tized science, a splendid but Satanic poetry, a witty but wicked criticism on the one side, and of a feeble, fanatical, illiberal, intolerant, religious literature on the other. Thus, both parties suffered from their separation; but religion most. Such was the case: it is very different now. Advances towards a reconciliation have been made. Men of letters, in general, have dropt their animosities to religion, and, if they have not all yet given in their adherence to any particular form of Christianity, they are seeking truth, and have turned their faces in the proper direction. The Reviews now, without exception, speak of religion with affection or respect. That sneering, cold-blooded, Gibbonic style, once the rage, has withered out of our literature. Meanwhile, we admit, that the religious community is not reciprocating good understanding so fully as we would wish. There is still too much of jealousy and fear in the aspect with which they regard the literature and science of the day. Why should it be so? Why should two powers, so similar, not interchange amicable offices? Why should two chords, placed so near in the Eolian harp of creation, not sound in harmony? Why should two sunbeams, both derived from the same bright eternal source, not mingle their radiance?

But to return to Carlyle: the first light in which he appeared before the public, was as a translator. He is more faithful in his versions than Coleridge; but inferior in the resources of style, and in that irrepressible originality which. was ever sparkling out from the poet, communicating new charms to the beautiful, new terrors to the dreadful, and adding graces which his author never gave. If Coleridge must be confessed to have plagiarized from the German, it ought not to be forgotten that he returned what he stole with interest, and has, in translating improved, beautified, and filled up the ideal of Schiller.

Besides "Wilhelm Meister," (a work which, by the way, contains, according to Carlyle and Edward Irving, the best character of Christ ever written,) he has published specimens of the German novels, accompanied by critical notices, which, though inferior to his after works in power and peculiarity, are quite equal, we think, to any thing he has written, in subtlety of discrimination, and superior in simplicity and idiomatic beauty of language. Carlyle's style was then not so deeply tinged with its idiosyncratic qualities, and in the mare magnum of Teutonic literature he had only as yet dipped his shoe. He was then obliged to conform more to the tastes and understandings of his readers. Ever since, although his thinking has been getting more independent and profound, and his eloquence more earnest and overpow ering, his diction has certainly not improved.

His "Miscellanies," recently collected, appeared principally in the Edinburgh, Foreign, and Foreign Quarterly Reviews. Though full of faults, and all a-blaze with the splendid sins of their author's diction, they are nevertheless masterpieces of wit and wisdom, of strength and brilliance; the crushed essence of thought is in them, and the sparkling foam of fancy; and in their truthfulness, enthusiasm, and barbaric vigour, they leave on us the impression of something vast, abysmal, obscure, and formidable. Indeed, were. a mountain to speak, or, to use his own bold language, “were the rocks of the sea to burst silence, and to tell what they had been thinking on from eternity," we imagine they would speak in some such rugged and prodigious style. Amid his many papers in The Edinburgh, we prefer his first on "Jean Paul," dear, dreaming, delirious Jean Paul, who used to write in the same poor apartment where his mother and sisters cooked, and his pigeons cooed, and they all huddled; who was seldom seen on the street without a flower on his

breast; who, when once he visited Schiller, dressed fantastically in green, complained, poor fellow, that he frowned him off from his brow, "as from a precipice;" who taught wisdom after the maddest fashion yet known among men,— now recreating under the "cranium of a giantess," and now selecting from the "papers of the devil," but whose works are at once the richest and the deepest in the German language, glittering above like the spires of Golconda, and con-cealing below treasures sumless as the mines of Peru. The article excited at the time (1826) a sensation. Not merely was it a splendid piece of writing, but it was the first which fairly committed the Review in favour of that German taste and genius which it had been reviling from its commencement; the first thunderbolt to the old regime of criticism, and the first introduction to the English public of the name and character and writings of one of the most extraordinary men which an age, fertile in real and in pretended prodigies, has hitherto produced.

