whoso will not bend must break." Too early and too thoroughly we cannot be trained to know that "Would in this world of ours is as mere zero to Should." Again to the same effect—“ Obedience is the primary duty of man. No man but is bound indefeasibly with all force of obligation to obey."

There is nothing peculiar upon the face of these precepts, except their strength; they might almost stand in the Institutions of the Jesuits. Here and there throughout his works we meet with qualifications. He denounces the obedience of the Jesuits— "Obedience to what is wrong and false -good heavens! there is no name for such a depth of human cowardice and calamity." It is the heroic, the divine, the true, that he would have us obey. When the powers set over us are no longer anything divine, resistance becomes a deeper law of order than obcdience.

If we ask how we are to know the heroic, the divine, we are left to understand that it will make itself manifest. The true King "carries in him an authority from God, or man will never give it him." "He who is to be my Ruler, whose will is to be higher than my will, was chosen for me in heaven."

Another duty is the duty of Veracity, of Sincerity as opposed to Cant, the duty of being Real and not a Sham. On these virtues and their opposites, on those that observe them and those that violate them, he expends much eloquence. The French Revolution' is almost a continued sermon on the evils of insincerity, hollowness, quackery, and on the good of the corresponding virtues. And in none of his works can we read far without encountering some declamation on Truth, Sincerity, Reality, Falsehood, Cant, Puffery, Sham.

On one point his preaching of Truth may mislead. He does not seem to think that Truth requires a man to make a frank and open declaration of his beliefs. For his own part, at least, he is very reticent as to his real opinions, on matters of religion for instance; and he praises Goethe's example of wrapping up opinions in mysterious oracles. The fact would seem to be, that all his requirements of Veracity, Sincerity, Reality, are satisfied. by one thing, the conscientious performance of one's appointed work. This, if we look beneath the gorgeous verbal opulence of the preacher, would seem to be the whole duty of man. he engages to cut thistles, let him cut them with all his might. If he engages to review authors, let him read their works conscientiously. If he engages to write history, let him diligently search out its facts.

If

His characteristic love of reality appears in his preference of Fact to Fiction, and his condemnation of Fine Art as Dilettantism.

Religion. His religious views are worded obscurely.

To ex

tract definite opinions from his vague declamations on the subject, would inevitably be to misrepresent him. He intimates plainly enough that he has departed from the received orthodoxy of this country; of this he makes no secret. He himself gave up studying for the Scottish Church; and he records his opinion "in flat reproval" of John Sterling's resolution to take orders in the English Church. "No man of Sterling's veracity, had he clearly consulted his own heart, or had his own heart been capable of clearly responding, and not been dazzled and bewildered by transient fantasies and theosophic moonshine, could have undertaken this function." Elsewhere he pities Sterling in this " fused epoch of ours," with "the old spiritual highways and recognised paths to the Eternal, now all torn up and flung in heaps, submerged in unutterable boiling mud-oceans of Hypocrisy and Unbelievability, of brutal living Atheism, and damnable dead putrescent Cant." But while he is thus severe alike on Infidelity and on Orthodoxy, he never says with an approach to intelligibility what is his own belief. John Sterling gives the following account of the Religion or No- Religion of the Sartor:

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"What we find everywhere, with an abundant use of the name of God, is the conception of a formless Infinite whether in time or space; of a high inscrutable Necessity, which it is the chief wisdom and virtue to submit to, which is the mysterious impersonal base of all Existence-shows itself in the laws of every separate being's nature, and for man in the shape of duty."

We may perhaps rank among his religious opinions his acceptance of Fichte's idea that the "true literary man is "the world's Priest," "continually unfolding the Godlike to men,' ""sent hither especially that he may discern for himself, and make manifest to us, this same Divine Idea." By way of defining the "true" man of letters, he says that "whoever lives not wholly in this Divine Idea is no Literary Man.”

Politics. His political views connect themselves partly with his ideas about Work, Reality, Sincerity, and suchlike; and partly with his Hero-King. All the miseries in this life are due to Idleness, Imposture, Unveracity. This he explicitly declares. "Quack-ridden; in that one word lies all misery whatsoever. Speciosity in all departments usurps the place of reality, thrusts reality away. The quack is a Falsehood incarnate." He does indeed say elsewhere that "it is the feeling of injustice that is insupportable to all men; "but then he explains that injustice "is another name for disorder, for unveracity, unreality." This being so, what does he propose as remedies for imposture, unreality, &c. We come upon two specific remedies hidden away under masses of declamation-emigration and

education emigration—to provide work for industrious men that can get no employment; education-for no stated reason. He simply recommends that "the mystery of alphabetic letter should be imparted to all human souls in this realm." These are his only constructive views in politics, and they can hardly be said to be his. For the rest, through his Chartism,' 'Past and Present,' 'Latter-Day Pamphlets,' and incidentally through his other works, he deplores the present state of things, denounces existing Kings, Aristocracies, Churches, and specially declaims against modern political movements. We did wrong to emancipate the negroes; they find the necessaries of life cheap, work little, and let the sugar crops rot. We are too lenient with our criminals (see p. 155). He would take more work out of them. He considers the transaction of Government business to be in a wretched state- hampered by "blind obstructions, fatal indolences, pedantries, stupidities;" the Colonial Office " a world-wide jungle of red-tape, inhabited by doleful creatures." He would have none but men of ability in important posts. He disapproves strongly of Parliaments elected by the people; sneers at voting and "ballot-boxes;" asks whether a crew that settled every movement by voting would be likely to take a ship round Cape Horn. His ideal of government is to have a king (which he is constantly deriving from Can through König, and constantly translating "Ableman") at the head of affairs, and capable, obedient officials under him through all degrees of importance. How to realise the ideal he does not show; and, as we have said, he takes no account of the endeavours of human communities towards this ideal, or of the uncontrollable forces that make it an impossibility.

