CARLYLE. 181 



noisy and aggressive. What the wise master puts into the 

 mouth of desperate ambition, thwarted of the fruit of its 

 crime, as the fitting expression of passionate sophistry, seems 

 to have become an article of his creed. With him 



&quot;Life is a tale 



Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 

 Signifying nothing.&quot; 



He goes about with his Diogenes dark-lantern, professing to 

 seek a man, but inwardly resolved to find a monkey. He 

 loves to flash it suddenly on poor human nature in some 

 ridiculous or degrading posture. He admires still, or keeps 

 affirming that he admires, the doughty, silent, hard-working 

 men who, like Cromwell, go honestly about their business ; 

 but when we come to his later examples, we find that it is 

 not loyalty to duty or to an inward ideal of high-mindedness 

 that he finds admirable in them, but a blind unquestioning 

 vassalage to whomsoever it has pleased him to set up for a 

 hero. He would fain replace the old-feudalism with a 

 spiritual counterpart, in which there shall be an obligation 

 to soul-service. He who once popularised the word flunkey 

 by ringing the vehement changes of his scorn upon it, is at 

 last forced to conceive an ideal flunkeyism to squire the 

 hectoring Don Belianises of his fancy about the world. Fail 

 ing this, his latest theory of Divine government seems to be 

 the cudgel. Poets have sung all manner of vegetable loves: 

 Petrarch has celebrated the laurel, Chaucer the daisy, and 

 Wordsworth the gallows-tree ; it remained for the ex-peda 

 gogue of Ecclefechan to become the volunteer laureate of 

 the rod, and to imagine a world created and directed by a 

 divine Dr. Busby. We cannot help thinking that Mr. Carlyle 

 might have learned something to his advantage by living a 

 few years in the democracy which he scoffs at as heartily 

 a priori as if it were the demagogism which Aristophanes 

 derided from experience. The Hero, as Mr. Carlyle under 

 stands him, was a makeshift of the past ; and the ideal of 

 manhood is to be found hereafter in free communities, where 

 the state shall .at length sum up and exemplify in itself 

 all those qualities which poets were forced to imagine 



