92 CARLYLE. 



contrive to stir us at last, unless with whole Moscows, 

 crowned with the tintinnabulary crash of the Kremlin ? For 

 ourselves, we are glad to feel that we are still able to find 

 contentment in the more conversational and domestic tone 

 of our old-fashioned wood-fire. No doubt a great part of 

 our pleasure in reading is unexpectedness, whether in turn 

 of thought or of phrase ; but an emphasis out of place, an 

 intensity of expression not founded on sincerity of moral or 

 intellectual conviction, reminds one of the underscorings in 

 young ladies letters, a wonder even to themselves under the 

 colder north-light of matronage. It is the part of the critic, 

 however, to keep cool under whatever circumstances, and to 

 reckon that the excesses of an author will be at first more 

 attractive to the many than that average power which shall 

 win him attention with a new generation of men. It is 

 seldom found out by the majority, till after a considerable 

 interval, that he was the original man who contrived to be 

 simply natural the hardest lesson in the school of art, and 

 the latest learned, if, indeed, it be a thing capable of acquisi 

 tion at all. The most winsome and wayward of brooks 

 draws now and then some lover s foot to its intimate reserve, 

 while the spirt of a bursting water-pipe gathers a gaping 

 crowd forthwith. 



Mr. Carlyle is an author who has now been so long before 

 the world that we may feel toward him something of the 

 unprejudice of posterity. It has long been evident that he 

 had no more ideas to bestow upon us, and that no new turn 

 of his kaleidoscope would give us anything but some varia 

 tion of arrangement in the brilliant colours of his style. It 

 is perhaps possible, then, to arrive at some not wholly inade 

 quate estimate of his place as a writer, and especially of the 

 value of the ideas whose advocate he makes himself, with a 

 bitterness and violence that increase, as it seems to us, in 

 proportion as his inward conviction of their truth diminishes. 



The leading characteristics of an author who is in any 

 sense original, that is to say, who does not merely reproduce, 

 but modifies the influence of tradition, culture, and contem 

 porary thought upon himself by some admixture of his own, 

 may commonly be traced more or less clearly in his earliest 

 works. This is more strictly true, no doubt, of poets, because 

 the imagination is a fixed quantity, not to be increased by 

 any amount of study and reflection. Skill, wisdom, and even 



