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Worship"-was its author's chief, if not his
only, bid for popularity, and has, perhaps,
remained the most popular of his works.
It is not the best; indeed, in the judgment
of the present writer, it is very far from the
best. For the desire to meet the hearer
half-way-it must be always remembered
that these were originally lectures-has re-
sulted in an undue emphasizing of certain
peculiarities of style, and in a reduction, to an
unnatural scale, of the ordinary conditions
of writing. Mr. Carlyle here attempted to
put his philosophico-political creed in little,
and, as it happens, it is not a creed which
bears that process well; so that the book
remains an unsatisfactory book, full of noble
passages, directed wholly to a noble end,
but of a popular kind, compared with other
work. Nothing of this sort can be said of
"Past and Present,”—a unique book, which
no one, perhaps, but its author could have
written, neither the like of it will any other
man write. Mr. Carlyle was, as has been
said, nothing so little as a mediævalist;
yet in some respects the Middle Ages had a
strong attraction for him, and in this partic-
ular instance he bent to the work with
hardly surpassed success his marvelous
talent for making the dry bones of history
to live. The reconstruction-not to use
the discredited word restoration-of the
past is marvelous; the application to the
present is, if possible, more marvelous still."

“Past and Present" was a tour de force, and a wonderfully successful one, yet it was altogether eclipsed by the book which at some interval, occupied by continuous and unremitting labor, followed. Few books have had such a fortune as the "Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell." It found its subject under the ban of both the great political parties in England; it left him emancipated from any purely political ostracism of any kind. In saying this, I by no means intend to convey any expression of opinion that Mr. Carlyle has established Oliver Cromwell in the position in which he would seem to have wished to establish him, -that of a wholly disinterested and puresouled patriot. Whitehall and Drogheda must disappear from the map of the United Kingdom before any general agreement on this point is obtained; and there must cease to be believers either in legitimacy and privilege on the one hand, or in the right of the nation to have its affairs managed in its own way, on the other. But the point is that this book lifted Cromwell from the position of a pet aversion or a pet idol into that of an

ordinary historic personage, whose actions may be judged favorably or unfavorably, but who can no longer be regarded as a mere monster or portent. Remarkable as had been the historical faculty for weaving details into clear narration which Mr. Carlyle had already shown, this book carried his reputation in that matter still higher, while his editions, as they may be called, of the "Letters and Speeches" revealed an entirely new talent in him. These documents, in so far as they had been known at all, had been a riddle for two hundred years. Mr. Carlyle treated them exactly as an editor of Eschylus treats the choruses of the "Supplices" or the "Choephora," with the difference that his emendations and elucidations, instead of being merely felicitous guesses and display of scholarship, are certain and indisputable recoveries of fact. Intense sympathy, unremitting labor, a wonderful literary faculty, and a complete familiarity with the circumstances of the original utterance and the original utterer, had enabled him to deal with them in the manner rather of science than of art. As with all work of the very first class, the thing was done once for all. Estimates of Cromwell's character will always differ, but we shall no more go back, nor will our sons go back, upon anything before this book as a basis for such estimates, than we shall go behind Bentley's Phalaris" or Darwin's observations on the breeding of pigeons.

There was again a considerable interval before Mr. Carlyle produced anything new, and his two next works, dating from the troubled period which closed the forties, were sufficiently remarkable. One of them is the most debatable and the most debated of all his works; the other is that which by common consent stands, as a work of art and as a personal monument, first of all. By the estimate which a man forms of " Latter-day Pamphlets" may be judged, perhaps, the degree of his initiation into the Carlylean mysteries, and at the same time the degree with which he has preserved in the course of that initiation his faculty of sound judgment. To the uninitiated they are an abomination merely, and the reason is not far to seek, for in them as in no other work is to be found the caricature of the author's peculiarities of style, the inurbane exaggeration of his violence of diction,which in our own days a great disciple of his has unfortunately imitated,—the willful consideration of all things through a pair of specially colored glasses, which earlier, and

