earlier poetry which Warton had begun in the eighteenth century. Wordsworth wrote admirable prose on poetry, and the prose of his Essays, just now published, especially of that on the Convention of Cintra, is quite stately. W. Hazlitt, W. S. Landor, Jeffrey, and a host of others added to the literature of criticism, and the ceaseless discussion of the works of the poets made them the foremost literary figures of the day.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. HAMILTON.-J. Veitch's Memoir of; T. S. Baynes' Edinburgh Essays; De Quincey's Essays on Ph. Writers; H. Calderwood's Philos. of the Infinite; J. Martineau's Essays; Mill's Exam. of Sir Wm. Ham.'s Philos.; J. H. Stirling's Ham.'s Philos. of Perception; Black. Mag., v. 86, 1859; N. A. Rev., vs. 76, 92, and 99; N. Br. Rev., v. 18, 1852.

CARLYLE.-J. Morley's Crit. Miscellanies; J. Martineau's Essays; Minto's Man. Eng. Pr. Lit.; Lowell's My Study Windows; P. Bayne's Lessons from my Masters; W. R. Greg's Lit. Judgments; J. Sterling's Essays; H. Giles' Lectures and Essays; Fras. Mag., v. 72, 1865; Quar. Rev., v. 132, 1872; Ecl. Mag, v. 18, 1849; 22, 1851; 26 and 7, 1852, and April and June, 1881; Froude's Life of.

DE QUINCEY.-P. Bayne's Essays; L. Stephen's Hours in a Library; H. Giles' Illus. of Genius; Minto's Man. Eng. Pr. Lit.; Fras. Mag., vs. 62 and 63; Nat. Quar. Rev., v. 22, 1871; N. A. Rev., v. 14, 1852, and 88, 1859; Quar. Rev., v. 110, 1861; Ecl. Mag., July, 1850; July, 1854; Dec., 1863; and Oct., 1868.

LAMB.-Eng. Men of Let. Series; Talfourd's Life and Memorials of; Bulwer's Prose Works; De Quincey's Biog., Essays and Lit. Reminis.; At. Mo., v. 3. 1859; Ed. Rev., v. 124, 1866; Fras. Mag., v. 75, 1867; Harper's Mo., vs. 20 and 39; Macmillan, Apr., 1867; N. A. Rev., v. 104, 1867; Quar. Rev., v. 122, 1867: Temple Bar, Apr., 1862; West. Rev., Oct., 1874.

Carlyle's subject,-almost his only subject,-whether he wrote history or biography, or the sort of musings which contained his conceptions of life, was always the dim struggle of man's nature with the passions, doubts, and confusions by which it is surrounded, with special regard to the grip of the infinite spiritual cravings, whether good or evil, upon it. He was always trying to paint the light shining in darkness and the darkness comprehending it not, and therefore it was that he strove so hard to invent a new sort of style which should express not simply the amount of human knowledge but also, so far as possible, the much vaster amount of human ignorance against which that knowledge sparkled in mere radiant points breaking the gloom.

Some critics have attempted to account for the difference in style between his early reviews in the Edinburgh and his later productions, by the corrections of Jeffrey. But Jeffrey did not correct Carlyle's Life of Schiller, and, if any one who possesses the volume containing both the life of Schiller and the life of Sterling will compare the one with the other, he will see at once that, between the two, Carlyle had deliberately devel

oped a new organon for his own characteristic genius, and that, so far from losing, his genius gained enormously by the process. And I say this not without fully recognizing that simplicity is, after all, the highest of all qualities of style, and that no one can pretend to find simplicity in Carlyle's mature style.

The purpose of style is to express thought, and if the central and pervading thought of all which you wish to express and must express if you are to attain the real object of your life, is inconsistent with simplicity, let simplicity go to the wall, and let us have the real drift. And this seems to me to be exactly Carlyle's case. It would have been impossible to express adequately in such English as was the English of his Life of Schiller, the class of convictions which had most deeply engraved themselves on his own mind. That class of convictions was, to state it shortly, the result of his belief-a one-sided belief no doubt, but full of significance that human language, and especially our glib, cultivated use of it, had done as much or more to conceal from men how little they do know, and how ill they grasp even that which they partly know, as to define and preserve for them the little that they have actually puzzled out of the riddle of life.

