welcomed, as it deserved to be, by Mill and Stirling, the "French Revolution " was not at once successful. The bulk of readers did not hail it as the great prose poem of the century. They were not enraptured by the Iliad-like swiftness and vividness of the narrative, the sustained passion, as if the whole had been written at a sitting, the full flow of poetry, with touches of grandeur and tenderness; and those pages like the pictures from Salvator Rosa's brush, in which a flash of lightning reveals, side by side, the horrors of nature and her pastoral sweetness. Landor, indeed, hailed the "French Revolution" as the best book published in his time, and recognized the coming of a new literary potentate; but his vision was exceptionally acute. The incongruities, monstrosities of style, and the author's disdain for what an admirer called the "feudalities of literature " struck all readers, and it was only some of them who thought much more of the intrinsic beauty of the jewel than of the strange setting. ite haunt, of many literary men. At dif- that the first draft was the best. Though ferent times between 1837 and 1840, Mr. Carlyle delivered at Willis's Rooms and Portman Square courses of lectures on some of his favorite subjects "German Literature," "The History of Literature,' "The Revolutions of Modern Europe," and "Heroes and Hero-Worship." Each of these lectures was a considerable event in literature. Their effect was such as it is difficult now to conceive. The audience included most of the chief men of letters of the day." The accomplished and distinguished, the beautiful, the wise, something of what is best in England, have listened patiently to my rude words," is his own account of his hearers. They were alternately shocked and entranced. There was uncertainty whether his burning words, delivered in an odd sing-song and unquestionable Doric, were wild rhapsodies or the sublime mutterings of a true prophet, who had a message to deliver to modern society. But at all events it was a man of a wholly new order who spoke, and people of all shades and schools-the Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites of London were amazed. Crabbe Robinson, who attended the whole of one course, says of a certain lecture, "It gave great satisfaction, for it had uncommon thoughts, and was delivered with unusual animation." "As for Carlyle's Lectures," writes Bunsen, "they are very striking, rugged thoughts, not ready made up for any political or religious system; thrown at people's heads, by which most of his audience are sadly startled." "Attended Carlyle's lecture," writes Macready, "The Hero as a Prophet,' on which he descanted with a fervor and eloquence that only complete conviction of truth could give. I was charmed, carried away by him. Met Browning there." The French Revolution," the first work to which Mr. Carlyle put his name, appeared in 1837. It would have been published sooner but for the famous disaster which befell the manuscript of the first volume. The author had lent it to Mr. John Stuart Mill; the latter handed it to Mrs. Taylor, his future wife. What became of it was never exactly known. Mrs. Taylor left the manuscript for some days on her writing-table; when wanted it could nowhere be found; and the most probable explanation of its disappearance was the suggestion that a servant had used the manuscript to light the fire. Carlyle at once set to work to reproduce from his notes the lost volume; he swiftly finished his task, but he always thought About 1839 began a new phase of activity. Mr. Carlyle had imbibed a deep distrust and even abhorrence of all the somewhat mechanical expedients for the amelioration of society then in fashion. The favorite schemes of social reform were then even more crude than they generally are; Mr. Carlyle despised them all. The philanthropists whom he met with were not the most practical or the wisest of their kind; Mr. Carlyle thought them, for the most part, mealy-mouthed, engaged in ineffectual dallying and parleying with the stern, invincible verities of life, and coaxing and coddling those upon whom nature had pronounced her irreversible sentences of extermination. From the depth of society, from torchlight meetings held by Chartists in Birmingham and other towns, from the agricultural counties where "Swing" was burning ricks or throwing down toll-gates, from Ireland, where an overgrown population no longer found potatoes enough to satisfy its simple wants, came sullen mutterings of discontent, ominous signs of commotions to come, perplexity, tribulation, and distress among nations. There was no lack of nostrums or social doctors. Mr. Carlyle pronounced them one and all vain and unprofitable. In a series of works published from 1839 to 1850-in "Chartism," "Past and Present," and "Latterday Pamphlets he