His gains from literature were extraordinary. The check for £20,000 is known to all. But his accumulation was reduced by his bounty; and his profits would, it is evident, have been far larger still had he dealt with the products of his mind on the principles of economic science (which however he heartily professed), and sold his wares in the dearest market, as he undoubtedly acquired them in the cheapest. No one can measure the elevation of Macaulay's character above the mercenary level, without bearing in mind that for ten years after 1825 he was a poor and a contented man, though ministering to the wants of a father and a family reduced in circumstances; though in the blaze of literary and political success; and though he must have been conscious from the first of the possession of a gift which by a less congenial and more compulsory use would have rapidly led him to opulence. Yet of the comforts and advantages, both social and physical, from which he thus forbore, it is so plain that he at all times formed no misanthropic or ascetic, but on the contrary a very liberal and genial estimate. It is truly touching to find that never, except as a minister, until 1851, when he had already lived fifty years of his fifty-nine, did this favorite of fortune, this idol of society, allow himself the luxury of a carriage. It has been observed that neither in art nor letters did Macaulay display that faculty of the higher criticism which depends upon certain refined perceptions and the power of subtle analysis. [Pg 6366] His analysis was always rough, hasty, and sweeping, and his perceptions robust. By these properties it was that he was so eminently [Greek: phortikos], not in the vulgar sense of an appeal to spurious sentiment, but as one bearing his reader along by violence, as the River Scamander tried to bear Achilles. Yet he was never pretentious; and he said frankly of himself that a criticism like that of Lessing in his 'Laocoön,' or of Goethe on 'Hamlet,' filled him with wonder and despair. His intense devotion to the great work of Dante is not perhaps in keeping with the general tenor of his tastes and attachments, but is in itself a circumstance of much interest. We remember however at least one observation of Macaulay's in regard to art, which is worth preserving. He observed that the mixture of gold with ivory in great works of ancient art—for example, in the Jupiter of Phidias—was probably a condescension to the tastes of the people who were to be the worshipers of the statue; and he noticed that in Christian times it has most rarely happened that productions great in art have also been the objects of warm popular veneration....