To expose the pretensions of human speech, to show us that it seems much clearer than it is, to warn us habitually that it swims as a mere superficial film' on a wide, unplumbed sea of undiscovered reality, is a function hardly to be discharged at all by plain and limited speech. Genuine Carlylese-which, of course, in its turn is in great danger of becoming a deceptive mask, and often does become so in Carlyle's own writings, so that you begin to think that all careful observation, sound reasoning, and precise thinking are useless, and that a true man would keep his intellect foaming and gasping, as it were, in an eternal epileptic fit of wonder-is intended to keep constantly before us the relative proportions between the immensity on every subject which we fail to apprehend, and the few well-defined focal spots of light that we can clearly discern and take in. Nothing is so well adapted as Carlyle's style to teach one that the truest language on the deepest subjects is thrown out, as it were, with more or less happy effect, at great realities far above our analysis or grasp, and not a triumphant formula which contains the whole secret of our existence."-Richard H. Hutton.

From Carlyle's Death of Goethe.

To measure and estimate all this, as we said, the time is not come; a century hence will be the fitter time. He who investigates it best will find its meaning greatest, and be the readiest to acknowledge that it

transcends him. Let the reader have seen, before he attempts to oversee. A poor reader, in the mean while were he, who discerned not here the authentic rudiments of that same new era, whereof we have so often had false warning. Wondrously, the wrecks and pulverized rubbish of ancient things, institutions, religions, forgotten noblenesses, made alive again by the breath of genius, lie here in new coherence and incipient union, the spirit of art working creative through the mass: that chaos, into which the eighteenth century with its wild war of hypocrites and sceptics had reduced the past, begins here to be once more a world. This, the highest that can be said of written books, is to be said of these: there is in them a new time, the prophecy and beginning of a new time The corner-stone of a new social edifice for mankind is laid there; firmly, as before, on the natural rock, far extending traces of a ground-plan we can also see, which future centuries may go on to enlarge, amend, and work into reality. These sayings seem strange to some; nevertheless they are not empty exaggerations, but expressions, in their way, of a belief, which is not now of yesterday; perhaps when Goethe has been read and meditated for another generation, they will not seem so strange.

Precious is the new light of knowledge which our teacher conquers for us; yet small to the new light of love which also we derive from him; the most important element of any man's performance is the life he has accomplished. Under the intellectual union of man and man, which works by precept, lies a holier union of affection, working by example; the influences of which latter, mystic, deep-reaching, all-embracing, can still less be computed. For love is ever the beginning of knowledge, as fire is of light; works also more in the manner of fire. That Goethe was a great teacher of men means already that he was a good man; that he himself learned; in the school of experience had striven and proved victorious. To how many hearers languishing, nigh dead, in the airless dungeon of unbelief (a true vacuum and nonentity) has the assurance that there was such a man, that such a man was still possible, come like tidings of great joy! He who would learn to reconcile reverence with clearness, to deny and defy what is false, yet believe and worship what is true; amid raging factions, bent on what is either altogether empty or has substance in it only for a day, which stormfully convulse and tear hither and thither a distracted, expiring system of society, to adjust himself aright; and, working for the world, and in the world, keep himself unspotted from the world-let him look here.

This man, we may say, became morally great, by being in his own age what in some other ages many might have been—a genuine man,

His grand excellency was this, that he was genuine. As his primary faculty, the foundation of all others, was intellect, depth and force of vision, so his primary virtue was justice, was the courage to be just. A giant's strength we admired in him; yet, strength ennobled into softest mildness; even like that "silent rock-bound strength of a world," on whose bosom, that rests on the adamant, grow flowers. The greatest of hearts was also the bravest; fearless, unwearied, peacefully invincible. A completed man; the trembling sensibility, the wild enthusiasm of a Mignon can assort with the scornful world-mockery of a Mephistophiles; and each side of many-sided life receives its due from him.

