Essay on Milton - 1903 Author:Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: is clearly an expression of his own aggressive personality. Lord Melbourne is quoted as having expressed a wish that he could " be as cocksure of anything as Tom... more » Macaulay was of everything." He uses strong words, makes unqualified statements, universal propositions. His use of superlatives was excessive, and he had a trick, as Newcomer indicates, of raising superlatives to the second or third degree, e.g., " What the Italian is to the Englishman, what the Hindoo is to the Italian, what the Bengalee is to other Hindoos, that was Nuncomar to other Bengalees." Macaulay's concreteness and power of illustration may be mentioned together, for they are both the result of his power of imaginatively constructing a picture of the past, of which his memory supplied him with countless details of the incidents and circumstances. Such are some of the elements of the famous journalistic style of Macaulay, a style against which one needs to be on one's guard, for it is easier to imitate its faults than its merits. VII. The Essay On Milton The Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802, had in 1825 reached its highest point of power. Its editor, Jeffrey, was "growing feverish about new writers." In January, 1825, he wrote to a friend in London: " Can you not lay your hands on some clever young man who would write for us? The original supporters of the work aregetting old, and either too busy or too stupid, and here the young men are mostly Tories." That same year Macaulay's essay on Milton appeared in the August number. Trevelyan says: " The effect on the author's reputation was instantaneous. Like Lord Byron, he awoke one morning and found himself famous. The beauties of the work were such as all men could recognize, and its very faults pleased. The redundance of youthful enthusiasm, which ...« less