cover if his leg was stitched together, and kindly offered to do it. Knowing that this would be very painful, two of the men went into the surgery to hold the dog during the operation, but "Gyle" needed no such assistance. Immediately on being told he laid himself down, and quietly closing his eyes never moved or uttered a sound. A fortnight afterward the stitches broke away, and the shepherd sewed it up again without any assistance whatever.

Here is another anecdote of the same

dog. A few Sundays ago the shepherd found one of the lambs ill. He came some distance to my house to procure medicine. After mixing and pouring it into a bottle in the presence of the dog, we started for the field, but long before we were near the field, or even apparently going to it, the dog started away, and taking the nearest cut to it through a wood, we saw him going straight to the lamb, and he laid down beside it, and waited our arrival. D. W. Leisure Hour.

THERE can be no doubt as to the permanent vitality of this book, or of the careless genius which produced it after this random fashion, at an age when Carlyle was looking back upon a long and laborious life. But there may be, we think, much doubt as to the manner in which Mr. Froude has exercised the absolute discretion intrusted to him by Carlyle as to the use he should make of these reminiscences. We do not think that Carlyle, with his great pride and his deep reserve, would ever have approved of the inclusion in this book of all the constant references to his wife, and to his love for her, poured out with the freedom of a diarist, though of a diarist who has formed for himself that semi-artificial manner which suggests a consciousness of audience. The rhapsodies on his "noblest," queenliest,' beautifullest," and so forth, natural enough to the old man in his desolation, should not, in our estimation, have been given to the world as they were written. What is the proper sphere of privacy, if the half-remorseful self-reproaches of the tenderest love, accusing itself of inadequacy, are to be made public to all

the world?

We have said so much elsewhere on the morose aspect of these graphic "Reminiscences," that we shall deal here only with the pleasanter and more brilliant characteristics of the book. And nothing contained in it is so affect

*

ing as the few pages devoted to the memory of James Carlyle. Carlyle speaks of himself, with a certain dignified pride, as the humble James Carlyle's work ;" and no doubt there was much of the father in the son, though the stern, taciturn conciseness of the father was blended in the son with the artistic restlessness and discontent, which seek relief in words and cannot hold the mouth, as it were, with a bridle, though it were pain and grief to do so. Here you see Carlyle's rich intellectual inheritance plainly enough :

'None of us will ever forget that bold glowing style of his, flowing free from his untutored soul, full of metaphors (though he knew not what a metaphor was) with all manner of potent words which he appropriated and applied with a surprising accuracy you often would not guess whence-brief, energetic, and which I should say conveyed the most perfect picture, definite, clear, not in ambitious colors but in full white sunlight, of all the dialects I have ever listened to. Nothing did I ever hear him undertake to render visible which did not become almost ocularly so. Never shall we again hear such speech as that was. whole district knew of it, and laughed joyfully over it, not knowing how otherwise to express the feeling it gave them; emphatic I have heard him beyond all men. In anger he had no need of oaths, his words were like sharp arrows that smote into the very heart. The I also inherit), yet only in description, and for fault was that he exaggerated (which tendency the sake chiefly of humorous effect. man of rigid, even scrupulous, veracity. I have often heard him turn back when he thought his strong words were misleading, and correct them into mensurative accuracy."

The

He was a

All these qualities reappeared in Thomas

& Brothers.

compunctious withdrawal of something

which had overshot the mark, though often in Thomas Carlyle's case so reluctant a withdrawal that the withdrawal failed of its effect. But then Carlyle goes on to paint in his father a characteristic which he had absolutely failed to inherit-nay, he had even fallen into something like an excess of the very weakness from which he declares his father so completely free :

mired at this.

"A virtue he had which I should learn to imitate. He never spoke of what was disagree able and past. I have often wondered and adThe thing that he had nothing to do with he did nothing with. His was a healthy mind. In like manner I have seen him always when we young ones, half roguish ly, and provokingly without doubt, were perhaps repeating sayings of his, sit as if he did not hear us at all. Never once did I know him utter a word, only once, that I remember, give a look in such a case. Another virtue the ex ample of which has passed strongly into me was his settled placid indifference to the clamors or the murmurs of public opinion. For the judgment of those that had no right or power to judge him, he seemed simply to care nothing at all. He very rarely spoke of despising such things. He contented himself with altogether disregarding them. Hollow babble it was for him, a thing, as Fichte said, that did not exist; das gar nicht existirte. There was something truly great in this. The very perfec. tion of it hid from you the extent of the attainment.'

