In him was vindicated the greatness of real goodness and the goodness of real greatness.

Brooks’s sentence praises a person in whom moral character and public stature are not at odds but mutually confirm each other. “Real goodness” is shown to possess its own kind of grandeur—strength, dignity, and largeness of spirit—while “real greatness” (rank, achievement, influence) is shown to be genuinely good only when it is rooted in virtue and benevolence. The line pushes back against the common suspicion that goodness is merely meekness, or that greatness is necessarily ruthless. In Brooks’s moral rhetoric, the highest human example is one where ethical integrity is not an ornament to success but its proof, and where power is validated by the good it serves.