Criticism. Of literary criticism in the ordinary sense of the word-in the sense of noting faults and merits of style, of showing what to avoid and what to imitate-Carlyle's writings contain next to nothing. He published, as we have seen, under the title of 'Critical and Miscellaneous Essays,' remarks on various great men of letters-German, French, and English. But in these essays he does not occupy himself with style, or with the statement and illustration of critical canons. He deals rather with life, character, and opinions; declaims on his favourite topicsMystery, Reverence, Industry, Veracity; rails at reviewers, logicians, historical philosophers, sceptical philosophers, atheists, and other favourite objects of aversion. He ranks authors, not according to their literary power, but according as they possess his cardinal virtues. Goethe and Johnson he extols above measure as being men of power, and, at the same time, industrious, veracious, and reverential towards the mystery of the world. In consideration of this he passes over in Goethe some minor iniquities that else

where he condemns in the abstract, and passes over in Johnson what some writers are pleased to call his intolerant prejudices and narrow canons of criticism. Voltaire and Diderot he finds industrious and veracious, but terribly wanting in reverence. Accordingly, he refuses to call them great men-finds in Voltaire adroitness rather than greatness, and styles him a master of persiflage.

One or two of his precepts may be called literary, though they scarcely belong to minute criticism. He warns writers to beware of affectation; to study reality in their style. One of the chief merits of Burns is his "indisputable air of reality." He further recommends them to write slowly; points out the evils of Sir Walter Scott's extempore speed, and affirms that no great thing was ever done without difficulty. Once more, he stands up for a style that does not show its meaning at once, that becomes intelligible slowly and after much laborious study. On this ground he praises Goethe and Novalis, saying that no good book or good thing of any sort shows itself at first. Still another literary notion, already alluded to, is his idea that, in the present day, men should write prose and not poetry, and history rather than fiction.

ELEMENTS OF STYLE.

Vocabulary.

His command of words must be pronounced to be of the highest order. Among the few that stand next to Shakspeare he occupies a very high place.

As his peculiar feelings are strongly marked, so are the special regions of his verbal copiousness. As a matter of course, he was specially awake to, and specially retained, expressions suiting his peculiar vein of strength, rugged sublimity, and every form of ridicule and contempt down to the lowest tolerable depths of coarseness. It would be interesting to collect the various forms that he uses to express his sense of the confusion, the chaotic disorder, of these latter days. An estimate of his abundance on that or any other of his favourite topics would give the reader the most vivid idea of his lingual resources.

Having a strong natural bent for the study of character, he is a consummate master of the requisite phraseology. In the language needful for describing character, he probably comes nearer Shakspeare than any other of our great writers. To be convinced of this, we have only to look at his opulence in bringing out the leading features of such a man as John Sterling. Between the subjective and the objective side, the language of feeling and the language of gesture and action, he is pretty evenly divided-a master of both vocabularies.

In the use of Latinised terms, as against Saxon, he follows the Shakspearian type of an indifferent mixture. He does not particularly affect either extreme. Often on themes where other writers would use solemn words of Latin origin, he prefers what Leigh Hunt calls a "noble simplicity," and which others would call "profane familiarity;" but he employs liberally the Latinised Vocabulary when it suits his purpose. His acquaintance with technical names is considerable. He makes frequent metaphorical and literal application of the language of mathematics and natural philosophy-his favourite studies when a young man. He knew also the vocabulary of several industries, as well as of the social mechanism and institutions.

Two circumstances in particular make his command of acknowledged English appear less than it really is. First, revelling in his immense force of Comparison or Assimilation, he shows a prodigious luxuriance of the figures of similarity-nicknaming personages, applying old terms to new situations, and suchlike. He often substitutes metaphorical for real names when the real are quite sufficient, and perhaps more suitable for the occasion. Now this habit, not to speak of its lowering the value and freshness of his genius by over-doing and over-affecting originality of phrase, often makes it appear as if he did not know the literal and customary names of things, and were driven to make shift with these allusive names. Another circumstance produces the same impression. is most liberal in his coinage of new words, and even new forms of syntax. For this he was taken to task by his friend John Sterling,1 part of whose criticism we quote :—

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"A good deal of the language is positively barbarous. 'En"vironment,' 'vestural,' 'stertorous,' 'visualised,' 'complected,' "and others I think to be found in the first thirty pages, are "words, so far as I know, without any authority; some of them "contrary to analogy; and none repaying by their value the disadvantage of novelty. To these must be added new and errone"ous locutions: 'whole other tissues' for all the other, and similar "uses of the word whole; orients' for pearls; lucid' and ""lucent' employed as if they were different in meaning; 'hulls' "perpetually for coverings, it being a word hardly used, and then "only for the husk of a nut; 'to insure a man of misapprehension;' "talented,' a mere newspaper and hustings word, invented, I be"lieve, by O'Connell. I must also mention the constant recurrence of some words in a quaint and queer connection, which gives a grotesque and somewhat repulsive mannerism to many 66 sentences. Of these the commonest offender is 'quite;' which appears in almost every page, and gives at first a droll kind of emphasis; but soon becomes wearisome. 'Nay,' 'manifold,' 1 Carlyle's Life of Sterling, 276.

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