His life, or such accounts as we had of
it, had been full of antitheses as startling as if some malign enchanter
had embodied one of Macaulay's characters as a conundrum to bewilder the
historian himself. A generous miser; a sceptical believer; a devout
scoffer; a tender-hearted misanthrope; a churchman faithful to his order
yet loathing to wear its uniform; an Irishman hating the Irish, as Heine
did the Jews,[1] because he was one of them, yet defending them with the
scornful fierceness of one who hated their oppressors more; a man honest
and of statesmanlike mind, who lent himself to the basest services of
party politics for purely selfish ends; a poet whose predominant faculty
was that of disidealizing; a master of vernacular style, in whose works
an Irish editor finds hundreds of faults of English to correct;
strangest of all, a middle-aged clergyman of brutal coarseness, who
could inspire two young, beautiful, and clever women, the one with a
fruitless passion that broke her heart, the other with a love that
survived hope and faith to suck away the very sources of that life
whereof it was the only pride and consolation. No wonder that a new life
of so problematic a personage as this should be awaited with eagerness,
the more that it was to be illustrated with much hitherto unpublished
material and was to be written by the practised hand of Mr.
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