The Works of Lord Macaulay, in Twelve Volumes: The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, in Eight Volumes; Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to the Edinburgh Review. New Edition. in Four Volumes.

Light brown leather spines and corners, marbled boards, endpapers, and edges, gilt titles and rules. Complete in twelve volumes. Comprising Macaulay's famous history of England, as well as numerous essays on various topics. "The History of England from the Accession of James the Second is the full title of the multi-volume work by Lord Macaulay more generally known as 'The History of England'. The history is famous for its brilliant ringing prose and for its confident, sometimes dogmatic, emphasis on a progressive model of British history, according to which the country threw off superstition, autocracy and confusion to create a balanced constitution and a forward-looking culture combined with freedom of belief and expression. This model of human progress has been called the Whig interpretation of history. Macaulay's approach has been criticised by later historians for its one-sidedness and its complacency. His tendency to see history as a drama led him to treat figures whose views he opposed as if they were villains, while his approved characters were presented as heroes. Macaulay goes to considerable length, for example, to absolve his hero William III of any responsibility for the Glencoe massacre. Macaulay's approach to writing history was innovative for his period. He consciously fused the picturesque, dramatic style of classical historians such as Thucydides and Tacitus with the learned and factual approach of his eighteenth century precursors such as Hume, following the plan laid out in his own earlier Essay on History." "Thomas Babington Macaulay was a nineteenth-century English poet, historian and Whig politician and Member of Parliament for Edinburgh. He wrote extensively as an essayist and reviewer, and on British history. The son and eldest child of Zachary Macaulay, a Scottish Highlander who became a colonial governor and abolitionist, Thomas was born in Leicestershire, England, and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. Macaulay was noted as a child prodigy.