Appreciation …

… A Good Word for Macaulay. (Hat tip, Dave Lull)

For Dom David Knowles, who was fond of translating Macaulay’s speeches into Latin, he was not only the most distinguished historian Cambridge had produced, an orator of the first rank, the prince of English essayists, a narrative poet with the rare distinction of being read continually for pleasure and committed effortlessly to memory (which continues to this day)—he was also, in a sense, the inventor of the paragraph, in the modern sense of a unit of prose composition made up of sentences “in which a topic or an idea is taken up, dismissed, or discussed.”I’m