's
keen-edged intellect would have appeared as admirable
as Othello's daring appears to us, and Othello himself
little better than a fool and a savage .... It is but a
change of scene, of climate, of the animal qualities of
the frame, and evil has become a good, and good has
become evil .... Now, our displeasure with Mr.
Macaulay is, not that he has advanced a novel and
mischievous theory: it was elaborated long ago in the
finely-tempered dialectics of the Schools of Rhetoric, at
Athens; and so long as such a phenomenon as a
cultivated rogue remains possible among mankind, it
will reappear in all languages and under any number
of philosophical disguises .... Seldom or never,
however, has it appeared with so little attempt at
disguise. It has been left for questionable poets and
novelists to idealize the rascal genus; philosophers
have escaped into the ambiguities of general propositions,
and we do not remember elsewhere to have
met with a serious ethical thinker deliberately laying
two whole organic characters, with their vices and
virtues in full life and bloom, side by side, asking
himself which is best, and answering gravely that it
is a matter of taste.

Mr. Macaulay has been bolder than his predecessors;
he has shrunk from no conclusion, and
looked directly into the very heart of the matter; he
has struck, as we believe, the very lowest stone of our
ethical convictions, and declared that the foundation
quakes under it.

For, ultimately, how do we know that right is right,
and wrong is wrong? People in general accept it on
authority; but authority itself must repose on some
ulterior basis; and what is that? . . . Are we to say
that in morals there is a system of primary axioms, out
of which we develop our conclusions, and apply them,
as they are needed, to life? It does not appear so.
The analogy of morals is rather with art than with
geometry. The grace of heaven gives us good men,
and gives us beautiful creations; and we, perceiving by
the instincts within ourselves that celestial presence in
the objects on which we gaze, find out for ourselves
the laws which make them what they are, not by comparing
them with any antecedent theory, but by careful
analysis of our own impressions, by asking ourselves
what it is which we admire in them, and calling that
good, and calling that beautiful.

So, then, if admiration be the first fact, if the sense
of it be the ultimate ground on which the after temple
of m