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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1. baron Macaulay , brytyjski pisarz, historyk i polityk, członek stronnictwa wigów, minister w rządach lorda Melbourne'a i lorda Johna Russella.

Był najstarszym synem Zachary'ego Macaulaya, abolicjonisty i gubernatora Sierra Leone. Wykształcenie odebrał w Trinity College na Uniwersytecie Cambridge. Podczas studiów pisał wiersze i wygrał wiele nagród, m.in. złoty medal Kanclerza Uniwersytetu w czerwcu 1821 r. W 1825 r. opublikował esej o Johnie Miltonie na łamach Edinburgh Review. W 1826 r. rozpoczął praktykę adwokacką, ale porzucił karierę prawniczą dla polityki.

W 1830 r. został wybrany do Izby Gmin z okręgu Calne. Dał się poznać jako zwolennik reform wyborczych oraz równouprawnienia obywateli, głównie zniesienia dyskryminacji Żydów. Po uchwaleniu Great Reform Act w 1832 r. zmienił okręg na Leeds. W latach 1832-1833 był sekretarzem Rady Kontroli. Po uchwaleniu Government of India Act w 1833 r. został jednym z członków Rady Gubernatora Generalnego.

Macaulay wyjechał do Indii w 1834 r. Przez 4 lata pracował w Najwyższej Radzie Indii. Doprowadził do ustanowienia języka angielskiego obowiązkowym językiem szkolnictwa wyższego. Stał na czele Komisji Prawnej, która przygotowała założenia Kodeksu Karnego , Kodeksu Procedury Karnej oraz Kodeksu Procedury Cywilnej .

Po powrocie do Wielkiej Brytanii w 1838 r. Macaulay uzyskał mandat parlamentarny z okręgu Edinburgh. W 1839 r. został sekretarzem ds. wojny. Po upadku gabinetu w 1841 r. poświęcił się pracy literackiej. Napisał wówczas zbiór ballad Lays of Ancient Rome. W 1841 r. przedstawił swoje poglądy na kwestie prawa autorskiego, które stały się ważną podstawą kształtowania się tego prawa w krajach anglosaskich. W latach 1846-1848 był Paymaster-General. W 1847 r. utracił miejsce w Izbie Gmin.

W 1849 r. został wybrany rektorem Uniwersytetu Glasgow. W 1852 r. został ponownie wybrany z okręgu Edinburgh, ale z powodu złego stanu zdrowia, który doprowadził go do zawału serca, zrezygnował z mandatu w 1856 r. Był jednym z założycieli National Portrait Gallery. W 1857 r. otrzymał tytuł 1. barona Macaulay i zasiadł w Izbie Lordów. Zmarł w 1859 r. i został pochowany w Opactwie Westminsterskim. Nigdy się nie ożenił i nie pozostawił potomstwa. Wraz z jego śmiercią wygasł tytuł parowski.

Umierając Macaulay pozostawił niedokończonym swoje najważniejsze dzieło, Dzieje Anglii od wstąpienia na tron Jakuba II. Pracę nad nim rozpoczął w latach 40. Pierwsze dwie części ukazały się w 1848 r., dwie następne w 1855 r. Macaulay miał nadzieję dojść w swojej pracy do śmierci królowej Anny , ale zmarł ukończywszy tylko jeszcze jeden tom. Szóstą część, kończącą się na śmierci Wilhelma III wydała po śmierci Macaulaya jego siostra. Chociaż jego praca była krytykowana za nieukrywaną sympatię do wigów, sprzedano w tydzień 26 000 jej egzemplarzy. Przetłumaczono ją na język niemiecki, polski, duński, szwedzki, włoski, język francuski, niderlandzki, hiszpański, węgierski, rosyjski, czeski i perski. Wikipedia  

✵ 25. Październik 1800 – 28. Grudzień 1859   •   Natępne imiona Thomas Babington Macaulay, Thomas Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay Fotografia
Thomas Babington Macaulay: 103   Cytaty 0   Polubień

Thomas Babington Macaulay cytaty

„Grzeczność – to dobroć w drobnostkach.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay

Źródło: Leksykon złotych myśli, wyboru dokonał Krzysztof Nowak, Warszawa 1998.

O myślach , O myśleniu

„Im więcej czytam o Sokratesie, tym mniej się dziwię, że go otruto.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay

The more I read about him, the less I wonder that they poisoned him.
Źródło: Robert E. Sullivan, Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009, s. 172.

O czytaniu

Thomas Babington Macaulay: Cytaty po angielsku

“It is my firm belief that if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolator among the respectable classes of Bengal thirty years hence.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Letter written to his father in 1836. Quoted in Indian Church History Review, December 1973, p. 187. Quoted from Goel, S. R. (2016). History of Hindu-Christian encounters, AD 304 to 1996. Chapter 13. ISBN 9788185990354

“Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

On Machiavelli http://www.bartleby.com/27/24.html (1827)

“I have not the Chancellor’s encyclopedic mind. He is indeed a kind of semi-Solomon. He half knows everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Letter to Macvey Napier (17 December 1830)

“Such night in England ne'er had been, nor ne'er again shall be.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

The Armada, l. 34 (1833)

“To punish public outrages on morals and religion is unquestionably within the competence of rulers. But when a government, not content with requiring decency, requires sanctity, it oversteps the bounds which mark its proper functions. And it may be laid down as a universal rule that a government which attempts more than it ought will perform less.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

