CARLYLE. 179 



that it would tire him too much to tell us about it, even if 

 he knew anything at all satisfactory himself. 



Mr. Carlyle s historical compositions are wonderful prose 

 poems, full of picture, incident, humour, and character, 

 where we grow familiar with his conception of certain 

 leading personages, and even of subordinate ones, if they 

 are necessary to the scene, so that they come out living 

 upon the stage from the dreary limbo of names ; but this is 

 no more history than the historical plays of Shakespeare. 

 There is nothing in imaginative literature superior in its 

 own way to the episode of Voltaire in the Fritziad. It is 

 delicious in humour, masterly in minute characterisation. 

 We feel as if the principal victim (for we cannot help 

 feeling all the while that he is so) of this mischievous 

 genius had been put upon the theatre before us by some 

 perfect mimic like Foote, who had studied his habitual 

 gait, gestures, tones, turn of thought, costume, trick of 

 feature, and rendered them with the slight dash of caricature 

 needful to make the whole composition tell. It is in such 

 things that Mr. Carlyle is beyond all rivalry, and that we 

 must go back to Shakespeare for a comparison. But the 

 mastery of Shakespeare is shown perhaps more strikingly 

 in his treatment of the ordinary than of the exceptional. 

 His is the gracious equality of Nature herself. Mr. Carlyle s 

 gift is rather in the representation than in the evolution of 

 character ; and it is a necessity of his art, therefore, to 

 exaggerate slightly his heroic, and to caricature in like 

 manner his. comic parts. His appreciation is less psycho 

 logical than physical and external. Grimm relates that 

 Garrick, riding once with Preville, proposed to him 

 that they should counterfeit drunkenness. They rode 

 through Passy accordingly, deceiving all who saw them. 

 When beyond the town Pr6ville asked how he had suc 

 ceeded. &quot;Excellently,&quot; said Garrick, &quot;as to your body; 

 but your legs were not tipsy.&quot; Mr. Carlyle would be as 

 exact in his observation of nature as the great actor, and 

 would make us see a drunken man as well ; but we doubt 

 whether he could have conceived that unmatchable scena 



