it is little more than testiness, is in him often a generous
indignation. What became and still remain in those who have made him
their model, substantive and organic vices, the foundation of literary
character and intellectual temper, were in him the incidental defects
of a vigorous genius. And we have to take a man of his power and vigour
with all his drawbacks, for the one are wrapped up in the other. Charles
Fox used to apply to Burke a passage that Quintilian wrote about Ovid.
'Si animi sui affectibus temperare quam indulgere maluisset,' quoted
Fox, 'quid vir iste praestare non potuerit!' But this is really not at
all certain either of Ovid, or Burke, or any one else. It suits
moralists to tell us that excellence lies in the happy mean and nice
balance of our faculties and impulses, and perhaps in so far as our own
contentment and an easy passage through life are involved, what they
tell us is true. But for making a mark in the world, for rising to
supremacy in art or thought or affairs--whatever those aims may be
worth--a man possibly does better to indulge, rather than to chide or
grudge, his genius, and to pay the penalties for his weakness, rather
than run any risk of mutilating those strong faculties of which they
happen to be an inseparable accident. Versatility is not a universal
gift among the able men of the world; not many of them have so many
gifts of the spirit, as to be free to choose by what pass they will
climb 'the steep where Fame's proud temple shines afar.' If Macaulay had
applied himself to the cultivation of a balanced judgment, of tempered
phrases, and of relative propositions, he would probably have sunk into
an impotent tameness. A great pugilist has sometimes been converted from
the error of his ways, and been led zealously to cherish gospel graces,
but the hero's discourses have seldom had the notes of unction and
edification. Macaulay, divested of all the exorbitancies of his spirit
and his style, would have been a Samson shorn of the locks of his
strength.

Although, however, a writer of marked quality may do well to let his
genius develop its spontaneous forces without too assiduous or vigilant
repression, trusting to other writers of equal strength in other
directions, and to the general fitness of things and operation of time,
to redress the balance, still it is the task of criticism in counting up
the contributions of one of these strong men to examine the mischiefs no
less than the