ation which Mr.
Carlyle feels for the great men of history will not allow him to
believe in the possibility of a political society where each might
find his proper sphere and duty without disturbing the order and
natural succession of the commonwealth. His judgment on this point
is like that of a man who had only known the steam-engine before
the invention of governor balls, and was ready to declare that its
mechanism would be shattered if a boy were not always at hand to
regulate the pressure of the steam.

* * * * *

"We may turn, however, from this difference to another of Mr.
Carlyle's doctrines, which mark at once his independence of thought
and his respect for experience, where he declares the necessity for
recognising the hereditary principle in government, if there is to be
'any fixity in things.' In the same way we find him almost lamenting
the fact that Oxford, once apparently so fast-anchored as to be
immovable, has begun to twist and toss on the eddy of new ideas.

"It is impossible to glance at Mr. Carlyle's Easter Monday discourse
without recalling the oration which his predecessor pronounced on
resigning office last autumn. * * * Mr. Carlyle is as simple and
practical as his predecessor was dazzling and rhetorical. An ounce of
mother wit, quotes the new Lord Rector, is worth a pound of clergy,
and while he admires Demosthenes, he prefers the eloquence of Phocion.
A little later he repeats his old doctrine on the virtue of silence,
laments the fact that 'the finest nations in the world--the English
and the American--are going all away into wind and tongue,' and
protests that a man is not to be esteemed wise because he has poured
out speech copiously. Mr. Carlyle has so often inculcated these
sentiments in his books that there can be no suspicion of an _arriere
pensee_ in their utterance now, but the contrast between him and his
predecessor is at the least instructive. Each does, however, in some
measure, supply what is deficient in the other. No one would claim
for the Chancellor of the Exchequer the intensity of power of his
successor, but in his abundant energy, his wide sympathy with popular
movement, and his real, if vague and indiscriminating, faith in the
activity and progress of modern life, he conveys lessons of trust
in the present, and hopefulness in the future, which would be
ill-exchanged for the patient and somewhat sad stoicism of Mr.
Carlyle."

Carlyle wa