The MagazineHistorian of EnglandLord Macaulay survives another academic assault.Jun 7, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 36
• By EDWIN M. YODER JR.
 Macaulay  The Tragedy of Power Here, in a nutshell, is the paradox of Thomas Babington Macaulay: Dip at random into this most fluent of historians, and no reader acquainted with the muddle and tragedy of human striving can believe that the past could be so schematic and colorful as he paints it—still less that the winners were so much more virtuous than the losers. Yet one is swept along, as if in a torrent, by the force and brilliance of the prose. And what is more, one is delighted! No historian writing in English, with the possible exception of Edward Gibbon, has ever been more captivating, nor more annoying in his peculiarities. From the age of 24, when he won first acclaim with a powerful essay vindicating Milton’s Roundhead politics, Macaulay rarely failed to popularize what he touched. Students of English history and letters on both sides of the Atlantic long relished his History of England, a historical melodrama celebrating the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688: the supplanting of James II by the last Stuart king’s Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch consort, a foundation stone of the whig interpretation of history, the triumph of parliament over the crown. An excerpt from his essay on Sir James Mackintosh, a forerunner in the writing of whiggish history, suggests the flavor: To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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