Philosophers From Scotland

""December, 1846.—Accustomed to the infinite wit and exuberant richness of his writings, his talk is still an amazement and a splendour scarcely to be faced with steady eyes. He does not converse;—only harangues. It is the usual misfortune of such marked men,—happily not one invariable or inevitable,—that they cannot allow other minds room to breathe, and show themselves in their atmosphere, and thus miss the refreshment and instruction which the greatest never cease to need from the experience of the humblest. "Carlyle allows no one a chance, but bears down all opposition, not only by his wit and onset of words, resistless in their sharpness as so many bayonets, but by actual physical superiority,—raising his voice, and rushing on his opponent with a torrent of sound. This is not in the least from unwillingness to allow freedom to others. On the contrary, no man would more enjoy a manly resistance to his thought. But it is the impulse of a mind accustomed to follow out its own impulse, as the hawk its prey, and which knows not how to stop in the chase. Carlyle, indeed, is arrogant and overbearing; but in his arrogance there is no littleness,—no self-love. It is the heroic arrogance of some old Scandinavian conqueror;—it is his nature, and the untameable impulse that has given him power to crush the dragons."

""All Carlyle's talk, that evening, was a defence of mere force,—success the test of right;—if people would not behave well, put collars round their necks;—find a hero, and let them be his slaves. It was very Titanic, and anti-celestial."

""A few words will be expected here as to Mr. Carlyle's manner as a lecturer. In so far as his mere manner is concerned, I can scarcely bestow on him a word of commendation. There is something in his manner which, if I may use a rather quaint term, must seem very uncouth to London audiences of the most respectable class, accustomed as they are to the polished deportment[A] which is usually exhibited in Willis's or the Hanover Rooms. When he enters the room, and proceeds to the sort of rostrum whence he delivers his lectures, he is, according to the usual practice in such cases, generally received with applause; but he very rarely takes any more notice of the mark of approbation thus bestowed upon him, than if he were altogether unconscious of it. And the same seeming want of respect for his audience, or, at any rate, the same disregard for what I believe he considers the troublesome forms of politeness, is visible at the commencement of his lecture. Having ascended his desk, he gives a hearty rub to his hands, and plunges at once into his subject. He reads very closely, which, indeed, must be expected, considering the nature of the topics which he undertakes to discuss. He is not prodigal of gesture with his arms or body; but there is something in his eye and countenance which indicates great earnestness of purpose, and the most intense interest in his subject. You can almost fancy, in some of his more enthusiastic and energetic moments, that you see his inmost soul in his face. At times, indeed very often, he so unnaturally distorts his features, as to give to his countenance a very unpleasant expression. On such occasions, you would imagine that he was suddenly seized with some violent paroxysms of pain. He is one of the most ungraceful speakers I have ever heard address a public assemblage of persons. In addition to the awkwardness of his general manner, he 'makes mouths,' which would of themselves be sufficient to mar the agreeableness of his delivery. And his manner of speaking, and the ungracefulness of his gesticulation, are greatly aggravated by his strong Scotch accent. Even to the generality of Scotchmen his pronunciation is harsh in no ordinary degree. Need I say, then, what it must be to an English ear?"

"Mr. Carlyle delivered the first of a course of lectures on German Literature, at Willis's Rooms, on Tuesday, to a very crowded and yet a select audience of both sexes. Mr. Carlyle may be deficient in the mere mechanism of oratory; but this minor defect is far more than counterbalanced by his perfect mastery of his subject, the originality of his manner, the perspicuity of his language, his simple but genuine eloquence, and his vigorous grasp of a large and difficult question. No person of taste or judgment could hear him without feeling that the lecturer is a man of genius, deeply imbued with his great argument." "This course of lectures," says a writer already quoted, "was well attended by the fashionables of the West End; and though they saw in his manner something exceedingly awkward, they could not fail to discern in his matter the impress of a mind of great originality and superior gifts."

"It was in the spring of 1837 that Carlyle's first great historical work appeared, "The French Revolution:—Vol. I., The Bastile; Vol. II, The Constitution; Vol. III., The Guillotine." The publication of this book produced a profound impression on the public mind. A history abounding in vivid and graphic descriptions, it was at the same time a gorgeous "prose epic." It is perhaps the most readable of all Carlyle's works, and indeed is one of the most remarkable books of the age. There is no other account of the French Revolution that can be compared with it for intensity of feeling and profoundness of thought."

