polise the name.
Cunning is the only resource of the feeble; and why may we not feel for
victorious cunning as strong a sympathy as for the bold, downright, open
bearing of the strong? That there may be no mistake in the essayist's
meaning, that he may drive the nail home into the English understanding,
he takes an illustration which shall be familiar to all of us in the
characters of Iago and Othello. To our northern thought, the free and
noble nature of the Moor is wrecked through a single infirmity, by a
fiend in the human form. To one of Machiavelli's Italians, Iago's
keen-edged intellect would have appeared as admirable as Othello's
daring appears to us, and Othello himself little better than a fool and
a savage. It is but a change of scene, of climate, of the animal
qualities of the frame, and evil has become good, and good has become
evil. Now, our displeasure with Lord Macaulay is, not that he has
advanced a novel and mischievous theory: it was elaborated long ago in
the finely tempered dialectics of the Schools of Rhetoric at Athens; and
so long as such a phenomenon as a cultivated rogue remains possible
among mankind, it will reappear in all languages and under any number of
philosophical disguises. Seldom or never, however, has it appeared with
so little attempt at disguise. It has been left for questionable poets
and novelists to idealise the rascal genus; philosophers have escaped
into the ambiguities of general propositions, and we do not remember
elsewhere to have met with a serious ethical thinker deliberately laying
two whole organic characters, with their vices and virtues in full life
and bloom, side by side, asking himself which is best, and answering
gravely that it is a matter of taste.

Lord Macaulay has been bolder than his predecessors; he has shrunk from
no conclusion, and has looked directly into the very heart of the
matter; he has struck, as we believe, the very lowest stone of our
ethical convictions, and declared that the foundation quakes under it.

For, ultimately, how do we know that right is right, and wrong is wrong?
People in general accept it on authority; but authority itself must
repose on some ulterior basis; and what is that? Are we to say that in
morals there is a system of primary axioms, out of which we develope our
conclusions, and apply them, as they are needed, to life? It does not
appear so. The analogy of morals is rather with art than with geometry.
The grace of heaven