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even later when Philip was sober, he would himself have called Carlyle, seeing all things in Carlyle. To the devotee, on the other hand, all this is admirable and quintessential. Between these two extremes, the impartial but appreciative critic may discover to his sorrow some evidence of spoiling, but still more, perhaps, of deep insight, of curious felicity of phrase, of rugged imperviousness Yet another interval of silence, and this to popular fallacy. "Hudson's Statue" is, "Hudson's Statue" is, time a very considerable one, followed these and remains, hitherto, the appointed morning two notable books; but, like the former inbitters for Englishmen of the nineteenth tervals, it was occupied with sufficient prepcentury, after they have gone through one of aration for the forthcoming work. No their periodical fits of worship of the un- notice in any way corresponding to its bulk worthy. But it is medicine, not drink, and deserts can here be attempted of the except to a few exceptionally constituted "Frederick." I think that it has-in Engpalates. On the other hand, the "Life of land-been hardly judged. It is of course Sterling" may be said to be nocturna ver- fair to remember that the author, when the sanda manu, versanda diurna. The compar- first volume appeared, had reached his ative simplicity of the style, the abstinence grand climacteric,-that a certain hardness from any wanton treading even upon obtru- of judgment, approaching to prejudice, had sive toes, the matchless episodic passages,- crept over him, and that it was sufficiently, such as that portrait of Coleridge which, one- obvious that he was no longer, as he had sided as it doubtless is, is so absolutely faithful once done, illustrating his principles by examto the side to which it confines itself, the ples taken fairly as they came, but was, of affectionate and complete presentation of a malice prepense, illustrating them by a delibtypical nineteenth-century man,-the abun-erately chosen paradox. Great as Frederick dance of personal and autobiographic detail, was in various ways, he seems-and I trust neither impertinently profuse nor affectedly will always seem-detestable to most Englimited, the pathos, the careful art, the un- lishmen. To me, personally, my own studied naturalness of the book, could not fail hearty detestation of the hero does not and have not failed of their effect. With "In affect in the least my equally hearty enjoyMemoriam" it builds the temple of nine- ment of the book; but it is not so with most teenth-century friendship for Englishmen, as people, and I do not know that one can no other age or country has ever had it built. fairly expect that it should be so. Let it only be said that in no work is the so often mentioned mastery of detail more marvelously exhibited, while in none are the detached passages of vivid description more attractive. The early history of the house of Hohenzollern, the Voltaire episode, the history of the police-persecuted school-master whom Frederick relieved, could not have been better done by Mr. Carlyle himself in the vigor of his manhood; that is to say, they could not have been so well done by any other living man.

Perhaps as the "Sartor" and the " French Revolution" are the most instructive of Carlyle's works for the estimate of his literary and philosophical position, as the best essays represent his highest positive achievement in style, as the "Cromwell" is his most astonishing performance in point of research and creative criticism, so these two books are the most intrinsically and independently interesting of all. Two passages there are at any rate in them which deserve never to be forgotten. The one is the author's, the other is an extract from a letter of Sterling's. "Sure enough," says the fierce pessimist of the pamphlets, "if one in a thousand see at all in this sad matter what I see and have long seen in it, his life either suddenly or gradually will alter in several particulars, and his sorrow, apprehension, and amazement will probably grow upon him the longer he considers this affair, and his life, I think, will alter ever farther, and he-this one in a thousand -will forgive me and be thankful to the

heavens and me while he continues in this
world or in any world."
"Toward me,"
writes Sterling on his death-bed," it is still
more true than toward England that no one
has been and done like you." There are
hundreds and thousands of men in England
who have countersigned both these sayings
since.