"The translation of "Wilhelm Meister," in 1824,[A] was the first real introduction of Goethe to the reading world of Great Britain. It appeared without the name of the translator, but its merits were too palpable to be overlooked, though some critics objected to the strong infusion of German phraseology which had been imported into the English version. This acquired idiom never left our author, even in his original works, although the "Life of Schiller," written but a few months before, is almost entirely free from the peculiarity."

"The following is from the article on Necker:— "As an author, Necker displays much irregular force of imagination, united with considerable perspicuity and compass of thought; though his speculations are deformed by an undue attachment to certain leading ideas, which, harmonizing with his habits of mind, had acquired an excessive preponderance in the course of his long and uncontroverted meditations. He possessed extensive knowledge, and his works bespeak a philosophical spirit; but their great and characteristic excellence proceeds from that glow of fresh and youthful admiration for everything that is amiable or august in the character of man, which, in Necker's heart, survived all the blighting vicissitudes it had passed through, combining, in a singular union, the fervour of the stripling with the experience of the sage."[A] [Footnote A: "In the earliest authorship of Mr. Carlyle," says Mr. James Russell Lowell, alluding to these papers, "we find some not obscure hints of the future man."

"He had already written several articles and essays, and a few of them had appeared in print; but they gave little promise or indication of the power he was afterwards to exhibit."

"[U]nder no circumstances, and no matter how completely time and events disprove his lurid vaticinations, should the English-speaking world forget this man, nor fail to hold in honor his unsurpass'd conscience, his unique method, and his honest fame. Never were convictions more earnest and genuine. Never was there less of a flunkey or temporizer. Never had political progressivism a foe it could more heartily respect."

"Never had beauty been so forgotten; style was poisoned at the fount of thought by Carlyle, whose sentences were confused disasters like railway accidents, and by Herbert Spencer, who wrote as though he were the offspring of two Times leaders; among novelists only Robert Louis Stevenson loved words..."

"I have read – nay, I have bought! – Carlyle's Latter Day Pamphlets, and look on my eight shillings as very much thrown away. To me, it appears that the grain of sense is so smothered up in a sack of the sheerest trash, that the former is valueless. He does not himself know what he wants. He has one idea – a hatred of spoken and acted falsehood; and on that he harps through the whole eight pamphlets. I look on him as a man who was always in danger of going mad in literature and who has now done so."

"Thomas Carlyle supposed that power should be entrusted unconditionally to great men, heroes who were laws to themselves, not responsible to the institutions or prejudices of inferior men. When a nation is so fortunate as to breed a great man (he thought), it should not seek to limit the expression of his greatness; it should be happy to forward his design. This doctrine rang musically in German ears, in a time of gloom and defeat, when Germans despaired of political institutions and their own capacity to use them. It was acceptable to Hitler, whom we have seen listening with egotistical relish to readings from Carlyle's History of Frederick the Great in the Bunker in Berlin. Hitler, like Carlyle, believed in "historical greatness", which to him was more important than the happiness or survival of a people; and he conceived of himself as a great man,—in which he was surely not mistaken; for it is absurd to suggest that one who made such a stir in the world was of ordinary stature. The Germans accepted him as the Messiah for whom they were waiting, and in the hours of his apparent success they sacrificed their political institutions to him; for they believed not in them, but in the man."

"Goebbels told Schwerin von Krosigk [in April 1945 in the Führerbunker] how he had recently been reading aloud to the Fuehrer, to solace him in his universal discomfiture. He was reading from his favourite book, Carlyle's History of Frederick the Great; and the chapter he was reading described "how the great king himself no longer saw any way out of his difficulties, no longer had any plan; how all his generals and ministers were convinced that his downfall was at hand; how the enemy was already counting Prussia as destroyed; how the future hung dark before him, and in his last letter to his minister, Count Finckenstein, he gave himself one last respite: if there was no change by February 15th, he would give it up and take poison. 'Brave king!' says Carlyle, 'wait yet a little while, and the days of your suffering will be over. Already the sun of your good fortune stands behind the clouds, and soon will rise upon you.' On February 12th the Czarina died; the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg had come to pass." At this touching tale, said Goebbels, "tears stood in the Fuehrer's eyes.""

"Carlyle regarded liberty as an aristocratic fad which would be blown away when the people came into their own. Liberty is indeed the touchstone of every man's career. Do you respect the judgements of others as much as your own? Or are you so confident of your own judgement that you would trample that of everyone else under foot? Macaulay gave the answer for liberty, Carlyle for tyranny. The worse cause had the more powerful advocate. All the same, it was the worse cause."