poured unmeasured scorn and contumely on the false teachers and blind guides of the time. It was the 66 kernel of his philosophy that legislation, | nothing but the good sense of 1881. Who reform or ballot bills, statutory meas- would not now echo Mr. Carlyle's protests ures of social improvement of any kind, against the supposed omnipotence of would do of themselves next to no good. Parliament or of the possibility of saving Reforms to be effectual must go deeper nations by the use of the ballot-box? than an English Parliament, of whose Who now believes that men can be instanperfect wisdom he had grave doubts, was taneously reformed in battalions and plalikely to tolerate. "Christian philan- toons, or that human nature can be remade thropy and other most amiable-looking, by any order of the Poor Law commisbut most baseless, and, in the end, most sioners? Who does not own that the baneful and all-bewildering jargon;" change in our colonies from servitude to philanthropisms" issuing "in a univer- idleness and squalor, temporary, it is true, sal sluggard and scoundrel protection was not an unmixed blessing to those society;" the crowds of amiable simple- most concerned? If all wise men are tons sunk in "deep froth oceans of benev- now haunted by a sense of the impotence olence; Bentham, a "bore of the first of legislation to effect deep changes for magnitude," with his immense baggage good, and of the necessity of working out of formulæ, and his tedious iteration of reformations really worth anything in the "the greatest happiness of the greatest souls of individuals, to whom do they owe number;" the political economists_mum- this so much as to Mr. Carlyle? Who bling barren truisms or equally unfruitful recognized the duty of spreading educaparadoxes about supply and demand; tion earlier and more clearly than he? Malthusians preaching to deaf ears the We say nothing of the keen eye for the most unacceptable of gospels; so-called detection of rogues and impostors, under statesmen collecting with impotent hands all disguises, which Mr. Carlyle's political information about the Condition of En- pamphlets reveal; or of those ingenious gland Question which they could not ap- epithets of his which, attached to some ply, and letting things slide to chaos and blustering, swelling piece of fraud, acted perdition; Ireland sluttishly starving from like a stone tied to the neck of a dog flung age to age on Act of Parliament freedom; into deep water. It is enough to say that the braying of Exeter Hall; the helpless again and again he reminded, in his own babbling of Parliament; and liberty made way, his generation of stern truths which a pretext, in the West Indies and else- it was in danger of forgetting. where, for flying in the face of the great In 1845 he published "Oliver Cromlaw that, if a man work not, neither shall he well's Letters and Speeches, with Elucieat, these were some of the butts of his dations." The work was well received. It scorn and contempt. It would be scarcely passed rapidly through several editions. worth while to try to measure the exact In a petition addressed in 1839 to the value of these jeremiads. Mr. Carlyle House of Commons on the subject of the was much too eloquently wrathful. His Copyright Bill, Mr. Carlyle had said of his criticisms were often grotesque carica- literary labors that they had "found hithtures. They abounded in contradictions, erto, in money or money's worth, small and it was always pretty clear that Mr. recompense or none," and he was by Carlyle found it much easier to rail at no means sure of ever getting any. His large than to suggest any working substi- "Oliver Cromwell," however, was at once tutes for the systems which he despised. widely read; and in his preface to the De Quincey was unanswerable when he second edition he thought proper to admit said to Carlyle, "You've shown or you've that, contrary to his expectations, "the made another hole in the tin kettle of so- work had spread itself abroad with some ciety; how do you propose to tinker it?" degree of impetus." No one could fail to Harsh and crude judgments are to be met see how the great Protector, as he really with in almost every page, and much of was, had at last been disinterred from the teaching, so far as it is intelligible beneath Pelions and Ossas of calumny and consistent, is preposterous and im- and rubbish, heaped upon him by generapracticable. But, dismissing all expecta- tions of detractors. We are familiar tion of finding precise suggestions, it is enough by this time with the process of astonishing to note how, under uncouth, historical whitewashing. None of the rhapsodical phraseology, lie many ideas attempts of the kind have, however, stood which are now the common property of the test of time so well as Mr. Carlyle's. most educated