time. For here again, most unexpectedly, comes antique fanaticism in new and newest vesture; miraculous, as all fanaticism is. Call it the fanaticism of "making away with formulas, de humer les formules." The world of formulas, the formed regulated world, which all habitable world is,―must needs hate such fanaticism like death; and be at deadly variance with it. The world of formulas must conquer it; or failing that, must die execrating it, anathematising it;-can nevertheless in nowise prevent its being and its having been. The anathemas are there, and the miraculous Thing is there.

Whence it cometh? Whither it goeth? These are questions! When the age of miracles lay faded into the distance as an incredible tradition, and even the age of conventionalities was now old; and man's existence had for long generations rested on mere formulas which were grown hollow by course of time; and it seemed as if no reality any longer existed, but only phantasms of realities, and God's universe were the work of the tailor and upholsterer mainly, and men were buckram masks that went about becking and grimacing there,-on a sudden, the earth yawns asunder, and amid Tartarean smoke, and glare of fierce brightness, rises SANSCULOTTISM, many-headed, fire-breathing, and asks: What think ye of me? Well may the buckram masks start together, terrorstruck; "into expressive, well-concerted groups!" It is, indeed, friends, a most singular, most fatal thing. Let whosoever is but buckram and a phantasm look to it; ill, verily, may it fare with him; here, methinks, he cannot much longer be. Woe, also, to many a one who is not wholly buckram, but partially real and human! The age of miracles has come back. "Behold the world-phoenix, in fire-consummation and fire-creation: wide are her fanning wings; loud is her death-melody, of battle-thunders and falling towns; skyward lashes the funeral flame, enveloping all things it is the death-birth of a world!"

:

Whereby, however, as we often say, shall one unspeakable blessing seem attainable. This mainly that man and his life rest no more on hollowness and a lie, but on solidity and some kind of truth. Welcome the beggarliest truth, so it be one, in exchange for the royallest sham! Truth of any kind breeds ever new and better truth; thus hard granite rock will crumble down into soil, under the blessed skyey influences; and cover itself with verdure, with fruitage, and umbrage. But, as for falsehood, which, in like contrary manner, grows ever falser,-what can it, or what should it do but decease, being ripe; decompose itself, gently or even violently, and return to the father of it,-too probably in flames of fire ?

Sansculottism will burn much; but what is incombustible it will not burn. Fear not sansculottism; recognise it for what it is, the portentous inevitable end of much, the miraculous beginning of much. One other thing thou mayest understand of it: that it, too, came from God; for has it not been? From of old, as it is written, are His goings forth; in the great deep of things; fearful and wonderful now as in the beginning: in the whirlwind also He speaks; and the wrath of men is made to praise

The Life of Institutions.

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Him. But to gauge and measure this immeasurable thing, and what is called account for it, and reduce it to a dead logic-formula, attempt not! Much less shalt thou shriek thyself hoarse, cursing it; for that, to all needful lengths, has been already done. As an actually existing son of time, look, with unspeakable manifold interest, oftenest in silence, at what the time did bring: therewith edify, instruct, nourish thyself, or were it but amuse and gratify thyself, as it is given thee.

These words prove that Carlyle contemplated the French Revolution as a poet or artist, and that he did not profess to trace it to this or that particular cause. He would not attempt to account for it." Quoting Homer's words, he proposes to describe the "destructive wrath" of the modern democracy, the sansculottic Achilles of this new Iliad. But he is quite clear as to the fundamental cause of the Revolution. Homer discerned, beneath all the subordinate causes of the terrors and horrors of the Trojan war, the disposing and determining will of Zeus (4los S'ÉTEλELETO BOVλn); Carlyle, in the whirlwind of the Revolution, hears the voice of God saying that authority which has become hollow shall be ended; that the old order which has become intolerable shall give place to new. The life of institutions, according to the leading doctrine of Sartor Resartus, is the spirit they contain, and when the spirit is out, the body must die. Such, says Carlyle, in old Calvinistic language, is the decree of God. But that decree is executed in a way which man never surmises, never expects. That other doctrine of Sartor Resartus, that logical theorising about society is of little avail as а practical power-that the analysis of the man of science, whether his science be social or physical, penetrates but a little way-is also illustrated for him in the French Revolution. There is nothing more characteristic of Carlyle in the book than the irony with which he refers to the finespoken, theorising, analysing gentlemen who, having, to their own extreme satisfaction, got rid of all belief in God, all recognition of the mystery of things-of the fact of the

Infinite and Eternal, on which like a thin film all the timeworld floats-were horror-struck by the Revolution they had evoked, and consumed in the fire they had kindled. Carlyle does not call these men philosophers, but philosophes, and their theorising not philosophy, but philosophism. The promises of their superficial and superfine philosophism he describes in a passage remarkable both for the breadth of its historical description, and the keenness of its sarcasm.

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THE ATHEISTIC MILLENNIUM.

