The name of this great man, though it belongs to a period before the
Victorian, is, like the name of Cobbett, very important to it. In
substance Macaulay accepted the conclusions of Bentham; though he
offered brilliant objections to all his arguments. In any case the soul
of Bentham (if he had one) went marching on, like John Brown; and in the
central Victorian movement it was certainly he who won. John Stuart Mill
was the final flower of that growth. He was himself fresh and delicate
and pure; but that is the business of a flower. Though he had to preach
a hard rationalism in religion, a hard competition in economics, a hard
egoism in ethics, his own soul had all that silvery sensitiveness that
can be seen in his fine portrait by Watts. He boasted none of that
brutal optimism with which his friends and followers of the Manchester
School expounded their cheery negations. There was about Mill even a
sort of embarrassment; he exhibited all the wheels of his iron universe
rather reluctantly, like a gentleman in trade showing ladies over his
factory. There shone in him a beautiful reverence for women, which is
all the more touching because, in his department, as it were, he could
only offer them so dry a gift as the Victorian Parliamentary Franchise.
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