injudicious closeness of application. During the whole of his later life he suffered from dyspepsia. It says much for the native energy of his system that, in spite of this depressing if not debilitating

disorder, he accomplished such an amount of solid work, retaining his powers to old age, and writing with unabated vigour at the extreme age of seventy. He had sufficient strength of will to sustain what De Quincey always recognised as the best remedy for his "appalling stomachic derangement "-namely, regular habits of active exercise.

We spoke of Macaulay as a man whose intellectual energies were to some extent dissipated upon various fields of exertion. Carlyle's energies have been to a much greater degree concentrated upon his books. For nearly half a century he gave the best part of his working time to literature, pursuing his appointed tasks with the utmost regularity and method. Probably more intellectual force has been spent upon the production of Carlyle's books than upon the productions of any two other writers in general literature.

His powers of memory were not of the same universally and immediately dazzling order as Macaulay's. Every person that met Macaulay went away in astonishment at "the stores which his memory had at instantaneous command." In private society Carlyle impresses his hearers by talk very much resembling the general texture of his writings. The first notice that we have of him is in De Quincey's 'Autobiographical Sketches,' where "a young man introduced by Irving" is said to have delivered a eulogy on Mahomet, and to have had a joke passed upon him by Charles Lamb in consequence. He had not Macaulay's wide

ranging readiness of recollection, could not quote with the same instantaneous fluency, and could not trust his memory so confidently without a written note. Again to compare him in this particular with De Quincey-he does not strike us as possessing great multifarious knowledge. He makes comparatively few allusions beyond the circle of subjects that he has specially studied. His scrupulous love of accuracy may have hampered the flowing display of his knowledge; but within the circles of his special studies, his memory is pre-eminently wonderful. To hold in mind the varied materials of his vivid historical pictures was a strain of retentive force immeasurably greater than was ever required of either De Quincey or Macaulay for the production of their works. His memory is singularly catholic as regards the kind of thing remembered; he remembers names, dates, scenical groupings, and the characteristic gestures and expressions of whole societies of men, to all appearance with equal fidelity.

Carlyle is sometimes loosely spoken of as a great "thinker," but his power does not lie in the regions of the dry understanding, in

analysis, argument, or practical judgment. In his youth he was distinguished as a mathematician; but when he turned to the study of men, he took fire: on anything connected with man, he felt too profoundly to reason well. His whole nature rose in rebellion against cold-blooded analysis and matter-of-fact argument. In his works he is never tired of sneering at "Philosophism," the "Dismal Science" of Political Economy, "Attorney Logic," and suchlike. He had a natural antipathy to such ways of approaching men and the affairs of men. He was naturally incapable of De Quincey's pursuit of character or meaning into minute shades, and of Macaulay's elaborate refutations by copious instance and analogy. Take, for example, his Hero-worship. Instead of analysing, as De Quincey might have done, the elements of greatness in his heroes, or of producing, as Macaulay might have done, argumentative arrays of actual undeniable achievements as the proof of their title to admiration, he exercises his ingenuity in representing their greatness under endless varieties of striking images; the hero is " a flowing lightfountain of native original insight, of manhood and heroic nobleness;" "at all moments the Flame-image glares in upon him;" "a messenger he, sent from the Infinite Unknown with tidings to us."

Though deficient as an analyst and as a debater, he shows in other forms abundance of the elementary intellectual force principally concerned in analysis and debate. Had his feelings been less dominant, he might have developed into a profound professor of what he calls the Dismal Science, and might even, with unprecedented persuasive skill, have converted the world to the practice of Malthusianism. But feeling and natural impulses chained his great intellect to their service; and instead of scientific analysis and solid argument, the result is a splendour and originality of imagery and dramatic grouping that entitle him to rank with. Shakspeare, or with whoever may be placed next to our received ideal of the incomparable.

men.

A man of feeling and impulse, his feelings and impulses were very different from what we find in natures constitutionally fitted for enjoyment, in the born lovers of existence, his own "eupeptic' In his works we encounter something very different from Macaulay's uniform glow of buoyant hopefulness, hearty belief in human progress, and confident plausible judgment of men and events. We find gloomy views of man and his destiny, a stern gospel of work, judgments passed in strong defiance of conventional standards, and towering egotism under the mask of humour.

In another aspect he strikes us as offering a considerable contrast to De Quincey. The Opium-Eater, though not by any means a eupeptic man, was an avowed Eudæmonist, "hated an inhuman moralist like unboiled opium," and was a lover of repose and of

the softer emotions. In Carlyle, on the contrary, the central and commanding emotion is Power; he is all for excitement and energy. We have already seen the difference in their ways of viewing great men; that De Quincey admires them in a passive attitude, while Carlyle is raised by the thought of their achievements to the loftiest heights of ideal energy. We have no means of knowing how Carlyle would have enjoyed the actual control of human beings as a commander or a civic ruler-like Cromwell, Frederick, Mirabeau, or Dr Francia; but he shows a most thorough enjoyment of commanding authority in the imagination. His thirst for the ideal enjoyment seems insatiable, and drives him to exaggerate the influence of his chosen heroes, and to suppress and understate the influence of their coadjutors. "Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the Great Men who have worked there." "All things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment of thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world's history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these."

