140 CAELYLE. 



consciously, for the most part in deep unconsciousness, 

 there was now the impossibility to live neglected, — to 

 walk on the quiet paths where alone it is well with us. 

 Singularity must henceforth succeed singularity. 

 foulest Circean draught, thou poison of Popular Ap- 

 plause ! madness is in thee and death ; thy end is 

 Bedlam and the grave." Mr. Carlyle won his first suc- 

 cesses as a kind of preacher in print. His fervor, his 

 oddity of manner, his pugnacious paradox, drew the 

 crowd ; the truth, or, at any rate, the faith that under- 

 lay them all, brought also the fitter audience, though 

 fewer. But the curse was upon him ; he must attract, 

 he must astonish. Thenceforth he has done nothing 

 but revamp his telling things ; but the oddity has be- 

 come always odder, the paradoxes more paradoxical. 

 No very large share of truth falls to the apprehension 

 of any one man ; let him keep it sacred, and beware of 

 repeating it till it turn to falsehood on his lips by be- 

 coming ritual. Truth always has a bewitching savor of 

 newness in it, and novelty at the first taste recalls that 

 original sweetness to the tongue ; but alas for him who 

 would make the one a substitute for the other ! We 

 seem to miss of late in Mr. Carlyle the old sincerity. 

 He has become the purely literary man, less concerned 

 about what he says than about how he shall say it to 

 best advantage. The Muse should be the companion, 

 not the guide, says he whom Mr. Carlyle has pronounced 

 "the wisest of this generation." What would be a 

 virtue in the poet is a vice of the most fatal kind in the 

 teacher, and, alas that we should say it ! the very Draco 

 of shams, whose code contained no penalty milder than 

 capital for the most harmless of them, has become at 

 last something very like a sham himself. Mr. Carlyle 

 continues to be a voice crying in the wilderness, but no 

 longer a voice with any earnest conviction behind it 



