By the time he died in 1859, Thomas Babington Macaulay, the Victorian historian and parliamentarian, had meticulously plotted his posthumous fame. A founding trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, he sat for no fewer than twenty-one portraits now found in its collection. He served on the committee to decorate the rebuilt Houses of Parliament, the corridors of which were duly adorned with paintings based upon his histories. His Cambridge College, Trinity, immortalized him in marble. In 1876 his nephew George Otto Trevelyan published the stately Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, a virtually authorized biography that remained standard for generations. He was entombed at Westminster Abbey, one of the few historians to lie in Poet’s Corner.

Despite his best efforts, however, Macaulay’s reputation has ever remained decidedly middle-brow. Like many popular writers, he was scorned as a literary dandy by the elite of his day. John Stuart Mill considered him an “intellectual dwarf, rounded off and stunted.” Thomas Carlyle dismissed his “irremediably commonplace nature.” Matthew Arnold snickered that Macaulay diverted “all who are beginning to feel enjoyment in the things of the mind.” Modern historians have been no kinder. Since Herbert Butterfield vivisected Macaulay’s History of England in the 1930s, it has been derided as a canonical example of “Whig history”—that venerable sectarian mythology designed to champion liberalism and Protestantism as the twin engines of human progress.

These complaints are laced with more than a little jealousy of Macaulay’s stylistic gifts. G. M. Trevelyan (another