228 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



prose. Now, much as Carlyle struggled after the faculty of metrical 

 expression, ease in that faculty had evidently been denied him by 

 Nature, and it was in prose or nothing that he was to manifest his 

 Buperiority. Nay, in his earliest prose-writings for the press one ob- 

 serves something of the same stifPness, hard effort, and want of fluency 

 that characterize almost all his verse-attempts. This, however, must 

 have been in great part accidental ; for we have only to go to some of 

 his private letters, dashed off in his twentieth year or thereabout, to 

 see that he had already acquired his marvelous power of picturesque 

 and eloquent expression, and was master of a swift, firm, and musical 

 style. But, for such a literary career as his was to be, mere gift of 

 expression, however fluent and eloquent, was not enough. It was not 

 enough that he should be able to write fluently and eloquently in a 

 general way, by the exercise of mere natural talent, on any subject 

 that turned up. He had to provide himself amply with matter, with 

 systematized knowledge of all sorts, and especially with systematized 

 historical knowledge. Hence the depth and extent of his readings, 

 the range and perseverance of his studies in French, German, Italian, 

 and Spanish, in addition to Latin and English. For writings so full- 

 bodied as those he was to give to the world, it was necessary that he 

 should step into literature as already himself a x>olyhistor or accom- 

 plished universal scholar ; and, when he did step conspicuously into 

 literature, it was in fact as already such a polyhisior. — In connection 

 with which it is worth while to note how completely by that time Car- 

 lyle had emancipated himself from the common idea of so many of his 

 literary contemporaries that literature ought to consist in writing about 

 literature. To this day what are the chief subjects of the essays and 

 books continually set forth by our professed authors ? Why, the lives 

 and writings of previous authors, the pei'sonages and phenomena of the 

 past literary history of the world. We have Homer, Dante, Shake- 

 speare, Milton, Goethe, and the other literary dii majorum gentium, 

 over and over again, with descents to as many of the literary dii mino- 

 rimx gentium as may be necessary for variety ; and the public is thus 

 deluged with an eternal, ever-flowing literature merely about liter- 

 ature. Now, though Carlyle began in this way too — as witness his 

 essays on Jean Paul Richter, on Goethe and Faust, on Burns, on Ger- 

 man Playwrights, etc. — there were premonitions even then, both in his 

 mode of handling these subjects and in the fact that such essays were 

 interspersed with others of a more general and philosophic kind, that 

 ho would not dwell long in the clement of mere literary history and 

 a)sthetic criticism, or be satisfied with adding his own contributions, 

 however excellent, to the perpetual conversation about ' Shakespeare 

 and the musical glasses.' Accordingly, before he had fully established 

 himself, he had taken final leave of the mere literature about literature, 

 and had moved on into a literature appertaining to human society and 

 human action generally, to war and statesmanship, to poverty and 



