PREFACE. THE style of Macaulay affords peculiar advantages as an instrument of literary training for young students; and it is with wisdom that the Association of New England Colleges demands from every matriculate familiarity with the characteristic and brilliant essay on Lord Clive. The present edition aims to supply such help as will make the essay most thoroughly useful to students of literature. It is as literature, not as history, that the essay is required; and as literature, not as history, it has here been treated. Exhaustive historical annotations would have doubled the size of the volume: minor allusions have therefore been disregarded on the one hand; while on the other, little attention has been paid to such references as can be found in an ordinary encyclopædia. Those who seek in the essay primarily a study of the history of India are recommended to the excellent edition of Mr. Courthope Bowen, which is furnished with an elaborate historical introduction and with copious notes. Many of Mr. Courthope Bowen's iii 29X605 notes have been borrowed in this volume, and are followed by the initials "C. B." The essay, however, richly repays study as a piece of pure literature; and the object of this edition will be attained if the student is put by it into intelligent and discriminating sympathy with the work of one of the masters of English prose. MAY, 1889. |
