i86 CARLYLE. 



been, the former, in any sense, may be doubted. The man 

 who spoke and wrote French in preference to his mother- 

 tongue, who, dying when Goethe was already drawing 

 toward his fortieth year, Schiller toward his thirtieth, and 

 Lessing had been already five years in his grave, could yet 

 see nothing but barbarism in German literature, had little 

 of the old Teutonic fibre in his nature. The man who pro 

 nounced the Nibelungen Lied not worth a pinch of priming, 

 had little conception of the power of heroic traditions in 

 making heroic men, and especially in strengthening that 

 instinct made up of so many indistinguishable associations 

 which we call love of country. Charlemagne, when he 

 caused the old songs of his people to be gathered and 

 written down, showed a truer sense of the sources of 

 national feeling and a deeper political insight. This want 

 of sympathy points to the somewhat narrow limits of 

 Friedrich s nature. In spite of Mr. Carlyle s adroit state 

 ment of the case and the whole book has an air of being 

 the plea of a masterly advocate in mitigation of sentence 

 we feel that his hero was essentially hard, narrow, and 

 selfish. His popularity will go for little with any one who 

 has studied the trifling and often fabulous elements that 

 make up that singular compound. A bluntness of speech, 

 a shabby uniform, a frugal camp equipage, a timely 

 familiarity, may make a man the favourite of an army 

 or a nation above all, if he have the knack of success. 

 Moreover, popularity is much more easily won from above 

 downward, and is bought at a better bargain by kings and 

 generals than by other men. We doubt if Friedrich would 

 have been liked as a private person, or even as an unsuc 

 cessful king. He apparently attached very few people to 

 himself, fewer even than his brutal old Squire Western of a 

 father. His sister Wilhelmina is perhaps an exception. 

 We say perhaps, for we do not know how much the 

 heroic part he was called on to play had to do with the 

 matter, and whether sisterly pride did not pass even 

 with herself for sisterly affection. Moreover she was 

 far from him ; and Mr. Carlyle waves aside, in his 



