and bridled the Bucephalus of the Revolution, "Thus passes, like a gigantic mass of valour, fury, ostentation, and wild revolutionary manhood, this Danton to his unknown home. He had many sins, but one worst sin he had not, that of cant. No hollow formalist, but a very man—with all his dross he was a man -fiery-real, from the great fire-bosom of nature herself. He saved France from Brunswick-he walked straight his own wild road, whither it led him. He may live for some generations in the memory of men."

The Edinburgh Reviewer seems to have a strong liking for Robespierre, and takes our author to task for his treatment of that "sea-green incorruptible." This liking on the part of the reviewer seems to us affected as well as absurd: for if there be one character to whom we cannot extend our just-defended principle of charity, it is he. He grounds it upon the fact that he was incorruptible, and was a worshipper after a fashion of his own. Two pitiful pillars for bolstering up a character bowed down by the weight of Danton's blood, by the execrations of humanity, by the unanimous voice of female France, re-echoing the woman's wild cry, "Go down to hell with the curses of all wives and mothers." But, oh! he was above a bribe! Nay, he was only beneath it; and so is a hyena. He died a poor man; but so far from making him an Andrew Marvel therefore, let us rather say with Hall, that "ambition in his mind had, like Aaron's rod, swallowed up the whole fry of petty propensities;" and that there are "other virtues besides that of dying poor." Miserable counterbalance! incorruptibility against treachery, ingratitude, infernal cruelty, and systematic hypocrisy-one virtue to a thousand crimes. But he was a worshipper, it seems. Of what? Of Wisdom in the shape of a smoked statue! And this most ridiculous and monstrous of all farces ever enacted in this world-this tom-foolery of hell, with its ghastly ceremonies and ghastlier high-priest, "in sky-blue coat and black breeches," decreeing the existence of a Supreme Being with one foot in Danton's blood, and the immortality of the soul with another on the brink of ruin—this cowardly acknowledgment, more horrible than the blasphemous denial-this patronage of Deity by one of the worst and meanest of his creatures-has at length met with an admirer in the shape of a contributor to "The Edinburgh Review!" "O shame, where is thy blush?" But he had a party who died with him, while Danton stood almost alone. Why, Nero had his friends. "Some hand unseen strewed flowers upon his tomb." The brood of a tiger probably regard their parent as an amiable character -much misrepresented. Satan has his party. Can we wonder, then, that a set of miscreants, driven to desperation, should cling to each other, and to the greatest villain of their number? And as to Danton, not only had he, too, his devoted adherents, Ca

mille Desmoulins, Herault De Sechelles, &c., but the galleries had nearly rushed down and rescued him. His fall secured Robespierre's ruin; and when the wretch attempted to speak in his own behalf, what cry rung in his ears, telling how deeply the people had felt and mourned their Titan's death? "Danton's blood chokes him."

We noticed, too, and wondered at his epithets, and the curious art he has of compounding and recompounding them, till the resources of style stagger, and the reader's eye, familiarised to the ordered and measured tameness of the common run of writers, becomes dim with astonishment. Take some specimens which occur on opening the book:-" Fountain-ocean, flame-image, stargalaxies, sharp-bustling, kind-sparkling, Tantalus-Ixion, Amazonian-graceful, bushy-whiskered, fire-radiant, high-pendant, selfdistractive, land-surging, waste-flashing, honour-worthy, famousinfamous, real-imaginary, pale-dim." Such are a few, and but a few, of the strange, half-mad, contradictory and chaotic epithets, which furnish a barbaric garnish to the feast which Carlyle has spread before us. Whether in these he had Homer in his eye, or whether he has rather imitated his hero Mirabeau, who, we know, was very fond of such combinations as Grandison-Cromwell, Crispin-Catiline, &c., we cannot tell; but, while questioning their taste, we honestly admit that we love the book all the better for them, and would miss them much were they away. To such faults (as men to the taste of tobacco) we not only become reconciled, for the sake of the pleasure connected with them, but we learn positively to love what seemed at first to breathe the very essence of affectation. It is just as when you have formed a friendship for a man, you love him all the better for his oddities, and value as parts of him all his singularities, from the twist in his temper and the crack in his brain, to the cast in his eye and the stutter in his speech. So, Carlyle's epithets are not beautiful, but they are his.

