CARLYLE. 173 



that it should be so easy to build castles in the air, and so 

 hard to find tenants for them. It is a singular intellectual 

 phenomenon to see a man, who earlier in life so thoroughly 

 appreciated the innate weakness and futile tendency of the 

 &quot; storm and thrust &quot; period of German literature, constantly 

 assimilating, as he grows older, more and more nearly to its 

 principles and practice. It is no longer the sagacious and 

 moderate Goethe who is his type of what is highest in 

 human nature, but far rather some Gotz of the Iron Hand, 

 some assertor of the divine legitimacy of Faustrecht. It is 

 odd to conceive the fate of Mr. Carlyle under the sway of 

 any of his heroes how Cromwell would have scorned him 

 as a babbler more long-winded than Prynne, but less clear 

 and practical how Friedrich would have scoffed at his 

 tirades as dummes Zeug not to be compared with the 

 romances of Crebillon fits, or possibly have clapped him in 

 a marching regiment as a fit subject for the cane of the 

 sergeant. Perhaps something of Mr. Carlyle s irritability is 

 to be laid to the account of his early schoolmastership at 

 Ecclefechan. This great booby World is such a dull boy, 

 and will not learn the lesson we have taken such pains in 

 expounding for the fiftieth time. Well, then, if eloquence, 

 if example, if the awful warning of other little boys who 

 neglected their accidence and came to the gallows, if none of 

 these avail, the birch at least is left, and we will try that. 

 The dominie spirit has become every year more obtrusive 

 and intolerant in Mr. Carlyle s writing, and the rod, instead 

 of being kept in its place as a resource for desperate cases, 

 has become the alpha and omega of all successful training, 

 the one divinely-appointed means of human enlightenment 

 and progress in short, the final hope of that absurd animal 

 who fancies himself a little lower that the angels. Have 

 we feebly taken it for granted that the distinction of man 

 was reason 1 Never was there a more fatal misconception. 

 It is in the gift of unreason that we are unenviably dis 

 tinguished from the brutes, whose nobler privilege of 

 instinct saves them from our blunders and our crimes. 

 But since Mr. Carlyle has become possessed, with the 



