CARLYLE. 123 



He accordingly gave to Englishmen tne first humanly 

 possible likeness of Voltaire, Diderot, Mirabeau, and 

 others, who had hitherto been measm-ed by the usual 

 British standard of their respect for the geognosy of 

 Moses and the historic credibility of the Books of Chron- 

 icles. What was the real meaning of this phenomenon 1 

 what the amount of this man's honest performance in the 

 world 1 and in what does he show that family-likeness, 

 common to all the sons of Adam, which gives us a fair 

 hope of being able to comprehend him 1 These were the 

 questions which Carlyle seems to have set himself hon- 

 estly to answer in the critical writings w^hich fill the first 

 period of his life as a man of letters. In this mood he 

 rescued poor Boswell from the unmerited obloquy of an 

 ungrateful generation, and taught us to see something 

 half-comically beautiful in the poor, weak creature, with 

 his pathetic "^instinct of reverence for what was nobler, 

 wiser, and stronger than himself. Everything that Mr. 

 Carlyle wrote during this first period thrills with the 

 purest appreciation of whatever is brave and beautiful 

 in human nature, with the most vehement scorn of 

 cowardly compromise with things base ; and yet, immit- 

 igable as his demand for the highest in us seems to be, 

 there is always something reassuring in the humorous 

 sympathy with mortal frailty which softens condemna- 

 tion and consoles for shortcoming. The remarkable 

 feature of ^Ir. Carlyle's criticism (see, for example, his 

 analysis and exposition of Goethe's ''Helena") is the 

 sleuth-hound instinct with which he presses on to the 

 matter of his theme, — never turned aside by a false 

 scent, regardless of the outward beauty of form, some- 

 times almost contemptuous of it, in his hunger after the 

 intellectual nourishment which it may hide. The deli- 

 cate skeleton of admirably articulated and related parts 

 which underlies and sustains every true work of art, and 



