with a passionate inquiry after his wife, to which Carlyle replies:

"Poor prisoner, who namest thyself Quéret-Démery, and hast no other history, she is dead, that dear wife of thine, and thou art dead! 'Tis fifty years since thy breaking heart put this question; to be heard now first, and long heard, in the hearts of men.

His characteristic manner of drawing the attention of the hearer with an imperative, is a mode of apostrophe

Now, therefore, judge if our patriot artists are busy; taking deep counsel how to make the scene worthy of a look from the universe.'

It will have been noted that many of the above-quoted apostrophes are of the nature of the figure called Vision. Carlyle's histories are, indeed, prolonged visions; throughout he treats the past as present, and makes us, as it were, actual spectators of the events related.

His irony is a department in itself. It often turns up in such passing touches as- "Our Nell Gwyn defender-of-the-faith;" "Christ's crown soldered on Charles Stuart's;" "most Christian kingship, and most Talleyrand bishopship;" Shakspeare, "whom Sir Thomas Lucy, many thanks to him, was for sending to the treadmill." In his treatment of modern society, irony is often kept up through long passages; thus "The Nigger Question" is full of irony. It is to be noted that his irony can always be known as such. He has none of the De Foe irony that runs a danger of being mistaken for earnest. The following is a short specimen, on the New Poor-Law, from Chartism':

"To read the reports of the Poor-Law Commissioners, if one had faith enough, would be a pleasure to the friend of humanity. One sole recipe seems to have been needful for the woes of England-refusal of outdoor relief.' England lay in sick discontent, writhing powerless on its fever-bed, dark, nigh desperate, in wastefulness, want, improvidence, and eating care, till, like Hyperion down the eastern steeps, the Poor-Law Commissioners arose, and said, Let there be workhouses, and bread of affliction and water of affliction there! It was a simple invention; as all truly great inventions And see, in any quarter, instantly as the walls of the workhouse arise, misery and necessity fly away, out of sight, out of being, as is fondly hoped, dissolve into the inane; industry, frugality, fertility, rise of wages, peace on earth and goodwill towards men do,-in the Poor-Law Commissioners' reports,―infallibly, rapidly or not so rapidly, to the joy of all parties, super

are.

(1.) Our author, as we remarked in speaking of his vocabulary, uses a fair admixture of homely words. When hard to under1 "Down" is a small blunder; it should be up.

stand, he is so not from the use of technical and scholastic terms, but from the use of words of his own coining. A reader of Carlyle, not knowing Latin, has often to consult a dictionary, and consults it in vain. It is a jest about him that he aspires to the honour conferred upon Jean Paul Richter, of having a dictionary written for himself.

As regards his similitudes, we have already seen that many of them are homely and graphic, while the few stock figures connected with his fanciful conception of the universe, the action of the Destinies, Eternal Voices, and suchlike, rather perplex than render comprehension easy. It should, however, be noticed, that to those once initiated into the circle of these figures they present a really simple, because very undiscriminating, way of expressing complicated circumstances. "Loyalty to facts" becomes a very glib figure to those that have once mastered its meaning.

His sentence-structure is favourable to simplicity, being free from involution and intricacy. The want of concatenation and consecutiveness mars, as has been said, the intelligibility of his rhapsodical Pamphlets' and his French Revolution.' drawbacks do not occur so much in the Friedrich.

These

(2.) His subjects are far from abstruse, being narratives and familiar questions of practice. The difficulty of the 'Sartor Resartus' is due, not so much to the nature of the subject, as to the intentional mystification, and the substitution of allusions and figures for plain statements. If it were stript of its gorgeous imagery and "boiled down," the residuum would probably be more intelligible than interesting.

