COLLATION: _xvi, 624 pp. Forty plates, including the engraved title-page._ THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY, FIRST BARON MACAULAY (1800-1859) 88. The | History Of England | From | The Accession Of James II. | By | Thomas Babington Macaulay. | Volume I. | London: | Printed For | Longman, Brown, Green, And Longmans, | Paternoster-Row. | 1849. [-1861]. Trevelyan, in his _Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay_, tells us there was no end to the trouble that the author devoted to matters which most writers are glad to leave to their publishers. "He could not rest until the lines were level to a hair's breadth, and the punctuation correct to a comma; until every paragraph concluded with a telling sentence, and every sentence flowed like water." In a footnote he adds this quotation from one of Macaulay's letters to Mr. Longman, which, while it referred to the edition of 1858, is also indicative of his attitude toward this, the first edition: "I have no more corrections to make at present. I am inclined to hope that the book will be as nearly faultless, as to typographical execution, as any work of equal extent that is to be found in the world." He was apprehensive concerning the success of the book. He writes, "I have armed myself with all my philosophy for the event of failure," but his fears were groundless. "The people of the United States," says Trevelyan, "were even more eager than the people of the United Kingdom to read about their common ancestors; with the advantage that, from the absence of an international copyright, they were able to read about them for next to nothing. On the 4th of April, 1849, Messrs. Harper, of New York, wrote to Macaulay: 'We beg you to accept herewith a copy of our cheap edition of your work. There have been three other editions published by different houses, and another is now in preparation; so there will be six different editions in the market. We have already sold forty thousand copies, and we presume that over sixty thousand copies have been disposed of. Probably, within three months of this time, the sale will amount to two hundred thousand copies. No work, of any kind, has ever so completely taken our whole country by storm.' An indirect compliment to the celebrity of the book was afforded by a desperate, and almost internecine, controversy which raged throughout the American newspapers as to whether the Messrs. Harper were justified in having altered Macaulay's spelling to suit the orthographical canons laid down in Noah Webster's dictionary."