128 CARLYLE. 



last into the image of God, and that the endless life of 

 the generations may hope to come nearer that goal of 

 which the short-breathed threescore years and ten fall 

 too unhappily short. 



But Mr. Carlyle has invented the Hero-cure, and all 

 who recommend any other method, or see any hope of 

 healing elsewhere, are either quacks and charlatans or 

 their victims. His lively imagination conjures up the 

 image of an impossible he, as contradictorily endowed 

 as the chief personage in a modern sentimental novel, 

 and who, at all hazards, must not lead mankind like a 

 shepherd, but bark, bite, and otherwise worry them 

 toward the fold like a truculent sheep-dog. If Mr. 

 Carlyle would only now and then recollect that men are 

 men, and not sheep, — nay, that the farther they are 

 from being such, the more well grounded our hope of 

 one day making something better of them ! It is indeed 

 strange that one who values Will so highly in the 

 greatest, should be blind to its infinite worth in the least 

 of men ; nay, that he should so often seem to confound 

 it with its irritable and purposeless counterfeit, Wilful- 

 ness. The natural impatience of an imaginative tem- 

 perament, which conceives so vividly the beauty and 

 desirableness of a nobler manhood and a diviner political 

 order, makes him fret at the slow moral processes by 

 which the All- Wise brings about his ends, and turns the 

 very foolishness of men to his praise and glory. Mr. 

 Carlyle is for calling down fire from Heaven whenever 

 he cannot readily lay his hand on the match-box. No 

 doubt it is somewhat provoking that it should be so easy 

 to build castles in the air, and so hard to find tenants 

 for them. It is a singular intellectual phenomenon to 

 see a man, who earlier in life so thoroughly appreciated 

 the innate weakness and futile tendency of the " storm 

 and thrust " period of German literature, constantly 



