EVIDENCE AND EXAMPLES. 83 



some of his most vigorous speech to show that Johnson's 

 inherent tendency was to action, and laments (thinking 

 too of his own bias probably) that a blind world fails 

 to find as fitting arenas for its (potential) doers of 

 deeds as it finds for its " ejectors of futile chatter/' 

 " Johnson's genuis " he exclaims, " tended to action 

 rather than to speculation. But to no man does Fortune 

 throw open all the kingdoms of this world and say : 

 " it is thine, choose where thou wilt dwell ! " To most 

 she opens only the smallest cranny or dog-hutch and 

 says, not without asperity : " There, that is thine while 

 thou canst keep it/' Thomas Carlyle, whose anatomical 

 characteristics (his hair growth was rough and unkempt, i 

 but probably not thickly planted) were distinctly those 

 of vigour and stir, was in temperament the least 

 reposeful of the giants. He exhibits in almost startling 

 degree one characteristic often met with in the active 

 and less impassioned character. Although in force of 

 thought and language, and as a provoker of thought in 

 noble fields, he has perhaps no rival, yet by inherent, 

 involuntary, irresistable organisation he was unable to 

 approve to approve at least of the men and movements 

 of his own time. He openly declared he could " re- 

 verence no living man." Mr. Lowell pithily remarks 

 that he went about with his Diogenes' lantern " pro- 

 fessing to seek a man but inwardly resolved to find a 

 monkey." In truth, it was not so much that he would 

 not find a man as that, by temperament, he could not. 

 He had no doubt much seeming passion seeming 

 anger, for example, but his anger was merely petulance 

 on a magnificent scale. His fury was intellectual fury. 

 Mr. Ruskin, like Carlyle, is a splendid scold, but he 

 scolds in more mellifluent tones. Not only do men, 

 things, and events come in for castigation, but the 



