Carlylian manner; the "well-known hand" gives us in small print Prince Karl's operations on the Rhine, the account of Skipper Jenkins, the life of Voltaire, and suchlike particulars subsidiary to the main narrative.

One great help to the lucidity of his narrative is the titular summaries, or labels, as he calls them. They lighten the heavy body of the narrative, giving the reader a natural break or stop, an opportunity for looking back and forward. Every book has its descriptive heading "Double-Marriage Project, and Crown Prince, going adrift under the Storm-winds, 1727-1730:" "Fearful Shipwreck of the Double-Marriage Project, February-November 1730: "Crown-Prince Retrieved; Life at Cüstrin, November 1730-February 1732." By these more comprehensive headings, we are enabled to run over the general succession of events without confusion. Then, the books are subdivided into chapters, each with a descriptive "label;" and within the chapters there are divisions of still smaller compass. Thus, the leading subject of one chapter is "Death of George I.:" as a minor subject we have "His Prussian Majesty falls into one of his Hypochondriacal Fits." The leading title of another chapter is "Visit to Dresden;" the minor "labels" are "The Physically strong pays his Counter Visit ;" and-"Of Princess Wilhelmina's Four Kings and other Ineffectual Suitors." With this care in dividing and subdividing, the table of Contents becomes a vertebrate skeleton of the work, instead of being merely an analysis without any discrimination of degrees of importance.

Upon the whole it may safely be affirmed that by one means or another, ordinary and extraordinary, he makes his narratives the most lucid productions of their kind. It may be a question whether he has not made sacrifices to distinctness, and whether he might not have been equally lucid without being offensively eccentric.

In the Explanation of Events, he proceeds with his natural perspicacity, though he grumbles a good deal at being obliged to explain. Thus, he enters at considerable length into the sources and the progress of the quarrel between old Friedrich and George II., enumerating separately five causes. His manner of explanation is thoroughly his own. Dry analysis being distasteful to him, he proceeds dramatically, disclosing the moving springs of events in supposed soliloquies, and personal communications oral and verbal between the leading agents, himself being usually present, and putting in his word after the fashion of a Greek chorus. How different his manner is from the ordinary way of writing history, need hardly be pointed out.

Two short passages from his account of the above-mentioned

quarrel "between the Britannic and Prussian Majesties" are all we have room for :

"My Brother the Comödiant' (George II.) 'quietly put his Father's Will in his pocket, I have heard; and paid no regard to it (except what he was compelled to pay, by Chesterfield and others). Will he do the like with his poor Mother's Will?' Patience, your Majesty: he is not a covetous man, but a self-willed and a proud,-always conscious to himself that he is the soul of honour, this poor brother King.

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Very soon after George's accession there began clouds to rise; the perfectly accomplished little George assuming a severe and high air towards his rustic Brother-in-law. We cannot stand these Prussian enlistments and encroachments; rectify these in a high and severe manner!' says George to his Hanover officials. George is not warm on his throne till there comes in, accordingly, from the Hanover officials, a complaint to that effect, and even a List of Hanoverian subjects, who are, owing to various injustices, now serving in the Prussian ranks. 'Your Prussian Majesty is requested to return us these men !'

"This List is dated 22d January 1728; George only a few months old in his new authority as yet. The Prussian Majesty grumbles painfully responsive: Will, with eagerness, do whatever is just; most surely! But is his Britannic Majesty aware? Hanover officials are quite misinformed as to the circumstances; and does not return any of the men. Merely a pacific grumble, and nothing done in regard to the complaints. Then there is the meadow of Clanrei which we spoke of: That belongs to Brandenburg you say? Nevertheless, the contiguous parts of Hanover have rights upon it.' Some eight cartloads of hay,' worth, say, almost 5l. or 10l. sterling: who is to mow that grass I wonder?

