Word: macaulay
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...Lord Macaulay's lordly eloquence had carried the day for English against Oriental rivals. He had heaped scorn on India's backward tongues-they taught "medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school, history abounding with kings 30 feet high and reigns 30,000 years long, and geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter . . ." He had acclaimed English as the key "to all the vast intellectual wealth which all the wisest nations of the world have created and hoarded in the course...
...classmates at Harrow, George Macaulay Trevelyan seemed, as he himself tells it, like "a 'swot' of the worst kind . . . socially [a] misfit . . . a complete muff at cricket, and clumsy at football." He was "wrapped in literary and historical imaginings," and he was also a crashing bore. "I never had dreams of being a general, or a statesman or an engine-driver, like other aspiring children . . . I wanted to be [a] historian...
Roundheads & Rome. The ticking began almost at birth. The son of Historian Sir George Otto Trevelyan and grandnephew of Lord Macaulay, young George grew up in a rambling mansion in Shakespeare's Warwickshire. He was a "queer, happy little boy," who would play soldier ("Napoleonic period") by the hour, and could recite the Lays of Ancient Rome by heart. At school, he was happiest arguing the Roundhead cause against his pro-Cavalier school chums, or wandering about some nearby battlefield with his history-minded house master ("O boy, you oughtn't to have a hot bath twice...
...Servile and impertinent," Lord Macaulay had called him, "shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of London." That, for several generations of scholars, was the final verdict on James Boswell. The 18th Century Scotsman was regarded as little more than a toady and a drunken rogue, whose one claim to fame was his great and somehow accidental Life of Samuel Johnson. And many credited the book's virtues to the subject rather than the biographer...
Over the past 20 years, Lord Macaulay's colossal misjudgment has been reversed. With the rediscovery of a vast cache of notes and letters that the portly biographer spent a lifetime scribbling, Boswell has gradually but increasingly been getting his due. Last week in Manhattan, a new stack of Boswelliana was made public for the first time...