CARLYLE. 141 



Hearing him rebuke us for being humbugs and impos- 

 tors, we are inclined to answer, with the ambassador of 

 Philip II., when his master reproached him with for- 

 getting substance in ceremony, "Your Majesty forgets 

 that you are only a ceremony yourself." And Mr. Car- 

 lyle's teaching, moreover, if teaching we may call it, 

 belongs to what the great German, whose disciple he 

 is, condemned as the "literature of despair." An apostle 

 to the gentiles might hope for some fruit of his preach- 

 ing; but of what avail an apostle who shouts his 

 message down the mouth of the pit to poor lost souls, 

 whom he can positively assure only that it is impossible 

 to get out 1 Mr. Carlyle lights up the lanterns of his 

 Pharos after the ship is already rolling between the 

 tongue of the sea and the grinders of the reef. It is 

 very brilliant, and its revolving flashes touch the crests 

 of the breakers with an awful picturesqueness ; but in 

 so desperate a state of things, even Dr. Syntax might 

 be pardoned for being forgetful of the picturesque. The 

 Toryism of Scott sprang from love of the past ; that of 

 Carlyle is far more dangerously infectious, for it is logi- 

 cally deduced from a deep disdain of human nature. 



Browning has drawn a beautiful picture of an old king 

 sitting at the gate of his palace to judge his people in 

 the calm sunshine of that past which never existed out- 

 side a poet's brain. It is the sweetest of waking dreams, 

 this of absolute power and perfect wisdom in one su- 

 preme ruler; but it is as pure a creation of human 

 want and weakness, as clear a witness of mortal limita- 

 tion and incompleteness, as the shoes of swiftness, the 

 cloak of darkness, the purse of Fortunatus, and the 

 elixir vitce. It is the natural refuge of imaginative tem- 

 peraments impatient of our blunders and shortcomings, 

 and, given a complete man, all would submit to the 

 divine right of his despotism. But alas ! to every the 



