hirty-Nine Articles and the Hanover family,--representing
Carlyle's passionate craving for supereminent persons, his passionate
abhorrence of democracy, his admiration of strong character, his
disposition to work from historical bases rather than from absolute
principles, but representing them at once with a prudence of common
sense and a prudence of self-seeking and timidity which are alike
foreign to his master's spirit.

We prefer the second phase of the man. It belongs more properly to him.
He is ambitious; and the _role_ which he first assumed is one which
ambition can only spoil. He has but a weak faith in principles, and
flinches and flies off to "Prester John," or somewhere into the clouds,
when at last principle and sentiment must either fly off or fairly take
the stubborn British _taurus_ by the horns. And in truth, his early
creed was in part merely passionate and foolish, and with courage and
disinterestedness to do more he would have professed less. His present
position is better,--that is, sounder and sincerer. Better for _him_,
because more limited and British, leaving him room still to toil at good
work, and not calling upon him to break with Church and State, which he
really has not the heart to do. As head of the hierarchy of beadles, he
is an effective and even admirable man, pious, zealous, and reformatory;
but institutions are more necessary to him than principles, and any
attempt to plant himself purely on the latter places him in a false
position.

Mr. Kingsley has fine gifts and good purposes. He has a rare power of
realizing scenes and characters,--a power equally rare of presenting
them in vivid, pictorial delineation. He must be a very engaging
lecturer, imparting to his official labor an interest which does not
always belong to labors of like kind.

For discoursing upon history he has important qualifications, which it
would be uncandid not to acknowledge. Of these it is the first that he
clings manfully, despite the tendencies of our time, to the human,
rather than the extra-human stand-point. He respects personality; he
treats of men, not of puppets; he is old-fashioned enough to believe
that men may be moved from within no less than from without, and does
not attempt, as Quinet has it, to abolish human history and add a
chapter to natural history instead. Here, too, he follows Carlyle, but
in a way which is highly to his credit. The enthusiasm for science which
marks these later centuri