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 is

Hence 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 rarest, as well as the most precious, of human virtues. But there never was a writer less capable of intentional unfairness. This, during his lifetime, was the belief of his friends, but was hardly admitted by his opponents. His biographer has really lifted the question out of the range of controversy. He wrote for truth; but, of course, for truth as he saw it; and his sight was coloured from within. This colour, once attached, was what in manufacture is called a mordant; it was a fast colour; he could not distinguish between what his mind had received, and what his mind had imparted. Hence, when he was wrong, he could not see that he was wrong; and of those calamities which are due to the intellect only, and not the heart, there can hardly be a greater. The hope of amending is, after all, our very best and brightest hope; of amending our works as well as ourselves. Without it we are forbidden revocare gradus, superasque evadere ad aurus, when we have accidentally, as is the way with men, slipped into Avernus. While, as to his authorship, Macaulay was incessantly labouring to improve, in the substance of what he had written he could neither himself detect his errors, nor could he perceive him when they were pointed out.

I will remark that Macaulay had once published an unfavorable, very well written review of a pamphlet of Gladstone's; but Gladstone had long moved on from the views he professed there.