132 CARLYLE. 



he ceased growing a number of years ago, and is a 

 remarkable example of arrested development. 



The cynicism, however, which has now become the 

 prevailing temper of his mind, has gone on expanding 

 with unhappy vigor. In Mr. Carlyle it is not, certainly, 

 as in Swift, the result of personal disappointment, and 

 of the fatal eye of an accomplice for the mean qualities 

 by which power could be attained that it might be used 

 for purposes as mean. It seems rather the natural cor- 

 ruption of his exuberant humor. Humor in its first 

 analysis is a perception of the incongruous, and in its 

 highest development, of the incongruity between the 

 actual and the ideal in men and life. With so keen 

 a sense of the ludicrous contrast between what men 

 might be, nay, wish to be, and what they are, and with 

 a vehement nature that demands the instant realization 

 of his vision of a world altogether heroic, it is no wonder 

 that Mr. Carlyle, always hoping for a thing and always 

 disappointed, should become bitter. Perhaps if he 

 expected less he would find more. Saul seeking his 

 father's asses found himself turned suddenly into a king ; 

 but Mr. Carlyle, on the lookout for a king, always seems 

 to find the other sort of animal. He sees nothing on 

 any side of him but a procession of the Lord of Misrule, 

 in gloomier moments, a Dance of Death, where every- 

 thing is either a parody of whatever is noble, or an aim- 

 less jig that stumbles at last into the annihilation of the 

 grave, and so passes from one nothing to another. Is a 

 world, then, which buys and reads Mr. Carlyle's works 

 distinguished only for its " fair, large ears " 3 If he who 

 has read and remembered so much would only now and 

 then call to mind the old proverb, Nee deus, nee lupus, 

 sed homo ! If he would only recollect that, from the 

 days of the first grandfather, everybody has remembered 

 a golden age behind him ! 



