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Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 March 2010
Summary
The years between the publication of the first two and the second two volumes of Macaulay's History exhibit a mingled pattern of light and shade. While the public man was showered with national and international honors, the private person found his once robust health beginning to give way until, midway in the period covered in this volume, it broke, never to be fully restored. Macaulay bore the irony of his situation with determined good spirits, but he could hardly help seeing his triumphs under the shadow of mortality.
The honors were certainly abundant. As he wrote to Ellis in February of 1853:
You little know the dignity of your correspondent. I now sign myself
T B Macaulay FRS, MRIA, M P late fellow of Trin Coll
Cambridge late Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow,
Knight of the Order of Merit of Prussia, Member of the
Royal Academies of Munich and Turin, Member of the
Historical Society of Utrecht, and, – die of envy –
Member of the French Institute in the
Department of Moral Science!!!
Later in the year he was to receive an honorary D.C.L. from Oxford. He was already a Trustee of the British Museum, the (honorary) Professor of Ancient Literature of the Royal Academy, a Bencher of Lincoln's Inn, and a Senator of the University of London. The profits from his books grew with every year. In England, the first installment of the History of England had reached an eleventh edition – a total of 35,000 copies in the expensive library format – before the second installment appeared to set off a wave of even greater sales.
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- The Letters of Thomas Babington MacAulay , pp. vii - xiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1981