the Puritans since been traduced in the traditional, unintelligent way which was then customary among all who disliked their theological reviews. The review of Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, in Blackwood, marked the surrender which had been secured through the genius and energy of a single student of a great period. Not that Carlyle's estimate of Cromwell is in all respects a final one. Mr. Prendergast has dealt it some severe blows in his Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, showing that Mr. Carlyle certainly did not understand the situation of things in that country, but had been deceived by mere simulacra or images which did not reflect the truth. And Liberal historians of English politics have been able to deduct from Cromwell's praises as a practical politician, by showing that his policy took no root in England, that it constituted nothing but an unhappy interregnum in the national development, and retarded rather than advanced many of the great movements the Protector himself had at heart.

In 1846, Carlyle had a visit from Margaret Fuller, of which an account, in a letter to Emerson, will be found in her Memoirs. In 1845-50, he produced nothing except some half-dozen papers on current topics, in The Examiner and The Spectator,—four of them on the Irish question, and a paper on the "Nigger Question," in Fraser. None of these except the last have been admitted into his works, so that the half decade, so far as his writing goes, is a blank for most of his readers. In 1850 came the Latter-Day Pamphlets,-a series which certainly did not occupy the previous years in its preparation, and in the following year The Life of Sterling. No other of his books display so strongly as do these his antagonism to the mind of his own time. But the Pamphlets contain, also, much of his most valuable teaching, especially on the great virtue of truthfulness. Especially lamentable to all discriminating friends of Carlyle are his utterances, here and in the paper in Fraser of the previous year, on that "sum of all the villainies,"-human slavery. Foreshadowed as these utterances had been by certain sayings in Past and Present, it was yet most disappointing to the friends of human liberty to find him beginning an active propaganda in defence of slavery. Fortunately, this part of the book had less influence than his nobler teachings. The class of minds attracted toward Carlyle were not likely to absorb this poison, while those it might have harmed could neither understand nor relish his books.

In 1851 he began to prepare for what he then contemplated as the opus majus of his life,-the biography of Frederick the Great. It was not until 1858 that the first portion of it appeared, and 1865 that it was finished. In the meantime, he published nothing except three insignificant essays. It is sometimes said that he visited Germany at this era, and made elaborate studies of the battle-fields he proposed to describe, as well as prolonged researches into public archives and great libraries. Another story is that he did start for Germany, but after spending one night in a Continental bed, under the feather-sack which makes its chief covering, fled back to London.* If he never was in Germany, then it was needless that he should have gone, for nothing could have added to the accuracy and the vividness of his pictures of Frederick's wars. The book is lit up by a constant series of lightning flashes, which enable the human eye to pierce distances and circumambient darkness to realize the heroic valor of Prussia's King and people, as no other method could. Outside Germany-perhaps we may say, outside Prussian Germany-the book has not been a success. It stands distinctly below Cromwell and the French Revolution as a work of art, in spite of the Titanic labor expended on it, while the haste with which the closing years of Frederick's reign and life are passed over suggests what Carlyle himself disclosed in a letter to Emerson. He had found that his choice of Frederick was a mistake. more he studied him, the less heroic he found him. the end the work became a burden instead of a joy. Carlyle ought to have made was Martin Luther, would have been made but for his dislike of having to dwell on theological questions, which the more part of his readers regarded as still vital, but which had for him little more than an antiquarian interest. With the grand outline study of Luther in Heroes and

The

And towards

The choice

We believe it

*Most valuable, if it were authentic, would be the information on this head furnished in a communication to the Milwaukee Sentinel by a Wisconsin man. By him Carlyle is reported as saying that he had never been in Germany, being too poor for the luxury of travel, but owed his intimate knowledge of Germany to his brother, Dr. John Carlyle, the Dantist, to whose notes of the Fatherland the world is indebted in good part for Sartor Resartus. But this reporter of Carlyle's conversation describes the interview as taking place at Craigenputtoch, the conversation as covering the merits of George Eliot's novels and Millais's paintings. As Carlyle paid but two flying visits to Craigenputtoch after he left in 1834, there is a difficulty here which suggests a doubt whether the alleged interview ever took place.

Hero-Worship before us, we can imagine the splendid portrait he would have drawn, and how he would have revelled in describing the anarchic peasants and Anabaptists, and their Drogheda-like suppression with Luther's full approval.

46

Το

Just as Frederick was finished, came the one appearance of its author upon a strictly public stage. Fourteen years before this the University of Glasgow had offered him its rectorship, and seven or eight years before a similar tender had come from Aberdeen; but both were declined. In 1865 his own university elected him rector, Mr. Disraeli being the rival candidate, and Mr. Gladstone his predecessor in office. Although Carlyle's health was none of the best, -injured, in fact, by his strenuous efforts to get a half-hero written out and done for,—he accepted, and in the spring of 1866 delivered the rectorial address in Music Hall of that city. We have an account of the scene from the pen of Alexander Smith: all appearances, time and labor had dealt tenderly with him. His face had not yet lost the country bronze. His long residence in London had not touched his Annandale look; nor had it, as we soon learned,-touched his Annandale accent. His countenance was striking, homely, sincere, truthful-the countenance of a man upon whom the burden of the unintelligible world' had weighed more heavily than most. His hair was yet almost dark; his moustache and short beard were iron-gray. His eyes were wide, melancholy, sorrowful, and seemed as if they had been at times aweary of the sun. Altogether, in his aspect there was something aboriginal, as of a piece of unhewn granite which had never been. polished to any approved pattern, where natural and original vitality had never been tampered with." By his side sat on that platform his old friend, Sir David Brewster, for whom he had written, perhaps, the first words of his he ever saw in print,-the sixteen articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia in 1820-23,—and who had written for him the preface to his translation of Legendre. The first degree conferred was upon his and Irving's old friend, Thomas Erskine of Linlathen,-a layman, but hardly second to any clerical theologian in his influence upon the theological thought oft vo continents.* Carlyle stopped at his home during his trip to the

