“MACAULAY DID FOR THE HISTORICAL ESSAY WHAT HAYDN DID FOR THE SONATA”

MACAULAY, Thomas Babington. Critical and Historical Essays. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1844. Three volumes. Quarto, contemporary three-quarter plum polished calf, elaborately gilt-decorated spines, raised bands, green morocco spine labels, marbled boards and endpapers, top edges gilt. $950.

Third edition of this three-volume collection of Macaulay's essays, published just one year after the first, handsomely bound.

Praised as "the prince of essayists," renowned historian "Thomas Macaulay did for the historical essay what Haydn did for the sonata… To take a bright period or personage of history, to frame it in a firm outline, to conceive it at once in article-size, and then to fill in this limited canvas with sparkling anecdote, telling bits of color, and facts, all fused together by a real genius for narrative, was the sort of genre painting which Macaulay applied to history… To this day his essays remain the best of their class, not only in England, but in Europe" (Cotter Morison). First published in 1843. Bookplates.

Text clean and fine; one corner of Volume I gently bumped, spines mildly toned, gilt bright. A handsome copy in near-fine condition.