of times before, and the poor gaping sea of prurient blockheadism receives it as a kind of inspired revelation, and runs to buy my books (it is said) now when I have got quite done with their buying or refusing to buy. If they would give me 10,000 a year and bray unanimously their hosannahs heaven high-for the rest of my life, who now would there be to get the smallest joy or profit from it?"

What can one say of such an utterance? And this from the man who had, with much wise justice and charity, looked into the sad sick heart of Jean Jacques and told us, with calm wisdom, whence his miseries flowed. Painful and regrettable indeed.

Were these acerb, contemptuous pages really written by that chastened and serene spirit, which of yore led us to the "Worship of Sorrow" in words of such persuasive depth and beauty that they have ever remained for many like shining load-stars in the dark hours of doubt and misgiving, convincing them that there is in man a higher than a love of happiness, that he can do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness ?'' What was Carlyle's message to the world preached in everything he wrote, from brochure to bulky history but this, that we must despise alike pleasure and pain, rise in victory over mere desire and the mean hungers and vanities of our poor selves, and become humble brave men and not grumble over our wages? Herein lies the grievous pain of this book, that the physician had, apparently, after all not in the least healed himself, that at the end of a noble and victorious career externally, we find him inwardly bankrupt of hope, faith, and charity, looking on the world with moody anger and querulous unsatisfied egotism. Where one might hope to find, had almost a right to find, a solemn hymn of victory closing in melodious adagio the long, well-fought battle of life, we come upon this lamentable piercing cry, not only of pain but of irascible discontent and harsh vehemence against men and things, wounding to the ear, and still more to the heart. How can we ever again read our "Sartor" with the old eyes and the old faith in our teacher, when we discover that this was the outcome of his wisdom? If, as every lover of Carlyle must hope and believe, this is no true presentation of his permanent mood, but

the exceptional voice of anguish uttered in the agony of bereavement with nerves all inflamed and torn up, body and mind in a most hag-ridden condition," we may be comforted. But why should we have been discomforted?

After all, Carlyle has already passed into that select band of authors who are proof not only against criticism, good or bad, but their own weaknesses or even vices. The world knows better than to be unduly exacting and uncharitable to the truly great. Rousseau and Byron would long ago have been forgotten and abolished if criticism, very often morally quite just, had any efficacy against such spirits. The "ill-cut serpents of eternity" are not to be disposed of by such short and easy methods. Carlyle's work is finished and before the world, and it will not be to-day or to-morrow that a final corrected estimate of its value will be attained. Still the outlines of a judgment may even now be forecast which excludes him at once from the class of thinkers properly so called, to place him on the roll of great writers, whose function is to stir and charm the emotions rather than enlighten the intellect. It is easy to see that feeling not reflection was his guide in life, as it was in opinion. To take pains to come to a sober, well-weighed, scientifically true judgment always appeared to him more or less of a disloyalty to the Silences and Eternities and "divine soul of man.' No ignorance of a subject ever kept him from the most peremptory and dogmatic conclusions about it. As this book shows, he was on the point of writing a pamphlet on the American Civil War, though he confesses he was "so ignorant about the matter," that perhaps he might have done more harm than good to the cause he favored, that cause being of course the interesting one of Jefferson Davis. His downright deliration about the "Nigger fanaticism, as he called it, is typical. If he could have really known slavery as the hateful thing it was, who can doubt that he, with his flaming love of justice and pity, would have been the fiercest of abolitionists and refused all parley with the abettors of the accursed thing. But he had conceived a horror of the

cash

nexus' as sole bond between man and man-very true and deep the feeling

which prompted this- and forthwith rushed to the conclusion that emancipation of Quashee was only a piece of modern cant and anarchy, that Quashee was meant by nature to be a servant, and that it was everybody's interest, Quashee's included, that he should remain such. Carlyle could never be so unfaithful to the Veracities as to look at two sides of a question which stirred his feelings, otherwise he might have perceived that slavery was, if possible, more abominable and injurious to the white man than the black. So he judged, or rather felt about everything. The Vesuvian fire within him was always filling his sky with sulphurous clouds of black smoke and burning cinders, at times making him discharge torrents of red-hot lava; but calm sunlight was naturally intercepted by these volcanic explosions.

