Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays and Poems. in Three Volumes

Chicago, New York, and San Francisco: Belford, Clarke & Co, 1888. Reissue. Hard Cover. Very Good/No Jacket. 0x0x0. U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing's copy, with his bookplate on front endpaper of each volume (these were purchased from a family library in Henderson Harbor, NY, near his birthplace in Watertown, which included many other works owned by him). Minor cosmetic wear to edges. 1888 Hard Cover. vi, [7]-829; 814; vi, [7]-826 pp. Brown cloth, gilt titles. A collection of writings on important historical figures and reviews of works of literature contemporary with Lord Macaulay. CONTENTS: Preface; Milton; Machiavelli; Hallam's Constitutional History; Southey's Colloquies on Society; Mr Robert Montgomery's Poems; Civil Disabilities of the Jews; Moore's Life of Lord Byron; Boswell's Life of Johnson; Southey's Edition of The Pilgrim's Progress; Lord Nugent's Memorials of Hampden; Burleigh and His Times; War of the Succession in Spain; Horace Walpole; William Pitt, Earl of Chatham; Sir James Mackintosh; Lord Bacon; Sir William Temple; Gladstone on Church and State; Lord Clive; Von Ranke; Leigh Hunt; Lord Holland; Warren Hastings; Madame d'Arblay; Life and Writings of Addison; The Earl of Chatham; Frederic the Great; Index. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: "Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay PC (25 October 1800 – 28 December 1859) was a British poet, historian and Whig politician. He wrote extensively as an essayist and reviewer, and on British history. He also held political office as Secretary at War between 1839 and 1841 and Paymaster-General between 1846 and 1848. Macaulay's political writings are famous for their ringing prose and for its confident, sometimes dogmatic, emphasis on a progressive model of British history, according to which the country threw off superstition, autocracy and confusion to create a balanced constitution and a forward-looking culture combined with freedom of belief and expression. This model of human progress has been called the Whig interpretation of history. This philosophy appears most clearly in the essays Macaulay wrote for the Edinburgh Review. But it is also reflected in the History; the most stirring passages in the work are those that describe the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688. Macaulay's approach has been criticised by later historians for its one-sidedness and its complacency. Karl Marx referred to him as a 'systematic falsifier of history'. His tendency to see history as a drama led him to treat figures whose views he opposed as if they were villains, while characters he approved of were presented as heroes. Macaulay goes to considerable length, for example, to absolve his main hero William III of any responsibility for the Glencoe massacre. On the other hand, this outlook, together with his obvious love of his subject matter and of English civilization, helps to place the reader within the age being described in a personal way that no cold neutrality could, and Macaulay's History is generally recognized as one of the masterpieces of historical writing and a magisterial literary triumph only comparable as such to Gibbon and Michelet.