CAELYLE. 123 



He accordingly gave to Englishmen tne first humanly- 

 possible likeness of Voltaire, Diderot, Mirabeau, and 

 others, who had hitherto been measiu-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 ^nd 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 ] These were the 

 questions which Carlyle seems to have set himself hon- 

 estly to answer in the critical writings which 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 creatm-e, 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 

 pvu-est appreciation of whatever is brave and beautiful 

 in human nature, with the most vehement scorn of 

 cowardly compromise with things base ; and yet, inmiit- 

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

 there is always something reassm'ing in the humorous 

 sympathy with mortal frailty which softens condemna- 

 tion and consoles for shortcoming. The remarkable 

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

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

 sleuth-homid 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 ai^t, and 



