These existed in him not only in abundance, but in forms distant from and even contrasted with the fashion of his intellectual faculties, and in conjunctions which come near to paradox. Behind the mask of splendor lay a singular simplicity; behind a literary severity which sometimes approached to vengeance, an extreme tenderness; behind a rigid repudiation of the sentimental, a sensibility at all times quick, and in the latest times almost threatening to sap, though never sapping, his manhood. He who as speaker and writer seemed above all others to represent the age and the world, had the real centre of his being in the simplest domestic tastes and joys. He for whom the mysteries of human life, thought, and destiny appear to have neither charm nor terror, and whose writings seem audibly to boast in every page of being bounded by the visible horizon of the practical and work-day sphere, yet in his virtues and in the combination of them; in his freshness, bounty, bravery; in his unshrinking devotion both to causes and to persons; and most of all, perhaps, in the thoroughly inborn and spontaneous character of all these gifts,—really recalls the age of chivalry and the lineaments of the ideal. The peculiarity, the differentia (so to speak) of Macaulay seems to us to lie in this: that while as we frankly think, there is much to question—nay, much here and there to regret or even censure—in his writings, the excess, or defect, or whatever it may be, is never really ethical, but is in all cases due to something in the structure and habits of his intellect. And again, it is pretty plain that the faults of that intellect were immediately associated with its excellences: it was in some sense, to use the language of his own Milton, "dark with excessive bright."... [Pg 6363] His moderation in luxuries and pleasures is the more notable and praiseworthy because he was a man who, with extreme healthiness of faculty, enjoyed keenly what he enjoyed at all. Take in proof the following hearty notice of a dinner a quattr' occhi to his friend: "Ellis came to dinner at seven. I gave him a lobster curry, woodcock, and macaroni. I think that I will note dinners, as honest Pepys did."