In Mr. Macaulay’s conception of human nature, the basenesses and the excellencies of mankind are no more than accidents of circumstance, the results of national feeling and national capabilities; and cunning and treachery, and lying, and such other “natural defences of the weak against the strong,” are in themselves neither good nor bad, except as thinking makes them so.  They are the virtues of a weak people, and they will be as much admired, and are as justly admirable; they are to the full as compatible with the highest graces and most lofty features of the heart and intellect, as any of those opposite so called heroisms which we are generally so unthinking as to allow to monopolize the name ....  Cunning is the only resource of the feeble; and why may we not feel for victorious cunning as strong a sympathy as for the bold, downright, open bearing of the strong? . . .  That there may be no mistake in the essayist’s meaning, that he may drive the nail home into the English understanding, he takes an illustration which shall be familiar to all of us in the characters of Iago and Othello.  To our northern thought, the free and noble nature of the Moor is wrecked through a single infirmity, by a fiend in the human form.  To one of Machiavelli’s Italians, Iago’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.