are no swelling words about the inhumanity of man to man, the cruel disparities of the human lot, the hope of future recompense. The head is bowed to the yoke in perfect meekness. Thus things are; why quarrel with them? Nay, more; who would have them different? John proceeds westward to Pall Mall "chanting a tune," while he proceeds in his opposite direction "tuneless"-opposite indeed, yet not unhappy. It is a thing to smile at after all; clearly, also, it were wise to smile, since no angry tirade can alter it. So Elia passes to his toil with the wise smile upon his lips, making us feel that the true happiness remains with him, as it did long since with the old monk who has taught us to expect little of the world since the world has little to give, but to seek our wealth within.

Upon the whole, it may be said that a more religious-minded man than Lamb has not left his mark on English literature. Not, of course, that he has anything to do with creeds, dogmas, or churches; to these he is absolutely indifferent. It is rather in the width of his charity, his sense of pity, his fine feeling about things that his religion lies. He never writes so beautifully as when his theme is the affections. Places he has loved, people he has known, things made sweet and familiar by memory—with what exquisite tenderness does he speak on such matters! There is deep essential reverence underlying his most extravagant badinage. Jest he must, but never at sacred things. One slight story sums up this trait. A discussion arose one night in which the names of Shakespeare and Christ were coupled, and the disputants seemed not to recognize the gulf that lay between the two. Lamb restored the lost

equipoise of comparison with a single observation. "If Shakespeare entered the room, we should all rise," said he. "If Jesus Christ entered the room, we

should all kneel."

Humour since Lamb's day has more and more tended to pure extravagance. Even in Dickens, the greatest of all English humourists, this decadence is very plain. Dick Swiveller is humorous, Sairey Gamp is humorous, but Pecksniff is farcical. In the one case you have a character sketched humorously, but yet quite truly; in the other, you have a farcical exaggeration of defects, which is quite untrue to life. And it is the fashion of Pecksniff which has prevailed in later humour. In almost all that passes for humour nowadays, there is really little else than broad farce. Lamb's is a much more delicate and subtle art. Probably the reader accustomed to a coarser draught will find Lamb's humour almost insipid. His art is so artless, so pellucid, so effortless, that its rarity of quality is not perceived. But it is this peculiar delicacy of touch that makes Lamb's art original, and gives it its most enduring charm. If any fault may be charged upon it, it is that it smacks sometimes of affectation. Lamb is nothing if not bookish. Loving writers like Sir Thomas Browne and Burton as he did, it is not surprising that he fell into their conceits and reproduced their quaintness. But he did not imitate them; rather, his whole mind was so saturated with them, that he could not help expressing himself in their manner. But even when these admissions are made, Lamb's style was distinctively his own. The odd terms of expression, the sudden flash of the felicitous epithet, owe something to a profound study

of the older writers; but the spirit and manner are distinctive. As regards our appreciation of these peculiarities of style, it is a question of palate. If the ordinary reader finds them tedious and affected there is nothing more to be said. There will always be some-let us hope many-who will love him; and those who love him at all will love him much.

Lamb's writings differ widely in quality, though it is scarcely possible to speak of good and bad as it is with most authors. There are degrees of excellence, but no positively inferior work. His best essays are his most intimate; these partake of the nature of confessions, and thus belong to the rarest form of literature. In his lightest vein of pure drollery there is nothing to surpass the Dissertation upon Roast Pig. It must also be remembered that Lamb was one of the finest critics whom English literature has produced. He was among the first to recognize Wordsworth, and it was solely through his fine discrimination that a taste for the older dramatic writers was revived. Few people read Isaac Walton till Lamb praised him, and such books as Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy owe much of their present popularity among students of literature to him. A student, a philosopher, a thinker; a man of original mind and great critical discernment; a poet of great sweetness within his own range; a most human-hearted man, sorely tried, but never soured by adversity; humble, magnanimous, charitable in all his thoughts and acts -one of the most quaint and lovable figures in all English literature-such was Charles Lamb.

XII

THOMAS CARLYLE

Born at Ecclefechan, December 4, 1795. Entered Edinburgh University, 1809. Published Life of Schiller, 1825. Married Jane Welsh, October, 1826. Contributed to Edinburgh Review, Westminster, Foreign Quarterly, etc., 1828-33, when Sartor Resartus was published in Frazer's Magazine. French Revolution, 1837. Past and Present, 1843. Latter-Day Pamphlets, 1850. Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, 1845. History of Frederick the Great, begun 1858, completed 1865. Elected Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, 1865. Died at 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, February 5, 1881.

W

ITH the name of Thomas Carlyle we become conscious of a changed atmosphere in literature. Taking him for all in all, he is the most representative, and by far the greatest, man of genius of the nineteenth century. The four notes of genius are originality, fertility, coherence, and articulation. He is so far original in style and method that there is no one with whom we can justly compare him. He followed no master, and acknowledged none; his angle of vision on all questions was his own, and what he saw he expressed in a fashion which decorous literary persons of the old order felt to be dazzlingly perverse, startling, eruptive, and even outrageous. His mind was also one of the most fertile of minds; not so much in the matter of industrious production as in the much rarer function of begetting great seminal ideas, which reproduced themselves over the entire area of modern literature. Coherence marks these ideas, for the main principles

of his philosophy are so simple and so definite, that from his earliest writings to his last there is perfect unity. Lastly, in the matter of articulation or expression, he is supreme. He enlarged the potentialities of language, as every great literary artist does, and in precision, splendour, and suggestiveness of phrase stands unapproached.

But Carlyle was much more even than a great man of genius, or a great writer. He never conceived himself, nor did any one who knew him intimately conceive him, as having found a sufficing expression of himself in his writings. He knew himself, and was felt by others, to be a great spiritual force. Criticism has had much to say upon the strangeness and mass of his genius; it has hardly yet apprehended aright his prophetic force. That he brought into English literature much that is startling and brilliant in style is the least part of the matter; he brought also a flaming vehemence of thought, passion, and conviction, which is unique. Goethe, with his piercing insight, was the first to recognize the true nature of the man. He discovered Carlyle long before England had heard of him, when he was simply an unknown and eccentric young Scotsman, who found astonishing difficulty in earning daily bread. The great German incontinently brushed aside, as of relative unimportance, all questions about his genius, and touched the true core of the man and his message, when he said that Carlyle was "a new moral force, the extent and effects of which it is impossible to predict." In other words, Goethe recognized the main fact about him, which was that by nature, temperament, and vocation, he was a prophet.

If Carlyle had been asked to state what he under