to the condition of society, pouring forth unmeasured contempt on "The Nigger Question," "The Present Time," "Model Prisons," "Downing Street," "The New Downing Street," "Stump Orators," "Parliaments," "Hudson's Statue," "Jesuitism." Next year appeared his Biography of John Sterling.' Thereafter he was occupied exclusively with his great historical work, The History of Frederick II., commonly called The Great.' The two first volumes were published in 1858, other two in 1862, and in 1865 the work was completed.

In the session of 1865-66 he was elected Lord Rector by the students of Edinburgh University; and on April 2, 1866, delivered to a crowded and enthusiastic audience his famous Installation Address. He was not suffered long to enjoy the most affecting public manifestations that have ever honoured his name. His wife died before his return to London: in the very hour of his public triumph came the stroke of calamity; and the old man mourned that "the light of his life was quite gone out." Not till after her death did he learn how much she had suffered for him.

He published nothing of importance during the last fifteen years of his life. Now and then he made his voice heard on questions of passing interest. In 1867 he wrote for Macmillan's Magazine' a very gloomy anticipation of the consequences of the Reform Bill, with the suggestive title, "Shooting Niagara, and After?" In 1869 he sent to the newspapers a letter on his favourite "Emigration." During the war between France and Germany, he wrote to rejoice over the French defeat, and quoted history to Ishow that it had been well deserved. His last publication was a series of articles on the Portraits of John Knox and the Early Kings of Norway, which appeared as a small volume in 1875. He died at Chelsea, February 5, 1881.

In his Rectorial Address at Edinburgh, being then a patriarch of seventy, he addressed a kindly warning to his youthful hearers against the physical dangers of too severe study. His own strong frame and great constitutional robustness were early impaired by injudicious closeness of application. During the whole of his later life he suffered from dyspepsia. It says much for the native cherry of his system that, in spite of this depressing-if not debilitating -disorder, he accomplished such an amount of solid work, retaining his powers to old age, and writing with unabated vigour at the extreme age of seventy. He had sufficient strength of will to sustain what De Quincey always recognised as the best remedy for his "appalling stomachic derangement "-namely, regular habits

of active exercise.

We spoke of Macaulay as a man whose intellectual energies were

to some extent dissipated upon various fields of exertion. Carly energies were concentrated with unparalleled intensity upon s books. For nearly half a century he gave the best part of mis working time to literature, pursuing his appointed tasks with frequent fits of strong distaste, but with unalterable steadiness of aim. Probably more intellectual force has been spent upon the production of Carlyle's books than upon. the productions of any two other writers in general literature.

His powers of memory were not of the same universally and immediately dazzling order as Macaulay's. Every person that met Macaulay went away in astonishment at "the stores which his memory had at instantaneous command." In private society Carlyle impressed his hearers by talk very much resembling the general texture of his writings. He had not Macaulay's wideranging readiness of recollection, could not quote with the same instantaneous fluency, and could not trust his memory so confidently without a written note. Again-to compare him in this particular with De Quincey-he does not strike us as possessing great multifarious knowledge. He makes comparatively few allusions beyond the circle of subjects that he has specially studied. His scrupulous love of accuracy may have hampered the flowing display of his knowledge; but within the circles of his special studies, his memory is pre-eminently wonderful. To hold in mind the varied materials of his vivid historical pictures was a strain of retentive force immeasurably greater than was ever required of either De Quincey or Macaulay for the production of their works. His memory is singularly catholic as regards the kind of thing remembered; he remembers names, dates, scenical groupings, and the characteristic gestures and expressions of whole societies of men, to all appearance with equal fidelity.

Carlyle is sometimes loosely spoken of as a great "thinker," but his power does not lie in the regions of the dry understanding, in analysis, argument, or practical judgment. In his youth he was distinguished as a mathematician; but when he turned to the study of men, he took fire: on anything connected with man, he felt too profoundly to reason well. His whole nature rose in rebellion against cold-bloode l analysis and matter-of-fact "gument. In his works he is never tired of sneering at "Thosophism," the "Dismal Science" of Political Economy, "Attorney Logic," and suchlike. He had a natural antipathy to such ways of approaching men and the affairs of men. He was naturally incapable of De Quincey's pursuit of character or meaning into minute shades, and of Macaulay's elaborate refutations by copious instance and analogy. Take, for example, his Hero-worship. Instead of analysing, as De Quincey might have done, the elements of greatness in his heroes, or of producing, as Macaulay might have done, argumentative arrays of

actual undeniable achievements as the proof of their title to admira tion, he exercises his ingenuity in representing their greatness under ndless varieties of striking images; the hero is "a flowing lightfountain of native original insight, of manhood and heroic nobleness; ""at all moments the Flame-image glares in upon him;" "a messenger he, sent from the Infinite Unknown with tidings to us."

Though deficient as an analyst and as a debater, he shows in other forms abundance of the elementary intellectual force principally concerned in analysis and debate. Had his feelings been less dominant, he might have developed into a profound professor of what he calls the Dismal Science, and might even, with unprecedented persuasive skill, have converted the world to the practice of Malthusianism. But feeling and natural impulses chained his strong intellect to their service; and instead of scientific analysis and solid argument, the result is a splendour and originality of imagery and dramatic grouping that entitle him to rank near Shakspeare, or with whoever may be placed next to our received ideal of the incomparable.

men.

