A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE HOW 213 



imagination. Of all histories that have fallen into 

 my hands, " Frederick " is the most vital and real. 

 If the current novels were half so entertaining, I 

 fear I should read little else. The portrait-painting 

 is like that of Rembrandt; the eye for battles and 

 battle-fields is like that of Napoleon, or Frederick 

 himself; the sifting of events, and the separating 

 of the false from the true, is that of the most 

 patient and laborious science; the descriptive pas- 

 sages are equaled by those of no other man; while 

 the work as a whole, as Emerson says, "is a Judg- 

 ment Day, for its moral verdict, on the men and 

 nations and manners of modern times." It is to 

 be read for its honest history; it is to be read for 

 its inexhaustible wit and humor; it is to be read 

 for its poetic fire, for its felicities of style, for its 

 burden of human sympathy and effort, its heroic 

 attractions and stimulating moral judgments. All 

 Carlyle's histories have the quick, penetrating 

 glance, that stroke of the eye, as the French say, 

 that lays the matter open to the heart. He did 

 not write in the old way of a topographical survey 

 of the surface: his "French Revolution" is more 

 like a transverse section; more like a geologist's 

 map than like a geographer's; the depths are laid 

 open; the abyss yawns; the cosmic forces and fires 

 stalk forth and become visible and real. It was 

 this power to detach and dislocate things and pro- 

 ject them against the light of a fierce and lurid 

 imagination that makes his pages unique and match- 

 less, of their kind, in literature. He may be defi- 



