ECLECTIC ENGLISH CLASSICS Addison's Sir Roger de Coverley (Underwood) Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum (Tanner) Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (Jones and Arnold) Burke's Conciliation with America (Clark) Speeches at Bristol (Bergin) Burns's Poems-Selections (Venable) Byron's Childe Harold (Canto IV), Prisoner of Chillon, Mazeppa, and other Selections (Venable) Carlyle's Essay on Burns (Miller) Chaucer's Prologue and Knighte's Tale (Van Dyke) Coleridge's Ancient Mariner (Garrigues) Cooper's Pilot (Watrous) Defoe's History of the Plague in Robinson Crusoe (Stephens) De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars Dickens's Christmas Carol and Cricket on the Hearth (Wannamaker) Tale of Two Cities (Pearce) Dryden's Palamon and Arcite (Bates) Eliot's Silas Marner (McKitrick) Emerson's American Scholar, Self Reliance, Compensation (Smith) Franklin's Autobiography (Reid) Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield (Hansen) De Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard, and Goldsmith's serted Village (Van Dyke) Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days (Gosling). Irving's Sketch Book-Selections (St. John) Tales of a Traveler (Rutland) Lincoln's Addresses and Letters (Moores) Address at Cooper Union; and Macaulay's Speeches on Copyright (Pittenger) Essay on Addison Macaulay's Essay on Milton (Mead) Essays on Lord Clive and Warren (8.95b) ECLECTIC ENGLISH CLASSICS MACAULAY'S LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON EDITED BY CLINTON W. LUCAS DELANCEY SCHOOL, Philadelphia, pa. NEW YORK: CINCINNATI: CHICAGO INTRODUCTION. THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY, the most popular essayist of his time, was born at Leicestershire, Eng., in 1800. His father, Zachary Macaulay, a friend and coworker of Wilberforce, was a man of austere character, who was greatly shocked at his son's fondness for worldly literature. Macaulay's mother, however, encouraged his reading, and did much to foster his literary tastes. "From the time that he was three," says Trevelyan in his standard biography, “Macaulay read incessantly, for the most part lying on the rug before the fire, with his book on the ground and a piece of bread and butter in his hand." He early showed marks of uncommon genius. When he was only seven, he took it into his head to write a "Compendium of Universal History." He could remember almost the exact phraseology of the books he read, and had Scott's "Marmion" almost entirely by heart. His omnivorous reading and extraordinary memory bore ample fruit in the richness of allusion and brilliancy of illustration that marked the literary style of his mature years. He could have written “Sir Charles Grandison" from memory, and in 1849 he could repeat more than half of "Paradise Lost." In 1818 Macaulay entered Trinity College, Cambridge. Here he won prizes in classics and English; but he had an invincible distaste for mathematics. 190971 |