told that "the Maker's Laws, whether they are promulgated in Sinai Thunder to the ear or imagination, or quite otherwise promulgated, are the Laws of God; transcendent, everlasting, imperatively demanding obedience from all men. This, without any thunder, or with never so much thunder, thou, if there be any soul left in thee, canst know of a truth. The Universe, I say, is made by Law; the great Soul of the World is just and not unjust. Look thou, if thou have eyes or soul left, into this great shoreless Incomprehensible; in the heart of its tumultuous Appearances, Embroilments and mad Time-Vortexes, is there not silent, eternal, an All-just, an All-beautiful, sole Reality and ultimate controlling Power of the Whole? This is not a figure of speech; this is a fact. The fact of gravitation known to all animals is not surer than this inner Fact which may be known to all men. . . . . Rituals, Liturgies, Credos, Sinai Thunder; I know more or less the history of these; the rise, progress, decline and fall of these. Can thunder from all the thirty-two Azimuths repeated daily for centuries of years make God's laws more godlike to me? Brother, no. Perhaps I am grown to be a man now, and do not need the thunder and the terror any longer: perhaps I am above being frightened; perhaps it is not fear but Reverence alone that shall now lead me! Revelations, Inspirations? Yes, and thy own God-created Soul; dost thou not call that a revelation?" Who made thee? Where didst thou come from? The Voice of Eternity, if thou be not a blasphemer and poor asphyxied mute, speaks with that tongue of thine! Thou art the latest birth of nature; it is the Inspiration of the Almighty' that giveth thee understanding! my brother, my brother."(Past and Present, pp. 307-9.)

6

If any doubt could have remained as to the real meaning of all such utterances, and as to the real significance of the relation which Mr. Carlyle occupies to Christianity, it must at length have been sufficiently removed by the appearance of his Life of Sterling, which we have made the occasion of these remarks. To us, we will confess at once, that this book is a very mournful one-the most mournful we have read for many a day. It is not, perhaps, that after all Mr. Carlyle had previously written, we had any right to expect a different book. We now at least clearly enough see that we had no such right. And yet somehow we had expectations regarding it, which, in almost every respect, have been miserably disappointed. We are conscious of admiring Mr. Carlyle in some respects so genuinely, of honouring so heartily the fine and "rarely bestowed" gift of genius which God has given him; he has withal such a noble insight into Humanity in this nineteenth century, and such a warm and vigorous sympathy with its perplexities, its wrongs, and its miseries, that

we looked (the expectation had somehow laid itself so closely to our heart, that we now wonder at ourselves a little) to this book at last for some light to be thrown on the weltering chaossome breaking of day o'er the confused darkness in which he had hitherto delighted to dwell. The subject was one to encourage us in this expectation: the story of a life which had gone astray amid this same darkness and perplexity in which so many are now wandering-of one who had sought truth with a pure and earnest aim, and yet only found (if, indeed, he had been so far successful) some faint forecasts of it, when he departed to the eternal Silence. Here, if ever, was an opportunity of building on the broken fragments of such a life, some sunny dome" of faith and hope for all weary travellers on the same pathway. For any other purpose than this the life was not worth recounting, certainly not worth again recounting. If Sterling's career was not to teach us in our present imbroglio of faiths and superstitions some lesson of religion, then it had not, that we can see, any lesson at all to teach. It had better, with many others, have remained unwritten; or, at least, enough had been said and written about it. However vain, therefore, we may now see that our expectation was in the matter, we cannot yet think it was altogether unreasonable.

66

The significance which, in almost every quarter had been found to attach to the life of John Sterling, was a religious one. What save this could it be? In Literature,-undoubtedly gifted as he was, and full from the beginning of a certain bloom and rich promise, which yet never ripened, and did not seem to be greatly ripening,-he had scarcely achieved for himself a name. He has left behind him nothing that will not soon be forgotten amid the endless article-writing and "blotting of white paper" in our day. This Carlyle himself sees very well and acknowledges. Sterling's performance and real or seeming importance in this world," he says, "was actually not of a kind to demand an express Biography, even according to the world's usages. His character was not supremely original; neither was his fate in the world wonderful. What he did was inconsiderable enough; and as to what it lay in him to have done, this was but a problem now beyond possibility of settlement. Why had a Biography been inflicted on this man? why had not No-biography, and the privilege of all the weary, been his lot?"