"You do not read his books; you experience them, and what you experience in them is the storm of the world. He was a nihilist, a destroyer, despite his doctrine of toil and the heroic virtues. He once found a perfect subject, the French Revolution. That really was the end of a world, and Carlyle wrote of it like a man possessed."

"Carlyle senses the masses, as no other writer has ever done; he expressed their outlook against his own conscious convictions... In the French Revolution there is no fault or weakness at all; it is a book without peer."

"Carlyle is surely the greatest figure in our modern literature... Carlyle's enormous personality, his capacity for influencing others for good and ill, have made him the greatest moral and intellectual force of his age. To him we owe the indifference to mere political shibboleths, the lull in party warfare, which is the note of our age. He gave no definite answer to any question, but he gave us the impetus which led others to seek for solutions. His literary influence on Froude and Mill, Mr Ruskin and Mr Lecky, and numbers of others was tremendous. The place which was occupied by Swift in the eighteenth century is held by Carlyle in the nineteenth, and though every line that he has written should cease to be read, he will still be remembered as the greatest of literary figures in an age of great men of letters."

"Those who still think that Carlyle was in some sense more or less Liberal should read his chapter on Democracy in Past and Present. Most of it is occupied with praise of William the Conqueror, and with a description of the pleasant lives enjoyed by serfs in his day. Then comes a definition of liberty : “ The true liberty of a man , you would say, consisted in his finding out, or being forced to find out, the right path, and to walk thereon"...He passes on to the statement that democracy " means despair of finding any Heroes to govern you, and contented putting up with the want of them." The chapter ends by stating, in eloquent prophetical language, that, when democracy shall have run its full course, the problem that will remain is " that of finding government by your Real-Superiors." Is there one word in all this to which Hitler would not subscribe?"

"Liberty he attached less importance to than economic security: in that a true man of the people. "Liberty, I am told, is a divine thing. Liberty, when it becomes the 'Liberty to die by starvation' is not so divine." It is here that Carlyle links up with the socialist trend of thought in his age."

"Carlyle appealed to the conscience and political interest of the rulers; Marx and Engels did their best to organise the workers to push themselves. (They must have been wonderfully disillusioned after a lifetime of entertaining such hopes of them.) Carlyle, with more immediate point, tells the ruling class that since they are in possession of the land, they owe it good governance; and if they did not do their duty, worse consequences would follow. He always had the vision of the French Revolution at the back of his mind."

"In the first place that appalling style, with its repetitiveness, its overemphasis, its perpetual note of adjuration, its shrillness and exaggeration, with no soft tones at all, the trumpets always braying and that rather discordantly: it makes him almost impossible to read... Yet for all his defects Carlyle was unmistakably a man of genius. He was that very unattractive kind of genius, a prophet. All prophets are misfits; and that throws a flood of light on the source and conditioning of their "message"."

"If you want one great name in English literature that sums up all that England does not stand for, a bitter spirit, sour, an extravagant, a worshipper of force and of the führerprinzip, it can be said in one name: Carlyle."

"He saw human life and earthly happenings against a vast background of mystic spiritualism, of eternities and immensities; he was an individualist, to whom the development of the race depends on great personal virtues, on heroic abnegation and self-sacrificing activity. His rugged independence made it difficult for his contemporaries to 'place' him; he resolutely refused to be labelled, or to be identified with any specific intellectual, literary or political creed."

"Carlyle, unquestionably, was the strongest moral force in the English literature of the nineteenth century... He laughed to scorn the pretensions of scientific materialism to undermine man's faith in the unseen; he heaped obloquy on the much vaunted science of political economy; he championed the spiritual against the material, demanded respect for justice and for the moral law and insisted on the supreme need of reverence—reverence, as Goethe had taught him, not merely for what is above us, but, also, for what is on the earth, beside us and beneath us."

"In the mid-nineteenth century and after, the fear of social disintegration was mostly a conservative concern. After the turbulent 1840s in England, the Victorian polemicist Thomas Carlyle worried about what force would discipline “the masses, full of beer and nonsense” as more and more of them received the right to vote. Carlyle’s remedy was a militarized welfare dictatorship, administered not by the existing ruling class but by a new elite composed of selfless captains of industry and other natural heroes of the order of Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great. The Nazis later claimed Carlyle as a forerunner."

