ECLECTIC ENGLISH CLASSICS AN ESSAY ON JOHN MILTON BY LORD MACAULAY NEW YORK •:• CINCINNATI •:• CHICAGO 1894 INTRODUCTION. THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY was born in Leicestershire, Oct. 25, 1800. Before he was ten years old he showed a decided bent for literature, and a good deal of juvenile prose and verse attests his precocity. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1818. He was averse to mathematical and scientific studies, but achieved much distinction at the university by his poems and essays, and by his speeches in the debating society. He received his degree in 1822, and four years later was admitted to the bar. When, about this time, commercial disaster befell his father, it was plain that Macaulay, upon whom the family support devolved, could not count for maintenance upon his chosen profession of the law. At the instance of powerful friends, he was in 1828 made a commissioner of bankruptcy, and two years afterwards he entered the House of Commons as member for Calne, a pocket borough in the gift of Lord Lansdowne. In 1834 he was appointed to a seat in the Supreme Council of India. This place he held till 1838, and the munificent salary attached to it (£10,000) gave him the independence needful for the carrying out of his great literary work, the “History of England." His "Essays," by which he is best known to the 5 |