I08 CARLYLE. 



ceremony, Your Majesty forgets that you are only a cere 

 mony yourself/ And Mr. Carlyle s teaching, moreover if 

 teaching we may call it belongs to what the great German, 

 whose disciple he is, condemned as the literature of despair. 

 An apostle to the Gentiles might hope for some fruit of his 

 preaching; but of what avail an apostle who shouts his 

 message down the mouth of the pit to poor lost souls, whom 

 he can positively assure only that it is impossible to get out ? 

 Mr. Carlyle lights up the lanterns of his Pharos after the ship 

 is already rolling between the tongue of the sea and the 

 grinders of the reef. It is very brilliant, and its revolving 

 flashes touch the crests of the breakers with an awful pic- 

 turesqueness ; but in so desperate a state of things, even Dr. 

 Syntax might be pardoned for being forgetful of the pictu 

 resque. The Toryism of Scott sprang from love of the 

 past; that of Carlyle is far more dangerously infectious, for it 

 is logically deduced from a deep disdain of human nature. 



Browning has drawn a beautiful picture of an old king 

 sitting at the gate of his palace to judge his people in the 

 calm sunshine of that past which never existed outside a 

 poet s brain. It is the sweetest of waking dreams, this of 

 absolute power and perfect wisdom in one supreme ruler ; 

 but it is as pure a creation of human want and weakness, as 

 clear a witness of mortal limitation and incompleteness, as 

 the shoes of swiftness, the cloak of darkness, the purse of 

 Fortunatus, and the elixir vit&amp;lt;z. It is the natural refuge of 

 imaginative temperaments impatient of our blunders and 

 shortcomings, and, given a complete man, all would submit 

 to the divine right of his despotism. But alas ! to every the 

 most fortunate human birth hobbles up that malign fairy who 

 has been forgotten, with her fatal gift of imperfection ! So 

 far as our experience has gone, it has been the very opposite 

 of Mr. Carlyle s. Instead of finding men disloyal to their 

 natural leader, nothing has ever seemed to us so touching as 

 the gladness with which they follow him, when they are sure 

 they have found him at last. But a natural leader of the 

 ideal type is not to be looked for nisi dignus vindice nodus. 

 The Divine Forethought had been cruel in furnishing one 

 for every petty occasion, and thus thwarting in all inferior 

 men that priceless gift of reason, to develop which, and to 

 make it one with free-will, is the highest use of our experience 

 on earth, Mr. Carlyle was hard bestead and very far gone 