Goethe reckoned Schiller happy that he died young, in the full vigor of his days; that he could “figure him as a youth forever." To himself a different, higher destiny was appointed. Through all the changes of man's life, onward to its extreme verge, he was to go; and through them all nobly. In youth, flatterings of fortune, uninterrupted outward prosperity cannot corrupt him; a wise observer must remark, “only a Goethe, at the sum of earthly happiness, can keep his Phoenix wings unsinged." Through manhood, in the most complex relation, as poet, courtier, politician, man of business, man of speculation; in the middle of revolutions and counter-revolutions, outward and spiritual; with the world loudly for him, with the world loudly or silently against him; in all seasons and situations, he holds equally on his way. Old age itself, which is called dark and feeble, he was to render lovely; who that looked upon him there, venerable in himself, and in the world's reverence, ever the clearer, the purer, but could have prayed that he too were such an old man? And did not the kind Heavens continue kind, and grant to a career so glorious the worthiest end?

Such was Goethe's life; such has his departure been-he sleeps now beside his Schiller and his Carl August; so had the Prince willed it, that between these two should be his own final rest. In life they were united, in death they are not divided. The unwearied workman now rests from his labors; the fruit of these is left growing and to grow. His earthly years have been numbered and ended; but of his activity (for it stood rooted in the eternal) there is no end. All that we mean by the higher literature of Germany, which is the higher literature of Europe, already gathers round this man as its creator; of which grand object, dawning mysterious on a world that hoped not for it, who is there that can assume the significance and far-reaching influences? The literature of Europe will pass away: Europe itself, the earth itself will pass away; this little life-boat of an earth, with its noisy crew of mankind, and all their troubled history, will one day have vanished, faded like a cloud

speck from the azure of the All! What then is man? What then is man? He endures but for an hour, and is crushed before the moth. Yet in the being and in the working of a faithful man is there already (as all faith, from the beginning, gives assurance) a something that pertains not to this wild death-element of TIME; that triumphs over time, and is, and will be, when time shall be no more.

And now we turn back into the world, withdrawing from this newmade grave. The man whom we love lies there: but glorious, worthy; and his spirit yet lives in us with an authentic life. Could each here vow to do his little task, even as the departed did his great one; in the manner of a true man, not for a day, but for eternity! To live, as he counselled and commanded, not commodiously in the reputable, the plausible, the half, but resolutely in the whole, the good, the true.

From Carlyle's Life of Stirling.

Nothing could be more copious than Coleridge's talk; and, furthermore, it was always, virtually or literally, of the nature of a monologue; suffering no interruption, however reverent; hastily putting aside all foreign additions, annotations, or most ingenuous desires for elucidation, as well-meant superfluities which would never do. Besides, it was talk not flowing any whither like a river; but spreading every whither in inextricable currents and regurgitations, like a lake or sea; terribly deficient in definite goal or aim-nay, often in logical intelligibility; what you were to believe or do, on any earthly or heavenly thing, obstinately refusing to appear from it. So that, most times, you felt logically lost; swamped near to drowning in this tide of ingenious vocables, spreading out boundless as if to submerge the world.

To sit as a passive bucket and be pumped into, whether you consent or not, can in the long run be exhilarating to no creature, how eloquent soever the flood of utterance that is descending. But if it be withal a confused, unintelligible flood of utterance, threatening to submerge all known landmarks of thought, and drown the world and you! I have heard Coleridge talk with eager, musical energy, two stricken hours, his face radiant and moist, and communicate no meaning whatsoever to any individual of his hearers, -certain of whom, I for one, still kept eagerly listening in hope; the most had long before given up, and formed (if the room were large enough) secondary humming groups of their own. He began anywhere; you put some question to him, made some suggestive observation. Instead of answering this, or decidedly setting out towards answer of it, he would accumulate formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, transcendental life-preserv