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forms" within the range of practical politics." Individualism was still a mark of the early years of the century. The spirit of "L'Etat c'est moi" survived in Mirabeau, never name to me that bête of a word 'impossible;' in the first Napoleon's threat to the Austrian ambassador, "I will break your empire like this vase;" in Nelson turning his blind eye to the signal of retreat at Copenhagen, and Wellington fencing Torres Vedras against the world: it lingered in Nicholas the Czar, and has found, perhaps, its latest political representative in Prince Bismarck.

This is the spirit to which Carlyle has always given his undivided sympathy. He has held out hands to Knox, Francia, Friedrich, to the men who have made manners, not to the manners which have made men, to the rulers of people, not to their representatives: and the not inconsiderable following he has obtained is the most conspicuous tribute to a power resolute to pull against the stream. How strong its currents may be illustrated by a few lines from our leading literary journal, the Athenæum, of the Saturday after his death:

"The future historian of the century will have to record the marvellous fact that while in the reign of Queen Victoria there was initiated, formulated, and methodised an entirely new cosmogony, its most powerful and highlygifted man of letters was preaching a polity and a philosophy of history that would have better harmonised with the time of Queen Semiramis. . . . Long before he launched his sarcasms at human progress, there had been a conviction among thinkers that it was not the hero that developed the race, but a deep mysterious energy in the race that produced the hero; that the wave produced the bubble, and not the bubble the wave. But the moment a

theory of evolution saw the light it was a fact. The old cosmogony, on which were built Sartor Resartus and the Calvinism of Ecclefechan, was gone. Ecclefechan had declared that the earth did not move; but it moved nevertheless. The great stream of modern thought has advanced; the theory of evolution has been universally accepted; nations, it is acknowledged, produce kings, and kings are denied the faculty of producing nations."

Taliter, qualiter; but one or two remarks on the incisive summary of this adroit and able theorist are obvious. First, the implied assertion "Ecclefechan had declared that the earth did not move "-that Carlyle was in essential sympathy with the Inquisitors who confronted Galileo with the rack, is perhaps the strangest piece of recent criticism extant for what is his French Revolution but a cannonade in three volumes, reverberating, as no other book has done, a hurricane of revolutionary thought and deed, a final storming of old fortresses, an assertion of the necessity of movement, progress, and upheaval. Secondly, every new discovery is apt to be discredited by new shibboleths, and one-sided exaggerations of its range. It were platitude to say that Mr. Darwin was not only an almost unrivalled student of nature, as careful and conscientious in his methods, as fearless in stating his results, butpace Mr. Carlyle-a man of genius, who has thrown floods of light on the inter-relations of the organic world. But there are troops of serfs, "ullius addicti jurare in verba magistri," who, accepting, without attempt or capacity to verify the conclusions of the master mind, think to solve all the mysteries of the universe by ejaculating the word "Evolution." If I ask what was the secret of Dante's or of Shakespeare's divining rod, and you answer “ Evolution," 'tis as if, when sick in heart and sick in head, I were

referred, as medicine for "a mind diseased," to Grimm's Law or to the Magnetic Belt.

Let us grant that Cæsar was evolved from the currents in the air about the Roman Capitol, that Marcus Aurelius was a blend of Plato and Clean thes, Charlemagne a graft of Frankish blood on Gallic soil, William I. a rill from Rollo filtered in Neustrian fields, Hildebrand a flame from the altar of the medieval church, Barbarossa a plant grown to masterdom in German woods, or later - not to heap up figures whose memories still possess the worldthat Columbus was a Genoan breeze, Bacon a réchauffé of Elizabethan thought, Orange the Silent a Dutch dyke, Chatham the frontispiece of eighteenth-century England, or Corsican Buonaparte the "armed soldier of Democracy." These men, at all events, were no bubbles on the froth of the waves which they defied and dominated.

This, and more, is to be said for Carlyle's insistance. that great men are creators as well as creatures of their age. Doubtless, as we advance in history, direct personal influence, happily or unhappily, declines. In an era of overwrought activity, of superficial, however free, education, when we run the risk of being associated into nothingness and criticised to death, it remains a question whether, in the interests of the highest civilisation (which means opportunity for every capable citizen to lead the highest life), the subordination of the one to the many ought to be accelerated or retarded. It is said that the triumph of Democracy is a mere matter of time." But time is in this case of the essence of the matter, and the party of resistance will all the more earnestly maintain that the defenders should hold the forts till the invaders have become civilised. "The individual withers and the world is more and more," preludes, though over a long interval,

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the cynic comment of the second "Locksley Hall

on the

"increasing purpose" of the age. At an earlier date "Luria" had protested against the arrogance of mere majori ties.

A people is but the attempt of many
To rise to the completer life of one;
And those who live as models to the mass
Are singly of more value than they all.

Carlyle set these notes to Tennyson and to Browning in his Hero Worship-in reality, in thought, and more in action, older than Buddha or than Achilles, but which he first, as a dogma, sprang on our recent times, clenched with the asseveration that on two men, Mirabeau and Napoleon, mainly hung the fates of the most nominally levelling of Revolutions. The stamp his teaching made is still graven on the minds of the men of light who lead, and cannot be wholly effaced by the tongues of the men of words who orate. If he leans unduly to the exaltation of personal power, Carlyle is on the side of those whose defeat can be beneficent only if it be slow. Otherwise, to account for his attitude, we must refer to his life and to its surroundings, i.e. to the circumstances amid which he was evolved."

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CHAPTER II.

ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH.

[ 1795-1826.]

In the introduction to one of his essays, Carlyle has warned us against giving too much weight to genealogy: but all his biographies, from the sketch of the Riquetti kindred to his full length Friedrich, prefaced by two volumes of ancestry, recognise, if they do not overrate, inherited influences; and similarly his fragments of autobiography abound in suggestive reference. His family portraits are to be accepted with the deductions due to the family fever that was the earliest form of his hero-worship. Carlyle, says the Athenæum critic before quoted, divides contemporary mankind into the fools and the wise the wise are the Carlyles, the Welshes, the Aitkens, and Edward Irving; the fools all the rest of unfortunate mortals: a Fuseli stroke of the critic' rivalling any of the author criticised; yet the comment has a grain of truth.

:

The Carlyles are said to have come from the English town somewhat differently spelt, to Annandale, with David II., and, according to a legend, which the great author did not disdain to accept, among them was a certain Lord of Torthorwald, so created for defences of the Border. The churchyard of Ecclefechan is profusely strewn with the

1 Even the most adverse critics of Carlyle are often his imitators, their hands taking a dye from what they work in.