not a doubt; that it is a certainty or else a mockery and horror. That none or all of the many things we are in doubt about, and need to have demonstrated and rendered probable, can by any alchemy be made a 'religion' for us, but are and must continue a baleful, quiet or unquiet, hypocrisy for us; and bring-salvation do we fancy? I think it is another thing they will bring, and are, on all hands, visibly bringing, this good while!"

Very interesting, in this connection, and quite in the same tone with the above, is the story which Mr. James tells of Carlyle's conversation with the new rector of his parish, evidently at a time considerably subsequent to the Life of Sterling. "It is my firm belief," said Carlyle to this astonished man, "that if these turbulent people [the troublesome ones of the parish] could once be brought to know some one who really believed for himself the eternal veracities, and did n't merely tell them of some one else who in old time was thought to have believed them, they would all be reduced to speedy silence. It is much, no doubt, to have a decent ceremonial of worship, and an educated, polite sort of person to administer it. But the main want of the world, as I gather, just now, and of this parish especially, which is that part of the world with which I am altogether best acquainted, is to discover some one who really knows God otherwise than by hearsay, and can tell us what divine work is actually to be done here and now in London

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streets, and not of a totally different work which behooved to be done two thousand years ago in old Judea."

It is not my object here to enter upon any general discussion of Carlyle's religion. But there is little necessity for that. His books everywhere have to do with religion, and it is not well possible to read any of them carefully without learning what his religion was.1 I refer to the matter here only sufficiently to establish the point that his religious views underwent no reaction · and pass to pol

itics.

That Carlyle took strong sides with Gladstone in the Russo-Turkish war cannot, of course, be urged as an indication of any liberalism; for he probably saw in Russia only a representative of force, a power able to use the tools and repress anarchy. It is in point, however, that he felt strong sympathy with the Zulus and other tribes in Africa, whom he believed to be wronged by the English government. His dislike of Napoleon III. was also extreme, and he was no friend of the Empire. Ten years before the Prussian war, when Napoleon III. was esteemed the arbiter of the destinies of Eu

1 See especially the chapter entitled "Morrison Again," in Past and Present; "The Everlasting No," "The Everlasting Yea," and "Natural Supernaturalism," in Sartor Resartus; the lectures upon the Hero as Divinity, as Prophet, and as Priest, in Hero-Worship; and various passages in the Essays.

rope, and his throne the firmest thing in the political world, Carlyle unhesitatingly prophesied the day when "the blue sulphurous flames should dart from behind the scenes," and emperor and empire "sink into the nethermost depths of uttermost perdition." Mr. James's linking of Carlyle's name with Louis. Napoleon's, as standing for the same principle in politics, is startling enough. In the French Revolution of 1848 Carlyle rejoiced, without reference to Louis Napoleon: "The teaching this great swindler, Louis Philippe, that there is a God's justice in the universe, was a great satisfaction."

I have spoken of Carlyle's kinder words for ourselves, as one of the finest nations of the world.1

1 Carlyle has said more kind things about America altogether than some of our extra-sensitive fellow-citizens are apt to remember. I cannot help setting down here some words of his to an American friend, which have recently been published. "They think," he cried sharply, some of you think I am no friend to America. But I love America not everybody's America, but the true America; the country which has given birth to Emerson and to Emerson's friends; the country of honest toilers and brave thinkers. Never shall I forget that the first money that ever came to me for a printed book came from America. When your people reprinted Sartor Resartus out of Fraser, they sent me a good sum for it. They need not have sent it. I had no claim on it or on them; but they sent it, and I did and do thank them for that.

By and by they republished my French Revolution. Do you know, I had not had a penny for that book from the English public till a good while after American friends remitted to me a pretty sum for it. Twice over, twice, my first money came to

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It was in his Inaugural Address at Edinburgh that he said this. This Inaugural Address was his last great utterance, and the most noticeable thing about it is its mellowness and moderation, so strikingly in contrast with all that had come from Carlyle during the Frederick period. He said with reference to his old onslaught on parliaments and stump-oratory: "I have written down some very fierce things about that, perhaps considerably more

me from your country. And do they think I forget it, and am not grateful for it, and don't love the country which showed its love for me?"

Mr. James observes that the reason why Carlyle hated Americans and called us a nation of bores was, that we took him at his word, and reckoned upon him as a sincere wellwisher to the species; our reverent study of him would make us find him out the quicker. But he did not hate Americans. He hated the American State as he hated Mill On Liberty, because it stood for what he held to be false in politics: "I do not believe that state can last in which Jesus and Judas have equal weight in public affairs," was his putting of it. We believe him to have been lamentably confused and wrong in all this, but we ought not to find it hard to preserve a clear line between political and personal. If at one time he calls the Americans bores, it is because at that time he was doubtless overrun by American bores more than by any others. The terms in which he bequeathes his Cromwell and Frederick collections to Harvard indicate his feelings towards those Americans who had "found him out" most completely. In this connection, I would call attention to Mr. Conway's account of Carlyle's awakening from his wild dream of the social condition of the South and the issues of the Civil War-especially the influence upon him of Emerson's letter.

emphatic than I could now wish them to be, but they were and are deeply my conviction. It seems to me that the finest nations of the world - the English and the Americans in chief-were going all off into wind and tongue." There is something pathetic in this from the old Carlyle, but especially, in its past tense, there is something hopeful. Another passage in this address is the more important for its closeness to the admission that his growling at the times had been fiercer than he could wish. "I have one advice to give you," he said, "which is practically of very great importance. You are to consider throughout much more than is done at present, and what would have been a great thing for me if I had been able to consider, that health is a thing to be attended to continually; that you are to regard that as the very highest of all temporal things for you."

But more important than all this, the most important thing possible as an assurance that Carlyle, sternly as he demanded energy, decision, and action, did not deify mere force and will, dissociated from a good cause and some high idea, is the fact that he wrote to Emerson - according to the newspapers after the completion of the Frederick, to express the sorrowful conviction that the years spent on it had been wasted, as the more he had to do with Frederick the less heroic he found him. To another friend he lately said, in the same strain, "I never was admitted much to Frederick's confi