out risk to our judgment, and feel that we are sane and selfrespecting men in saying "honor, honor, honor to Thomas Carlyle," as well as in frankly challenging those errors in his works into which all men are liable to fall.

"They are going to make Rhadamanthus of you," said John Sterling to Carlyle, at one of their last interviews. The prediction was uttered not without sadness, and may, perhaps, be taken as an indication that the hopeful and happy-thoughted Sterling perceived the tendency to fault-finding to be growing upon his friend, and threatening to overshadow his brain. Fault-finding in excess is the besetting sin of those men in whom the keen sensibilities of genius combine with impassioned moral fervor to produce what we may call the prophetic temperament. They do not see the bright side of things; instead of working side by side with the seven thousand who serve God and man as honestly as themselves, they ignore their existence. I think it likely that absorbing study of the words and deeds of Cromwell, vehemence of sympathy with the Hebraic rigor of militant and triumphant Puritanism, contributed to deepen Carlyle's gloom, and to darken still more those unfavorable views of men and affairs which are natural to the afternoon and evening rather than to the morning of life. In resuscitating Cromwell, he had not only, as biographers commonly have, to glance over his hero's letters and speeches, but to read "every fibre" of them "with magnifying-glasses." By force of dramatic sympathy, he lived Cromwell's life over again. That was dangerous. A man of his temperament was not in safe company with Cromwell at the siege of Drogheda. In the latter half of his literary activity, the hope, the joyousness, the calm which he learned from Goethe, have been replaced by less melodious moods of mind. The first book which he published after the Letters and Speeches of Cromwell was the Latter-day Pamphlets. There is less of music in it than in any of his books.

A glance into the far-famed Pamphlets proves two things: that their general power is not less than that of Carlyle's earlier works, and that their literary form is defective. The power is seen everywhere. "The present time," I quote from the first paragraph of the first pamphlet, "youngest born of eternity, child and heir of all the past times with their good and evil, and parent of all the future, is ever a new era' to the thinking man, and comes with new questions and significance, however commonplace it look; . . . nor is there any sin more fearfully avenged on men and nations than that same, which, indeed, includes and presupposes all manner of sins: the sin which our old, pious fathers called 'judicial blindness;' which we, with our light habits, may still call misinterpretation of the time that now is." That is a weighty commencement. Published in 1849, the Pamphlets were written while Europe was still tormented with the din and tumult of the revolutions of 1848. "Few of the generations," says Carlyle, a few lines farther on," have seen more impressive days. Days of endless calamity, disruption, dislocation, confusion worse confounded; if they are not days of endless hope, too, then they are days of utter despair." Sketching with a few strokes of graphic and grimly humorous delineation, the attempt made to reform the Papacy, and pronouncing it hopeless and suicidal, he points out that, by the reforming Pope, "the sleeping elements, mothers of the whirlwinds, conflagrations, earthquakes," were awakened, and the general overturn of 1848 brought about. In the thirty years which have passed since then a new generation has arisen, and as the commotions of 1848 have left very little mark in history, our new generation may have difficulty in realizing that singular year. It was a year of revolutions, but of paltry anarchic revolutions, without heroism either in the attack or the resistance. The mob, led by chattering attorneys and crack-brained professors, assailed the constituted authorities; and the kings and ducal eminences, and serene dignitaries in

general, instead of showing fight, caught up their carpet-bags, announced that they were scions of the family of Smith, and ran for their lives. This state of things is brilliantly, and with graphic selection of the characteristic features and salient points, touched off in the following passage:

THE YEAR 1848.