To which emphatic query he strangely enough replies by writing another biography of this man, and from what reason? From one just the very opposite of that which, in the feeling of so many, had alone imparted significance and interest to the life of Sterling. Because Archdeacon Hare had viewed the life of his friend mainly in a religious light, and dwelt

upon it perhaps somewhat exclusively in this light-for this reason, and to correct the false effects, as he believes, of the picture thus drawn, Mr. Carlyle has re-written his life. He and some correspondent (who seems, in a very marked sense, to be an alter ego-a Carlyle the second,) do not hesitate, in fact, to express considerable indignation at the misrepresentations in which they conceive the figure of Sterling to stand in the Memoir of the Archdeacon. He appears to them to be treated in it merely as a clergyman, in which capacity he only acted for eight months, and the relations of which were, in no degree, the most

important of his life. "A pale sickly shadow in torn surplice," writes this correspondent, "is presented to us here, weltering, bewildered amid heaps of what you call 'Hebrew Old-clothes:' wrestling with impotent impetuosity to free itself from the baleful imbroglio, as if that had been its one function in life; who, in this miserable figure, would recognise the brilliant, beautiful, and cheerful John Sterling, with his ever-flowing wealth of ideas, fancies, imaginations; with his frank affections, inexhaustible hopes, audacities, activities, and general radiant vivacity of heart and intelligence, which made the presence of him an illumination and inspiration wherever he went? It is too bad. Let a man be honestly forgotten when his life ends; but let him not be misremembered in this way. To be hung up as an eeclesiastical scarecrow, as a target for heterodox and orthodox to practise archery upon, is no fate that can be due to the memory of Sterling. It was not as a ghastly phantasm, choked in Thirty-ninearticle controversies, or miserable Semitic, Anti-semitic streetriots, in scepticisms, agonized self-seekings, that this man appeared in life."-(P. 6.)

Now while it is no special concern of ours to defend Archdeacon Hare's portrait of his friend, we have no hesitation in saying that he appears to us, with all the evidence now before us, to have apprehended and rendered the real meaning of Sterling's life, upon the whole, more truly than Mr. Carlyle. In the present biography we no doubt see Sterling in a more varied and complete light,—generally, indeed, in a quite different light; yet all the obvious efforts of Mr. Carlyle to crush the matter out of sight, fail to convince us that the religious phase of Sterling's career was not, for others at least, the most significant and noteworthy through which he passed. If it did not possess all the importance which it assumes in Hare's memoir, it was yet the most important feature claiming public attention. It was the point of view especially from which those beyond the mere circle of Sterling's companionship felt that his life had any peculiar interest for them. It very naturally, therefore, assumed the prominence it did in the hands of the Archdeacon, although

from the deficiency of his representation in other respects, it now seems to occupy a somewhat too naked and exclusive position. For our own part, however, we feel bound to say that we prefer the portrait of Hare to that of Carlyle. It will not, of course, be supposed for a moment that we intend any comparison between the mere literary merits of the Memoirs. The brief sketch of the Archdeacon has, in this respect, no pretensions to rank with the more copious and finished biography before us. But we feel strongly (notwithstanding the somewhat rude bluster we have quoted above), that it is a more loveable and interesting character rises upon us from the faint and rapid outlines of the one than from the more complete picture of the other. We confess, indeed, to no small amount of disenchantment, in reading Carlyle's Life. Every touch of the heroic we had hitherto associated with Sterling gradually disappeared. The pure, earnest, struggling aspirant after truth merged into the merely frank, brilliant, somewhat impetuous, and spoiled Dilettante. The halo that had surrounded him, to our vision, was gone. Mr. Carlyle would probably say— so much the better. It was just for this purpose he wrote his book. This was just his aim-to snatch the figure of his friend from the absurd halo of religious interest which had been thrown around it. But we feel satisfied, notwithstanding Mr. Carlyle's asseverations, that such an interest, although not in the measure supposed by some, did invest Sterling's life.