44

Carlyle, on the contrary, loved, like Hamlet, to unpack his soul" with words, even when, like Hamlet, he was profuse in his self-reproaches for the relief which that unpacking of his soul certainly gave him. But even as regards this different temperament of the two men, it is clear that the father had something of that high-pressure of emotion in him which gave the literary writer his motive-power :

"I have often seen him weep, too; his voice would thicken and his lips curve while reading the Bible. He had a merciful heart to real distress, though he hated idleness, and for imbecility and fatuity had no tolerance. Once-and I think once only--I saw him in a passion of tears. It was when the remains of my mother's fever hung upon her, in 1817, and seemed to threaten the extinction of her reason. We were all of us nigh desperate, and ourselves mad. He burst at last into quite a torrent of grief, cried piteously, and threw himself on the floor and lay moaning. I wondered, and had no words, no tears. It was as if a reck of granite had melted, and was thawing into water. What unknown seas of feeling lie in man, and will from time to time break through !" In painful contrast to this sketch of

the strong peasant from whom Carlyle was so justly proud to be descended, is his sketch of the light literary men of the world, whom he felt (sometimes unjustly) to be writers and nothing more. Take, for instance, a bitter, but we suppose substantially true, account of De Quincey, though it seems to us clear that Carlyle did not sufficiently appreciate that vivid seeing power in De Quincey which was his own greatest literary strength :

One

"Jemmy Belcher was a smirking little dumpy Unitarian bookseller in the Bull-ring, regarded as a kind of curiosity and favorite among these people, and had seen me. showery day 1 had took shelter in his shop; picked up a new magazine, found in it a cleverish and completely hostile criticism of my Wilhelm Meister,' of my Goethe, and self, etc., read it faithfully to the end, and have never set eye on it since. On stepping out my bad spirits did not feel much elevated by the dose just swallowed, but I thought with myself, 'This man is perhaps right on some points; if so, let him be admonitory!' And he was so (on a Scotticism, or perhaps two); and I did reasonably soon (in not above a couple of hours), dismiss him to the devil, or to Jericho, as an ill-given, unserviceable kind of entity in my course through this world. It was De Quincey, as I often enough heard afterward from foolish-talking persons. What matter who, ye foolish talking persons?' would have been my silent answer, as it generally pretty much was. I recollect, too, how in Edinburgh a year or two after, poor De Quincey, whom I wished to know, was ported to tremble at the thought of such a thing; and did fly pale as ashes, poor little soul, the first time we actually met. He was a pretty little creature, full of wire-drawn ingenuities, bankrupt enthusiasms, bankrupt pride, with the finest silver-toned low voice, and most elaborate gently-winding courtesies and ingenuities in conversation. 'What wouldn't one give to have him in a box and

re

take him out to talk!' That was Her criticism of him, and it was right good. A bright, ready, and melodious talker, but in the end an inconclusive and long-winded. One of the smallest man figures I ever saw; shaped like a pair of tongs, and hardly above five feet in all. When he sate, you would have taken him, by candlelight, for the beautifullest little child; blueeyed, sparkling face, had there not been a something, too, which said Eccovi-this child has been in hell.' After leaving Edinburgh I never saw him, hardly ever heard of him. His fate, owing to opium, etc.. was hard and sore, poor fine-strung weak creature, launched so into the literary career of ambition and mother of dead dogs.