Next to this we love his panegyric on Burns, written as he sojourned in the neighbourhood of that district which derives its glory and its shame from the memory of the great poet. We recalled it keenly to memory as, in his own company, we gazed with deep emotion upon Burns' house in Dumfries, the scene of the dread tragedy which was transacted there while the still gold of an autumnal sunset was gilding its humble roof, and touching the window through which had so often rolled and glowed the ardent eye of the poet-the poet of whom Scotia, while "pale" with grief at his errors, is proud to ecstasy as she repairs to his honoured grave-whose tongue was only a produced heart, and whose heart loved all that he saw, from the sun to the sickle whicn he grasped in his hot hand; from the star of his Mary to the mousie running from his ploughshare-whose soul, by the

side of a sounding wood, " rose to Him that walketh on the wings of the wind"-who, "walking in glory and joy behind his plough upon the mountain side," generally drew that joy from nature, and that glory from song,-whose dust, in its tomb, turns and shivers at the name "drunkard,” which mean, or malignant, or prejudiced, or misinformed men have vainly sought to inscribe upon it-over whose follies and sins, all of them occasional, and none habitual or inveterate, let a mantle be drawn, warm as his own heart, bright as his own genius, and ample as his own understanding! Carlyle, like Wilson, always rises above himself when he speaks of Burns. And the secret is, that both see and love the man, as well as admire the poet. Altogether, indeed, Burns has been fortunate in his critics, although Jeffrey did try to trip up his heels, and Wordsworth made but a clumsy attempt to break his fall, forgetting that such an attempt was needless, for, falling at the plough, where could he light but on the fresh, soft, strong earth, and how could he rise but in the attitude of an Antæus ?

His paper on the "Signs of the Times," contains an exposition of the difference between a mechanical and a dynamical age-ingenious, but hardly just. We wonder that a man of Carlyle's calibre can chime in with the cant against mechanism, raised by "mechanical salt butter rogues." Men, it is true, now-a-days, use more machines than they did, but are they therefore more machines themselves? Was James Watt an automaton? Has the Press become less an object of wonder or fear since it was worked by steam? Imagination, even, and mechanism are good friends. How sublime the stoppage of a mail as the index of rebellion? Luther's Bible was printed by a machine. The organ, as it heaves up earth's only fit reply to the thunder, is but a machine. A mechanical age! What do its steam carriages

convey? Is it not newspapers, magazines, reviews, poems ? Are they not in this way the conductors of the fire of intellect and passion? Is not mechanism just the short-hand of poetry? Thomas Carlyle fears that the brood hen will yet be superseded! We deem this fear superfluous, and for our parts, never expect to sup on steam chickens, or breakfast on steam-laid eggs.

His last paper in The Edinburgh (save one on Ebenezer Elliott) was entitled "Characteristics," and of its author at least was eminently characteristic. It might, in fact, be proposed as a Pons Asinorum to all those who presume to approach the study of this remarkable man. It adds all the peculiarities of his philosophy to all the peculiarities of his style, and the result is a bit of pure unmixed Carlylism, which many of his admirers dote on as a fragment of heaven-born philosophy, and his detractors defame as a slice of chaos, but which we value principally as a revelation of the man. Whatever were its merits, it proved too strong and mystic food for the ordinary readers of The Edinburgh, and led, we have heard, to his withdrawal from its arena.

At an earlier date than this appeared his "Life of Schiller," a stately, rotund, and eloquent composition, of which its author is said now to be a little ashamed. We can see no more reason for this than for the preference which he since habitually gives to Goethe above the Author of "The Robbers."

We retain, too, a lively memory of a paper on Diderot, embodying a severe and masterly dissection of that brilliant charlatan of another, containing a con amore account of Mirabeau of various articles on Goethe-and of a paper on Sir Walter Scott, where we find his familiar features shown us in a new and strange light, as if in the gleam of an apothecary's evening window.