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Thomas B. Macaulay

1800 AD — 1859 AD

Listed in the author section of Bartlett’s ninth-edition anthology, in the linked 1905 printing. Dates reflect that historical edition and may differ from modern scholarship.

Author and source reference ↗

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Historical source references

On Mitford's History of Greece
On Milton
On Machiavelli
On John Dryden
On Moore's Life of Lord Byron
On Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress
On Horace Walpole
On Boswell's Life of Johnson (Croker's ed
On Sir William Temple
On Ranke's History of the Popes
On Warren Hastings
On Frederic the Great
History of England
Letter to Macvey Napier, Dec
Lays of Ancient Rome
The Battle of Lake Regillus
Lines written in August, 1847
Political Georgics
Christianity · anthology attribution: Macaulay
Freedom · anthology attribution: Macaulay
Infidelity · anthology attribution: Macaulay
Poetry · anthology attribution: Macaulay
Printed citation: Macaulay
Page 43 · printed citation: Macaulay · subject: Church
Page 98 · printed citation: Macaulay · subject: Genius
Page 108 · printed citation: Macaulay · subject: Greatness
Page 120 · printed citation: Macaulay · subject: History
Page 133 · printed citation: Macaulay · subject: Influence
Page 172 · printed citation: Macaulay · subject: Milton
Page 175 · printed citation: Macaulay · subject: Moderation

Archive entries

01c. 1829 AD

That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.

Thomas B. Macaulay / quote

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02c. 1829 AD

Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.

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03c. 1829 AD

The history of nations, in the sense in which I use the word, is often best studied in works not professedly historical.

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04c. 1829 AD

Wherever literature consoles sorrow or assuages pain; wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep,—there is exhibited in its noblest form the immortal influence of Athens.

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05c. 1829 AD

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

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06c. 1829 AD

Nobles by the right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand.

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07c. 1829 AD

Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.

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08c. 1829 AD

The English Bible,—a book which if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.

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09c. 1829 AD

His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar.

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10c. 1829 AD

A man possessed of splendid talents, which he often abused, and of a sound judgment, the admonitions of which he often neglected; a man who succeeded only in an inferior department of his art, but who in that department succeeded pre-eminently.

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11c. 1829 AD

He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked.

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12c. 1829 AD

We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.

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13c. 1829 AD

From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness,—a system in which the two great commandments were to hate your neighbour and to love your neighbour's wife.

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14c. 1829 AD

That wonderful book, while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it.

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15c. 1829 AD

The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to him great, and whatever was great seemed to him little.

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16c. 1829 AD

What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man!—To be regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion! To receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius have in general received only from posterity; to be more intimately known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries!

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17c. 1829 AD

Temple was a man of the world amongst men of letters, a man of letters amongst men of the world.

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18c. 1829 AD

She [the Roman Catholic Church] may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.

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19c. 1829 AD

The chief-justice was rich, quiet, and infamous.

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20c. 1829 AD

In that temple of silence and reconciliation where the enmities of twenty generations lie buried, in the great Abbey which has during many ages afforded a quiet resting-place to those whose minds and bodies have been shattered by the contentions of the Great Hall.

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21c. 1829 AD

In order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of North America.

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22c. 1829 AD

We hardly know an instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking and so grotesque as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.

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23c. 1829 AD

I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history.

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24c. 1829 AD

There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles II. But the seamen were not gentlemen, and the gentlemen were not seamen.

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Thomas B. Macaulay

Archive entries

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