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calendar; the harvest-moon wades deep among clouds of sleet and hail. Whoever has a heart for prayer, let him pray now, for the wrestle of death is at hand. Pray-and withal keep his powder dry! And be ready for extremities, and quit himself like a man! Thus they pass the night, making that Dunbar Peninsula and Brock rivulet long memorable to me. We English have some tents; the Scots have none. The hoarse sea moans bodeful, swinging low and heavy against those whinstone bays; the sea and the tempests are abroad, all else asleep but we, and there is One that rides on the wings of the wind.

Toward three in the morning, the Scotch foot, by order of a major-general, say some, extinguish their matches, all but two in a company: cower under the corn-shocks, seeking some imperfect shelter and sleep. Be wakeful, ye English; watch, and pray, and keep your powder dry. About four o'clock comes order to my pudding-headed Yorkshire friend that his regiment must mount and march straightway; his and various other regiments march, pouring swiftly to the left to Brocksmouth House, to the Pass over the Brock. With overpowering force let us storm the Scots' right wing there; beat that, and all is beaten. Major Hodgson, giving his charge to a brother officer, turned aside to listen for a minute, and worship and pray along with them; haply his last prayer on this earth, as it might prove to be. But no: this cornet prayed with such effusion as was wonderful; and imparted strength to my Yorkshire friend, who strengthened his men by telling them of it. And the heavens, in their mercy, I think, have opened us a way of deliverance!—The moon gleams out, hard and blue, riding among hail-clouds; and over St. Abb's Head a streak of dawn is rising.

And now is the hour when the attack should be, and no Lambert is yet here, he is ordering the line far to the right yet; and Oliver occasionally, in Hodgson's hearing, is impatient for him. The Scots, too, on this wing are awake, thinking to surprise us; there is their trumpet sounding, we heard it once; and Lambert, who is to lead the attack, is not here. The Lord General is impatient,-behold Lambert at last! The trumpets peal, shattering with fierce clangor night's silence; the cannons awaken along all the line: "The Lord of Hosts! the Lord of Hosts!" On, my brave ones, on!

The dispute on this right wing was hot and stiff for three-quarters of an hour! Plenty of fire from field-pieces, snaphances, match-locks, entertains the Scotch main-battle across the Brock;-poor stiffened men, roused from the corn-shocks with their matches all out! But here on the right, their horse," with lancers in the front rank," charge desperately; drive us back across the hollow of the rivulet; back a little; but the Lord gives

THE BATTLE OF DUNBAR.

73 us courage, and we storm home again, horse and foot, upon them, with a shock like tornado tempests; break them, beat them, drive them all adrift. "Some fled across Copperspath, but most across their own foot." Their own poor foot, whose matches were hardly well alight yet! Poor men, it was a terrible awakening for them: field-pieces and charge of foot across the Brocksburn; and now here is their own horse in mad panic trampling them to death. Above three thousand killed upon the place: "I never saw such a charge of foot and horse," says one; nor did I. Oliver was still near to Yorkshire Hodgson when the shock succeeded; Hodgson heard him say, "They run! I profess they run!" And over St. Abb's Head and the German Ocean, just then, bursts the first gleam of the level sun upon us, and I heard Noll say, in the words of the Psalmist, "Let God arise, let His enemies be scattered "'—or in Rous's metre

Let God arise, and scattered

Let all His enemies be;

And let all those that do Him hate

Before His presence fice!

Even so. The Scotch army is shivered to utter ruin; rushes in tumultuous wreck, hither, thither; to Belhaven, or, in their distraction, even to Dunbar; the chase goes as far as Haddington; led by Hacker. "The Lord General made a halt," says Hodgson, "and sang the hundred-andseventeenth psalm," till our horse could gather for the chase. Hundredand-seventeenth psalm, at the foot of the Doon Hill; there we uplift it to the tune of Bangor, or some still higher score, and roll it strong and great against the sky:

O give ye praise unto the Lord,

All nati-ons that be:
Likewise ye people all, accord
His name to magnify!

For great to-us-ward ever are
His loving-kindnesses;

His truth endures for evermore:
The Lord O do ye bless.

And now to the chase again.

Carlyle regards universal history as, in the widest and deepest sense, a Bible-the record of what has been in God's world; and as we read a passage like this, we cannot refuse to acknowledge that he has made his contribution to the Bible of

England's history with the earnestness of a Hebrew seer. The sublime chapter on the death of Oliver is, if possible, still more Biblical in its tone; and I must confess that it seems to me sheer superstition to impute infallible inspiration to every page. in the annals and chronicles of the kings of Israel and Judah, and to refuse to admit the existence of any inspiration at all in that soul-thrilling account of the last hours of the greatest and godliest Prince that ever reigned in England. If any man tells me that he can read that chapter with sneering indifference, I shall be unable to believe him if he adds that he feels his heart glow within him while he reads the prophecies of Isaiah or the letters of Paul.

RETROSPECT.

W

CHAPTER VIII.

HIS WORK BEFORE FIFTY.-CHANGE IN HIS

MOOD. THE LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS.

E are now in a position to appreciate the justice of Professor Masson's remark, referred to in the outset, that there has been an element of military arrangement in the life of Carlyle. As a general plans a great campaign-as a true man, to use Milton's image, makes his whole life an epic poem-so did Carlyle lay out his life, so, at least, are we, as we look along it, almost constrained to believe that he arranged and planned it. Of course any express or literal planning is out of the question, and all the unity of his life has been derived from elevation of principle and fortitude of will. His career has been an exact antithesis to what he declares that of the German literary man, Hoffmann, to have been. "Hoffmann belongs to that too numerous class of vivid and gifted literary men, whose genius, never cultured or elaborated into purity, finds loud and sudden, rather than judicious or permanent admiration; and whose history, full of error and perplexed vicissitude, excites sympathizing regret in a few, and unwise wonder in many."

It has been a prevailing and most pernicious idea that this character belongs by some natural fitness to the man of letters. He has from time immemorial been regarded as a kind of privileged yet, on the whole, pitiable outcast from the regular professions, one who, unless he choose to expose himself to the reproach of dulness, must indulge in more or less of Bohemianism. There has been nothing "disjointed" in Carlyle's life, no solution of moral and intellectual continuity; and yet

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no life could have been less formal or pedantic, less bound in the trammels of clock-work regularity and routine. "A man,' he says, "should withal be king of his habitudes." This he can be in a kingly fashion only when he is sure of his principles.

It was in 1845 that the Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell appeared. Carlyle was still under fifty, and yet consider what a spell of work he had done. Sartor Resartus, exquisite in the best and highest order of idyllic description, profound in philosophy, original in character-painting; three or four volumes of the finest Review essays ever written, many of them complete and masterly biographies; Chartism, an eloquent and suggestive comment upon certain incidents and characteristics of the time, probably imperishable, notwithstanding the ephemeral nature of much of what suggested it; Past and Present, a reproduction, in all the warmth of living color, of an instructive and charming episode in the history of England in the twelfth century, with brilliant, and, on the whole, sagacious application of its main lessons to modern requirements; Lectures on Heroes and Hero-worship, which, whatever their merits or demerits, set Thomas Carlyle at the head of all hitherto known platform lecturers; the History of the French Revolution, one of the glories of English Literature; and the Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, with historical reproduction of Oliver's environment, in which, dug from beneath a mountain of rubbish, the real Cromwell, in his fashion as he lived, was set upon a pedestal from which detraction rude will never cast him down. Such is the magnificent roll of Carlyle's achievements before he was fifty years old. How much grander it is than the roll of Frederick's or Napoleon's battles! It seems to me to justify an ardor of enthusiastic admiration, stronger than any words of mine can express; and if we studiously and conscientiously divest ourselves of hero-worship, we may indulge our admiration with

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