If we now pass from these general remarks to some special criticism on the work before us, we feel, first of all, called upon to express our delight with it in a mere literary point of view. We agree with our contemporaries generally in esteeming it, in this respect, one of the best of Mr. Carlyle's books. It has not only here and there touches of exquisite art, but its pervading texture is, to our minds, of a more finely wrought and beautiful character than any of his recent compositions. The style, in its general structure, is the same which, from so many quarters, has provoked assault; but it moves, save at brief intervals, in a clearer, quieter, and more placid flow than usual. If not rising to any of those terrific heights of sublimity, of which it is so capable, crushing and overwhelming the reader with its piled-up and lurid grandeur, and stunning him with the thunder of its march; neither does it ever sink, save in rare instances, into the mere grotesque and fantastic-the mere mimicry of thunder, which not infrequently turns our gravity into a smile in the perusal of Mr. Carlyle's writings. There are, indeed, some scattered passages of a very provocative and impetuous kind, and one or two which, in their ragged and inapposite contrasts, may well call forth a smile; but a character of pathetic softness, of mild and graceful tenderness, is the distinguishing one of the volume. It is impos

sible to doubt how truly Carlyle loved his friend, or what a deep and pensive fountain of love there is in the man altogether. Down below all his rugged sternness and repulsive bitterness, there is a well of genial and most gentle affection, the stream of which makes glad almost every page of this book. As a work of art, too, as a compact piece of biographic story, in which the principal figure occupies his due prominence, while a group starts into life here and there around him, by a few rapid and picturesque touches, it is very nearly perfect. After we had once begun its perusal, we could not lay it aside nor pause over it. But onward we went, now well-nigh touched to tears, and now, it is true, touched with indignation, at some obvious and gross injustice, but owning everywhere the felicitous mastery of the hand that was leading us. A feeling of deep sadness, however, of profound and perplexing sorrow, was uppermost with us in its perusal.

In token of the rich literary merit we have ascribed to this volume, we feel bound to present our readers with a few extracts, although most of them, even to those who may not have read the volume, will, we dare say, be familiar from the numerous notices that have appeared of it. They are of that kind, however, which will bear a second reading. Sterling's mother is thus described in the second chapter:

"Mrs. Sterling, even in her later days, had still traces of the old beauty; then and always she was a woman of delicate, pious, affectionate character; exemplary as a wife, a mother, and a friend. A refined female nature; something tremulous in it, timid, and with a certain vernal freshness still unweakened by long converse with the world. The tall slim figure, always of a kind of quaker neatness; the innocent anxious face, anxious bright hazel eyes; the timid, yet gracefully cordial ways; the natural intelligence, instinctive sense and worth, were very characteristic. Her voice, too, with its something of soft querulousness, easily adapting itself to a light thin-flowing style of mirth, on occasion, was characteristic; she had retained her Ulster intonations, and was withal somewhat copious in speech. A fine tremulously sensitive nature, strong chiefly on the side of the affections, and the graceful insights and activities that depend on these truly a beautiful, much suffering, much loving house-mother. From her chiefly, as one could discern, John Sterling had derived the delicate aroma of his nature-its piety, clearness, sincerity; and from his father the ready practical gifts, the impetuosities, and the audacities, were also (though in strange, new form) visibly inherited. A man was lucky to have such a Mother-to have such Parents as both his were."-(Pp. 17, 18.)

We give as a companion picture the following a very slight thing indeed, but pleasant and attractive:-Charles Barton "now, in 1829-30, an amiable, cheerful, rather idle young fellow about town;" had been one of Sterling's fellow-students at Cam