182 CARLYLE. 



and typify because they could not find them in the actual 

 world. 



In the earlier part of his literary career, Mr. Carlyle 

 was the denouncer of shams, the preacher up of sincerity, 

 manliness, and of a living faith, instead of a droning ritual. 

 He had intense convictions, and he made disciples. With a 

 compass of diction unequalled by any other public performer 

 of the time, ranging as it did from the unbooked freshness of 

 the Scottish peasant to the most far-sought phrase of literary 

 curiosity, with humour, pathos, and eloquence at will, it was 

 no wonder that he found eager listeners in a world longing 

 for a sensation, and forced to put up with the West-End 

 gospel of &quot; Pelham.&quot; If not a profound thinker, he had what 

 was next best he felt profoundly, and his cry came out of 

 the depths. The stern Calvinism of his early training was 

 rekindled by his imagination to the old fervour of Wishart 

 and Brown, and became a new phenomenon as he reproduced 

 it subtilised by German transcendentalism and German cul 

 ture. Imagination, if it lays hold of a Scotsman, possesses 

 him in the old demoniac sense of the word, and that hard 

 logical nature, if the Hebrew fire once gets fair headway in it, 

 burns unquenchable as an anthracite coal-mine. But to 

 utilise these sacred heats, to employ them, as a literary man 

 is always tempted, to keep the domestic pot a-boiling is such 

 a thing possible 1 ? Only too possible, we fear; and Mr. 

 Carlyle is an example of it. If the languid public long for 

 a sensation, the excitement of making one becomes also a 

 necessity of the successful author, as the intellectual nerves 

 grow duller and the old inspiration that came unbidden to 

 the bare garret grows shier and shier of the comfortable 

 parlour. As he himself said thirty years ago of Edward 

 Irving, &quot; Unconsciously, for the most part in deep uncon 

 sciousness, there was now the impossibility to live neglected 

 to walk on the quiet paths where alone it is well with us. 

 Singularity must henceforth succeed singularity. foulest 

 Circean draught, thou poison of Popular Applause 1 madness 

 is in thee and death ; thy end is Bedlam and the grave.&quot; 

 Mr. Carlyle won his first successes as a kind of preacher in 