"Friedrich Wilhelm feels that all this is a pettifogging, vexatious course of procedure; and that his little cousin, the Comödiant, is not treating him very like a gentleman. Is he, your Majesty!' suggests the Smoking Parliament."

His deep-seated dramatic tendency leads him to such forms, when he does condescend to "motive-grinding." Explanation on the larger scale he scouts; he has no patience with "philosophical" histories. He does not want to have great events traced to their chief causes; he prefers that they should-remain in mystery. He lays his ban on all attempts to give reasons for the French Revolution.'

·

"To gauge and measure this immeasurable Thing, and what is called account for it, and reduce it to a dead logic-formula, attempt not! As an actually existing Son of Time, look with unspeakable manifold interest, oftenest in silence," &c.

Yet in the dramatic form, he does, as a matter of fact, give the commonplace explanation, that the masses found the yoke of their superiors intolerable.

Carlyle has his doubts about the propriety of making History a schoolmistress. "Before Philosophy can teach by Experience," he says, "the Philosophy has to be in readiness, the Experience must

be gathered and intelligibly recorded." Yet, like most other historians, he makes use of history to illustrate his peculiar doctrines, ethical, religious, and political. Not that he is, like Macaulay, continually building up arguments in support of his views. He does not argue, he declaims. He sets up certain men, Oliver Cromwell and the two Friedrichs, as shining examples of Duty, Veracity, and Justice, and upon every colourable opportunity extols them for their exercise of these, his favourite virtues. He is drawn to the Great Rebellion, because it affords "the last glimpse of the Godlike vanishing from this England; conviction and veracity giving place to hollow cant and formulism." He loves and praises old Friedrich in spite of his ungovernable temper, because "he went about suppressing platitudes, ripping off futilities, turning deceptions inside out;" because "the realm of Disorder, which is Unveracity, Unreality, what we call Chaos, has no fiercer enemy." He writes the history of young Friedrich, although "to the last a questionable hero," because he was an able ruler, and "had nothing whatever of the Hypocrite or Phantasm." In every case he takes for granted the excellence of his favourite virtues; more than that, he tacitly assumes and maintains that they atone for every other immorality. His excuses of old Friedrich's severities on the score of justice, have called out loud expressions of indignation. from the reviewers of his History.

Farther, he has not escaped the imputation of colouring characters and garbling facts under the bias of his narrow standard of morality. In the opinion of a distinguished French critic, he has misconceived and distorted the history of the French Revolution from a habitual effort to vilify whoever has a different theory of life from himself.

For such as are not repelled by his many eccentricities and arrogant judgments, Carlyle's histories possess an intense charm. Without recurring, to the elements of power in his style, we here glance briefly at his use of the opportunities peculiar to narrative.

The interest of his narrative is very largely personal. Scenery and military movements he describes with the most graphic power; but he is constantly at the right hand of individuals rejoicing in their strength as the prime movers of great transactions. He records public transactions, but he keeps his heroes in the foreground or stays with them in the background as the centres of power. In our small quotations to show his mode of explaining events, this appears incidentally; but no illustration could bring out fully what is so pervading a character of all his histories. He gives the prominence to individuals on principle: assigning to "great men," "heroes," a prodigious influence on the affairs of the world, he carries this so far as to think their sayings and

doings alone worthy of permanent record.

Tittle tattle about inferior personages, Acts of Parliament, and suchlike, he makes over to Dryasdust; and certainly his intensely personal method has the advantage in point of sensational interest. His exaltation of heroes, if not the most accurate way of representing human transactions, is doubtless the most artistic: every drama requires a central figure.

With his strong sense of dramatic effect Carlyle's plot would be almost as absorbing as a sensational novel, were we not generally aware beforehand from other sources what is to be the upshot. Judge by reading, for example, his account of the Crown-Prince's attempted flight from the cruelties of old Friedrich. Note also, generally, his art of introducing a name with some such phrase as "Mark this man well; we shall perhaps hear of him again.'

