xperimental philosophy on which is based
the glory of our age. Macaulay especially, in that long and brilliant
article which appeared in the "Edinburgh Review" in 1837, has
represented him as a remarkably worldly man, cold, calculating, selfish;
a sycophant and a flatterer, bent on self-exaltation; greedy, careless,
false; climbing to power by base subserviency; betraying friends and
courting enemies; with no animosities he does not suppress from policy,
and with no affections which he openly manifests when it does not suit
his interests: so that we read with shame of his extraordinary
shamelessness, from the time he first felt the cravings of a vulgar
ambition to the consummation of a disgraceful crime; from the base
desertion of his greatest benefactor to the public selling of justice as
Lord High Chancellor of the realm; resorting to all the arts of a
courtier to win the favor of his sovereign and of his minions and
favorites; reckless as to honest debts; torturing on the rack an honest
parson for a sermon he never preached; and, when obliged to confess his
corruption, meanly supplicating mercy from the nation he had outraged,
and favors from the monarch whose cause he had betrayed. The defects and
delinquencies of this great man are bluntly and harshly put by Macaulay,
without any attempt to soften or palliate them; as if he would consign
his name and memory, not "to men's charitable speeches, to foreign
nations, and to the next ages," but to an infamy as lasting and deep as
that of Scroggs and of Jeffreys, or any of those hideous tyrants and
monsters that disgraced the reigns of the Stuart kings.

And yet while the man is made to appear in such hideous colors, his
philosophy is exalted to the highest pinnacle of praise, as the greatest
boon which any philosopher ever rendered to the world, and the chief
cause of all subsequent progress in scientific discovery. And thus in
brilliant rhetoric we have a painting of a man whose life was in
striking contrast with his teachings,--a Judas Iscariot, uttering divine
philosophy; a Seneca, accumulating millions as the tool of Nero; a
fallen angel, pointing with rapture to the realms of eternal light. We
have the most startling contradiction in all history,--glory in
debasement, and debasement in glory; the most selfish and worldly man in
England, the "meanest of mankind," conferring on the race one of the
greatest blessings it ever received,--not accidentally, not in
repentan