of its kind has ever been written in this world, though I should be sorry to have to estimate accurately how much of his picture is true vision, and how much the misleading guess work of a highlyimaginative dreamer.

It is in some respects curious that Carlyle has connected his name so effectually as he has done with the denunciation of shams. For I am far from thinking that the passionate love of truth in its simplicity was at all his chief characteristic. In the first place, his style is too self-conscious for that of sheer, self-forgetting love of truth. No man of first-rate simplicity—and first-rate simplicity is, I imagine, one of the conditions of a first-rate love of truth-would express commonplace ideas in so roundabout a fashion as he; would say, for instance, in recommending Emerson to the reading public, "The words of such a man,—what words he thinks fit to speak, are worth attending to"; or would describe a kind and gracious woman as "a gentle, excellent, female soul," as he does in his Life of Sterling. There is a straining for effect in the details of Carlyle's style which is not the characteristic of an overpowering and perfectly simple love of truth. Nor was that the ruling intellectual principle of Carlyle's mind. What he meant by hatred of shams, exposure of unveracities, defiance to the "Everlasting No," affirmation of the "Everlasting Yea," and the like, was not so much the love of truth as the love of divine force, the love of that which had genuine strength and effective character in it, the denunciation of imbecilities, the scorn for the dwindled life of mere conventionality or precedent, the contempt for extinct figments, not so much because they were figments as because they

were extinct, and would no longer bear the strain put upon them by human passion. You can see this in the scorn which Carlyle pours upon "thin" men,his meagre reverence for " thin-lipped, con. stitutional Hampden," for instance, and his contempt for such men as the Edgeworth described in John Sterling's life, whom he more than despises, not for the least grain of insincerity, but for deficiency in quantity of nature, and especially such nature as moves in society. Greatly as Carlyle despised 'cant," he seems to have meant by cant, not so much principles which a man does not personally accept, but repeats by rote on the authority of others, as principles which have ceased, in his estimation, to exert a living influence on society, whether heartily accepted by the individual or not. Thus, in his life of Sterling, he indulges in long pages of vituperation against Sterling for taking to the Church, not that he believed Sterling to be insincere in doing so, but because what Carlyle called the "Hebrew old clothes" were to his mind worn out, and he would not admit that any one of lucid mind could honestly fail to see that so it was.

Carlyle, in short, has been the interpreter to his country, not so much of the "veracities or "verities" of life, as of the moral and social spells and symbols which, for evil or for good, have exercised a great imaginative influence over the social organism of large bodies of men, and either awed them into sober and earnest work, or stimulated them into delirious and anarchic excitement. He has been the greatest painter who ever lived of the interior life of man, especially of such life as spreads to the multitude, not perhaps exactly as it

really is, but rather as it represented itself to one who looked upon it as the symbol of some infinite mind of which it embodied a temporary phase. I doubt if Carlyle ever really interpreted any human being's career-Cromwell's or Fredrick's or Coleridge's as justly and fully as many men of less genius might have interpreted it. For this was not, after all, his chief interest. His interest seems to me always to have been in figuring the human mind as representing some flying colour or type of the Infinite Mind at work behind the Universe, and so presenting this idea as to make it palpable to his fellow-men. He told Sterling he did not mind whether he talked "pantheism or pottheism,"-a mild joke which he so frequently repeated as to indicate that he rather overrated its excellence,so long as it was true; and he meant, I fancy, by being true, not so much corresponding to fact, as expressing adequately the constant effort of his own great imagination to see the finite in some graphic relation to the infinite. Perhaps the central thought of his life was in this passage from Sartor Resartus: "What is man himself, but a symbol of God? Is not all that he does symbolical,

-a revelation to sense of the mystic God-given power that is in him, a gospel of freedom, which he, the 'Messias of Nature,' preaches, as he can, by act and word? Not a hut he builds but is the visible embodiment of a thought, but leaves visible record of invisible things, but is, in the transcendental sense, symbolical as well as real." Carlyle was far the greatest interpreter our literature has ever had of the infinite forces working through society, of that vast, dim background of social beliefs, unbeliefs, enthusiasms, sentimentalities, super

stitions, hopes, fears, and trusts, which go to make up either the strong cement, or the destructive lava-stream, of national life, and to image forth some of the genuine features of the retributive providence of history.

MR. CARLYLE ON VERSE

STUDENTS of Mr. Carlyle will not have been surprised at the outbreak against verse which was published the other day in his letter to Dr. Bennett. Nearly twenty years ago he first publicly broached the same heresy in his life of John Sterling, whom he strenuously advised-perhaps in that case wisely -to give up verse and stick to prose, but on grounds which were many of them equally applicable to all men and without reference to the individual faculty of the man. "Why sing your bits of thoughts if you can contrive to speak them? By your thought, not your mode of delivering it, you must live or die," urged Mr. Carlyle to his discouraged friend. And again :-"Beyond all Ages, our Age admonishes whatsoever thinking or writing man it has,- Speak to me some wise, intelligible speech; your wise meaning in the shortest and clearest way; behold, I am dying for want of wise meaning and insight into the devouring fact: speak, if you have any wisdom!' As to song so called, and your fiddling talent,—even if you have one, much more if you have none, we will talk of that a couple of centuries hence, when things are calmer again. Homer shall be thrice welcome; but only when Troy is taken; alas! while the siege lasts, and the