As if by sympathetic subterranean electricities, all Europe exploded, boundless, uncontrollable; and we had the year 1848, one of the most singular, disastrous, amazing, and, on the whole, humiliating years the European world ever saw. Not since the irruption of the Northern Barbarians has there been the like. Everywhere immeasurable democracy rose monstrous, loud, blatant, inarticulate as the voice of Chaos. Everywhere the official holy-of-holies was scandalously laid bare to dogs and the profane:-enter, all the world, see what kind of official holy it is. Kings everywhere, and reigning persons, stared in sudden horror, the voice of the whole world bellowing in their ear, "Begone, ye imbecile hypocrites, histrios not heroes! Off with you, off!"—and, what was peculiar and notable in this year for the first time, the kings all made haste to go, as if exclaiming, "We are poor histrios, we, sure enough; did you want heroes? Don't kill us; we couldn't help it!" Not one of them turned round and stood upon his kingship, as upon a right he could afford to die for, or to risk his skin upon; by no manner of means. That, I say, is the alarming peculiarity at present. Democracy, on this new occasion, finds all kings conscious that they are but play-actors. The miserable mortals, enacting their High Life Below Stairs, with faith only that this universe may, perhaps, be all a phantasm and hypocrisis-the truculent Constable of the Destinies suddenly enters: Scandalous phantasms, what do you here? Are 'solemnly-constituted impostors' the proper kings of men? Did you think the life of man was a grimacing dance of apes? To be led away by the squeak of your paltry fiddle? Ye miserable, this universe is not an upholstery puppet-play, but a terrible God's fact; and you, I think-had not you better be gone!" They fled precipitately, some of them with what we may call an exquisite ignominy, in terror of the tread-mill or worse. And everywhere the people, or the populace, take their own government upon themselves; and open "kinglessness," what we call anarchy-how happy if it be anarchy plus a street-constable !-is everywhere the order of the day. Such was the history, from Baltic to Mediterranean, in Italy, France,

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Prussia, Austria, from end to end of Europe, in those March days of 1848. Since the destruction of the old Roman Empire by inroad of the Northern Barbarians, I have known nothing similar.

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A curious interest attaches at this moment to Carlyle's specification, as one notable characteristic of the undivine comedy or tragi-comedy of 1848, that it was, in a quite unprecedented degree, the work of young men. Students, young men of letters, advocates, editors, hot inexperienced enthusiasts, or fierce and justly bankrupt desperadoes, acting everywhere on the discontent of the millions," blew the European nations into flame. "Never," says Carlyle, "till now did young men, and almost children, take such a command in human affairs. A changed time since the word Senior (Seigneur, or Elder) was first devised to signify lord,' or superior; as in all languages of men we find it to have been! In times when men love wisdom, the old man will ever be venerable, and be venerated, and reckoned noble." All who are acquainted with the writings of Lord Beaconsfield will recollect his theory that it is to young men the progress of the world is due; and the intense and radical diversity of nature between Lord Beaconsfield and Thomas Carlyle could hardly, perhaps, be more pertinently illustrated. than in the preference of the one for the flashy virtues of youth, and of the other for the experienced wisdom of age. In times of wide-spread folly, however, old men, Carlyle goes on to say, are apt to be mere superannuated boys, with the foolishness of boys, yet "without the graces, generosities, and opulent strength of young boys." Therefore, in our time we must after all look for leadership to young men ; "the mature man, hardened into sceptical egoism, knows no monition but that of his own frigid cautions, avarices, mean timidities.” That Carlyle is here in the right as to the general rule and law that the elders of the people are their natural leaders, whether in court, camp, or congregation, I have no doubt. There may be more question as to the alleged apathy and prudential cow

STYLE OF THE PAMPHLETS.

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ardice of mature or aged men in this, as distinguished from other times.

In literary form, the Latter-day Pamphlets are inferior to Carlyle's earlier writings. His mannerism is now too obvious, too strongly obtruded. His humor becomes harsher, and sometimes borders upon coarseness. Heavyside, Flimnap, MacCrowdy, Crabbe with his Radiator, Smelfungus, Sauerteig, Peter, Bobus of Houndsditch, Phantasm Captains, and the rest of the dramatis personæ, cease to be amusing from the frequency of their appearance on the boards. The vehemence has now become almost spasmodic, and the "green oases by the palm-tree wells," the spaces of repose and chastened and genial beauty, have become far less frequent than formerly.

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