The interest in the progress of mankind, so notable in Macaulay, is greatly wanting in Carlyle. There could hardly be a greater contrast than between the glowing optimist and the despairing prophet; between the hopeful opening of the 'History of England and the doleful opening of the 'Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell.' In Carlyle's histories, the absorbing interest of succession, of gradual development, is not wanting; but it is the interest of plot, of suspended expectation, not the cheering interest of increase in human wellbeing. To the patriotic Prussian, indeed, his History of Friedrich' would be exhilarating, as showing the gradual advance of the House of Brandenburg: and even the philanthropist might rejoice to see the people prospering under the rule of Friedrich. But little encouragement to jubilation of any kind is given by the sardonic historian. His eye is rather on the Phantasms that remain, than on the Phantasms that have been trodden under foot.

Exposition.

From Carlyle the student will learn no delicate arts of exposition. In considering the intellectual qualities of his style, simplicity and clearness, we saw what he does to make himself readily and distinctly intelligible. With his immense command of words he is able to repeat his doctrines in great variety of forms. He is most profuse in similitudes. The two great drawbacks to his powers of exposition are, (1) that he deliberately prefers imperfect hints and figurative sayings to complete and plain expression; and (2) that his examples are not typical cases, but selected for stage effect.

His character-drawing is one of his chief distinctions. It is elaborately studied, and in many points the execution is admirable. His sketch of the outward man seldom fails to be felicitous; not groping about confusedly in minor détails of feature or

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of figure, but dashing off the general likeness with bold comprehensive strokes.-See his description of George's two mistresses (p. 151), and Mentzel (p. 147). His description of Leibnitz is also good as regards the externals, though perhaps it would bear filling out in other respects: Sage Leibnitz, a rather weak, but hugely ingenious old gentleman, with bright eyes and long nose, with vast black peruke and bandy legs." These are but slender specimens of his art, probably far from being the best that could be produced; but the reader will have no difficulty in finding others; he describes every person that crosses his pages.

As a rule, he is satisfied with a few suggestive strokes; but occasionally he fills in the picture. When he does so, he gives the general view first, and then tells of particular after particular, deliberately, and with some similitude or collateral circumstance to fix each particular distinctly in the mind. His description of Friedrich in the two first pages of his history, is one of his most finished delineations.

He carries the same art of clear broad touches into his description of character. He is not perverted by likes or dislikes from trying to give the broad outlines truly; as a rule, he looks at a character only with the eye of an artist: and as a rule, his vigorous portraiture of the general temperament is true to nature. example or two will show how he always aims at comprehensive general views. We take them at random :

An

"This Jocelin, as we can discern well, was an ingenious and ingenuous, a cheery-hearted, innocent, yet withal shrewd noticing quick-witted man; and from under his monk's cowl has looked out on that narrow section of the world in a really human manner; not in any simial, canine, ovine, or otherwise inhuman manner," &c.

"The eupeptic, right-thinking nature of the man; his sanguineous temper, with its vivacity and sociality, an ever-busy ingenuity, rather small perhaps, but prompt, hopeful, useful, always with a good dash, too, of Scotch shrewdness, Scotch canniness; and then a loquacity, free, fervid, yet judicious, canny,-in a word, natural vehemence, wholesomely covered over and tempered (as Sancho has it) in 'three inches of old Christian fat!'-all these fitted Baillie to be a leader in General Assemblies," &c.

In these short dashing portraitures, perhaps the only thing worth objecting to is a certain want of order. It is when we come to the minute detail of character that we become conscious of a weakness in the scientific foundations. Carlyle's failure should warn all of the danger of despising psychological analysis, and at the same time producing an analysis made out by common-sense with the assistance of capricious fancy. De Quincey had too clear an insight to fall into such a blunder; he had no hope even of criticism, unless it was to be based on accurate psychology. Contempt for psychology usually implies bad psychology; contempt for analysis,