We noticed, too, his passion for the personal. His ideas of all his characters are connected with vivid images of their personal appearance. He is not like Grant, of the "Random Recollections," whose soul is swallowed up in the minutiae of dress, and whose "talk is of" buttons. Carlyle is infinitely above this. But in the strength of his imagination, and the profound philosophical conviction, that nature has written her idea of character and intellect upon countenance and person, and that "faces never lie," he avails himself of all the traditionary and historical notices which he can collect; and the result is the addition of the charms of painting to those of history. His book will never need an illustrated edition. It is illustrated beforehand, in his graphic and perpetually repeated pictures. Mirabeau lifts up, on his canvass, his black boar's head, and carbuncled and grimpitted visage, like

"a tiger that had had the small-pox." Robespierre shows his seagreen countenance and bilious eyne, through spectacles, and, ere his fall, is "seen wandering in the fields with an intensely meditative air, and eyes blood-spotted, fruit of extreme bile." Danton strides along heavily, as if shod with thunder, and shaking, above his mighty stature, profuse and "coal-black" locks. Marat croaks hoarse, with "bleared soul, looking through bleared, dull, acrid, wo-struck face," "redolent of soot and horse-drugs." Camille Desmoulins stalks on with "long curling locks, and face of dingy blackguardism, wondrously irradiated with genius, as if a naphtha lamp burnt within it." Abbé Sieyes, a "light thin" man, "elastic, wiry," weaves his everlasting constitutions of still flimsier materials than himself Bailly "trembles under the guillotine with cold." Vergniaud, during his last night in prison, sings "tumultuous songs." Gross David shows his "swoln cheek," type of genius, in a "state of convulsion." Charlotte Corday hies to Paris, a "stately Norman figure, with beautiful still countenance." Louis stands on the edge of the scaffold, speaking in dumb show, his "face very red." Marie Antoinette, Theresa's daughter, skims along, touching not the ground, till she drops down on it a corpse. Madame Theroigne flutters about, a "brown-locked figure," that might win laughter from the grim guillotine itself. Barbaroux, "beautiful as Antinous," "looks into Madame Roland's eyes, and in silence, in tragical renunciance, feels that she is all too lovely." And last, not least, stands at the foot of the scaffold Madame Roland herself, a noble white vision, with high queenly face, soft proud eyes, and long black hair flowing down to her girdle." Thus do all Carlyle's characters live and move; no stuffed figures, or breathing corpses, but animated and flesh and blood humanities. And it is this intense love of the picturesque and personal which gives such a deep and dramatic interest to the book, and makes it above all comparison the most lively and eloquent history of the period which has appeared.

We might have dwelt, too, on the sardonic air which pervades the greater part of it. Carlyle's sarcasm is quite peculiar to himself. It is like that of an intelligence who has the power of viewing a great many grave matters at a strange sinister angle, which turns them into figures of mirth. The author of "Don Juan" describes the horrors of a shipwreck like a demon who had, invisible, sat amid the shrouds, choked with laughter;-with immeasurable glee had heard the wild farewell rising from sea to sky; had leaped into the long boat, as it put off with its pale crew; had gloated over the cannibal repast;-had leered, unseen, into the "dim eyes of those shipwrecked men," and, with a loud and savage burst of derision, had seen them, at length, sinking into the waves. Carlyle's laughter is not that of a fiend

but resembles the neigh of a homeless steed. More truly than Byron might he say, "And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'tis that I may not weep. For our parts, we love to see him, as he stands beside the boiling abyss of the French Revolution; not, like many, raving in sympathy; nor, like others, coolly sounding the tumultuous surge; nor, like others, vituperating the wild waters; but veiling the profoundest pity, love, terror, and wonder in inextinguishable peals of laughter. This laughter may be hearty, but assuredly it is not heartless.

