The third and final volume of Macaulay’s Critical and Historical Essays gathers his celebrated reviews from the Edinburgh Review, including penetrating assessments of figures such as Frederick the Great, Madame d’Arblay, and William Pitt. Macaulay’s prose — vivid, confident, and rhetorically dazzling — made these essays the most widely read historical criticism of the Victorian age.
Even where modern scholarship has revised his judgements, Macaulay’s essays remain invaluable as works of literature and as documents of nineteenth-century British historical consciousness. Essential reading for admirers of English prose and students of European historiography.