th one hiss of lordly contempt. Yet Macaulay has a more
vivid historical imagination, more power of placing himself in the age
about which he writes, than historians like Hume and Hallam, whose
judgments of men are summaries of qualities, and imply no inwardness of
vision, no discerning of spirits. In the whole class, the point of view
is the historian's, and not the point of view of the persons the
historian describes. The curse which clings to celebrity is, that it
commonly enters history only to be puffed or lampooned.

The truth is, that most men, the intelligent and virtuous as well as the
ignorant and vicious, are intolerant of other individualities. They are
uncharitable by defect of sympathy and defect of insight. Society, even
the best, is apt to be made up of people who are engaged in the
agreeable occupation of despising each other; for one association for
mutual admiration there are twenty for mutual contempt; yet while
conversation is thus mostly made up of strictures on individuals, it
rarely evinces any just perception of individualities. James is
indignant or jeering at the absence of James in John, and John is
horror-stricken at the impudence of James in refusing to be John. Each
person feels himself to be misunderstood, though he never questions his
power to understand his neighbor. Egotism, vanity, prejudice, pride of
opinion, conceit of excellence, a mean delight in recognizing
inferiority in others, a meaner delight in refusing to recognize the
superiority of others, all the honest and all the base forms of
self-assertion, cloud and distort the vision when one mind directs its
glance at another. For one person who is mentally conscientious there
are thousands who are morally honest. The result is a vast massacre of
character, which would move the observer's compassion were it not that
the victims are also the culprits, and that pity at the spectacle of the
arrow quivering in the sufferer's breast is checked by the sight of the
bow bent in the sufferer's hands. This depreciation of others is the
most approved method of exalting ourselves. It educates us in
self-esteem, if not in knowledge. The savage conceives that the power of
the enemy he kills is added to his own. Shakespeare more justly
conceived that the power of the human being with whom he sympathized was
added to his own.

This toleration, without which an internal knowledge of other natures is
impossible, Shakespeare possessed beyond any ot