106 CARLYLE. 



soul-service. He who once popularised the word flunkey 

 by ringing the vehement changes of his scorn upon it, is at 

 last forced to conceive an ideal flunkeyism to squire the 

 hectoring Don Belianises of his fancy about the world. Fail 

 ing this, his latest theory of Divine government seems to be 

 the cudgel. Poets have sung all manner of vegetable loves; 

 Petrarch has celebrated the laurel, Chaucer the daisy, and 

 Wordsworth the gallows-tree; it remained for the ex-peda 

 gogue of Ecclefechan to become the volunteer laureate of 

 the rod, and to imagine a world created and directed by a 

 divine Dr. Busby. We cannot help thinking that Mr. Car- 

 lyle might have learned something to his advantage by living 

 a few years in the democracy which he scoffs at as heartily 

 a priori as if it were the demagogism which Aristophanes 

 derided from experience. The Hero, as Mr. Carlyle under 

 stands him, was a makeshift of the past; and the ideal of 

 manhood is to be found hereafter in free communities, where 

 the state shall at length sum up and exemplify in itself all 

 those qualities which poets were forced to imagine and typify 

 because they could not find them in the actual world. 



In the earlier part of his literary career, Mr. Carlyle was 

 the denouncer of shams, the preacher up of sincerity, manli 

 ness, and of a living faith, instead of a droning ritual. He 

 had intense convictions, and he made disciples. With a 

 compass of diction unequalled by any other public performer 

 of the time, ranging as it did from the unbooked freshness of 

 the Scottish peasant to the most far-sought phrase of literary 

 curiosity, with humour, pathos, and eloquence at will, it was 

 no wonder that he found eager listeners in a world longing 

 for a sensation, and forced to put up with the West-End 

 gospel of Pelham. If not a profound thinker, he had what 

 was next best he felt profoundly, and his cry came out of 

 the depths. The stern Calvinism of his early training was 

 rekindled by his imagination to the old fervour of Wishart and 

 Brown, and became a new phenomenon as he reproduced it 

 subtilized by German transcendentalism and German culture. 

 Imagination, if it lays hold of a Scotchman, possesses him in 

 the old demoniac sense of the word, and that hard logical 

 nature, if the Hebrew fire once gets fair headway in it, burns 

 unquenchable as an anthracite coal-mine. But to utilize 

 these sacred heats, to employ them, as a literary man is 

 always tempted, to keep the domestic pot a-boiling is such 



