Lord Macaulay, my only friend through teenage years

I often hate Allan Massie's opinions but here he and Lord Macaulay are right. Why don't we have Liberals like Macaulay any more?

Gladstone in those days was what Macaulay called the rising hope of the stern unbending Tories - when he became a Liberal he called the Confederate States a nation rightly struggling to be free - he was correct- and Bourbon Sicily the rule of Satan made manifest - probably wrong but I wasnt there.

Nowadays right-wing conservatives are liberals and liberals are socialists and socialists are ...I'm not sure what they are anymore but pretty awful. And are there any conservative left? If so they are called extremists.

On the other hand if the Lord Chancellor told people whom to marry there would probably be fewer divorces and more happy marriages.


If you haven't read Lord Macaulay on Robert Montgomery do so with haste. At any rate it reduced me to hysterics aged 13. Lytton Strachey called Macaulay's humour elephantine which I suppose it is.