CARLYLE. 163 



edly the power of entertaining. If a man have anything 

 to tell, the world cannot be expected to listen to him unless 

 he have perfected himself in the best way of telling it. 

 People are not to be argued into a pleasurable sensation, 

 nor is taste to be compelled by any syllogism, however 

 stringent. An author may make himself very popular, 

 however, and even justly so, by appealing to the passion of 

 the moment, without having anything in him that shall 

 outlast the public whim which he satisfies. Churchill is a 

 remarkable example of this. He had a surprising extem 

 porary vigour of mind ; his phrase carries great weight of 

 blow ; he undoubtedly surpassed all contemporaries, as 

 Cowper says of him, in a certain rude and earth-born 

 vigour ; but his verse is dust and ashes now, solemnly 

 inurned, of course, in the Chalmers columbarium, and with 

 out danger of violation. His brawn and muscle are fading 

 traditions, while the fragile, shivering genius of Cowper is 

 still a good life on the books of the Critical Insurance 

 Office. &quot; Is it not, then, loftiness of mind that puts one by 

 the side of Virgil 1 &quot; cries poor old Cavalcanti at his wits 

 end. Certainly not altogether that. There must be also 

 the great Mantuan s art ; his power, not only of being 

 strong in parts, but of making those parts coherent in an 

 harmonious whole, and tributary to it. Gray, if we may 

 believe the commentators, has not an idea, scarcely an 

 epithet, that he can call his own, and yet he is, in the best 

 sense, one of the classics of English literature. He had 

 exquisite felicity of choice } his dictionary had no vulgar 

 word in it, no harsh one, but all culled from the luckiest 

 moods of poets, and with a faint but delicious aroma of 

 association ; he had a perfect sense of sound, and one idea 

 without which all the poetic outfit (si absit prudentia) is of 

 little avail, that of combination and arrangement, in 

 short, of art. The poets from whom he helped himself 

 have no more claim to any of his poems as wholes, than the 

 various beauties of Greece (if the old story were true) to 

 the Venus of the artist. 



Imagination, as we have said, has more virtue to keep a 



