Thomas Babington Macaulay

Poet and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay died this day, December 28, in 1859.  As Macaulay was the son of a highlander, it is perhaps not too much of a surprise that he became a fan of Sir Walter Scott’s work.  George Trevelyan, in “The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay” relates that ‘…He was so fired with reading Scott’s Lay and Marmion, the former of which he got entirely, and the latter almost entirely, by heart, merely from his delight in reading them, that he determined on writing himself a poem in six cantos which he called the “Battle of Cheviot”…’