"Leigh Hunt" (1841), in Critical...Essays 2:509
Attributed

“If any person had told the Parliament which met in terror and perplexity after the crash of 1720 that in 1830 the wealth of England would surpass all their wildest dreams, that the annual revenue would equal the principal of that debt which they considered an intolerable burden, that for one man of £10,000 then living there would be five men of £50,000, that London would be twice as large and twice as populous, and that nevertheless the rate of mortality would have diminished to one half of what it then was, that the post-office would bring more into the exchequer than the excise and customs had brought in together under Charles II, that stage coaches would run from London to York in 24 hours, that men would be in the habit of sailing without wind, and would be beginning to ride without horses, our ancestors would have given as much credit to the prediction as they gave to Gulliver's Travels.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

From Edinburgh Review, 1830
Attributed

“Copyright is monopoly, and produces all the effects which the general voice of mankind attributes to monopoly. […] Monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

http://www.baen.com/library/palaver4.htm
Attributed

“No sound of joy or sorrow
Was heard from either bank;
But friends and foes in dumb surprise,
With parted lips and straining eyes,
Stood gazing where he sank;
And when above the surges,
They saw his crest appear,
All Rome sent forth a rapturous cry,
And even the ranks of Tuscany
Could scarce forbear to cheer.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay książka Lays of Ancient Rome

Horatius, st. 60
Lays of Ancient Rome (1842)

“I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Letter to Macvey Napier (5 November 1841)

“Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Essay on Mitford's History of Greece (1824)

“Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Southey's Colloquies on Society (1830)

“I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Attributed

“Soon fades the spell, soon comes the night;
Say will it not be then the same,
Whether we played the black or white,
Whether we lost or won the game?”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Sermon in a Churchyard, st. 8 (1825)

“I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Letter to his Niece (15 September 1842)

“That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Essay on Mitford's History of Greece (1824)

“Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed have to wait forever.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay książka Critical and Historical Essays

Critical and Historical Essays: Volume II (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1907), p. 180
On Milton (1825)

“It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern,—a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Minute on Education http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html (1835)

“The work of Dr. Nares has filled us with astonishment similar to that which Captain Lemuel Gulliver felt when first he landed in Brobdingnag, and saw corn as high as the oaks in the New Forest, thimbles as large as buckets, and wrens of the bulk of turkeys. The whole book, and every component part of it, is on a gigantic scale. The title is as long as an ordinary preface: the prefatory matter would furnish out an ordinary book; and the book contains as much reading as an ordinary library. We cannot sum up the merits of the stupendous mass of paper which lies before us better than by saying that it consists of about two thousand closely printed quarto pages, that it occupies fifteen hundred inches cubic measure, and that it weighs sixty pounds avoirdupois. Such a book might, before the deluge, have been considered as light reading by Hilpa and Shallum. But unhappily the life of man is now three-score years and ten; and we cannot but think it somewhat unfair in Dr. Nares to demand from us so large a portion of so short an existence. Compared with the labour of reading through these volumes, all other labour, the labour of thieves on the treadmill, of children in factories, of negroes in sugar plantations, is an agreeable recreation.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Review of a life of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley by Edward Nares, Edinburgh Review, 1832)
Attributed

“The sweeter sound of woman’s praise.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Lines written in August, 1847

“There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay książka Critical and Historical Essays

"Essay on Ludwig von Ranke's 'History of the Popes', in "Critical and Historical Essays", iii, (London; Longman, 7th Edn. 1952), 100-1.
Attributed

“Oh! wherefore come ye forth in triumph from the north,
With your hands and your feet and your raiment all red?
And wherefore doth your rout send forth a joyous shout?
And whence be the grapes of the wine-press which ye tread?”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

The Battle of Naseby http://www.bartleby.com/246/74.html (1824)

“The Chief Justice was rich, quiet, and infamous.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

On Warren Hastings (1841)

“To the Whigs of the seventeenth century we owe it that we have a House of Commons. To the Whigs of the nineteenth century we owe it that the House of Commons has been purified. The abolition of the slave-trade, the abolition of colonial slavery, the extension of popular education, the mitigation of the rigour of the penal code, all, all were effected by that party; and of that party, I repeat, I am a member. I look with pride on all that the Whigs have done for the cause of human freedom and of human happiness. I see them now hard pressed, struggling with difficulties, but still fighting the good fight. At their head I see men who have inherited the spirit and the virtues, as well as the blood, of old champions and martyrs of freedom…While one shred of the old banner is flying, by that banner will I at least be found.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Speech http://www.bartleby.com/349/authors/133.html to the electors at Edinburgh (May 1839)

“Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Letter to H.S. Randall, author of a Life of Thomas Jefferson (23 May 1857)

“A man who has never looked on Niagra has but a faint idea of a cataract; and he who has not read Barère's Memoirs may be said not to know what it is to lie.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

On Mémoires de Bertrand Barère (1844)

“An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

On Lord Bacon

“It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

On John Dryden (1828)

“The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to him great, and whatever was great seemed to him little.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

On Horace Walpole (1833)

“The ambassador [of Russia] and the grandees who accompanied him were so gorgeous that all London crowded to stare at them, and so filthy that nobody dared to touch them. They came to the court balls dropping pearls and vermin.”

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Vol. V, ch. 23
History of England (1849–1861)