Word: macaulay
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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When Thomas Babington Macaulay was four, a maid at Lady Waldegrave's spilled a cup of hot tea on his legs. Swallowing his pain, he quickly picked up the thread of his comments on his hostess' art collection. When a few minutes later she asked how he felt, little Thomas answered: "Thank you, madam, the agony is abated." At eight he wrote his Compendium of Universal History, a record of leading events from creation to the current year (1808). Next followed a long heroic poem, part of which celebrated the career of his father, Zachary, famed abolitionist...
...leading contributor to the powerful Edinburgh Review. At 30 he was an M. P., the most effective speaker in Parliament. Two years later he was the hero of the bitterly fought Reform Bill. At 33 he was a member of the supreme council of India. (Resigning five years later, Macaulay left behind a new Indian penal code and educational system, had saved ?30,000.) He became the most successful English essayist (sometimes so intoxicated with erudite digressions that he wound up lamely saying that space did not permit him to finish); and a historian whose publishers gladly sent...
...schoolboy of 14 now knows, Macaulay's genius was considerably overrated. His phenomenal, encyclopedic memory was too often a substitute for thinking. His wit borrowed its main punch from his universal spleen and political bias. (Said Macaulay, who loved only his sisters: "There are not ten people in the world whose deaths would spoil my dinner.") Most of the writers and poets he demolished-Byron, Shelley, Keats, Thackeray, Gibbon,. Wordsworth, Tom Paine, Herman Melville, to name only a few- have long survived him. And his History, while still exciting for its colorful narrative, is not noted for its accuracy...
...events-Cabinet crises, diplomatic juggling, Queen Victoria's shrewish squabbles with her ministers. Its value: that Greville, a shrewd and accurate reporter, wrote from the inside, that most of the leading political and literary figures of the day-the Duke of Wellington, Palmerston, Peel, the Princess de Lieven, Macaulay-were his friends. His scandals -such as the lustful Duke of Cumberland's attack on Lady Lyndhurst-are those with direct political repercussions...
...bitterest self-reproaches, occurring every few months, centre on his love of horse-racing. After winning ?4,000 at Newmarket he broods: "I herd with the vilest and stupidest and most degraded of beings. ..." After an evening with encyclopedic Thomas Babington Macaulay, Greville ranks himself with the worms, compares his mind to "a hurdy-gurdy in the Street" and Macaulay's to "the great Organ at Haarlem...