He seems to have come into the world å sort of one-faced Janus, with his back resolutely turned towards the future about which he would neither hear nor believe any good thing. He not only despaired of future good for the world, but for himself even when clear victory had rewarded his valiant efforts, and his path, if he could have seen it, was strewn with nobly-won palms and laurels.

All honest work and ways had to his thinking ceased more or less with his entrance into the world. His father is Ultimus Romanorum. He positively implies that such a thing as a good watch in these days of quackery could no longer be obtained. It is likely enough that the transition from the ancien régime which his long life fairly spanned, supplied his tenacious affections and memory with instances of wise old customs and usages which were lost or forgotten in the age of telegraphs and steam. But he is no mere commonplace laudator temporis acti. He thoroughly loathes the present and all its works. A fair, not to say a philosophic man would have struck a balance, would have said with regret that much good had been hurried away in the ever-surging new, but still have admitted that the new also contained much of good. Such a thought he would have put away from him. He was a strange spiritual survival, belonging to an extinct moral world. His real contemporaries were

Luther, John Knox, and Oliver Cromwell. They had no qualms or mawkish doubts, they were "thorough men ;" they did not palter with their moral sense or chop logic. Such a reactionary as Carlyle hardly can be found. De Maistre and his like are progressists in comparison. They are reactionary from the head, political interests of party, and what not. Carlyle is so from the blood, the most inward core and fibre. He detests the modern world and its ways, from no reason or interest, he simply detests it with his whole soul, and that is enough for him.

His work as an historian-that is his essential and permanent work-naturally bears the impress of these qualities and predispositions. He belongs to no school of modern writers on history, numerous and important as the class is. He shares not a whit the wider, juster, historical conception of the past-the classification of epochs, the notion of sociological growth carried on through the centuries, the long course of development which reaches from primitive man to the present day. The strongest and fruitfullest side of modern historical studies-early institutions-he does not even glance at, and it would certainly have been abhorrent to him. "Institutions, one can imagine him saying with his war-horse snort; "what of institutions? the spirit of man is what we seek, man symbol of eternity imprisoned into time,

etc., etc. As a matter of fact the only thing he cared about in history was character. The strong man who has his way, who makes cowards and caitiffs tremble before him, who pitches pedants' formula to the winds, and plays the diable à quatre generally with owlish conventionalities and purblind decorums and decencies-that is the man who attracts him; he and his belongings make up history for Carlyle. This alone explains his otherwise inconsistent sympathy for all manner of wild men whom on other grounds he would have fiercely condemned, Burns, Mirabeau, Danton, and the rest. force" ever arrests his eye; and what an eye! No poet or dramatist ever pierced with more unerring insight to the core of a character than he could in an instant and with a power well-nigh unique in literature unfold that charac

"Stormy

ter and make it live and move again before our very eyes. Michelet is not without a kindred talent, but he has not the depth and insight of Carlyle; nor his wondrous and truly sublime pathos. His historical imagination was transcendent and almost terrific. He realises the minutest details of a great event, feels with all the characters like a consummate dramatist, sees with their eyes, and yet with his own too, seeing much which they did or could not see, and in the end rolls out such pictures as never historian painted before. Where can anything be found, leaving the longest interval, approaching to the battle of Dunbar ?

'The night is wild and wet. 2nd September means 12th by our calendar. The harvest moon wades deep among clouds of sleet and Whoever has a heart for prayer let him pray now, for the wrestle of death is at hand.

hail.

The hoarse sea moans bodeful, swinging low and heavy against those whine-stone bays. The sea and the tempests are abroad; all else asleep but we. And there is One that rides on the wings of the wind." "The trumsilence, the cannons awaken along all the line. The Lord of hosts, the Lord of hosts!' On my brave ones, on!" Plenty of fire from field. pieces, snaphances, matchlocks, entertains the

pets peal, shattering with fierce clangor night's

Scotch main. Battle across the Brock. Poor stiffened men roused from the corn-shocks with their matches all out.'

And so on (for there is no end to quoting) till the Lord General Cromwell was heard to say, "They run; I profess they run," and he and his at the foot of Doon Hill made a halt and sang the 117th Psalm, rolling it strong and great against the sky." Is Milton often finer than this?

