The Atlantic Bookshelf: A Guide to Good Books

IT was certainly no accident that George Macaulay Trevelyan became a historian. The best traditions of scholarship — an infinite capacity for taking pains and a facility for precise and vigorous writing—have been inherited in his family for ninety years. Lord Macaulay was his granduncle. Sir George Otto Trevelyan, his father, was decorated with the Order of Merit for his contributions to historical research, notably for his six-volume history, The American Revolution. And in his turn the present writer, George Macaulay Trevelyan, has received the same honor from King George in respect for his rich and authoritative works, chief of which are his England under the Stuarts, three volumes dealing with Garibaldi’s Italy, a History of England, and the present work, a trilogy, England under Queen Anne, of which the first book is in print.

Incidentally, Trevelyan tradition is served in the fourth generation by the daughter of the family, Mary Caroline Trevelyan, who makes her début this spring with a history of William III and the Defence of Holland. Incidentally, again, all of these writers from first to last — from the days when Macaulay first submitted his Lays of Ancient Rome to the present — have been published by the old English firm, Longmans, Green and Company. So tradition goes.