Title page from Critical and Historical Essays, Vol. 2

Part of: Critical and Historical Essays contributed to the Edinburgh Review, 3 vols. Critical and Historical Essays, Vol. 2

Essays by Macaulay in the Edinburgh Review published between 1832 and 1839 on Horace Walpole, the War of Spanish Succession, William Pitt, Sir James Mackintosh, Lord Bacon, and Gladstone.

Key Quotes

The State

We consider the primary end of government as a purely temporal end, the protection of the persons and property of men. We think that government, like every other contrivance of human wisdom, from the highest to the lowest, is likely to answer its main end best when it is constructed with a single…

Rhetoric of Liberty

In the thirteenth year of his age he (Francis Bacon) was entered at Trinity College, Cambridge. That celebrated school of learning enjoyed the peculiar favour of the Lord Treasurer and the Lord Keeper, and acknowledged the advantages which it derived from their patronage in a public letter which…