"Perhaps I owe more to Thomas Carlyle than to any other writer. The philosophy of the "Sage of Chelsea" always appealed to me from the time I first opened Heroes and Hero Worship. Sartor Resartus is, I think, the book I would save from my library if my house was on fire and I could only escape with one book."

"When Froude took Lord Wolseley to see Carlyle, the sage bade the laurelled commander lock the doors of the parliamentary palaver, and walk off with the key."

"When he [Joseph Chamberlain] was busy on temperance and the Gothenburg system, we had one of our talks with Carlyle. The sage told him that he rejoiced that this mighty reform was being attempted; then all at once he took fire at thought of compensation for the dispossessed publican, and burst into full blaze at its iniquity. Fiercely smiting the arms of his chair, with strong voice and flashing eye, he summoned an imaginary publican before him. "Compensation!" he cried, "you dare come to me for compensation! I'll tell you where to go for compensation! Go to your father the devil, let him compensate you"."

"I always felt the force of his [John Stuart Mill's] distrust of "thunderings" after an hour with Carlyle. You walked away from Chelsea stirred to the depths by a torrent of humour. But then it was splendid caricature: words and images infinitely picturesque and satiric, marvellous collocations and antitheses, impassioned railing against all the human and even superhuman elements in our blindly misguided universe. But of direction, of any sign-post or way out, not a trace was to be discovered, any more than a judicial page, or sense of any wisdom in the judicial, is to be found in his greatest pieces of history. After the grand humorist's despair was over, it was a healthy restorative in passing homeward along the Embankment to fling oneself into the arms of any statistician, politician, political economist, sanitary authority, poor-law reformer, prisoner-reformer, drainage enthusiast, or other practical friend of improvement, whom genial accident might throw in one's way."

"I have already mentioned Carlyle's earlier writings as one of the channels through which I received the influences which enlarged my early narrow creed; but I do not think that those writings, by themselves, would ever have had any effect on my opinions. What truths they contained, though of the very kind which I was already receiving from other quarters, were presented in a form and vesture less suited than any other to give them access to a mind trained as mine had been. They seemed a haze of poetry and German metaphysics, in which almost the only clear thing was a strong animosity to most of the opinions which were the basis of my mode of thought; religious scepticism, utilitarianism, the doctrine of circumstances, and the attaching any importance to democracy, logic, or political economy. Instead of my having been taught anything, in the first instance, by Carlyle, it was only in proportion as I came to see the same truths through media more suited to my mental constitution, that I recognized them in his writings. Then, indeed, the wonderful power with which he put them forth made a deep impression upon me, and I was during a long period one of his most fervent admirers; but the good his writings did me, was not as philosophy to instruct, but as poetry to animate. Even at the time when out acquaintance commenced, I was not sufficiently advanced in my new modes of thought, to appreciate him fully; a proof of which is, that on his showing me the manuscript of Sartor Resartus, his best and greatest work, which he had just then finished, I made little of it; though when it came out about two years afterwards in Fraser's Magazine I read it with enthusiastic admiration and the keenest delight. I did not seek and cultivate Carlyle less on account of the fundamental differences in our philosophy. He soon found out that I was not "another mystic," and when for the sake of my own integrity I wrote to him a distinct profession of all those of my opinions which I knew he most disliked, he replied that the chief difference between us was that I "was as yet consciously nothing of a mystic." I do not know at what period he gave up the expectation that I was destined to become one; but though both his and my opinions underwent in subsequent years considerable changes, we never approached much nearer to each other's modes of thought than we were in the first years of our acquaintance. I did not, however, deem myself a competent judge of Carlyle. I felt that he was a poet, and that I was not; that he was a man of intuition, which I was not; and that as such, he not only saw many things long before me, which I could only when they were pointed out to me, hobble after and prove, but that it was highly probable he could see many things which were not visible to me even after they were pointed out."

"This is not so much a history, as an epic poem; and notwithstanding, or even in consequence of this, the truest of histories. It is the history of the French Revolution, and the poetry of it, both in one; and on the whole no work of greater genius, either historical or poetical, has been produced in this country for many years."

"Carlyle was one who stood constantly in the presence of those ‘Eternal verities’ of which he speaks... The spirit of the prophet was in him... He was the greatest of the Britons of his time—and after the British fashion of not coming near perfection: Titanic, not Olympian: a heaver of rocks, not a shaper. But if he did no perfect work, he had lightning's power to strike out marvelous pictures and reach to the inmost of men with a phrase."