We remarked, in fine, its singular compression of events, scarce one prominent point in the whole complicated history being omitted;-the art he has of stripping off the proud flesh, and giving the marrow of history; his want of prejudice and bias, producing, on the one hand, in him, a perfect and ideal impartiality, and, on the other, in you, an unsatisfied and tantalised feeling, which prompts you to ask, "What, after all, does this man want us to think of the French Revolution,—to love or to hate, to bless or to ban it?"—the appositeness and point of his quotations, which, like strong tributaries, mingle congenially with the main current of his narrative, and are drawn from remote regions;—and his habitual use of the present tense, thus completing the epic cast of his work, giving a freshness and startling life to its every page, and producing an effect as different from the tame past of other writers, as the smoothed locks of a coxcomb are from the roused hair of a Moenad or an Apollo standing bright in the breath of Olympus.

Such is our estimate of a book which, though no model in style, nor yet a final and conclusive history of the period, can never, as long as originality, power, and genius are admired, pass from the memories of men. We trust we shall live to see its grand sequel in the shape of a life of Napoleon, from the same pen. May it be worthy of the subject and the author, and come forth in the fine words of Symmons:

Thundering the moral of his story,
And rolling boundless as his glory.

Altogether, in an age of singularities, Thomas Carlyle stands peculiarly alone. Generally known, and warmly appreciated, he has of late become popular, in the strict sense, he is not, and may never be. His works may never climb the family library, nor his name become a household word; but while the Thomsons and the Campbells shed their gentle genius, like light into the hall and the hovel,-the shop of the artisan and the sheiling of the shepherd-Carlyle, like the Landors and Lambs of this age, and the Brownes and Burtons of a past, will exert a more limited but profounder power,—cast a dimmer but more gorgeous radiance, attract fewer but more devoted admirers, and obtain an equal, and perhaps more enviable immortality.

104

THOMAS DE QUINCEY.

CONCEIVE a small, pale-faced, wo-begone, and attenuated man, opening the door of his room in street, advancing towards you with hurried movement, and half-recognising glance; saluting you in low and hesitating tones, asking you to be seated; and after he has taken a seat opposite you, but without looking you in the face, beginning to pour into your willing ear, a stream of learning and wisdom as long as you are content to listen, or to lend him the slightest cue. Who is it? "Tis De Quincey, the celebrated Opium-eater, the friend and interpreter of Coleridge and Wordsworth, the sounder of metaphysic depths, and the dreamer of imaginative dreams, the most learned and most singular man alive, the most gifted of scholars, the most scholar-like of men of genius. He has come from his desk, where he has been prosecuting his profound researches, or, peradventure, inditing a lively paper for "Tait," or a recondite paper for "Blackwood." Your first feeling, as he enters, is, Can this be he? Is this the distinguished scholar? Is this the impassioned autobiographer? Is this the man who has recorded such gorgeous visions, seen by him while shut up in the Patmos of a laudanum phial? His head-how can it carry all he knows? His brow is singular in shape, but not particularly large or prominent: where has nature expressed his majestic intellect? His eyes-they sparkle not, they shine not, they are lustreless: nay, they have a slight habit the one of occasionally looking in a different direction from the other; there is nothing else particular about them; there is not even the glare which lights up sometimes dull eyes into eloquence; and yet, even at first, the tout ensemble strikes as that of no common man, and you say, ere he has opened his lips, "He is either mad or inspired."

you

But sit and listen to him; hear his small, thin, yet piercing voice, winding out so distinctly his subtleties of thought and feeling; his long and strange sentences, evolving like a piece of complicated music, and including everything in their comprehensive sweep; his interminable digressions, striking off at every possible angle from the main stream of his discourse, and ever returning to it again; his quotations from favourite authors, so perpetual and so appropriate; his recitation of passages from the poets in a tone of tremulous earnestness; his vast stores of learning, peeping out every now and then through the loopholes of his small and searching talk; his occasional bursts of enthusiasm; his rich collection of anecdote; his uniform urbanity and willingness to allow you your full share in the conversation. Witness all this for an hour together, and you will say at the close, "This is the best living image of Burke and Coleridge-this is an extraordinary