men. The novelties and From the gibbet on which Cromwell had paradoxes of 1840 are, to a large extent, | hung for nearly two centuries he has been taken down forever. In 1850 appeared the Latter-day Pamphlets." Mr. Carlyle's next work, published in 1851, was the life of his friend, John Sterling, one of the most charming biographies in the language. Why Sterling's "Life" should have been again written, after Archdeacon Hare had told the simple, uneventful story, was a priori anything but clear, but posterity would not willingly lose this record of a beautiful friendship. Carlyle had first met Sterling accidentally at the India Office in company with John Stuart Mill. The talk on this occasion laid the foundations of a lasting intercourse. Sterling's mother took to Mrs. Carlyle in a kindly, maternal way, and the two families formed many ties. "We had unconsciously made an acquisition which grew richer and wholesomer every new year, and ranks now, even seen in the pale moonlight of memory, and must ever rank, as among the precious possessions of life." The personal feeling which guided Mr. CarÎyle's pen gave a lighter touch and more genial glow to the style; the book is full of sunny sketches of men and things; and a benign fate, similar to that which descended upon young Edward King, the hero of "Lycidas," has given to John Sterling in these pages an immortality which his fugitive writings and his amiable virtues and beautiful endowments would not have procured him. Between 1858 and 1865 appeared the ten volumes of Mr. Carlyle's laborious "History of Frederick the Great." On this work Mr. Carlyle spent more time and trouble than on any of his other books. It is a marvel of industry. He has not been outdone by the German writers on the subject - and Ranke, Preuss, and Droysen are in the field-in minute and painful investigation. Every accessible memoir and book bearing on the subject was read and collated. Mr. Carlyle went to Germany in 1858 for the sake of his book. He visited Zarndorff, Leuthen, Liegnitz, Sorr, Mollwitz, Prague, and many other places famous in the wars of Frederick; and the vivid descriptions to be found in the later volumes -for example, the description of the scenes of the battles of Chotusitz and Dettingen-we owe to this journey. In none of his works is more genius discernible. Nowhere does his humor flow more copiously and brilliantly. Who that has read his "Tobacco Parliament "will ever forget it? The figures of Wilhelmina, Old Papa, Excellency Robinson, Old Dessau, and a dozen other characters, move about vividly as they did in life. And yet the ten volumes are painful to read. Peculiarities of diction, embarrassing in others of Mr. Carlyle's books, have grown to be wearisome and vexatious; little tricks and contortions of manner are repeated without mercy; miserable petty details are pushed into the foreground; whole pages are written in a species of crabbed shorthand; the speech of ordinary mortals is abandoned; and sometimes we can detect in the writer a sense of weariness and a desire to tumble out in any fashion the multitude of somewhat dreary facts which he had collected. When he visited Varnhagen von Ense in 1858, he told his host, as we gather from Von Ense's "Tagebücher," that his "Friedrich" was "the poorest, most troublesome, and arduous piece of work he had ever undertaken." "No satisfaction in it at all, only labor and sorrow. What the devil had I to do with your Frederick?" As to which Von Ense observes, "It must have cost him unheard-of labor to understand Frederick," adding in his snappish, cantankerous way, "if he does understand him." Since his "Frederick" was published Mr. Carlyle had undertaken no large work. But he had not been altogether silent. During the American war was published his half-contemptuous, we had almost said, truculent account of the issues in his " Ilias in Nuce," enunciating his old predilection for the peculiar institution. In 1865 he was elected rector of Edinburgh University. Next year he delivered an address to the students on the "Choice of Books." It was full of serene wisdom, the apt words of one who looked benignly down from the summit of a life well spent on the beginners in the struggle. Those who remember the old man's appearance, as he talked to the lads before him with amiable gravity of manner, his courageous, hopeful words, did not expect that in a few hours exceeding sorrow would befall him. During his absence from London his wife died. Her death was quite unlooked for; while she was driving in the Park she suddenly expired. When the coachman stopped he found his mistress lifeless. Carlyle might well say that "the light of his life had quite gone out;" and the letters which he wrote to his friends are full of exceeding sorrow, and were at times the voice of one for whom existence