It was difficult to understand what was going on across the Channel, but there was satisfaction in the thought that we were not as other nations. Our… - G. M. Trevelyan

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It was difficult to understand what was going on across the Channel, but there was satisfaction in the thought that we were not as other nations. Our social and political troubles, it was held, lay behind us, wisely solved in advance—by Queen Elizabeth, William of Orange, Pitt, Lord Grey, Mr. Cobden or Sir Robert Peel, according to choice—and above all by the calm good sense of the British people. In the middle of the European revolutions the first part of Macaulay's history was published, and attained at once a popularity and influence analogous to that of Scott, Byron or Dickens. There were many grounds for its success, but one was that it presented a reasoned eulogy of Britain and things British, as that age understood them. Nor could the historian resist the temptation of inserting a passage proudly contrasting 1688 at home with 1848 abroad.

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About G. M. Trevelyan

George Macaulay Trevelyan (16 February 1876 – 21 July 1962) was an English historian and academic.

Also Known As

Alternative Names: George Macauley Trevelyan George Macaulay Trevelyan

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The discredit to the good name of England if she drifts, however unintentionally, into a partition of the Persian State with the Russian Government, and the consequent setback to the moral element in our foreign policy, cannot lightly be faced.

In our own day classics have been dethroned without being replaced. But throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries our statesmen were so brought up that they thought of Rome as the hearth of their political civilization, where their predecessor Cicero had denounced Catiline; where the models of their own eloquence and statecraft, as taught them at Eton, Harrow and Winchester, had been practised and brought to perfection. And, therefore, the ruins of the Forum were as familiar, as sacred, and as moving to Russell and to Gladstone as to Mazzini and Garibaldi themselves. This was a prime fact in the history of the Risorgimento.

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I am sure I am as little of a Jacobite as anybody but I sincerely hope that the statue of James II will not be moved, because it is a fine work of art. If once we begin moving statues for political or historical reasons there will be no end to controversy.

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