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But Carlyle's especially characteristic mark among historians is his humor. Never since Herodotus, who loved his joke and cared often, one may suspect, more for the fun than the truth of his stories, has any historian in any language come near Carlyle in this respect. His torians have mostly been rather solemn and pompous folk. Not even Voltaire, the wittiest of writers in other developments, ventures in his serious histories to essay the comic vein. But Carlyle is hardly ever well out of it. In his most tragic and pathetic passages, the humorous side of things may recede a little just for a moment, but Puck is always hovering in the neighborhood, and is at

his antics again before you have time to say hold. The marvellous art and delicacy with which Carlyle applies his humor, always thereby deepening and softening his pathos, never in the least marring or destroying it, is one of the greatest things in literature. For it is clearly a greater achievement than that of the professed humorists-Rabelais, Montaigne, Swift, Sterne-who have nothing else to do but to cultivate their humor and follow its whims whithersoever it may lead them. Sidney Smith, by his admirable infusion of wit into his serious argument, comes nearest to him. But his wit, though of the brightest, is cold and on the surface compared to the warm rich humor of Carlyle, which appeals to the heart quite as much as to the sense of the ludicrous. The one, in short, it wit and the other humor. It is very likely that this quality, while it immensely increases the admiration of one class of readers, has been injurious to him in the eyes of another class, prob

ably by a far larger one. Some good people resent fun and laughter, especially in connection with otherwise serious subjects, and consider it as taking a liberty with them to introduce anything of the kind. There are, certainly, things in the "Frederick" which affect people accustomed to the so-called dignity of history, as Shakespeare's clowns and grave-diggers affected Voltaire, with his notions about the dignity of tragedy, and this may be one reason why the "Frederick" [not only in size, Carlyle's greatest book] has never, I believe, attained the popularity of his other works. There were much more to say on Carlyle as an historian, if these were the occasion and place for it. There is only space for a remark or two more, one of some importance.

Every attentive reader of Carlyle must have noticed a marked difference between his earlier and later writings consisting in this, that whereas from the "Sartor" onwards to "Past and Present" (1843), he speaks of war and bloodshed and violence generally, with more or less disgust and becomingly human reprobation, he afterwards can hardly go far enough in their praise, practically occupied himself with little else than the study of campaigns and military matters (whether of Cromwell

or Frederick), or in the germane enjoyment of excogitating means of coercing and subduing caitiffs and scoundrels and fairly gloating over the process. His vehemence against war in the Sartor" might content the Peace Society itself. The humorous description of the French and English Drumdrudge, each sending its thirty recruits

“Till after infinite effort the two parties come into actual juxtaposition, and thirty stand fronting thirty, each with a gun in his hand. Straightway the word 'Fire!' is given, and they blow the souls out of one another. Had these men any quarrel? Busy as the devil, not the smallest. How then? Simpleton! Their governors had fallen out, and, instead of shooting each other, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot."

In “Past and Present" he speaks of the Manchester Insurrection like a man decently clothed and in his right mind, regards it as the most successful of insurrections just because so few were killed, and is altogether intelligent and humane. Then came a great change in his feelings with regard to all these matters. War and violence become with him almost ends in themselves one might say, so manifest is the relish with which he describes them. No one who ever read the latter-day pamphlet on Model Prisons will forget the Brobdignagian humor with which he addresses the "Devil's regiments of the line."

Mark it, my diabolic friends, I mean to lay leather on the backs of you, collars round the necks of you, and will teach you after the example of the Gods," etc. There was a grain of truth and insight in all this, as there seldom fails to be in Carlyle's wildest vagaries. He sees a fact, one aspect of a question, in dazzling clearness; but he does not only neglect, but scorns and repudiates as treason to heaven's truth all effort to reconcile his fact or aspect with other facts and aspects. This temper grew on him with years and he came at last to sympathize with mere savage barbarity. As this shows, said of Kaiser Frederick Barbarossa

"He made Gebhardus, the anarchic governor of Milan, lie chained under his table like a dog for three days, as it would be well if every anarchic governor, of the soft type and

the hard, were made to do on occasion; asking

himself in terrible earnest, Am I a dog, then; alas, am I not a dog?' Those were serious old

times."

