. Though the lad did not inherit a fortune, his father was able without much inconvenience to give him the advantages of an education at one of the universities. Up to the age of thirteen he was taught almost exclusively by his mother; and when he was at length placed in a private school, his brightness and eagerness of mind astonished all those with whom he came in contact. That most charming of all biographies of literary men, Trevel- yan's " Life and Letters of Macaulay," teems with evidence of his singular attainments at an early age. At Cambridge, which he entered...