has nothing left. "A most sorry dog-kennel it oftenest all seems to me, and wise words, if one even had them, to be only thrown away upon | little house at Chelsea, just to hear this it. Basta, basta, I for the most part say genial Timon inveigh and harangue of it, and look with longings towards the against shams, wiggeries, and other cusstill country where at last we and our tomary themes. His talk was in many beloved ones shall be together again. respects like his writings equally pic Amen, amen." "It is the saddest featuresque, vehement, lit up with wayward ture of old age," he wrote, just a year flashes of humor, abounding in songafter the death of his wife, in a letter to like refrains, rarely falling into those his friend, Mr. Erskine of Linlathen, ingeniously grotesque entanglements of "that the old man has to see himself phraseology which disfigure his later daily growing more lonely; reduced to pages, and set off by his homely Scotch commune with inarticulate eternities, and accent, rugged, peasant-like as the day the loved ones, now unresponsive, who when first he quitted Nithsdale. There have preceded him thither. Well, well, were not many greater pleasures than to there is blessedness in this too, if we sit by his armchair and hear him tell, take it well. There is grandeur in it, if as he loved to tell, when years came on, also an extent of sombre sadness which of old Annandale folk and ways, or descant is new to one; nor is hope quite wanting, on his favorite themes, turning round nor the clear conviction that those whom sharply every now and then upon the we most screen from sore pain and mis-listener while he uttered some crashing ery are now safe and at rest. It lifts one dogma, such as "Lies-lies are the very to real kingship withal, real for the first devil." There have been men of more time in this scene of things. Courage, astonishing powers of talk men with my friend, let us endure patiently, let us more varied information at their comact piously, to the end." mand; men who could quote chapter and In 1867 the discussions about Parlia- verse in a way which was not distinctive mentary reform revived in Mr. Carlyle of him. But Mr. Carlyle's talk had a his old thoughts about democracy, and charm of its own which no one could rehe published in Macmillan's Magazine sist. He put so much genius, so much 'Shooting Niagara, and After?" Through of himself, so much aggressive fervor our columns, he gave to the world in 1870, his trenchant views on the Franco-German War, denouncing "the cheap pity and newspaper lamentation over fallen and afflicted France," and expressing his opinion that it would be well for her and everybody if Bismarck took Alsace and so much of Lorraine as he wanted. Mr. Carlyle's last published writings were some contributions in 1875 to Fraser's Magazine, on John Knox's portrait. His active literary life had thus extended over about half a century. 66 Mr. Carlyle has shunned many literary honors which were always within his reach. He did not accept the grand cross of the Bath, and on the death of Manzoni, in 1875, he was presented with an hon the Prussian order "for merit" It was knowing Mr. Carlyle imperfectly to know him only by his books. One must have talked with him, or, to be more accurate, allowed him to talk, in order to understand how his influence had burnt itself so deep into all men who knew him well. In his prime, strangers of all sorts came from the ends of the earth to the into a talk with a friend or a stranger who was to his mind. It was natural to him, as natural as it was to Dr. Johnson, to talk well. Let us quote on this head the testimony of Margaret Fuller, herself no mean talker, and, with all her admiration, a little vexed, as we may see, at Mr. Carlyle's inability to let others shine. In spite of its transcendental twang, the description will serve to show how he looked in 1846 to a clever woman. He His talk is still an amazement and splendor scarcely to be faced with steady eyes. does not converse, only harangues. Carlyle allows no one a chance, but bears down all opposition, not only by his wit and onset of words, resistless in their sharpness as so many bayonets, but by actual physical superiority, raising his voice and rushing on his opponent with a torrent of sound. This is not in the least from unwillingness to allow freedom to others; no man would more enjoy a manly resistance to his thought. But it is the impulse of a mind accustomed to follow out its own impulses as the hawk its prey, and which knows not how to stop in the chase. . . . kind of satirical, heroical, critical poem, with sings rather than talks. He pours upon you a regular cadences, and generally catching up near the beginning some singular epithet which serves as a refrain when his song is full. He puts out his chin till