Gladstone on Macaulay

I have never read Macaulay's histories. In his essays, I tend to be aware of the thumb on the scale, confident that someone could work from the same documents and come up with a very different interpretation. In his biography of Gladstone, Roy Jenkins mentions in passing, as judicious, a notice of Macaulay that Gladstone wrote, a review of The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. It is possible to find this on line, via the University of Pennsylvania's Online Books Page, and eventually HathiTrust. (If your IP address indicates that you are outside the US, this may not work.)The review is quite long (the life and letters ran to two volumes), and with many interesting passages. A fair sample isHence arose, it seems reasonable to believe, that charge of partisanship against Macaulay as a historian, on which much has been, and probably much more will be, said. He may not have possessed that scrupulously tender sense of obligation, that nice tact of exact justice, which is among the very…