The graphic force shown in single senfrequently representative only of what Carlyle himself discerned, not

to sounds and sights, which must, we suppose, be ascribed to the artistic vein in his temperament. He says quite frankly: "In short, as has been enough indicated elsewhere, I was advancing toward huge instalments of bodily and spiritual wretchedness in this my Edinburgh purgatory; and had to clean and purify myself in penal fire of various kinds for several years coming; the first, and much the worst, two or three of which were to be enacted in this once-loved city. Horrible to think of in part even yet! The bodily part of them was a kind of base agony (arising mainly in the want of any extant or discoverable fence between my coarser fellow-creatures and my more sensitive self), and might and could easily (had the age been pious or thoughtful) have been spared a poor creature like me. Those hideous disturbances to sleep, etc., a very little real care and goodness might prevent all that; and I look back upon it still with a kind of angry protest, and would have my successors saved from it." And in a later page he adds his confession that he liked, on the whole, social converse with the aristocracy best : Certain of the aristocracy, however, did seem to me still very noble; and, with due limitation of the grossly worthless (none of whom had we to do with), I should vote at present that, of classes known to me in England, the aristocracy (with its perfection of human politeness, its continual grace of bearing and of acting, steadfast honor,' light address and cheery stoicism), if you see well into it, is actually yet the best of English classes." That is a very curious testimony to the effect of Carlyle's artistic feeling in modifying his own teaching as to "the gospel of work." It was not the gospel of work which had made even the noblest of the aristocracy what they were.

Áfter reading these "Reminiscences," one cannot but ask one's self in what respect was Carlyle really a great man, and where did he fall short of true greatness? We should say that he was really great in imagination-very great in insight into the more expressive side of hunan character-great in Scotch humor, though utterly unable to appreciate the lighter kinds of true humor, like Lamb's-and

very great, too, in industry, quite indefatigable in small painstakings, whenever he thought that the task to which he had devoted himself was worthy of him. But he was far from great, even weak in judgment; far from great, even narrow in sympathy; far from great, even purblind in his appreciation of the importance to be attached to the various mechanism of human life. It is singular that one who manifested his genius chiefly by history-or should we rather say, by his insight into and delineation of some of the most critical characters in history, and some of the most vivid popular scenes in history?—should have been so totally devoid of what we may call the true historical sense-the appreciation, we mean, of the inherited conditions and ineradicable habits of ordinary national life. There was something of the historical Don Quixote about Carlyle; he tilted at windmills, and did not know that he was tilting at windmills. He had so deep an appreciation of the vivid flashes of consciousness which mark all great popular crises, because they mark all great personal crises, that he wanted to raise all human life and all common popular life to the level of the high self-conscious stage. He never thoroughly appreciated the meaning of habit. He never thoroughly understood the value of routine. He never adequately entered into the power of tradition. He judged of human life as if will and emotion were all in all. He judged of political life as if great men and great occasions ought to be all in all, and was furious at the waste of force involved in doing things as men had been accustomed to do them, wherever that appeared to be a partially ineffectual way. And his error in judging of peoples is equally traceable in his judgments on individuals. If a man had a strong interest in the routine and detail of life, he called him "sawdustish." If he had a profound belief in any popular ideas beyond those acknowledged by himself, Carlyle probably called him moonshiny. Such men as John Mill came under the one condemnation, such men as Mazzini under the other. And yet either John Mill or Mazzini may be said to have applied a more effectual knowledge of men to the historical conditions of their own

THE ENGLISH POETS. Selections, with Critical Introductions by Various Writers, and a general Introduction by Matthew Arnold. Edited by Thomas Humphrey Ward, M. A. Four Volumes. London and New York: Macmillan & Co.

The plan of this anthology is the same as that upon which so many scientific, historical, and biographical "series" have recently been prepared-the plan, namely, of assigning each branch or subject to some one who has shown himself especially competent to deal with it. Under the general editorial supervision of Mr. Ward, and with Mr. Matthew Arnold to strike the key note, as it were, of the resultant harmonies, those critics and students who have exhibited the widest acquaintance and pro

foundest sympathy with English poetry have been invited to set forth and illustrate the claims and qualities of the particular poets with whose work they are most familiar. "It is impossible," says the editor in his preface, that a selection of this kind should be really well done, should be done with an approach to finality, if it is the work of one critic alone. The history of English poetry is so wide, its various sections or stages have become the objects of so special a study, that a book which aims at selecting the best from the whole field, and pronouncing its judgments with some degree of authority, must not be the work of one writer, but of many."

The editor himself has dealt with Chaucer, James I. of Scotland, Watson, Barnfield, the