138 CARLYLE. 



" Life w a tale 



Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 

 Signifying nothing." 



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 whomso 

 ever it has pleased him to set up for a hero. He would 

 fain replace the old feudalism with a spiritual counter 

 part, in which there shall be an obligation to soul-service. 

 He who once popularized 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. 

 Failing 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-pedagogue 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 understands 

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

 hood is to be found hereafter in free communities, where 

 the state shall at length sum up and exemplify in itself 



