expecting the regeneration of mankind, not from any direct
action on the sentiments of unselfish benevolence and love of justice,
but from the effect of educated intellect enlightening the selfish
feelings." John Stuart Mill, with that candour which is the rarest of
his great qualities, gave a generous and authoritative testimony to the
merit of these attacks upon his father, and his father's creed, which
Macaulay himself lived to wish that he had left unwritten.

["The author has been strongly urged to insert three papers on the
Utilitarian Philosophy, which, when they first appeared, attracted some
notice. * * * He has, however, determined to omit these papers, not
because he is disposed to retract a single doctrine which they contain,
but because he is unwilling to offer what might be regarded as an
affront to the memory of one from whose opinions he still widely
dissents, but to whose talents and virtues he admits that he formerly
did not do justice. * * It ought to be known that Mr. Mill had the
generosity, not only to forgive, but to forget the unbecoming acrimony
with which he had been assailed, and was, when his valuable life
closed, on terms of cordial friendship with his assailant."--Preface to
Macaulay's Collected Essays.]

He was already famous enough to have incurred the inevitable penalty
of success in the shape of the pronounced hostility of Blackwood's
Magazine. The feelings which the leading contributors to that periodical
habitually entertained towards a young and promising writer were in
his case sharpened by political partisanship; and the just and measured
severity which he infused into his criticism on Southey's "Colloquies
of Society" brought down upon him the bludgeon to whose strokes poetic
tradition has attributed the death of Keats. Macaulay was made of
harder stuff, and gave little heed to a string of unsavoury invectives
compounded out of such epithets as "ugly," "splay-footed," and
"shapeless;" such phrases as "stuff and nonsense," "malignant trash,"
"impertinent puppy," and "audacity of impudence;" and other samples from
the polemical vocabulary of the personage who, by the irony of fate,
filled the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. The substance of
Professor Wilson's attacks consisted in little more than the reiteration
of that charge of intellectual juvenility, which never fails to
be employed as the last resource against a man whose abilities are
undoubted, and whose character is