it looks like the beak He of a bird of prey, and his eyes flash bright in- | these things; he will not tarry over the stinctive meanings like Jove's bird. niceties of attorney logic. He does not Scarcely less interesting than his talk travel by the common highways; he is were his letters. They are models of on the wing; and there is neither obstawhat letters ought to be. Even those cle nor boundary thought of in his flight. which were written in his old age were Justness of view as a critic is not to be little infected with the vices of manner expected of him. His prejudices have which spoiled his published writings. always been immense and wayward. You We have lying before us letters written must not look for sober, well-ordered in as pure and liquid a style as that reasoning; for him the time of argument of the essay on Burns or on Goethe. is always past; his business is to make They will no doubt be gathered together; good his victory, to force upon you his and if, as is understood, he has had more conviction. As Johnson refuted Berkethan one possible Boswell, who knows ley by "striking his foot with mighty that his memory may not have the fate of force against a stone," so with equal coJohnson's his pithy sayings being re-gency Mr. Carlyle has disposed of many membered and quoted when Carlylese is disagreeable theories by dubbing their forgotten as much as Johnsonese? He authors M'Crowdy or M'Quirk. was a copious letter-writter, and answered readily and with rare forbearance the frequent miscellaneous appeals made to him. His clever young countrymen, coming to London with unborn projects in their heads, were apt to believe that they had a prescriptive right to lay before him their difficulties and plans, and to claim full and precise counsel. He rarely failed to respond with affectionate solicitude; and many a young author has owed to him wise advice which saved him from making shipwreck. Mr. Carlyle's purse was open, but his charity was of a rarer kind than that which is content with occasionally .subscribing a few pounds. He would enter into details and give counsel at once precise, minute, and judicious. In early life he was a swift writer. Later, however, his habits of composition changed. It is said that the sight of the manuscript of a well-known author, with numerous interlineations and erasures, was a revelation to him of the pains which were necessary for the best workmanship. Certain it is that he corrected and re-corrected his later works; pieces of manuscript were interpolated or pasted in, and the finished production was sometimes very wonderful in appearance. This is not the fit time to try to measure Mr. Carlyle's services or the worth of his works. They have stood many years before the world; each one has long ago had his say about them; the general judgment of mankind on their shortcomings and faults has been pronounced. It will scarcely be questioned that the quantity of the ore of pure truth to be extracted from them is small. Precise definitions, reservations, and qualifications are not in his way; he is too eager and too much afire to be particular about books are a sort of Puritanical syllabus, not less condemnatory of the modern spirit than that which issued from the Vatican. His social and political theories are, in the main, but aspirations after impossible ideals-vain attempts, heroic, but ineffectual, to bring back the past and yet to retain the richest fruits of progress. His extravagances of style lie on the surface, and his disciples have found it easy to copy and outdo his tricks and foibles of manner and his recurring touches of grotesqueness. They have not always copied also the sound sense which made atonement and which controlled all that he did. Many historians have fancied that they were following in Mr. Carlyle's footsteps because they poohpoohed the operation of general causes and principles, paraded some trumpery scrap of information about the clothes or "property" of their heroes, ostentatiously cleared up a wretched date, or struck out a new mode of spelling an unimportant name. We have seen clumsy imitators who cumbered their pages with meaningless and garish details, or interpolated labored rhapsodies, which were feeble reminiscences or hollow echoes of Sauerteig. The commonplaces of Mr. Carlyle have been the stock in trade of a terribly wearisome group of writers, who assumed the nod of Jove, but could not hurl his thunderbolts. Unfortunately they aped other and graver faults, and supposed that they were animated by Mr. Carlyle's spirit when they applauded ev ery exhibition of brute force and insulted the weaker but not less noble elements of human nature. Mr. Carlyle is responsi ble for much in modern literature which it is not pleasant to look upon; and some of his own pages, with their exultant va |