CARLYLE. 



wit are cumulative ; but that diviner faculty, which 

 spiritual eye, though it may be trained and sharpened, 

 not be added to by taking thought. This has always 

 something innate, unaccountable, to be laid to a happy con 

 junction of the stars. Goethe, the last of the great poets, 

 accordingly takes pains to tell us under what planets he was 

 born ; and in him it is curious how uniform the imaginative 

 quality is from the beginning to the end of his long literary 

 activity. His early poems show maturity, his mature ones a 

 youthful freshness. The apple already lies potentially in the 

 blossom, as that may be traced also in the ripened fruit. 

 With a mere change of emphasis, Goethe might be called an 

 old boy at both ends of his career. 



In the earliest authorship of Mr. Carlyle we find some not 

 obscure hints of the future man. Nearly fifty years ago he 

 contributed a few literary and critical articles to the Edin 

 burgh Encyclopaedia. The outward fashion of them is that 

 of the period ; but they are distinguished by a certain secu 

 rity of judgment remarkable at any time, remarkable espe 

 cially in one so young. British criticism has been always 

 more or less parochial ; has never, indeed, quite freed itself 

 from sectarian cant, and planted itself honestly on the aesthe 

 tic point of view. It cannot quite persuade itself that truth 

 is of immortal essence, totally independent of all assistance 

 from quarterly journals or the British army and navy. Car 

 lyle, in these first essays, already shows the influence of his 

 master, Goethe, the most widely receptive of critics. In a 

 compact notice of Montaigne, there is not a word as to his 

 religious scepticism. The character is looked at purely from 

 its human and literary sides. As illustrating the bent of the 

 author s mind, the following passage is most to our purpose : 

 A modern reader will not easily cavil at the patient and 

 good-natured, though exuberant egotism which brings back 

 to our view &quot; the form and pressure &quot; of a time long past. 

 The habits and humours, the mode of acting and thinking, 

 which characterized a Gascon gentleman in the sixteenth cen 

 tury, cannot fail to amuse an inquirer of the nineteenth ; 

 while the faithful delineation of human feelings, in all their 

 strength and weakness, will serve as a mirror to every mind 

 capable of self-examination. 1 We find here no uncertain in 

 dication of that eye for the moral picturesque, and that sym 

 pathetic appreciation of character, which within the next 



