98 CARLYLE. 



recommend any other method, or see any hope of healing 

 elsewhere, are either quacks and charlatans or their victims. 

 His lively imagination conjures up the image of an impossible 

 he, as contradictorily endowed as the chief personage in a 

 modern sentimental novel, and who, at all hazards, must not 

 lead mankind like a shepherd, but bark, bite, and otherwise 

 worry them toward the fold like a truculent sheep-dog. If 

 Mr. Carlyle would only now and then recollect that men are 

 men, and not sheep nay, that the farther they are from 

 being such, the more well grounded our hope of one day 

 making something better of them ! It is indeed strange that 

 one who values Will so highly in the greatest, should be blind 

 to its infinite worth in the least of men ; nay, that he should 

 so often seem to confound it with its irritable and purposeless 

 counterfeit, Wilfulness. The natural impatience of an ima 

 ginative temperament, which conceives so vividly the beauty 

 and desirableness of a nobler manhood and a diviner political 

 order, makes him fret at the slow moral processes by which 

 the All- Wise brings about his ends and turns the very fool 

 ishness of men to his praise and glory. Mr. Carlyle is for 

 calling down fire from Heaven whenever he cannot readily 

 lay his hand on the match-box. No doubt it is somewhat 

 provoking that it should be so easy to build castles in the 

 air, and so hard to find tenants for them. It is a singular in 

 tellectual phenomenon to see a man, who earlier in life so 

 thoroughly appreciated the innate weakness and futile ten 

 dency of the * storm and thrust period of German literature, 

 constantly assimilating, as he grows older, more and more 

 nearly to its principles and practice. It is no longer the 

 sagacious and moderate Goethe who is his type of what is 

 highest in human nature, but far rather some Gotz of the 

 Iron Hand, some assertor of the divine legitimacy of Faust- 

 recht. It is odd to conceive the fate of Mr. Carlyle under 

 the sway of any of his heroes how Cromwell would have 

 scorned him as a babbler more long-winded than Prynne, but 

 less clear and practical how Friedrich would have scoffed 

 at his tirades as dummes Zeug not to be compared with the 

 romances of Crdbillon fils, or possibly have clapped him in 

 a marching regiment as a fit subject for the cane of the 

 sergeant. Perhaps something of Mr. Carlyle s irritability is 

 to be laid to the account of his early schoolmastership at 

 Ecclefechan. This great booby World is such a dull boy, 