*Professor F. D. Maurice traced to Erskine and Irving the theological germs of the English Broad Church Theology. See Maurice's prefaces to his Prophets and King of the Old Testament (1852) and his Doctrine of Sacrifice (1854). President Por

North. The address was not read but spoken, and all but unpremeditated; the overflow of his thoughts a little more stately and formal than the flow of speech in his daily conversation, with gleams of humor glinting out here and there as if by accident. As it stands printed in the final edition of his Essays, there is no need to quote it here.

Carlyle felt her

As he said to his "A most sorry dog

It was while Carlyle was still lingering in Scotland, that he got the sad news of Mrs. Carlyle's death, on the 21st of April. Her health had been feeble for some time previous to this, and she seems to have died of heart disease, after a shock caused by her pet dog being run over as she was driving in Hyde Park. Mr. Carlyle hastened at once to London, whence he and his brother. John and some friends accompanied the body northward to Haddington. She lies beside her father, Dr. Welsh. loss as only so profound a nature could feel it. friends, "the light of his life had gone out." kennel it [i. e., existence in this world,] oftenest of all seems to me; and wise words, if one even had them, to be only thrown away upon it. Basta! Basta! I, for the most part,say of it, and look with longings toward the still country, where at last we and our loved ones shall be together again. Amen, Amen." "It is the saddest feature of old age," he wrote, just a year after the death of his wife, to Mr. Erskine, "that the old man has to see himself daily growing more lonely; reduced to commune with inarticulate eternities and the loved ones, now unresponsive, who have preceded him thither. Well, well; there is blessedness in this, too, if we take it well. There is grandeur in it, if also an extent of sombre sadness which is new to one; nor is hope quite wanting, nor the clear conviction that those whom we must screen from sore pain and misery are now safe and at rest. It lifts one to real kingship withal, real for the first time in this scene of things. Courage, my friend; let us endure patiently, let us act piously, to the end."

This year, 1866, is also memorable for Carlyle's share in the defence of Gov. Eyre, against those who impeached his conduct in Jamaica, a defence which reminds us of the equally wrong directer of Yale College, wrote to Erskine in 1866: "I wish to say to you that your little work on the internal Evidences for the Truth of Revealed Religion (1820) has been in America a work highly esteemed and of potent theological influence. My father, who has been pastor of one flock for nearly sixty years, once said to me that that book had done more than any single book of his time to give character to the new phase of theology in New England."

tion of his sympathies during our own civil war a few years earlier. To many Americans Mr. Carlyle's "American Iliad in a Nutshell,”Ilias (Americana) in Nuce,—first published in Macmillan of August, 1863, is, and will remain, the most prominent fact in his history. No six printed lines ever made a man so many enemies, or so deservedly. It reached us in the heat of the war, when Gettysburg and Vicksburg were already accomplished facts. But nothing more had been ascertained, except the incapacity of such generals as we had in the East to make effective use of the resources at their command. There was just room for the taunt at our failures with which the scorpion ended as with a venomous sting. That Mr. Carlyle should have so little eye for the heroic self-sacrifices of the war; that he should ignore the struggle for national unity and existence, and see nothing in it but a struggle over “Quashee," was painful to all his friends on our side of the Atlantic. It was one of the saddest warpings of his powerful mind, that in his reaction from the doctrine of Whiggery which reigned supreme in England when he began to exercise his function as public teacher, he became the advocate of every kind of despotism that could call itself "strong government." There was one exception to this. Nothing could induce him to invest with the nimbus of heroic worth his old acquaintance, Napoleon III. In his days of obscurity, Carlyle looked upon him as an opera singer in search of an engagement; in his prosperity, as one who had got what he was in search of in a theatre sufficiently vast, but one destined to give way in a crash of ruin, and to hurl him and all his associates to perdition. In the Second Empire he never believed; and when France was in the convulsions of her great struggle with Germany, he threw himself decidedly on Bismarck's side, and gave moral support to the demand for the retrocession of Elsass and Lothringen. That the people of these provinces should have anything to say in the matter, never seems to have entered his head. He had never accepted his friend Mazzini's doctrine of nationalities.

Equally pronounced was his attitude towards the struggle between Turkey and the Christian peoples of the Balkan peninsula. He wrote of that irrepressible conflict :—

"It seems to me that something very different from war on his behalf, is what the Turk now pressingly needs from England and from all the world—namely, to be peremptorily informed that we