on was laboriously cultivating his
gifts for many years before he acquired a position in the eye of the
nation. Macaulay, fresh from college in 1825, astonished the world by
his brilliant and most imposing essay on Milton. Full-orbed, he was seen
above the horizon; and full-orbed after thirty-five years of constantly
emitted splendor, he sank beneath it.

His gains from literature were extraordinary. The check for L20,000 is
known to all. But his accumulation was reduced by his bounty; and his
profits would, it is evident, have been far larger still had he dealt
with the products of his mind on the principles of economic science
(which however he heartily professed), and sold his wares in the dearest
market, as he undoubtedly acquired them in the cheapest. No one can
measure the elevation of Macaulay's character above the mercenary level,
without bearing in mind that for ten years after 1825 he was a poor and
a contented man, though ministering to the wants of a father and a
family reduced in circumstances; though in the blaze of literary and
political success; and though he must have been conscious from the first
of the possession of a gift which by a less congenial and more
compulsory use would have rapidly led him to opulence. Yet of the
comforts and advantages, both social and physical, from which he thus
forbore, it is so plain that he at all times formed no misanthropic or
ascetic, but on the contrary a very liberal and genial estimate. It is
truly touching to find that never, except as a minister, until 1851,
when he had already lived fifty years of his fifty-nine, did this
favorite of fortune, this idol of society, allow himself the luxury of a
carriage.

It has been observed that neither in art nor letters did Macaulay
display that faculty of the higher criticism which depends upon certain
refined perceptions and the power of subtle analysis. His analysis was
always rough, hasty, and sweeping, and his perceptions robust. By these
properties it was that he was so eminently [Greek: phortikos], not in
the vulgar sense of an appeal to spurious sentiment, but as one bearing
his reader along by violence, as the River Scamander tried to bear
Achilles. Yet he was never pretentious; and he said frankly of himself
that a criticism like that of Lessing in his 'Laocoon,' or of Goethe on
'Hamlet,' filled him with wonder and despair. His intense devotion to
the great work of Dante is not perhaps in keeping with the general