a good many glib, superficial estimates that have become current. Lord Melbourne is said to have remarked: "I wish I were as cocksure of any one thing as Macaulay is of everything." There was, it is true, painfully little hesitation about Macaulay, but he was distinctly not a conceited man; he had, moreover, a better right to be "cocksure" about most things than the average man; his mere knowledge was not only extraordinarily great, but accurate; he knew that his memory was wellnigh infallible. His lack of spiritual depth has already been noticed; but it is a very hasty and false conclusion to infer that he was without great intellectual depth, or without a very striking genius. He is furthermore charged with deficiency of real humor. He was not, certainly, a great humorist, he was in no sense a Lamb or a Thackeray; but one suspects that those who prefer the charge have not read his correspondence. The fairest view, after all, considers the almost unanimous opinion of his contemporaries; such an estimate does not forget his spotless integrity, his capacity for painstaking work, his brilliant conversation, his controlling eloquence in the House of Commons, and, above all, his authorship of the Essays and The History of England. Greater even than his vogue as essayist and historian is his influence on the writing of English prose, especially in journalism. In spite of many literary reactions, nearly every journalist who wishes to impress the larger public takes refuge in the force and the clearness, the antithesis and the brevity invariably associated with the name of Macaulay.

THOMAS CARLYLE

"MAN, son of Earth and of Heaven," says Carlyle, "lies there not in the innermost heart of thee, a Spirit of active Method, a Force for work!" "All true Work is Religion: and whatsoever Religion is not Work may go and dwell among the Brahmins, Antinomians, Spinning Dervishes, or where it will; with me it shall have no harbor." Here is the great message of Carlyle, by far the most outstanding feature of his lifegenuine, earnest work. This gospel he preached in words of fire. Many no doubt have held such a philosophy, but no man in the nineteenth century has brought to this philosophy the genius of Carlyle; hence of no modern man can it so justly be said that he spoke "with tongues." It has become a commonplace to call him the prophet of the century.

Yet this is by no means the whole or commonly accepted view of Carlyle. It is still customary to hear him spoken of as a dyspeptic cynic, a hard-hearted misanthrope, and, worse yet, a hypocrite who, preaching fine practices, was in his private life a bully and a tyrant. This view is the result of Froude's treatment of his master. In the nine volumes, including Personal Reminiscences, Biography, and Letters of Carlyle, written or edited by Froude shortly after Carlyle's death, an unfair impression was given; for Froude, feebly asserting that his master was white, painted him black. So great, moreover, was the volume of Froude's work, and so overwhelming the authority with which he spoke,

that, in spite of careful and adequate corrections by such scholars as Professor Masson and Professor Norton, the popular prejudice has largely lived on ; and now, inveterate after twenty years, it is in some minds almost an incurable disease. The only fair estimate, after all, is based on a consideration of the whole correspondence, in the authentic editions, of Carlyle, his wife, and his friends.

Carlyle's cruelty and insincerity, after such a consideration, cannot stand. Even his cynicism, often bitter and towards the end violent, is not the most fundamental thing about him. "I have called my task," he wrote to Miss Welsh in June, 1826, "an Egyptian bondage, but that was a splenetic word, and came not from the heart, but from the sore throat." Almost all through his life Carlyle suffered also from sleeplessness and dyspepsia, a "rat gnawing at his stomach.” "Some days," he wrote in 1823, "I suffer as much pain as would drive about three Lake poets down to Tartarus." But there was more than this. "His misery," says Professor Masson aptly, "was the fretting of such a sword in such a scabbard, or in any scabbard." Carlyle and his wife used often to joke about "the raal mental awgony in my ain inside." By disposition, too, he was moody and melancholy; and in moments of despair he was cynical enough. But the Yahoo-raillery of Swift was never his. "The former," says Mr. Augustine Birrell," pelts you with mud, as did in old days gentlemen electors their parliamentary candidates; the latter only occasionally splashes you, as does a public vehicle pursuing on a wet day its uproarious course." The doubt, moreover, which was at the bottom of the cynicism was emphatically not his chief quality. He