(3.) Occasionally, for the sake of effects of comprehensive strength, he uses abstract expressions; but his diction is upon the whole concrete to a degree rarely found among writers of prose. Even when he uses abstractions, he violates grammar (p. 146) to give them plurals, and thereby treat them as class names; he vivifies some of them further (p. 151) by treating them as personalities. His love of the concrete often appears in his repeating a number of suggestive particulars or circumstances instead of one general designation. Thus, in his 'Chartism,' when discussing the discontent of the working classes, he refers to it again and again by mentioning significant symptoms-"Glasgow Thuggery, Chartist torch-meetings, Birmingham riots, Swing conflagrations;" or again, "Chartism with its pikes, Swing with his tinder-box." When he

has to state his conviction that much misery is caused by poor Irish labourers finding no work in Ireland, and coming to England in search of it, he does so in very picturesque terms :

"But the thing we had to state here was our inference from that mournful fact of the third Sanspotatoe, coupled with this other well-known fact, that the Irish speak a partially intelligible dialect of English, and their fare

across by steam is fourpence sterling! Crowds of miserable Irish darken all our towns. The wild Milesian features, looking false ingenuity, restlessness, unreason, misery, and mockery, salute you on all highways and byways. The English coachman, as he whirls past, lashes the Milesian with his whip, curses him with his tongue: the Milesian is holding out his hat to beg.

When he desires a more comprehensive effect, he personifies this influx of Irish destitution under the name of the Irish giant Despair, and thus describes him :

"I notice him in Piccadilly, blue-visaged, thatched in rags, a blue child on each arm; hunger-driven, wide-mouthed, seeking whom he may devour." With regard to this picturesque statement, the remark may be made that, while each particular is immediately and easily understood, it may be doubted whether the meaning that the writer professedly wishes to convey is so easily apprehended as it would be in the driest general statement. Upon the whole, this excess of concreteness is perhaps not in favour of our understanding the general drift, but the reverse. Most readers complain that Carlyle is bewildering in his prophetical utterances. The excess of figures and the absence of plain generalities is perhaps partly the cause. Let any reader of ordinary analytic power try, after reading 'Chartism,' to recall the train of argument, and he will find his confused recollection of individually vivid figures rather against than in favour of the effort.

Clearness.

Perspicuity. In his expressly didactic or prophetic works, he shows, as we have seen, little concern to impart his views without confusion. Nor are his essays so perspicuous as the essays of Macaulay. The History of Friedrich is, however (see p. 170), a clearer narrative than the History of England;' it lifts us more above the confusion of details by means of comprehensive summaries and divisions with descriptive titles, and it brings leading events into stronger relief by assigning to subordinate events a subordinate place in the narrative.

Precision. He is not an exact writer. Hating close analysis, his aim always is to give the broad general features rather than the minute details. He has little of the hair-splitting, dividing and distinguishing mania of De Quincey; no desire to sift his opinions on a topic, and say distinctly what they are and what they are not. Some idea of the difference between them in this respect is obtained by comparing Carlyle's various lucubrations on Jean Paul Richter with De Quincey's article on the same subject. But we see the utter antagonism of manner as regards precision at its height when we reflect how De Quincey would have treated such a subject as the discontent of the working classes. If Carlyle

had been at pains to reduce his political views to distinct heads as De Quincey would have done, one would have been better able to judge of their universally alleged poverty.

Strength.

We have already touched on a good many of the peculiarities of Carlyle's singular force of style. The language that Sterling calls "positively barbarous "--the rugged derivatives and quaint solecisms-is very stimulating when it is intelligible. Among his figures of speech we meet with many elements of strength-powerful and original similitudes, bold metaphors, vivid handling of abstractions, choice of telling circumstances, sensational contrasts, habitual exaggeration of language, and daring liberties with ordinary forms of speech. Here we have for the production of telling literary effects a catalogue of instrumentalities that will hardly be paralleled from any writer after Shakspeare. And this is not all. The comprehensive summaries, already mentioned as his principal instruments of perspicuity, embracing as they do a great range of particulars, more than any other of his arts, lift up and dilate the mind with a feeling of extended power.