This is so much the worse as nothing is more certain than that these Italian expeditions of the German Emperors were the source of ultimate ruin to the empire and disaster to Europe. But Carlyle did not trouble himself with considerations of this kind. The point which I want to come to is this, that in these Reminiscences he gives us himself the approximate date when this momentary change of which we have been speaking took place in his sentiments. Referring to Mill's "considerably hidebound London Review, he regrets that he was not made editor of it.

Though short, the intimation is sufficient. The year of revolution in the nineteenth century, and the too sympathetic brooding over the great leader of the rebellion in the seventeenth century, had, combining with elective affinities within, wrought this change. He never seems to have been aware that there had been a change, which is also characteristic.

And now to take leave even of this melancholy book with a few friendly words. Disappointing as is the picture which Carlyle here gives us of his inner mind, on one side he appears truly admirable, and that is his indomitable courage and persistence in work. In this respect he carried out to the letter all his precepts. From the "Life of Schiller" to the "Life of Frederick,' period of some forty odd years, he never drew rein; through ill-health and disheartenment, through trials and sorrows, through neglect and through fame, he worked on with desperate hope, determined to bring out his product,' infinitessimal or otherwise, with truly heroic courage.

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a

"

Secondly: These These hastily written pages-written under the circumstances we know are nevertheless very often, in point of style and literary power, equal to anything the author ever produced. They were dashed off at such speed that in one instance—the "Essay

on Irving"-the writer absolutely forgot the fact of their composition. Without the straining after effect sometimes too visible in Carlyle, his language is here often singularly rhythmical, picturesque, and graphic The Scotch border country is painted in quiet tones and modest colors-transparent, deep, harmonious -with great beauty. And all this was done in a moment, as it were, by a broken-hearted old man of three score years and twelve. It is difficult to refer

to the deepest note of all--the cruel, the relentless pathos with which he mourns his wife. Literature may be searched through, and nothing found so unutterably pitiful and melting as this long wail of anguish of the bereaved one over his lost partner of forty years. I am halftempted to blot what I have written. There were depths of love, radiant sublimities, in this man which we shall not soon meet with again.-Fortnightly Review.

I Do not propose at the present time to attempt anything like a critical estimate of the great man who has just passed from our midst. Better occasions may offer themselves for saying what has to be said in that direction. For the present it would seem that there is little need of speech. Much has been written, and not a little admirably written, in commemoration of the teacher and the message which he delivered to mankind; as also there has not been wanting the usual snarl of the cynic irritated by a chorus of eulogy. Even the feeblest of critics could scarcely fail to catch some of the characteristic features of one of the most vigorous and strongly-marked types that ever appeared in our literature. The strongest among them would find it hard to exhaust the full significance of so remarkable a phenomenon. Despair of saying anything not palpably inadequate or anything not already said by many writers might suggest the propriety of silence, were it not that in any review which claims a literary character it might seem unbecoming not to make some passing act of homage to one who was yesterday our foremost man of letters. To do justice to such a theme we ought to have been touched by the mantle of the prophet himself. We should have been masters of the spell wrought by his unique faculty of humorous imagination. When Mr. Carlyle spoke, as he has spoken in so many familiar passages, of the death of › a personal friend, or of one of those heroes whom he loved with personal

affection, he could thrill us with a pathos peculiar to himself; for no one could adopt more naturally or interpret more forcibly the mood of loft Stoicism, dominating without deadening the most tender yearning; or enable us at once to recognize the surpassing value of a genuine hero and to feel how dreamlike and transitory all human life appears in presence of the eternal and infinite, and how paltry a thing, in the. moments when such glimpses are vouchsafed to us, is the most towering of human ambitions. To express adequately these solemn emotions is the prerogative of men endowed with the true poetic gift. It will be enough for a prosaic critic to recall briefly some of the plain and tangible grounds which justify the pride of his fellow-countrymen - especially of those who follow his calling-in Mr. Carlyle's reputation.

One remark, indeed, suggests itself to every one. Carlyle's life would serve for a better comment than even his writings upon his title," the hero as man of letters."

And it is in that capacity that I shall venture to consider him very briefly without attempting to examine the special significance or permanent value of his writings. Carlyle, as we all know, indulged in much eloquent declamation upon the merits of silence as .compared with speech. Like many other men of literary eminence, he seemed rather to enjoy the depreciation. of his own peculiar function. As Scott considered that a mere story-teller or compounder of rhymes was but a poor