only question could
be whether they were properly balanced. The answer was fair enough.
Mill was imputing motives too easily, and assuming that the Reviewers
saw the abuses in the same light as he did, and were truckling to
public robbers in hopes of sharing the plunder. He was breaking a
butterfly upon a wheel. The Edinburgh Reviewers were not missionaries
of a creed. They were a set of brilliant young men, to whom the
_Review_ was at first a mere pastime, occupying such leisure as was
allowed by their professional pursuits. They were indeed men of
liberal sympathies, intelligent and independent enough to hold by a
party which was out of power. They had read Hume and Voltaire and
Rousseau; they had sat at the feet of Dugald Stewart; and were in
sympathy with intellectual liberalism. But they were men who meant to
become judges, members of parliament, or even bishops. Nothing in
their social atmosphere had stimulated the deep resentment against
social injustice which makes the fanatic or the enthusiast. We may
take as their interpreter the Whig philosopher James Mackintosh
(1765-1832), a man of wide reading, both in history and philosophy, an
eloquent orator, and a very able writer. Mackintosh, said
Coleridge,[126] is the 'king of the men of talent'; by which was
intimated that, as a man of talent, he was not, like some people, a
man of genius. Mackintosh, that is, was a man to accept plausible
formulae and to make them more plausible; not a man to pierce to the
heart of things, or reveal fruitful germs of thought. His intellect
was judicial; given to compromises, affecting a judicious _via media_,
and endeavouring to reconcile antagonistic tendencies. Thoroughgoing
or one-sided thinkers, and Mill in particular, regarded him with
excessive antipathy as a typical representative of the opposite
intellectual tendencies. Mackintosh's political attitude is
instructive. At the outbreak of the French revolution he was a
struggling young Scot, seeking his fortune in London, just turning
from medicine to the bar, and supporting himself partly by journalism.
He became secretary to the Society of the 'Friends of the People,' the
Whig rival of the revolutionary clubs, and in April 1791 sprang into
fame by his _Vindiciae Gallicae_. The Whigs had not yet lost the fervour
with which they had welcomed the downfall of the Bastille. Burke's
_Reflections_, the work of a great thinker in a state of irritation
bordering upon frenzy, had sou