The crowning feat of strength is the combination of circumstances in effective groups-the imagination of impressive situations. Carlyle's power in this respect is nearly, if not quite, equal to Shakspeare's equal, that is, in degree, though not perhaps in kind. It was first revealed in his 'Sartor Resartus'; and none of his later works surpass this first great production in the imagination of rugged grandeur. Take, for example, his picture of "Teufelsdroeckh at the North Pole":

"More legitimate and decisively authentic is Teufelsdroeckh's appearance and emergence (we know not well whence) in the solitude of the North Cape, on that June Midnight. He has a light-blue Spanish cloak' hanging round him, as his most commodious, principal, indeed sole upper-garment;' and stands there on the World-promontory, looking over the infinite Brine, like a little blue Belfry (as we figure), now motionless indeed, yet ready, if stirred, to ring quaintest changes.

"Silence as of death,' writes he; for Midnight, even in the Arctic latitudes, has its character: nothing but the granite cliffs ruddy-tinged, the peaceable gurgle of that slow-heaving Polar Ocean, over which in the utmost North the great Sun hangs low and lazy, as if he too were slumbering. Yet is his cloud-couch wrought of crimson and cloth-of-gold; yet does his light stream over the mirror of waters, like a tremulous fire-pillar, shooting downwards to the abyss, and hide itself under my feet. In such moments, Solitude also is invaluable; for who would speak, or be looked on, when behind him lies all Europe and Africa, fast asleep, except the watchmen; and before him the silent Immensity, and Palace of the Eternal, whereof our Sun is but a porch-lamp?" "

Another fair specimen of his combining power is seen in Teu

felsdroeckh's "own ideas with respect to duels." This also shows a spice of cynicism:

"Few things, in this so surprising world, strike me with more surprise. Two little visual Spectra of men, hovering with insecure cohesion in the midst of the UNFATHOMABLE, and to dissolve therein, at any rate, very soon,-make pause at the distance of twelve paces asunder; whirl round; and, simultaneously by the cunningest mechanism, explode one another into Dissolution; and off-hand become Air, and Non-extant! Deuce on it (verdammt), the little spitfires!-Nay, I think with old Hugo von Trimberg: God must needs laugh outright, could such a thing be, to see His wondrous Manikins here below!

In one of his later Miscellanies, iv. 315, there is a "Fragment on Duelling" (of date 1850), where the actual fights are described with startling spirit, and the surroundings drawn with almost incomparable power. This also is a good specimen of his style.

Let us take a brief glance at the principal themes or occasions that excite his powers of gorgeous expression. (1.) He puts forth all his powers to extol his favourite recipes for clearing the world of confusion. One or two fragments of such eloquence have been already given. Above all, he is ever on the watch for an opportunity of enforcing his gospel of Work, the panacea which alone brings order out of confusion, cosmos out of chaos. Such passages

as the following may be described as "bracing." The general effect of such a gospel is to exalt the sense of active vigour, to disturb, if not dispel, the indolent mood compatible with adoring reverence or tender sentiment :—

Any law, however well meant as a law, which has become a bounty on unthrift, idleness, bastardy, and beer-drinking, must be put an end to. In all ways it needs, especially in these times, to be proclaimed aloud that for the idle man there is no place in this England of ours. He that will not work, and save according to his means, let him go elsewhither; let him know that for him the Law has made no soft provision, but a hard and stern one; that, by the Law of Nature, which the law of England would vainly contend against in the long-run, he is doomed either to quit these habits, or miserably be extruded from this earth, which is made on principles different from these. A day is ever struggling forward, a day will arrive in some approximate degree, when he who has no work to do, by whatever name he may be named, will not find it good to show himself in our quarter of the solar system."

His eulogy of the heroes, the men that he pronounces to have done genuine work in the world, has the same bracing tone. Prostrate adoration, as we have seen, does not suit his temperament; he "fraternises" with the heroes, holds up them and their works as patterns to all men of the heroic mould. True, he commands the multitude to worship, and declaims against them if they refuse ; but he is rarely found in the adoring attitude himself.

(2.) Perhaps his richest vein is his unmeasured invective against