Once more, and for the last time, we must come back to the outward life of our subject. His election in 1865 as Rector of Edinburgh University was in some sort the climax of his worldly career. The distinction, in itself, may seem but a small one, but it has to be remembered that it is allotted on a very peculiar principle. The Rector is elected by the students, and not merely literary but political and other considerations enter into the question. Mr. Carlyle had never laid himself out for flat

So has a great light gone out in our midst. Some reference was made at the beginning of this paper to the personal and moral influence, independent of mere literary influence, which Mr. Carlyle has so long exercised. But no treatment of the subject would be complete without some further remarks on this. I have for my part no doubt that a very high place is assured to the author of the "French Revolution," of "Cromwell," of the " Essays," of the "Sterling," in the purely literary estimate of any competent critic of English at any future time. But it is doubtful whether any one who has not been an Englishman in Victorian times will ever be able fully to understand the position which Mr. Carlyle occupied as a teacher of men during almost the whole period of the reign. The word teacher must be used because there is no other available, but it is an awkward and in some sense a delusive one. For, as has been already hinted, definiteness of gospel was no part of Mr. Carlyle's work, and those who sought to find a definite gospel in him, as many of his earlier admirers did, and not a few later ones of the foolisher sort, took but little good by their endeavor. Either they tried to transfer their master's formulas to their own facts, thereby doing the very thing heit may be in the secular stillness of Oxford most protested against, or they emphasized some particular, and in his case symbolical, crotchet until it became ridiculous and absurd. Accordingly, the most gifted of those who about thirty years or more ago might have been definitely called Carlyleans have either fallen into comparative literary sterility and decadence, or, being saved from this by their natural force, have ended in a wild dogmatism on all things under the sun which is hardly saved by its eccentricity from being simply foolish. It was a great characteristic of Mr. Carlyle himself that he never spoke with insufficient knowledge. It is a characteristic of some of his imitators that they never speak with knowledge that is sufficient. But the real influence which he has exercised, the total amount of which is as enormous as its tendency is good, has been of a different kind from this. During the whole time of his literary fertility, and in hardly less degree since that period came to an end with the completion of the "Frederick," the vast majority of English youths possessed of

brains have been infallibly, and half by instinct, directed to some work or other of Mr. Carlyle's-it hardly mattered whichat the period when they were beginning to think for themselves. The influence was sometimes lasting, it was frequently powerful, it was almost always good. For a very short time during the process of vaccination, the patient may have been a little the worse for it, but the beneficial effects in a healthy subject were permanent. The reading of Carlyle by a person who has any capacities of original thought does not often, now that the outward peculiarities of his style have become familiar things in literature and are in many cases almost trite, result in a Carlylese mania such as was once too common. The humorous eccentricity and exaggeration is enjoyed, the happy turns of phrase are caught up and remembered, the vivid pictures of actual events enrich the gallery of memory. But the preeminent importance. of Mr. Carlyle has been his contribution to what in a much-quoted phrase, less happily applied by its original inventor, has been called the criticism of life. No one has in relation to his own time had such power to thaw the frost of custom and circumstance, to dispel the clouds of convention, to quicken and waken the soul of the reader, and to plant it face to face with the fact of the mystery, the gravity, the momentous importance of life. Thousands of young men, who are now no longer young, must remember how

rooms environed by everything that could suggest merely learned and dreamy ease, it may be in the roar and bustle surrounding London lodgings where everything told of business and the desire for gain-this singular mentor came to them and with stentorian voice-harpocratic-stentorian, as Sterling would have said-suggested that neither in dilettantism nor in money-getting was the business of man. As to what was his business, Harpocrates succeeded Stentor and no word was vouchsafed. Carlylism, if such a term may be used, is a kind of religion, but it is one of those religions which have no confession or accepted symbol, and in which every adept is a law and a general council to himself. Therefore it happens that among the most fervent admirers of this dead man is to be found the widest and at first sight the wildest diversity of practical belief on every subject of interest to mankind. High Tories, believers in the orthodox creeds, enthusiastic defenders of art for art's sake, find themselves side by side with democrats,

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things worth caring for, failed during those seven days to turn first to their newspaper for news of the dying master, and fewer did not feel a shock when they learned that the end was at last come.