The chief turn of nineteenth-century England was taken about the time
when a footman at Holland House opened a door and announced "Mr.
Macaulay." Macaulay's literary popularity was representative and it was
deserved; but his presence among the great Whig families marks an
epoch. He was the son of one of the first "friends of the negro," whose
honest industry and philanthropy were darkened by a religion of sombre
smugness, which almost makes one fancy they loved the negro for his
colour, and would have turned away from red or yellow men as needlessly
gaudy. But his wit and his politics (combined with that dropping of the
Puritan tenets but retention of the Puritan tone which marked his class
and generation), lifted him into a sphere which was utterly opposite to
that from which he came. This Whig world was exclusive; but it was not
narrow. It was very difficult for an outsider to get into it; but if he
did get into it he was in a much freer atmosphere than any other in
England. Of those aristocrats, the Old Guard of the eighteenth century,
many denied God, many defended Bonaparte, and nearly all sneered at the
Royal Family. Nor did wealth or birth make any barriers for those once
within this singular Whig world. The platform was high, but it was
level. Moreover the upstart nowadays pushes himself by wealth: but the
Whigs could choose their upstarts. In that world Macaulay found Rogers,
with his phosphorescent and corpse-like brilliancy; there he found
Sydney Smith, bursting with crackers of common sense, an admirable old
heathen; there he found Tom Moore, the romantic of the Regency, a
shortened shadow of Lord Byron. That he reached this platform and
remained on it is, I say, typical of a turning-point in the century. For
the fundamental fact of early Victorian history was this: the decision
of the middle classes to employ their new wealth in backing up a sort of
aristocratical compromise, and not (like the middle class in the French
Revolution) insisting on a clean sweep and a clear democratic programme.