CARLYLE. 113 



plodding exactness would have saved Fouquet eleven years 

 of the imprisonment to which Mr. Carlyle condemns him, 

 would have referred us to St. Simon rather than to Voltaire 

 for the character of the brothers Belle-He, and would have 

 kept clear of a certain ludicrous etymology of the name Ant 

 werp, not to mention some other trifling slips of the like 

 nature. In conclusion, after saying, as honest critics must, 

 that The History of Friedrich II. called Frederick the 

 Great J is a book to be read in with more satisfaction than to 

 be read through, after declaring that it is open to all manner 

 of criticism, especially in point of moral purpose and ten 

 dency, we must admit with thankfulness, that it has the one 

 prime merit of being the work of a man who has every 

 quality of a great poet except that supreme one of rhythm 

 which shapes both matter and manner to harmonious pro 

 portion, and that where it is good, it is good as only genius 

 knows how to be. 



- With the gift of song, Carlyle would have been the greatest 

 of epic poets since Homer. Without it, to modulate and 

 harmonise and bring parts into their proper relation, he is 

 the most amorphous of humorists, the most shining avatar 

 of whim the world has ever seen. Beginning with a hearty 

 contempt for shams, he has come at length to believe in 

 brute force as the only reality, and has as little sense of jus 

 tice as Thackeray allowed to women. We say brute force 

 because, though the theory is that this force should be di 

 rected by the supreme intellect for the time being, yet all 

 inferior wits are treated rather as obstacles to be contemp 

 tuously shoved aside than as ancillary forces to be conciliated 

 through their reason. But, with all deductions, he remains 

 the profoundest critic and the most dramatic imagination of 

 modern times. Never was there a more striking example of 

 that ingenium perfervidum long ago said to be characteristic 

 of his countrymen. His is one of the natures, rare in thes^ 

 latter centuries, capable of rising to a white heat ; but once 

 fairly kindled, he is like a three-decker on fire, and his 

 shotted guns go off, as the glow reaches them, alike dange 

 rous to friend or foe. Though he seems more and more to 

 confound material with moral success, yet there is always 

 something wholesome in his unswerving loyalty to reality, as 

 he understands it. History, in the true sense, he does not 

 and cannot write, for he looks on mankind as a herd without 

 volition, and without moral force ; but such vivid pictures of 



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