Macaulay and the Utilitarians

Scott was a romantic writer because he liked these forms of life, but that is not quite enough. By painting these very attractive and delightful and hypnotic pictures of these ages, he placed them alongside our values. And this shattered the monopoly which says every age is as good as it can be; we are advancing to an even better one. If there are values in the past which are more valuable than those of the present, or at least in competition with them, then they must have their own validity. This is what romantics bitterly detested: order up! The pope's methodized aristotle. These are the things denied and denounced by the entire romantic movement from the beginning to the