A man of feeling and impulse, his feelings and impulses were very different from what we find in natures constitutionally fitted for enjoyment, in the born lovers of existence, his own "eupeptic" In his works we encounter something very different from Macaulay's uniform glow of buoyant hopefulness, hearty belief in human progress, and confident plausible judgment of men and events. We find gloomy views of man and his destiny, a stern gospel of work, judgments passed in strong defiance of conventional standards, and towering egotism under the mask of humour.

In another aspect he strikes us as offering a considerable contrast to De Quincey. The Opium-Eater, though not by any means a eupeptic man, was an avowed Eudæmonist, "hated an inhuman moralist like unboiled opium," and was a lover of repose and of the softer emotions. In Carlyle, on the contrary, the central and commanding emotion is Power; he is all for excitement and energy. We have already seen the difference in their ways of viewing great men; that De Quincey admires them in a passive attitude, while Carlyle is raised by the thought of their achievements to the loftiest heights of ideal energy. We have no means of knowing how Carlyle would have enjoyed the actual control of human beings as a commander or a civic ruler-like Cromwell, Frederick, Mirabeau, or Dr Francia; but he shows a most thorough enjoyment of commanding authority in the imagination. His thirst for the ideal enjoyment seem insatiable, and drives him to exaggerate the influence of his chosen heroes, and to suppress and understate the influence of their coadjutors. "Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world,

is at bottom the history of the Great Men who have worked there." "All things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment of thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world the soul of the whole world's history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these."

A good way of representing the difference between two such writers is to look through their works, and piece together their conceptions of the universe in their highest moods of sublimity. De Quincey sees midsummer moving over the heavens like an army with banners; hears cathedral music in the confused noise of mountain-streams; loves to contemplate calmly in the mirror of such minds as "Walking Stewart's" the whole mighty vision of the sentient universe, oriental pageantry, revolutionary convulsions, civic splendour; and occasionally lifts his mind to travel in the same calm way through the illimitable grandeurs of astronomical spaces. Contrast this repose of attitude with the violent excitement of Carlyle's favourite conceptions: the world pictured as a dark simmering pit of Tophet, wild puddle of muddy infatua tions, of irreconcilable incoherences, bottomless universal hypocrisies, an ungenuine phantasmagory of a world, full of screechings and gibberings, of foul ravening monsters, of meteor-lights and Bacchic dances, the wild universe storming in upon man infinite vague-menacing.

Carlyle's love of powerful excitement finds a magnificent outlet in his humour and derision. Psychologists tell us that the basis of laughter is a sudden accession of pleasure in the shape of the special elation of power and superiority. Carlyle avowedly approves of laughter-sets up hearty laughter as a criterion of genuine human worth; and, as we shall see when we come to his qualities of style, he is self-indulgent, if not intemperate, in the exercise of his own sense of the ludicrous. His mirth is robust -as he says himself, in describing the Norsemen, "a great broad Brobdingnag grin of true humour."

His pathos is of the kind that goes naturally with such excessive indulgence in the excitement of power. Wherever there is a height there is a corresponding hollow; the lover of intoxicating excitement too surely pays the penalty in intervals of exhaustion, of unutterable depression and despondency. With all his fire, his gospel of work, and his denunciation of unproductive sentimentality, Carlyle has his inevitable fits of the melting mood. We shall see that at times he is overpowered with sadness at the thought of human miseries and perplexities, and that he bemoans with more than Byronic despondency the irresistible movement of time.

We have already spoken of the amount of intellectual effort

spent upon the production of our author's books. The grand duty of work that he preaches with such earnestness he was no less earnest in performing. He gathered his materials not only with painful labour, but with scrupulous respect for minute fact. This for him was but a small part of the toil of writing history; when the materials were collected, a much larger draught of his impatient energy was spent in filling the dry facts with human interest. The mere writing was never an easy or happy task for him: he wrote at white heat, with feverish effort, with all his faculties intensely concentrated. If we take any page of his 'French Revolution' and try to conceive how it was built up, and what care was expended on the separate elements of it before the whole was "flung out of him," as he said, in the final convulsive effort of composition, we come as near as we can to realising what labour went to the making of Carlyle's books.

He does not seem to have done his work with the fitful irregularity of Christopher North, but rather to have acted on the Virgilian plan of so much manuscript each day. Such work as his could hardly have been accomplished without the steadiest concentration of endeavour. It is known that in composing the 'French Revolution' he set himself daily to produce so much, and in all probability he composed his other works on the same rigid method. In this respect he is a much safer model to the general run of students than the versatile and discursive Macaulay.

OPINIONS.-Carlyle's doctrines are the first suggestions of an earnest man, adhered to with unreasoning tenacity. As a rule, with no exception that is worth naming, they take account mainly of one side of a case. He was too impatient of difficulties, and had too little respect for the wisdom and experience of others, to submit to be corrected; opposition rather confirmed him in his own opinion. Most of his practical suggestions had already been tried and found wanting, or had been made before and judged impracticable upon grounds that he did not or would not understand. His modes of dealing with pauperism and crime were in full operation under the despotisms of Henry VII. and Henry VIII. His theory of a hero-king, which means in practice an accidentally good and able man in a series of indifferent or bad despots, has been more frequently tried than any other political system: Asia at this moment contains no government that is not despotic. His views in other departments of knowledge also, are chiefly determined by the strength of unreasoning impulses.

This will appear when we state his opinions in some detail. We throw them for convenience into a few familiar divisions.

Psychology. He disclaims the ordinary mental analysis. He speaks with great contempt of "motive-grinding." He sat through