Macaulay was rarely shy about hoisting his standard.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind…. By poetry we mean the art of employing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination, the art of doing by means of words what the painter does by means of colours.  (You will see Debussy put beside Impressionist painters like Monet for a similar analogy.) …. Truth indeed is essential to poetry.  The reasonings are just; but the premises are false.  (I do not follow that.)

…. it is the constant manner of Shakespeare to represent the human mind as lying, not under the absolute dominion of one despotic propensity, but under a mixed government, in which a hundred powers balance each other.  Admirable as he was in all parts of his art, we most admire him for this, that while he has left us a greater number of striking portraits than all other dramatists put together, he has scarcely left us a single caricature.

That is a useful reminder not to apply labels to any of the output of this genius.

But it is not by speeches of self-analysis, however great they may be in force and spirit, that the great masters of human nature have portrayed human beings…Shakespeare never tells us that in the mind of Iago, everything that is beautiful and endearing was associated with some filthy and debasing idea.

That looks spot on about Iago – and John Claggart in Billy Budd.

Macaulay did of course have notorious prejudices – against, say, Marlborough and Penn.  (He got himself tied up in knots over Glencoe because his pin-up boy, William of Orange, signed the warrant.) 

And he could show his prejudices in discussing letters, as in this pearler:

The conversation between Brutus and Cassius in the First Act of Julius Caesar is worth the whole French drama ten times over, while the working up of Brutus by Cassius, the stirring of the mob by Antony, and – above all – the dispute and reconciliation of the two generals, are things far beyond the reach of any other poet that ever lived.

Whoa!  Steady, Tom.  That is just the kind of thing that made de Gaulle so hard to handle.

And your reference to reconciliation may have suited the Victorian epoch, but the parts you first mention are immediately followed by the scene where the inflamed mob massacres an innocent poet, and then there is the scene where the not so innocent conspirators settle their hit lists.  I know of no more gripping theatre on our stage.  It is simply breathtaking.