And this from Mr. Cotter Morison

“Macaulay did for the historical essay what Haydn did for the sonata, and Watt for the steam engine; he found it rudimentary and unimportant, and left it complete and a thing of power. . . .  To take a bright period or personage of history, to frame it in a firm outline, to conceive it at once in article-size, and then to fill in this limited canvas with sparkling anecdote, telling bits of colour, and facts, all fused together by a real genius for narrative, was the sort of genre-painting which Macaulay applied to history. . . .  And to this day his essays remain the best of their class, not only in England, but in Europe. . . .  The best would adorn any literature, and even the less successful have a picturesque animation, and convey an impression of power that will not easily be matched.  And, again, we need to bear in mind that they were the productions of a writer immersed in business, written in his scanty moments of leisure, when most men would have rested or sought recreation.  Macaulay himself was most modest in his estimate of their value. . . .  It was the public that insisted on their re-issue, and few would be bold enough to deny that the public was right.”

It is to Mr. Morison that the plan followed in the present edition of the Essays is due.  In his monograph on Macaulay (English Men of Letters series) he devotes a chapter to the Essays and “with the object of giving as much unity as possible to a subject necessarily wanting it,” classifies the Essays into four groups, (1)English history, (2)Foreign history, (3)Controversial, (4)Critical and Miscellaneous.  The articles in the first group are equal in bulk to those of the three other groups put together, and are contained in the first volume of this issue.  They form a fairly complete survey of English history from the time of Elizabeth to the later years of the reign of George iii, and are fitly introduced by the Essay on Hallam’s History, which forms a kind of summary or microcosm of the whole period.

The scheme might be made still more complete by including certain articles (and especially the exquisite biographies contributed by Macaulay to the Encyclopaedia Britannica) which are published in the volume of “Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches.”  Exigencies of space have, however, compelled the limitation of the present edition to the “Essays” usually so-called.  These have also been reprinted in the chronological arrangement ordinarily followed (see below) in The Temple Classics (5 vols. 1900), where an exhaustive bibliography, etc., has been appended to each Essay.

Chief dates in the life of Thomas Babington Macaulay, afterwards Baron Macaulay:—­