ments,
sloughing or dropping the latter in the final result, the more we are
refreshed and enlarged. Who has not, at some period of his life, been
captivated by the rhetoric and fine style of nearly all the popular
authors of a certain sort, but at last waked up to discover that behind
these brilliant names was no strong, loving man, but only a refined
taste, a fertile invention, or a special talent of one kind or another.

Think of the lather of the modern novel, and the fashion-plate men and
women that figure in it! What noble person has Dickens sketched, or
has any novelist since Scott? The utter poverty of almost every current
novelist, in any grand universal human traits in his own character, is
shown in nothing more clearly than in the _kind_ of interest the reader
takes in his books. We are led along solely by the ingenuity of the
plot, and a silly desire to see how the affair came out. What must be
the effect, long continued, of this class of jugglers working upon the
sympathies and the imagination of a nation of gestating women?

How the best modern novel collapses before the homely but immense human
significance of Homer's celestial swineherd entertaining divine Ulysses,
or even the solitary watchman in Aeschylus' "Agamemnon," crouched, like
a night-dog, on the roofs of the Atreidae, waiting for the signal fires
that should announce the fall of sacred Ilion!

But one need not look long, even in contemporary British literature, to
find a man. In the author of "Characteristics" and "Sartor Resartus"
we surely encounter one of the true heroic cast. We are made aware that
here is something more than a _litterateur,_ something more than genius.
Here is veracity, homely directness and sincerity, and strong primary
idiosyncrasies. Here the man enters into the estimate of the author.
There is no separating them, as there never is in great examples. A
curious perversity runs through all, but in no way vitiates the result.
In both his moral and intellectual nature, Carlyle seems made with
a sort of stub and twist, like the best gun-barrels. The knotty and
corrugated character of his sentences suits well the peculiar and
intense activity of his mind. What a transition from his terse and
sharply articulated pages, brimming with character and life, and a
strange mixture of rage, humor, tenderness, poetry, philosophy, to the
cold disbelief and municipal splendor of Macaulay! Nothing in Carlyle's
contributions seems fortui