How 'sweet are the manners; vice "losing all its deformity; becoming decent (as established things, making regulations for themselves, do); becoming almost a kind of "sweet" virtue! Intelligence so abounds; irradiated by wit and the art of conversation. Philosophism sits joyful in her glittering saloons, the dinner-guest of opulence grown ingenuous, the very nobles proud to sit by her; and preaches, lifted up over all Bastilles, a coming millennium. From far Ferney, patriarch Voltaire gives sign; veterans Diderot, D'Alembert have lived to see this day; these with their younger Marmontels, Morellets, Chamforts, Reynals, make glad the spicy board of rich ministering dowager, of philosophic farmer-general. O nights and suppers of the gods! Of a truth the long-demonstrated will now be done; "the age of revolutions approaches" (as Jean Jacques wrote), but then of happy blessed ones. Man awakens from his long somnambulism; chases the fantasms that beleaguered and bewitched him. Behold the new morning glittering

down the eastern steeps; fly, false fantasms from its shafts of light; let the absurd fly utterly, abandoning this lower earth for ever. It is truth and Astrœa Redux that (in the shape of Philosophism) henceforth reign. For what imaginable purpose was man made, if not to be "happy"? By victorious analysis, and progress of the species, happiness enough now awaits him. Kings can become philosophers; or else philosophers kings. Let but society be once rightly constituted by victorious analysis. The stomach that is empty shall be filled; the throat that is dry shall be wetted with wine. Labour itself shall be all one as rest; not grievous, but joyous. Wheat-fields, one would think, cannot come to grow untilled; no man made clayey, or made weary thereby ;-unless, indeed, machinery will do it. Gratuitous tailors and restaurateurs may start up, at fit intervals, one as yet sees not how. But if each will, according to rule of benevolence, have a care for all, then surely no one will be uncared for. Nay, who knows but, by sufficiently victorious analysis, "human life may be indefinitely lengthened," and men get rid of death, as they have already done of the devil? We shall then be happy in spite of death and the devil. -So preaches magniloquent Philosophism her Redeunt Saturnia regna.

We are next shown,-black against this soft brightnessthe squalor, misery, and disaffection in which the working millions of France were plunged. These we," the courtiers and the philosophes, "lump together into a kind of dim, compendious unity, monstrous but dim, far-off as the canaille; or, more humanly, as the masses.' "Masses, indeed," says Carlyle; "and yet, singular to say, if, with an effort of imagination, thou follow them, over broad France, into their clay hovels, into their garrets and hutches, the masses consist all of units." Every unit has his own pains and griefs, "and if you prick him, he will bleed." This is one of those touches from Shakespeare by which the language of this book is frequently pointed or enriched. Shakespeare, Homer, and Tacitus appear to have been the masters of literary art whom Carlyle had chiefly before him as models in composition. "Every unit of these masses," he proceeds, "is a miraculous man with a spark of the Divinity, what thou callest an immortal soul, in him!" The chief end of the millions in France seemed to be to keep the privileged hundreds in luxurious ease. On them fell all the taxes. The clergy, the nobility, the parlements were exempt. "Untaught, uncomforted, unfed," the people lived in the habitual and angry persuasion that the upper classes, from the Court downwards, were their enemies. When the chronic misery and semi-starvation became more than usually acute, they expressed their wretchedness in tumultuary risings, "their voice only an inarticulate cry." In May, 1775, for example, there being a scarcity of bread, "these vast multitudes do here, at Versailles Château, in wide-spread wretchedness, in sallow faces, squalor, winged raggedness, present, as in legible hieroglyphic writing, their petition of grievances. The château-gates must be shut; but the king will appear on the balcony, and speak to them. They have seen the king's face; their petition of grievances

has been, if not read, looked at. For answer, two of them are hanged, on a new gallows forty feet high'; and the rest driven back to their dens,-for a time."

Thus summarily, as if it were a matter of quite subordinate importance, does the Government deal with the masses, and yet Carlyle will have it that the welfare of these is "the sole point and problem of Government," compared with which all other points and problems are mere accidental crotchets, superficialities, and beatings of the wind." The problem was now to be taken up; and the solution turned out to be such as made the ears of every one hearing it to tingle. The "evangel" of Rousseau had been passionately embraced by the young generation, and the fundamental proposition in Rousseau's system is that Governments ought to exist to promote the happiness of the people, or rather that Governments have only to set the people free in order to secure their happiness. Carlyle teaches that both Rousseau and the opponents of Rousseau overlooked the fact that happiness, whether of one class or of all classes, is not an easy thing to obtain. A "millennium of mere ease and plentiful supply," a "lubberland of happiness, benevolence, and vice cured of its deformity," is in his eyes an imbecile dream. “How, in this wild universe, which storms-in on him, infinite, vaguemenacing, shall poor man find, say, not happiness, but existence, and footing to stand on, if it be not by girding himself together for continual endeavour and endurance?" Of all the elements and agencies that produced the French Revolution-of all the forces that, in their volcanic action, tore up the surface of French society, and threw it in fragments into the sky-none was more potent than the persuasion which was embedded in the mind of the nation that happiness is a natural right and heritage of man, and that it was the baleful influence of kings, priests, and nobles that alone prevented the millions of France from being