142 CAELYLE. 



most fortunate human birth hobbles up that malign fairy 

 who has been forgotten, with her fatal gift of imperfec- 

 tion ! So far as our experience has gone, it has been the 

 very opposite of Mr. Carlyle's. Instead of finding men 

 disloyal to their natural leader, nothing has ever seemed 

 to us so touching as the gladness with which they follow 

 him, when they are sure they have found him at last. 

 But a natural leader of the ideal type is not to be looked 

 for nisi dignus vindice nodus. The Divine Forethought 

 had been cruel in furnishing one for every petty occa- 

 sion, and thus thwarting in all inferior men that price- 

 less gift of reason, to develop which, and to make it one 

 with free-will, is the highest use of our experience on 

 earth. Mr. Carlyle was hard bestead and very far gone 

 in his idolatry of mere pluck, when he was driven to 

 choose Friedrich as a hero. A poet — and Mr. Carlyle 

 is nothing else — is unwise who yokes Pegasus to a pro- 

 saic theme which no force of wing can lift from the dull 

 earth. Charlemagne would have been a wiser choice, 

 far enough in the past for ideal treatment, more mani- 

 festly the Siegfried of Anarchy, and in his rude way the 

 refounder of that empire which is the ideal of despotism 

 in the Western world. 



Friedrich was doubtless a remarkable man, but surely 

 very far below any lofty standard of heroic greatness. 

 He was the last of the European kings who could look 

 upon his kingdom as his private patrimony ; and it was 

 this estate of his, this piece of property, which he so 

 obstinately and successfully defended. He had no idea 

 of country as it was understood by an ancient Greek or 

 Roman, as it is understood by a modern Englishman or 

 American ; and there is something almost pitiful in see- 

 ing a man of genius like Mr. Carlyle fighting painfully 

 over again those battles of the last century which settled 

 nothing but the continuance of the Prussian monarchy, 



