BEIEF ESSAYS 201 



ity and sensibility laid him open to. If a man is 

 born constitutionally unhappy, as both these men 

 seem to have been, his suffering will be in propor- 

 tion to the strength and vividness of the imagina- 

 tion; and Carlyle's imagination, compared with 

 Johnson's, was like an Arctic night with its stream- 

 ing and ilashing auroras, compared with the mid- 

 night skies of Fleet Street. 



Carlyle fought a Giant Despair all his life, and 

 never for a moment gave an inch of ground. In- 

 deed, so far as the upshot of his life was concerned, 

 the amount of work actually done, and its value as 

 a tonic and a spur to noble endeavor of all kinds, 

 it is as if he had fought no Giant Despair at all, 

 but had been animated and sustained by the most 

 bright and buoyant hopes. The reason of this 

 probably is that his gloom and despair did not end 

 in mere negation. If he fulminated an Everlasting 

 No, he also fulminated an Everlasting Yes. John- 

 son fought many lesser devils, such as moroseness, 

 laziness, irritability of temper, gloominess, and ten- 

 dency to superstition, etc. "My reigning sin," he 

 says in his journal, "to which perhaps many others 

 are appendant, is a waste of time and general slug- 

 gishness to which I was always inclined, and, in 

 part of my life, have been almost compelled by 

 morbid melancholy and disturbance of mind. Mel- 

 ancholy has had in me its paroxysms and remissions, 

 but I have not improved the intervals, nor suffi- 

 ciently resisted my natural inclination, or sickly 

 habits." He was always resolving to rise at eight 



