Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–59) was an English historian, essayist, philanthropist, and Whig politician. He was a civil servant in India, where he founded a system of education and a new criminal code before returning to Britain and dedicating himself to literature and politics.
Born in Rothley Temple, Leicestershire, and educated at Trinity College-Cambridge, Macaulay was called to the Bar in 1826. He then mixed his legal career with writing. His article on John Milton in the August 1825 issue of the Edinburgh Review had gained him recognition. For nearly 20 years, he was one of the magazine’s most prolific and popular writers. He became MP for the borough of Caine in 1830 and took part in the Reform Bill debates.
Macaulay was a legal adviser to the Supreme Council of India (1834–38.) He is considered primarily responsible for introducing the British education system in India. Upon his return in 1839, Macaulay became MP for Edinburgh and later secretary of war under Home Secretary William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne.
Macaulay wrote extensively on contemporary and historical sociopolitical subjects. His History of England from the Accession of James II (5 vols., 1848–61) enjoyed unprecedented popularity for a work of its kind. Its literary style has remained an object of praise since its publication.
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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.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Bible, Religion
The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Painting, Art, Painters
Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
We must judge a government by its general tendencies and not by its happy accidents.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Government
By poetry we mean the art of employing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination; the art of doing by means of words, what the painter does by means of colors.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Poetry
Oh, wherefore come ye forth in triumph from the north, With your hands, and your feet, and your raiment all red? And wherefore doth your rout send forth a joyous shout? And whence be the grapes of the wine-press which ye tread?
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Wine
There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not gentlemen; and the gentlemen were not seamen.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Navy, The Military, Army
Obscurity and affectation are the two great faults of style. Obscurity of expression generally springs from confusion of ideas; and the same wish to dazzle, at any cost, which produces affectation in the manner of a writer, is likely to produce sophistry in his reasoning.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Style
Few of the many wise apothegms which have been uttered from the time of the seven sages of Greece to that of poor Richard, have prevented a single foolish action.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Children, look in those eyes, listen to that dear voice, notice the feeling of even a single touch that is bestowed upon you by that gentle hand! Make much of it while yet you have that most precious of all good gifts, a loving mother. Read the unfathomable love of those eyes; the kind anxiety of that tone and look, however slight your pain. In after life you may have friends, fond, dear friends, but never will you have again the inexpressible love and gentleness lavished upon you, which none but a mother bestows.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Mother
Charles V. said that a man who knew four languages was worth four men; and Alexander the Great so valued learning, that he used to say he was more indebted to Aristotle for giving him knowledge, than to his father Philip for giving him life.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Knowledge
The measure of a man’s real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
As in every human character so in every transaction there is a mixture of good and evil: a little exaggeration, a little suppression, a judicious use of epithets, a watchful and searching skepticism with respect to the evidence on one side, a convenient credulity with respect to every report or tradition on the other, may easily make a saint of Laud, or a tyrant of Henry the Fourth.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: History
He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Poetry
If any person had told the Parliament which met in terror and perplexity after the crash of 1720 that in 1830 the wealth of England would surpass all their wildest dreams, that the annual revenue would equal the principal of that debt which they considered an intolerable burden, that for one man of
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Progress
History has its foreground and its background, and it is principally in the management of its perspective that one artist differs from another. Some events must be represented on a large scale, others diminished; the great majority will be lost in the dimness of the horizon, and a general idea of their joint effect will be given by a few slight touches.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: History
A page digested is better than a volume hurriedly read.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Reading
And she (the Roman Catholic Church) may still exist in undiminished vigor, 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.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Religion
Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: History
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 neighbor and to love your neighbor’s wife.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Society, Ethics
To punish a man because he has committed a crime, or because he is believed, though unjustly, to have committed a crime, is not persecution. To punish a man, because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Prejudice
Every generation enjoys the use of a vast hoard bequeathed to it by antiquity, and transmits that hoard, augmented by fresh acquisitions, to future ages.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Knowledge
It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age. Great minds do indeed react on the society which has made them what they are, but they only pay with interest what they have received.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Influence
The real object of the drama is the exhibition of the human character.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
The opinion of the great body of the reading public, is very materially influenced even by the unsupported assertions of those who assume a right to criticise.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Criticism
Both in individuals, and in masses, violent excitement is always followed by remission, and often by reaction. We are all inclined to depreciate what we have over-praised, and, on the other hand, to show undue indulgence where we have shown undue rigor.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Those who seem to lead the public taste, are, in general, merely outrunning it in the direction it is spontaneously pursuing.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Fashion
She thoroughly understands what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Religion
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Poetry, Poets
Logicians may reason about abstractions. But the great mass of men must have images. The strong tendency of the multitude in all ages and nations to idolatry can be explained on no other principle.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay