Miscellaneous Sketches.

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No. I.-CARLYLE AND STERLING.* This volume has, for some months past, been expected, with a kind of fearful curiosity, by the literary public. As for the second shock of an earthquake-after the first had sucked a street into its jaws—so had men, in silence and terror, been waiting for its avatar. Every one was whispering to every other, “What a bombshell is about to fall from Thomas Carlyle's battery! Nothing like it, we fear, since the “Model Prisons. Let our theologians look to it!" Well, the book has come at last, and, notwithstanding the evil animus of parts of it, a milder, more tender, and more pleasant gossiping little volume we have not read for many a day. The mountain has been in labour, and lo! a nice lively field-mouse, quite frisky and goodhumoured, has been brought forth. It is purely ridiculous and contemptible to speak, with some of our contemporaries, of this volume as Mr Carlyle's best, or as, any sense, a great work. The subject, as he has viewed it, was not great, and his treatment of it, while exceedingly graceful and pleasant, is by no mcans very powerful or very profound.

In fact we look on it as a clever evasion of the matter in hand. Why were the public so deeply interested in John Sterling ? Not on account of his genius, which was of a high, but not the highest, order, and was not at all familiar, in its fruits at least, to the generality. He

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was not a popular author. His conversational powers and private virtues were known only to his friends. But his mind had passed through certain speculative changes, which invested him with a profound and rather morbid interest, and gave him a typical or representative cha

, racter. He had been in youth a sceptic of rather an ultra school. In early manhood he became a Coleridgean Christian, and an active curate, and ere he died, he relapsed into a modified and refined form of scepticism again. This constituted the real charm which attracted men to Sterling. This was the circle of lurid glory which bound his head, and by which we tracked his steps through his devious and dangerous wanderings.

But of all this there is far too little, although, in another sense,

that little is all too much. Sterling's private story is very minutely and beautifully detailed. The current of his literary career (a river flowing under ground !) is as carefully mapped out as if it had been a Nile or a Ganges-a broad blessing to nations. But over the struggles of his inner life, the steps, swift or slow, by which he passed from Radical Rationalism to Christianity, and thence to Straussism or Carlylism, there is cast a veil, through which very little light, indeed, is allowed to glimmer. To show how unfair and unsatisfactory this plan of treatment is, let us conceive a new life of Blanco White, in which all

' his changes of opinion were slurred over; or a life of Dr Arnold, in which his achievements as a schoolmaster and a politician were faithfully chronicled, but the religious phases of his history were ignored. Now Sterling's fame is, even more than theirs, based on his reputation as an honest and agonised inquirer, and it is too bad to cloak up the particulars of those earnest researches under general terms, and to give us, instead of the information for which we were panting, pictures of Welsh or West Indian scenery, one or two vague ravings about the

Bedlam delusions” of our day, and the “immensities and eternities"--or letters so selected or so garbled, that they shall cast no light upon the more secret and interesting passages of his spiritual history.

The gentleness of the tone of the work, although only

comparative, is an agreeable change from that of the “ Latter-Day Pamphlets,” the language of which was frequently as coarse and vulgar, as the spirit was fierce, and the views one-sided. The Indian summer is often preceded by a short but severe storm, and, perhaps, is softer and more golden in proportion to the roughness of the tempest. Mr Carlyle, here, seems absolutely in love! Not above ten sentences of vituperation occur in the 344 pages. We suspect that the reception of the “Model Prisons” has taught him that even his dynasty is not infallible, and that bulls from Chelsea must modify their bellowings, if they would not wish to be treated like bulls from the Vatican. Whether he be or be not aware of the fact, his giant shadow is passing swiftly from off the face of the public mind, nor will the present change of tone retard its down-going. It is too late. The gospel of negations has had its day, and served its generation, and must give place to another and a nobler evangel.

The book is most interesting from its relation to the biographer, and its true name is “Sterling's Carlyle.”

, Few as the religious allusions in it are, they are such as leave no doubt upon our minds as to Carlyle's own views. His sneers at Coleridge's theosophic moonshine—at Sterling's belief in a “ personal God:” his suppression of an argument on this subject, drawn out by Sterling in a letter to himself (page 152)—his language in page 126, no stars—nor ever were, save certain old Jew ones,

which have gone out”--the unmitigated contempt he pours out here and there on the clergy, and on the Church, and, by inference and insinuation, upon the “traditions" and the “incredibilities” of Christianity-all point to the foregone conclusion, which he has, we fear, long ago reached. With this conclusion we do not at present mean to grapple; but we mean to mark, and very strongly to condemn, the manner and spirit in which he has, although only here and there, stated and enforced it.