A good way of representing the difference between two such writers is to look through their works, and piece together their conceptions of the universe in their highest moods of sublimity. De Quincey sees midsummer moving over the heavens like an army with banners; hears cathedral music in the confused noise of mountain-streams; loves to contemplate calmly in the mirror of such minds as 'Walking Stewart's' the whole mighty vision of the sentient universe, oriental pageantry, revolutionary convulsions, civic splendour; and occasionally lifts his mind to travel in the same calm way through the illimitable grandeurs of astronomical spaces. Contrast this repose of attitude with the violent excitement of Carlyle's favourite conceptions: the world pictured as a dark simmering pit of Tophet, wild puddle of muddy infatuations, of irreconcilable incoherences, bottomless universal hypocrisies, an ungenuine phantasmagory of a world, full of screechings and gibberings, of foul ravening monsters, of meteor-lights and Bacchic dances, the wild universe storming in upon man infinite vague-menacing.

Carlyle's love of powerful excitement finds a magnificent outlet in his humour and derision. Psychologists tell us that the basis of laughter is a sudden accession of pleasure in the shape of the special elation of power and superiority. Carlyle avowedly approves of laughter-sets up hearty laughter as a criterion of genuine human worth; and, as we shall see when we come to his qualities of style, he is self-indulgent, if not intemperate, in the exercise of his own sense of the ludicrous. His mirth is robust

-as he says himself, in describing the Norsemen, "a great broad Brobdingnag grin of true humour."

His pathos is of the kind that goes naturally with such excessive indulgence in the excitement of power. Wherever there is a height there is a corresponding hollow; the lover of intoxicating excitement too surely pays the penalty in intervals of exhaustion, of unutterable depression and despondency. With all his fire, his gospel of work, and his denunciation of unproductive sentimentality, Carlyle has his inevitable fits of the melting mood. We shall see that at times he is overpowered with sadness at the thought of human miseries and perplexities, and that he bemoans with more than Byronic despondency the irresistible movement of time.

We have already spoken of the amount of intellectual effort spent upon the production of our author's books. The grand duty of work that he preaches with such earnestness he seems to have been no less earnest in performing. In reading his books we cannot but be struck with the many evidences of faithful labour. Take, for example, any page of his French Revolution,' and consider what pains he must have expended upon the mere composition, the choice of the language, the structure of the sentences, and the studied figures of speech; upon the various arts of original, clear, and forcible expression: then, putting this aside as involving no small effort, as something not to be done in a hurry, consider the labour that it must have cost him to form from scattered documents and by patient exercise of the historical imagination, his own vivid conceptions of the scenes that he delineates so vividly.

He does not seem to have done his work with the fitful irregularity of Christopher North, but rather to have acted on the Virgilian plan of so much manuscript each day. Such work as his could hardly have been accomplished without the steadiest concentration of endeavour. It is known that in composing the French Revolution' he set himself daily to produce so much, and in all probability he composed his other works on the same rigid method. In this respect he is a much safer model to the general run of students than the versatile and discursive Macaulay.

OPINIONS.-Carlyle's doctrines are the first suggestions of an earnest man, adhered to with unreasoning tenacity. As a rule, with no exception that is worth naming, they take account mainly of one side of a case. He was too impatient of difficulties, and had too little respect for the wisdom and experience of others, to submit to be corrected; opposition rather confirmed him in his own opinion. Most of his practical suggestions had already been tried and found wanting, or had been made before and judged im

practicable upon grounds that he did not or would not understand. His modes of dealing with pauperism and crime were in full operation under the despotisms of Henry VII. and Henry VIII. His theory of a hero - king, which means in practice an accidentally good and able man in a series of indifferent or bad despots, has been more frequently tried than any other political system: Asia at this moment contains no government that is not despotic. His views in other departments of knowledge also, are chiefly determined by the strength of unreasoning impulses.

This will appear when we state his opinions in some detail. We throw them for convenience into a few familiar divisions.

Psychology. He disclaims the ordinary mental analysis. He speaks with great contempt of "motive-grinding." He sat through Thomas Brown's lectures with perpetual inward protest, declaring that he did not want the mind to be taken to pieces in that way.

We need not therefore look in his writings for any large views of the mind, or any enunciations of doctrines of a comprehensive kind. In his partiality for everything German, he adopts with unquestioning faith some Kantian and other transcendentalisms of German origin. His own original views of the mind are fragmentary and somewhat fanciful.

We may apply the title "Psychological" to some of his doctrines about the indissoluble union of certain qualities. For one example, take his theory of Laughter as the criterion of goodness. "Readers," he says, "who have any tincture of Psychology, know that no man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad." Again, "Laughter, also, if it come from the heart, is a heavenly thing." As another example, take his doctrine that Intellect is the true measure of worth. "Human Intellect, if you consider it well, is the exact summary of Human Worth." A man of intellect, of real and not sham intellect, is by the nature of him likewise inevitably a man of nobleness." "The able man is definable as the born enemy of Falsity and Anarchy and the born soldier of Truth and Order."

Such doctrines are, it is hardly necessary to say, far from clear. Very bad men often laugh heartily enough, in the ordinary sense of the words; and very able men, in the ordinary sense of the word "able," are often very great scoundrels. Carlyle's unreserved admirers probably bring themselves to accept such dogmas by laying stress on the saving clauses,-"if it comes from the heart; "if you consider it well;" and suchlike. But none of these clauses will save the doctrines if they are taken in the ordinary meaning of their words; and one may well doubt whether great writers are to be allowed the privilege of throwing the ancient boundaries of words into confusion.

Other examples of his habit of attaching laudatory predicates to