actual undeniable achievements as the proof of their title to admira tion, he exercises his ingenuity in representing their greatness under endless 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."

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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 astronomi. cal 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 hypoc risies, 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. 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

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

Thomas Brown's lectures with perpetual inward protest, declaring that he did not want the mind to be taken to pieces in that way.

We need not therefore look in his writings for any large views of the mind, for any enunciation of doctrines of a comprehensive kind. In his partiality for everything German, he adopts with unquestioning faith some Kantian and other transcendentalisms of German origin. His own original views of the mind are frag mentary and somewhat fanciful.

We may apply the title "Psychological" to some of his doctrines about the indissoluble union of certain qualities. For one example, take his theory of Laughter as the criterion of goodness. "Readers," he says, "who have any tincture of Psychology, know

that no man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad." Again, "Laughter, also, if it come from the heart, is a heavenly thing." As another example, take his doctrine that Intellect is the true measure of worth. "Human Intellect, if you consider it well, is the exact summary of Human Worth.' "A man of intellect, of real and not sham intellect, is by the nature of him likewise inevitably a man of nobleness." The able man is definable as the born enemy of Falsity and Anarchy and the born soldier of Truth and Order."

Such doctrines are, it is hardly necessary to say, far from clear. Very bad men often laugh heartily enough, in the ordinary sense of the words; and very able men, in the ordinary sense of the word "able," are often very great scoundrels. Carlyle's unreserved admirers probably bring themselves to accept such dogmas by laying stress on the saving clauses,-"if it comes from the heart;""if you consider it well;" and suchlike. But none of these clauses will save the doctrines if they are taken in the ordinary meaning of their words; and one may well doubt whether great writers are to be allowed the privilege of throwing the ancient boundaries of words into confusion.

Other examples of his habit of attaching laudatory predicates to what he has a liking for, without much regard to the fitness of the application, are such as the following: "All deep things are song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but wrappings and hulls ;" "You may see how a man would fight by the way in which he sings;" "The imagination that shudders at the hell of Dante,' is not that the same faculty, weaker in degree, as Dante's own?" "Your genuine poet is the real Encyclopedist," &c. &c. All these involve indifferent psychology, and they are but samples of more of the same kind.

Ethics.-Doctrines in Ethics we shall keep as far as possible distinct from doctrines in Theology; although many of our author's doctrines are two-sided.

(1.) According to Carlyle, the chief end of life is the performance of Duty. He is full of contempt for the pursuit of happiness, and pours out his most indignant eloquence against the theory of life that would make happiness the end. "In all situations out of the Pit of Tophet, wherein a living man has stood or can stand, there is actually a prize of quite infinite value placed within his reach-namely, a Duty for him to do: this highest Gospel forms the basis and worth of all other Gospels whatsoever."

His stern creed allows no collateral support to the discharge of duty. If men labour in hope of reward, they are still unconverted, still in darkness. They must recognise that they deserve nothing. To Methodism," with its eye for ever turned on its own navel," and torturing itself with the questions-Am I right, am I wrong } Shall I be saved, shall I be damned?'—he gives the lofty advice— "If thou be a man, reconcile thyself" to the fact "that thou art wrong; thou art like to be damned;" "then first is the devouring Universe subdued under thee," and there breaks upon thee "dawn as of an everlasting morning." On the same principle of acknowledging utter worthlessness, and recognising that nothing too bad can befall us, we are advised-"Fancy that thou deservest to be hanged (as is most likely), thou wilt feel it happiness to be only shot; fancy that thou deservest to be hanged in a hair-halter, it will be a luxury to die in hemp." In short, our only consolation in life is to be the sense of doing our duty; as regards everything else, we must expect nothing, lest we should be disappointed.

(2.) But Duty is an abstraction, an empty Ideal: does Carlyle recommend any duties in particular? Yes.

The first great duty is the duty of Work-Action, Activity. This eminent feature in his preaching has been called "The Gospel of Labour." According to this gospel, all the "peopled, clothed, articulate - speaking, high-towered, wide-acred World has been "made a world for us" by work; the individual that does not lend a hand fails in his duty as a denizen of the Universe. Man's greatest enemy is Disorder; his most imperative and crying duty is to subdue disorder, convert chaos into order and method; the able-bodied or able-minded man that stands idle deserves unspeakable contempt, he is a dastard, a fool, a simulacrum; he does not fulfil his destiny as a man. Wherefore, "Do thy little stroke of work; this is Nature's voice, and the sum of all the commandments, to each man.'

To the question, What is to be done? he answers peremptorily, Do the Duty which lies nearest thee,' which thou knowest to be a duty." "Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it in God's name. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." He never recommends or brings prominently forward