LORD MACAULAY'S ESTIMATE OF ETHICS.

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—In the review of Mr. Maurice's work, the Conscience, in the last number of the Spectator, occurs the following passage :— " The difference between Professor Huxley's earnest and well- weighed words and the flippant scoff of Lord Macaulay, that the best writer on morals does not deserve half the gratitude from mankind which is duo to a good shoemaker, will gauge for us the interval between the temper of 1869 and that of thirty years back in this controversy."

I rely on the candour of the Spectator when I beg you to recon- sider this reproach. The passage to which I conclude your reviewer refers is to be found at page 384 of the 1850 edition of Macaulay's Essays, and is as follows :—

" 'In my own time,' says Seneca, there have boon inventions of this sort, transparent windows, tubes for diffusing warmth equally through all parts of a building, short-hand, which has been carried to such a perfection that a writer can keep pace with the most rapid speaker. But the inventing of such things is drudgery for the lowest slaves; philosophy lies deeper. It is not her office to teach men how to use

their hands. The object of her lessons is to form the soul.' ` We shall next be told,' exclaims Seneca, 'that the first shoemaker was a philosopher.' For our own part [continues Lord Macaulay], if we are forced to make a choice between the first shoemaker and the author of the three books On Anger, we pronounce for the shoemaker. It may be worse to be angry than to be wet. But shoes have kept millions from being wet ; and wo doubt whether Seneca ever kept anybody from being angry."

Is it possible that your reviewer can think that this passage denotes preference of a shoemaker to "the best writer on morals"?

If Seneca really deserves that description, Lord Macaulay was undoubtedly wrong ; but it is plain that his slighting mention of Seneca was founded on an exactly opposite opinion.

The passage in your review is a mere passing allusion ; but it is

an injustice, and injustice of a sort to which Lord Macaulay's writings are especially subjected. His short, brilliant sentences are tempting for quotation, and it is less trouble to recollect and repeat one carelessly than to turn to the passage and see what it was that he really wrote. In the saute way I have seen him charged by a popular critic with an illiberal depreciation of classical writers, on the strength of the following passage in his unpublished minute, given at page 414 of the Letters of a Cent- petition Wallah:—

" It may safely bo said that the literature now extant in that (the English) language is of far greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world together."

If the critic had read the sentence immediately preceding the above, he would have seen what is included in the literature here spoken of. The sentence is as follows :—

" Whoever knows that language has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations."

What can be meant by the intellectual wealth of ninety genera- tions,—some 2,000 or 3,000 years,—if it does not include transla- tions of the classical authors ? The subject of the minute was the superiority of English to Sanskrit in educating the Hindoos, to whom Greek and Latin were not in any case to be taught.

The unfortunate New Zealander has in the same way been transformed from his original character into a tangible and aggressive invader. But that much persecuted Maori has already exhausted the patience of all his acquaintances so entirely that I should not mention him, if it were not for the ludicrous incorrect- ness of representing Lord Macaulay as looking forward with satisfaction to the decay of the country which he loved with such passionate devotion and pride—a pride which has drawn on him the reproaches of some of his critics.

Any one who has the patience to recur to the New Zealander's first appearance may find him in a somewhat different frame of mind from that which is usually imputed to him, at pages 179-180 of Lord Macaulay's 21fiscellancous 1Vorles, published in 1860.

Each of these cases seems in itself too trifling to be worthy of notice ; but injustice is no trifle—especially the injustice that is contained in continual incidental allusions rather than in distinct and serious charges. It may be said that Lord Macaulay's popu- larity needs no defence; but popularity does not necessarily prevent injustice; indeed, the very fact of a clear and attractive style very commonly draws on its possessor the charge of shallowness. How great is the injustice of representing Lord Macaulay as a shallow worshipper of material comfort 1 have not' now space to prove. After all, the injury is less to his reputation than to those persons who believe the charge, and who aro, in consequence, prevented from profiting by the generous patriotism, the deep hatred of wrong, and fervent love of right with which his writings aro inspired. I do not say that his ready eloquence and forcible style may not sometimes have led him into exaggeration ; but to speak of him as indulging in a " flippant scoff " on any great sub- ject seems to me so utterly at variance with the whole tone and spirit of his writings, that I cannot believe the expression to have been deliberately used by any contributor of yours. I take advan- tage of the justice and candour that distinguish the Spectator, to remonstrate against misrepresentations to which others are far more addicted.—I am, Sir, E.

[Our correspondent has written a very excellent little com- mentary on the miscarriages of interpretation to which Lord

Macaulay's epigrammatic sentences have been subjected, but we deliberately believe, after a new perusal of the passage

in the essay on Lord Bacon to which our review referred, that Lord Macaulay did mean to pronounce for " the first shoe-

maker" (and we admit that our allusion was inaccurate, so far as it left out the word " first"), not only as against Seneca, but as against the whole series of ancient philosophers " from the time of Seneca downwards," including Plato himself.

Lord Macaulay's point is that no philosophy before Bacon's had any " fruits," except so far as it " exercised the faculties of the disputants ;" and that any art, however humble, which, like shoe- making, is obviously beneficial to the multitude, ought to take rank of such philosophy. " A pedestrian may show as much vigour on the treadmill as on the highway road. But on the road his vigour will assuredly carry him forward ; and on the treadmill ho will not advance an inch. The ancient philosophy was a treadmill, not a path," and in this judgment Lord Macaulay expressly includes the Socratic and Platonic moral philosophy. The preference of the first shoemaker to Seneca was certainly not meant to show Lord Macaulay's low estimate of Seneca, it was meant to show his low estimate of the whole body of the ancient philosophy. 1Ve confess we do deliberately regard that as a very false judgment flippantly expressed.—ED. Spectator.]