THOMAS CARLYLE:

AN ESSAY.

MIRAGE

PHILOSOPHY.

No one of Mr Carlyle's disciples, we should think, ever became a Carlylist at once. The singularity of style at first puzzles or repels-the persevering reader then finds some suggestive idea which leads him on-in time the obscurity clears up, the images and ideas shine through, causing what was distasteful to appear admirable-till, finally, the dubious student, no longer perplexed by the cipher of which, as he flatters himself, he has discovered the key, becomes the uncompromising champion.

But a great number of readers turn back on the threshold, repelled by the startling aspect of that singular phraseology. To them he is merely affected and obscure-even if they have gone far enough to disentangle a leading idea, they perhaps recognise

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it as a truism in masquerade, and set him down as a charlatan. His writing appears to them to be, as Sir Hugh Evans says, "pribbles and prabbles-it is affectations."

Between these two classes-the knights who see only the golden side of the shield, and the knights opposite who are blind to all but the brass-we should like to strike some sort of balance of opinion, and find between the oscillations a firm stand-point, from whence to survey the History of Frederick-a History marked in its outward aspect by all the strongest peculiarities of the writer.

At the root of all Carlyle's works lies a main idea in a particular aspect. The idea, he tells us, he derived from the transcendental philosophy, as expounded by Fichte: it is this

"That all things which we see or work with in this earth, especially we ourselves and all persons, are as a kind of vesture or sensuous Appearance: that under all these lies, as the essence of them, what he calls the 'Divine Idea of the World ;' this is the Reality which lies at the bottom of all Appearance. To the mass of men no such Divine Idea is recognisable in the world; they live merely, says Fichte, among the superficialities, practicalities, and shows of the world, not dreaming that there is anything divine under them."- Hero- Worship.

As the idea of music may exist independent of sound, yet, to be communicable, demands some voice or instrument, so all earthly things are as the tones of music, or under another figure, Vestures, making manifest to our faculties the underlying idea. So

what we call rationally Society, is to the transcendentalist the embodied idea of a communion of spirits upon earth. This idea of society is a complex one; two of its principal components are Religion and Polity--and of these and their different vestures or manifestations in Church and State, our English transcendentalist principally treats.

This being the root - idea, we have said it always presents itself to him in a particular aspect, which he has expounded in his 'Sartor Resartus.' It appears to him that the last suit of clothes with which the world was invested is worn out. In Church and State, and all Society, he sees only looped and windowed raggedness. All the institutions in which the moral necessities of man are embodied, are in decay and ruin-even as the world's former wardrobes of paganism, and monkery, and chivalry, exist only in museums. The world is out

at elbows, and the time is out of joint; and Mr Carlyle, not without sad appreciation of the cursed spite which dwells in the circumstance, believes that he was born to set it right.

He tells us himself that the main thing to inquire about in every man, is the significance which the idea of the world bears for him. Now we see that the idea with which Mr Carlyle's earthly habitation impresses him, is a very melancholy one-everywhere dust, rags, shabbiness, mildew, and cobwebs inhabited by monstrous spiders. The most cheerful

nature once fully possessed with this imagination, and habituated to look on this scene of moral desolation, must inevitably catch a sympathetically mournful, if not dreary hue: the brightest lake overhung by such a sky must be dark and dismal. Hence the picture conveyed to the reader, with more or less of a kind of forcible vagueness in all his works, is that of This Planet in Tatters, and Mr Carlyle weeping over it. Such a doctrine, "Woe to thee, O Planet!" can, if conveyed in a prophetic tone, appear only as a Jeremiad.

But there is still, we learn, a hope for the world in its mendicancy. It may yet be extricated from Rag Fair and St Giles's, and become presentable in the best society. Tailors capable of taking its measure and fitting it with comfortable and convenient vestments have existed ere now, and may appear again. The great thing will be to know these master-tailors when we see them, and to distinguish them from mere pretentious snips. Therefore Mr Carlyle, after the exposition of his Clothes(or rather old clo')-Philosophy, sets forth his idea of who these people were in time past, so that in selecting our tailors hereafter we may be able to discriminate Stultz from Moses and Son.

In another book his idea lay still in the same direction. He resolved to show us a better state of things in vivid contrast with their present aspectthe difference between the world in a new suit made