Now, in the first place, although he must be sceptical, why should he be profane? He may curse, but why should he swear? He may despise hypocrisy, and trample on cant, but why should he insult sincere, albeit weak

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minded belief? Why such words as these, in reference to a Methodist, who had displayed, in critical circumstances, a most heroic and noble" degree of courage—“The last time I heard of him, he was a prosperous, modest dairyman, thankful for the upper light, and for deliverance from the wrath to come?”

Words these, "wrath to come," which shook the souls of Cromwell, Milton, and Howe, to their depths; which are still capable of moving millions to fear, to faith, to morality, and to love; and which yet can only excite Mr Carlyle to contemptuous derision. If there be one thought in the Christian theology more tremendous than another, it is that of an unceasing outflow of just vengeance,

like “pulsing aurora of wrath,” like an ever-rising sun of shame and fear, like a storm, the clouds of which return after the rain—not to be compared to other wrathful phenomena, to the thunder-cloud which gathers, bursts, passes on to other lands or to other worlds, while the blue sky arises behind it in its calm immortality; nor to the pestilence, which breaks out like the sudden springing of a mine, stamps with its foot, and awakens death, but passes quickly away, and leaves the joy of health and security behind; nor to the earthquake, which starts up like a giant from his slumber, heaves mountains, troubles oceans, swallows up cities, but speedily subsides, and again the eternal hills rest and are silent; but to itself only, for it alone deserves the name of wrath! And without dogmatising or speculating on the real meaning or extent of this predicted vengeance, surely a sneer can neither explain, nor illuminate, nor prevent 'its coming! There are many besides poor Methodistic miners, who tremble at the words, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” and one of them, unless we are much mistaken, is, at times, the melancholy Polyphemus of Chelsea.

Secondly, why does he so often edge his evident earnestness with a levity and a mockery which remind you of Voltaire himself? Why thus delight in forming an ungainly and horrible hybrid ? Deep solemn thought is on h s brow ; love is swimming wildly in his eye; but a sneer, keen as if it were the essence of all sneers, past, present,

and to come, ever and anon palpitates on his lips. Why is this? Even as an engine of assault, such ridicule is powerless. Laughter, ere it can kill, must be given forth with all one's heart and soul, and mind and strength; must be serious, and total. But Thomas Carlyle cannot thus laugh at any sincere faith ; his mirth, like Cromwell's speeches, “breaks down,” chokes in his throat, or dies away in a quaver of consternation. But why ever begin what his heart will not permit him to finish ?

Thirdly, his contempt for the office of the Christian ministry is so violent, and almost ferocious, as to increase the suspicion that he loves Christianity as little as he does its clergy. He speaks of Sterling's brief curateship as the great mistake of his life-nay, as if it amounted to a stain and crime. It did not appear so to poor Sterling himself, who, when dying, begged for the old Bible he used at Herstmonceux among the cottages, and seems to have died with it in his arms. It does not appear so to us.

A curate, however mistaken, “going about doing good,” is a nobler spectacle, we fancy, than a soured and stationary litterateur, sitting with a pipe in his mouth, and, like the character in the Psalms, "puffing out despite” at all his real or imaginary foes. Sir James MacIntosh thought otherwise of ministerial work, when he congratulated Hall on having turned from philosophy and letters to the “far nobler task of soothing the afflicted, succouring the distressed, and remembering the forgotten.” We have no passion verily for “surplices,” nor respect for many whom they cover; but we know that they have been worn by men whose shoe-latchets neither John Sterling nor Thomas Carlyle are worthy to unloose; and are still worn by some, at least, their equals in powers and in virtues, in scrupulosity of conscience, and in tenderness and dignity of walk. John Sterling would have been a far better, happier, and greater man, lad he remained a working curate to the last, instead of becoming a sort of petty Prometheus, equally miserable, and nearly as idle, with a big black crow (elegantly mistaken for a vulture) pecking at his morbid liver. And, for our part, we would rather be a humble city missionary, grappling with vulgar sin and misery, in the lanes

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