These existed in him not only in abundance, but in forms distant from
and even contrasted with the fashion of his intellectual faculties, and
in conjunctions which come near to paradox. Behind the mask of splendor
lay a singular simplicity; behind a literary severity which sometimes
approached to vengeance, an extreme tenderness; behind a rigid
repudiation of the sentimental, a sensibility at all times quick, and in
the latest times almost threatening to sap, though never sapping, his
manhood. He who as speaker and writer seemed above all others to
represent the age and the world, had the real centre of his being in the
simplest domestic tastes and joys. He for whom the mysteries of human
life, thought, and destiny appear to have neither charm nor terror, and
whose writings seem audibly to boast in every page of being bounded by
the visible horizon of the practical and work-day sphere, yet in his
virtues and in the combination of them; in his freshness, bounty,
bravery; in his unshrinking devotion both to causes and to persons; and
most of all, perhaps, in the thoroughly inborn and spontaneous character
of all these gifts,--really recalls the age of chivalry and the
lineaments of the ideal. The peculiarity, the _differentia_ (so to
speak) of Macaulay seems to us to lie in this: that while as we frankly
think, there is much to question--nay, much here and there to regret or
even censure--in his writings, the excess, or defect, or whatever it may
be, is never really ethical, but is in all cases due to something in the
structure and habits of his intellect. And again, it is pretty plain
that the faults of that intellect were immediately associated with its
excellences: it was in some sense, to use the language of his own
Milton, "dark with excessive bright."...