"The forms of government appear to him almost without meaning; such subjects as the extension of suffrage, the guarantee of any kind of political right, are evidently in his eyes pitiful things, materialism more or less disguised. What he requires is that men should grow morally better, that the number of just men should increase: one wise man more in the world would be to him a fact of more importance than ten political revolutions."

"Got Carlyle's Fred II from Cawthorn's and read it—that is as much as I can read it. I never saw a worse book. Nothing new of the smallest value. The philosophy nonsense and the style gibberish. I have the profoundest contempt for him... Read Cobbett—a much better writer than that charlatan Carlyle."

"At the Atheneum I read Carlyle's Trash—Latterday something or other—beneath criticism—yet his evidence before the Commissioners of the British Museum is even more absurd. Surely the world will not be duped for ever by such an empty-headed bombastic dunce."

"Then—with confessional tears—I tried, through something Haldane said when I told him you had been reading Carlyle's French Revolution, to read his Frederic the Great. I couldn't do more than the first volume. The manner drove me wild. The continuous exhibition of the Medicine-Man's paraphernalia made it like a mad mullah's dance."

"I found him as usual sitting at his table, but evidently in a condition of great suppressed irritability; with Mill's treatise On Liberty lying before him... [H]e rose angrily from the table with the book in his hand, and gave vent to such a torrent of anathema (glancing at Christianity itself, as if Christianity had been the inspiration of it), as filled me with pain and amazement. He addressed himself directly to me, almost as if I had written the book, or had sent it to him, or was in some way mixed up with it in his mind. I felt terribly hurt; but what could I say in protest against such a wide-rushing torrent of invective? ... I know the book well enough now, and the ghastly issues to which it inevitably points, with its accurate balancing of enlightened self-interests, and its deification of every man's own heart; and I will only say that, putting myself honestly in Carlyle's place, I do not wonder that his indignation was beyond endurance. It must have been to him, in the incisiveness of its attack and the taking popularity of its style, like a vision of the great red dragon standing triumphant before him, ready to devour the fruit of his soul's travail as soon as it was born. Since that day, I have never heard him express more utter abhorrence of anything than I have, more than once in late years, heard him express of the crowing, God denying, death-stricken spirit, now making such ‘great signs’ with our fashionable sciences and life-philosophies,—and all the world wondering after it!"

"It is really, as Coleridge I think said of something else, like reading a story by flashes of lightning!"

"About that age [16], or perhaps a year later, a friend sent me Sartor Resartus, and one of the most abiding remembrances of those days is the attic in which I used to read by the light only of my collier's lamp whilst going through Carlyle's most impressive book. I felt I was in the presence of some great power, the meaning of which I could only dimly guess at. I mark the reading of Sartor, however, as a real turning point, and went through the book three times in succession until the spirit of it somewhat entered into me. Since then I have learned much of the human failings and weaknesses of Carlyle, but I still remain a worshipper at his shrine. He was, indeed, to me in those days a hero, more particularly when Past and Present and the French Revolution followed in the wake of Sartor."

"For Cromwell, the primary authority is Mr. Carlyle's "Life and Letters," an invaluable store of documents, edited with the care of an antiquarian and the genius of a poet."

"Carlyle was the greatest of English historical portrait-painters... But the writer who saw individuals with such incomparable clearness was weak in perspective and blind to the very existence of the masses. His later years reveal something like contempt for the poor and the ignorant. "Shooting Niagara" gave almost brutal expression to his opinion of the working-classes in 1867. He told Wolseley, half in earnest, that he hoped he would lock the door of Parliament and turn the members out. He sided with the South in the slavery struggle, and with Governor Eyre against quashee nigger. His whole philosophy was that the common herd must be drilled, led and punished by their superiors. Alike in politics and history he drifted ever further away from the generous intuitions of his early manhood."

"If the "Frederick" thus fails both as a biography and a history of the reign and adds little to knowledge, it is none the less full of purple patches. It has been called the largest and most varied show-box in historical literature. Mrs. Carlyle, an exacting critic, pronounced it the best of her husband's works. It exhibits an undiminished power of mise-en-scène, freshness of humour, and mastery of character-painting. Emerson pronounced it the wittiest book ever written. Carlyle never composed anything more brilliant than the story of Voltaire's visit to Potsdam, and the portraits of the rulers of Europe are in his best style."

"It is admirable in Carlyle that, in his judgment of our German authors, he has especially in view the mental and moral core as that which is really influential. Carlyle is a moral force of great importance. There is in him much for the future."

