ver be blotted out. The portrait is full-length,
full of Rembrandt-like light and shadow, and remorselessly faithful.
Painted not for the public eye, but sketched in a thousand little parts,
in matter-of-fact every-day letters to humble friends, with no remotest
thought that other eyes would ever see them,--it is this by which
Carlyle as a man will be known to all coming time. Not a hero, not a
monster, as some have claimed, but a faulty man, with the defects of his
qualities, described by a woman faulty like himself. A constitutional
growler, with a warm heart withal, and infinite capacities for
tenderness; selfish it may be, but inexorably just; cold to all the
outside world, but warm-hearted and generous and magnificently loyal to
his family, throughout all his distinguished career. No trace of
snobbery or false shame in him. Not liking the reformers of his own day,
but almost deifying the reformers of the past, and himself making it his
mission, from earliest youth to hoary age, to reform the world in his
own particular Carlylean way; fiercely assailing much that passed for
religion, but being always deeply and truly religious at heart. What a
vast contradictory Titan he seems in it all! If a lovely wind-flower,
fresh and fragrant as the breath of morning, was crushed in the arms of
this god of thunder, what shall we say? Shall we reject the god of
thunder, who gave us the "Heroes," and the "Cromwell," and the
"Frederick," and wish that he might have been a gentle poet singing to a
lute; or shall we thank God for him, even as he was, though we give a
tear to the wind-flower?

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

VICTOR HUGO.

The times of Napoleon and the First Empire seem to be more than a
lifetime away from us; and yet it was in that day that Victor Hugo lived
as a child in the old convent of the Feuillantines so graphically
described in "Les Miserables." Here he and his two brothers lived with
their mother in the strictest seclusion, while the father, General Hugo,
a soldier of the Empire, was off with the Grand Army at some distant
point, either in garrison or in the field. The child, who was afterwards
to hold Napoleon the Little up to the execration of the world, felt his
earliest emotions of patriotism stirred by the glorious conquests of
Napoleon the Great. General Hugo was one of the most gallant soldiers of
the day, and placed in many positions of trust and of responsibility, as
well as of danger,