within a narrow circle.
There is a marked sign of this narrowness, in his disinclination even to
look at the works of contemporaries whose tone or manner he disliked.

It appears that this dislike, and the ignorance consequent upon it,
applied to the works of Carlyle. Now, we may have much or little faith
in Carlyle as a philosopher or as a historian. Half-lights and
half-truths may be the utmost which, in these departments, his works
will be found to yield. But the total want of sympathy is the more
noteworthy, because the resemblances, though partial, are both numerous
and substantial between these two remarkable men and powerful writers,
as well in their strength as in their weakness. Both are honest; and
both, notwithstanding honesty, are partisans. Each is vastly, though
diversely, powerful in expression; and each is more powerful in
expression than in thought. Both are, though variously, poets using the
vehicle of prose. Both have the power of portraitures, extraordinary for
vividness and strength. For comprehensive disquisition, for balanced and
impartial judgments, the world will probably resort to neither; and if
Carlyle gains on the comparison in his strong sense of the inward and
the ideal, he loses in the absolute and violent character of his
one-sidedness. Without doubt, Carlyle's licentious though striking
peculiarities of style have been of a nature allowably to repel, so far
as they go, one who was so rigid as Macaulay in his literary orthodoxy,
and who so highly appreciated, and with such expenditure of labor, all
that relates to the exterior or body of a book. Still, if there be
resemblances so strong, the want of appreciation, which has possibly
been reciprocal, seems to be partly of that nature which Aristotle would
have explained by his favorite proverb, [Greek: keramens keramei].[D]
The discrepancy is like the discrepancy of colors that are too near.
Carlyle is at least a great fact in the literature of his time, and has
contributed largely,--in some respects too largely,--toward forming its
characteristic habits of thought. But on these very grounds he should
not have been excluded from the horizon of a mind like Macaulay's, with
all its large and varied and most active interests....

[D] Potter [detests] potter.

There have been other men of our own generation, though very few, who if
they have not equaled have approached Macaulay in power of memory, and
who have certainly exceeded him in t