d the best
from mystical Christianity or Quietism, without having taken up its
defects--one who has found in TAULER or GUYON, or perhaps still more in
FENELON, something to love, and has loved it without effort. We are
certain that the work is one which will enjoy a very extensive
popularity among all liberal-minded yet truly devout Christians.

HISTORY OF FRIEDRICH THE SECOND, CALLED FREDERICK THE
GREAT. By THOMAS CARLYLE. In four volumes. Vol. III.
New York: Harper & Brothers. Boston: A.K. Loring. 1862.

To judge CARLYLE well, one should have outgrown a love for him. Then,
and not till then, will the reader ace him as he is--a genius obscured
and belittled by eccentricity in judgment and grotesqueness in literary
art; a man who must be seen, out of whom much may be taken, but not with
profit unless we leave much behind; a writer who was ahead of his age in
1830, but who is wellnigh thirty years behind it now; one still
worshipping heroes, and quite ignorant that great ideas are taking for
the world the place of great men. It is curious to consider that
CARLYLE, without understanding the first principles of the French
Revolution, should have written most readably on it, and that, still
more blind to the manifest path of free labor and of utility, he should
still have assumed a pseudo-radical position. Yet, after all, nothing is
strange when a man is wrong in his premises. Carp at them as he may,
CARLYLE is of the destructives rather than the builders, and, like all
literary destructives, continually flies for shelter to the
conservatives, even as Rabelais fled for safety to the Pope.

In this third volume of Friedrich the Second, he who neither overrates
nor underrates CARLYLE may read with great profit. In it one
sees, as in a brilliant series of highly-colored views--overcolored very
often--shifting with strange rapidity and in wild lights, how from June,
1740, to August, 1744, King Frederick lived his own life, and
incidentally that of Prussia and a good part of the civilized world with
it, as all active and earnest monarchs are wont to do. That it is
piquant and interesting--to the well-educated taste more so than any
novel--is true enough; and if the author acts despotically and talks
arbitrarily, we may smile, and leave him to settle it with his dead men.
He must be dumb indeed who can read it and not feel his thinking powers
greatly stimulated, and with it, if he be a writer, his faculty of
cre