"I have recently been reading Thomas Carlyle's book on Frederick the Great. This biography is extraordinarily instructive and uplifting. Carlyle is an ardent admirer of Frederick the Great and the picture he draws of his life is that of an heroic epic."

"He was a teacher and a prophet in the Jewish sense of the word. The prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah have become a part of the permanent spiritual inheritance of mankind, because events proved that they had interpreted correctly the signs of their own times, and their prophecies were fulfilled. Carlyle, like them, believed that he had a special message to deliver to the present age. Whether he was correct in that belief, and whether his message was a true message, remains to be seen. He has told us that our most cherished ideas of political liberty, with their kindred corollaries, are mere illusions, and that the progress which has seemed to go along with them is a progress towards anarchy and social dissolution. If he was wrong, he has misused his powers. The principles of his teaching are false. He has offered himself as a guide upon a road of which he had no knowledge; and his own desire for himself would be the speediest oblivion both of his person and his works. If, on the other hand, he has been right; if, like his great predecessors, he has read truly the tendencies of this modern age of ours, and his teaching is authenticated by facts, then Carlyle, too, will take his place among the inspired seers, and he will shine on, another fixed star in the intellectual sky. Time only can show how this will be."

"They (the Nazis) would put it to our young people that our best writers were Nazis at heart, and so try to warp their minds. It is interesting, in this connextion, to read what Nazi critics have been saying lately about Shakespeare and Carlyle. They have not got a bad case over Carlyle - he had something of the Nazi about him: he despised individualism and liberty and worshipped the dictator-hero. However, Carlyle also said "Thought is stronger than artillery-parks", and this side of him the Nazis don't mention."

"This is the condition of England, according to Carlyle. An idle landowning aristocracy which "have not yet learned even to sit still and do no mischief", a working aristocracy submerged in Mammonism, who, when they ought to be collectively the leaders of labour, "captains of industry", are just a gang of industrial buccaneers and pirates. A Parliament elected by bribery, a philosophy of simply looking on, of doing nothing, of laissez-faire, a worn-out, crumbling religion, a total disappearance of all general human interests, a universal despair of truth and humanity, and in consequence a universal isolation of men in their own "brute individuality", a chaotic, savage confusion of all aspects of life, a war of all against all, a general death of the spirit, a dearth of "soul", that is, of truly human consciousness: a disproportionately strong working class, in intolerable oppression and wretchedness, in furious discontent and rebellion against the old social order, and hence a threatening, irresistibly advancing democracy — everywhere chaos, disorder, anarchy, dissolution of the old ties of society, everywhere intellectual insipidity, frivolity, and debility. — That is the condition of England. Thus far, if we discount a few expressions that have derived from Carlyle's particular standpoint, we must allow the truth of all he says. He, alone of the "respectable" class, has kept his eyes open at least towards the facts, he has at least correctly apprehended the immediate present, and that is indeed a very great deal for an "educated" Englishman."

"Thomas Carlyle has become known in Germany through his efforts to make German literature accessible to the English. For several years he has been mainly occupied with the social conditions of England — the only educated man of his country to do so! — and as early as 1838 he wrote a brief work entitled Chartism. At that time the Whigs were in office and proclaimed with much trumpeting that the "spectre" of Chartism, which had arisen round 1835, was now destroyed. Chartism was the natural successor to the old radicalism which had been appeased for a few years by the Reform Bill and reappeared in 1835–36 with new strength and with its ranks more solid than ever before. The Whigs thought they had suppressed this Chartism, and Thomas Carlyle took this as his cue to expound the real causes of Chartism and the impossibility of eradicating it before these causes were eradicated."

"Search as you will, Carlyle's book is the only one which strikes a human chord, presents human relations and shows traces of a human point of view."

"He is like a lover or an outlaw who wraps up his message in a serenade, which is nonsense to the sentinel, but salvation to the ear for which it is meant. He does not dodge the question, but gives sincerity where it is due. One word more respecting this remarkable style. We have in literature few specimens of magnificence. Plato is the purple ancient, and Bacon and Milton the moderns of the richest strains. Burke sometimes reaches to that exuberant fullness, though deficient in depth. Carlyle in his strange, half mad way, has entered the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and shown a vigour and wealth of resource which has no rival in the tourney play of these times—the indubitable champion of England. Carlyle is the first domestication of the modern system, with its infinity of details, into style."