with the sense of fun. The reader of Sartor Resartus need not be reminded that a feeling of the mystery of things is one of Mr. Carlyle's deepest characteristics. Here again, very notably, he resembles Shakspeare. It is the mystery of common things, of facts quite on the surface, that oppresses both these miraculous men. The old, old tale that we ripe and ripe, and then rot and rot-that we fat all things to fat ourselves, and fat ourselves for worms-that we are such things as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep-strikes Shakspeare and Carlyle as inexpressibly wonderful. Shakspeare, the greater and perhaps fundamentally the more earnest of the two, contemplates the mystery oftenest with reference to the future. He thinks of the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns, of the dreams that may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil. Carlyle's sense of wonder dwells more on the past. That any man or thing was for a time visible, and then was "swallowed" of darkness, interests him without end. If Friar Bacon's brass head, in Greene's comedy, had spoken to him, he certainly would not have let it crack from want of respectful appreciation of its remarks, "time is" and "time was." Most people, however, agree with the simpleminded watcher that, if the head really had nothing more original or important to say than this, it was not worth while to waken his overworn master to hear it; and to those who have not Carlyle's sense of wonder, and are destitute of humor, his perpetual amazement at, and frequent specification of, the fact that the Merovingian kings, the builders of Stonehenge, and our ancestors in general, were once extremely alive, and are now perfectly dead, is apt to seem sheer ineptitude. But this is a shallow account of the matter. If the obviousness of facts is to neutralize their wonderfulness, Hamlet's moralizing on the skull of Yorick will come under the imputation of platitude.

It has been objected to the History of the French Revolution that one may read it without obtaining any definite idea

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

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of the chronological sequence of events-without obtaining, in one word, the kind of acquaintance with the French Revolution which would be useful in a competitive examination. It is, I admit, advisable for one who knows nothing of recent French history to read some other account of the Revolution before taking up Carlyle's. But with careful reading and careful meditating, all the main facts of the business, linked together in chronological and even in organic sequence, are found to be in the book itself. While we read, no doubt, we are apt to overlook dates and other specifications, just as in any exciting crisis we are apt to overlook the lapse of time; but the dates are given; and as we rehearse the whole in memory-Bastile, Constitution, Guillotine-we feel that we have not a less, but a more correct idea of the whole affair than we could have derived from a commonplace history. You do not really learn what kind of thing an eruption of Vesuvius is by being told that at 2 A.M. the lava overflowed the crater, at 1 P.M. it had reached a neighboring valley, at 6 P.M. So many tons of ashes had fallen; you must see it in the work of some painter or some poet, who can show you the mountain's blaze as it reddens the heavens and incarnadines the sea. Statistical history cannot describe a French Revolution. "So soon," says Carlyle, 'as history can philosophically delineate the conflagration of a kindled fire-ship, she may try this other task. Here lay the bitumen-stratum, there the brimstone one; so ran the vein of gunpowder, of nitre, terebinth, and foul grease: this, were she inquisitive enough, history might partly know. But how they acted and reacted below decks, one fire-stratum playing into the other, by nature and the art of man, now when all hands ran raging, and the flames lashed high over shrouds and topmast: this let not history attempt. The fire-ship is old France, the old French form of life; her crew a generation of men. Wild are their cries and their ragings there, like spirits tormented in that flame." Still more expressive, if possible, is

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the similitude with which Carlyle helps us to realize the paroxysms of the Revolution-that of winds raising the sands of the desert, and whirling them round and round in Sahara-waltz. Exactly such an ambient atmosphere of gloom, of heat, of wild haste, of terror, enveloped the twenty-five millions who whirled round in the delirium of the Revolution. A grander, more apt, or more impressive similitude does not exist in literature.

Such is this great and memorable Book. It is not without its defects; but be they what they may, it is among the Mont Blancs and Kanchinjingas of the literature of the world.

IN

CHAPTER V.

CHARTISM.-HEROES.-ABBOT SAMSON.

N the interval between the French Revolution and Past and Present, Carlyle gave to the world his short treatise on Chartism and his Lectures on Heroes and Hero-worship. The former is remarkable for the bold sympathy it evinces with the working-classes, and the enthusiasm of admiring hope with which it contemplates the industrial outbursts occasioned by the great mechanical inventions and appliances of the early part of the present century. Carlyle seems as yet to have had no serious misgiving as to the effect of mechanical development in depressing the spiritual energy of the nation. The awakening of a great manufacturing city to the industry of a new day, its ten thousand spindles going off "like the boom of an Atlantic tide," was still regarded by him as sublime. The victory of rectitude and excellence over Mammon and brute force he exultingly expected, and to those who shook the head and spoke of the problem of elevating the masses as insoluble, he administered rebukes like this:

THE WORD "IMPOSSIBLE."

It is not a lucky word this same impossible: no good comes of those who have it so often in their mouth. Who is he that says always, There is a lion in the way? Sluggard, thou must slay the lion then; the way has to be travelled! In art, in practice, innumerable critics will demonstrate that most things are henceforth impossible; that we are got, once for all, into the region of perennial commonplace, and must contentedly continue there. Let such critics demonstrate; it is the nature of them: what harm is in it? Poetry once demonstrated to be impossible, arises

the Burns, arises the Goethe. Unheroic commonplace being now clearly all we have to look for, comes Napoleon, comes the conquest of the world. It was proved by fluxionary calculus that steamships could never get across from the farthest point of Ireland to the nearest of Newfoundland: impelling force, resisting force, maximum here, minimum there; by law of nature and geometric demonstration:-What could be done? The Great Western could weigh anchor from Bristol port; that could be done. The Great Western, bounding safe through the gullets of the Hudson, threw her cable out on the capstan of New York, and left our still moist paper demonstration to dry itself at leisure. "Impossible," cried Mirabeau; ne me dites jamais ce bête de mot." (Never name to me that blockhead of a word.)

Mr. Carlyle had already lost faith in extension of the suffrage and introduction of the ballot; but he advocated the universal education of the people, and the encouragement of emigration, proposals which, as has been justly observed, though condemned by the Press at the time as unpractical, have been recognized long since by all rational men as pertinent and wise.

No one of Carlyle's books has been more popular than the Lectures on Heroes and Hero-worship. Delivered in London to a miscellaneous though brilliant and cultivated audience, they were necessarily clear and easy of comprehension, and do not require to be dwelt upon here. They contain many admirable passages, as, for example, the descriptions of the old Norse mythology, of Iceland, of the Book of Job, of Luther's Table-talk, and of Dante's Divine Comedy. These lectures are remarkable for the essentially bright and favorable view they present of human nature. Carlyle maintains with scornful emphasis that man is no poltroon, no mere greedy egotist and selfish coward, but one whom it is safe to appeal to on his nobler side, one who reverences, and cannot help reverencing, worth and valor when he sees them. The ethical elevation, the earnest and spiritual religion, the impassioned sympathy with valor, devout self-sacrifice, all that is heroic in man, and