CARLYLE. 167 



In the earliest authorship of Mr. Carlyle we find some not 

 obscure hints of the future man. Nearly fifty years ago he 

 contributed a few literary and critical articles to the Edin 

 burgh Encyclopaedia. The outward fashion of them is that 

 of the period ; but they are distinguished by a certain 

 security of judgment remarkable at any time, remarkable 

 especially in one so young. British criticism has been 

 always more or less parochial ; has never, indeed, quite 

 freed itself from sectarian cant, and planted itself honestly 

 on the aesthetic point of view. It cannot quite persuade 

 itself that truth is of immortal essence, totally independent 

 of all assistance from quarterly journals or the British army 

 and navy. Carlyle, in these first essays, already shows the 

 influence of his master, Goethe, the most widely receptive 

 of critics. In a compact notice of Montaigne, there is not 

 a word as to his religious scepticism. The character is 

 looked at purely from its human and literary sides. As 

 illustrating the bent of the author s mind, the following 

 passage is most to our purpose : &quot; A modern reader will 

 not easily cavil at the patient and good-natured, though 

 exuberant egotism which brings back to our view the 

 form and pressure of a time long past. The habits and 

 humours, the mode of acting and tanking, which character 

 ized a Gascon gentleman in the sixteenth century, cannot fail 

 to amuse an inquirer of the nineteenth ; while the faithful 

 delineation of human feelings, in all their strength and 

 weakness, will serve as a mirror to every mind capable of 

 self-examination&quot; We find here no uncertain indication of 

 that eye for the moral picturesque, and that sympathetic 

 appreciation of character, which within the next few years 

 were to make Carlyle the first in insight of English critics 

 and the most vivid of English historians. In all his earlier 

 writing he never loses sight of his master s great rule, Den 

 Gegenstandfest zu halten. He accordingly gave to English 

 men the first humanly possible likeness of Voltaire, Diderot, 

 Mirabeau, and others, who had hitherto been measured by 

 the usual British standard of their respect for the geognosy 

 of Moses and the historic credibility of the Books of 



