apostle of "Pig's-wash,"
was hardly the man to exhaust the heroic in history. In the "Hero as
Man-of-Letters," Carlyle was at home. If ever pure letters produced a
hero, the sage of Chelsea was one. With Johnson, with Rousseau, he is
perfectly rational, and the mass of literature which has accumulated
round the names of these two, only tends to confirm the essential
justice of Carlyle's estimate. Nor need we dispute his estimate of the
vigour and manliness of Burns. It is only when Carlyle describes him
as "the most gifted British soul" in the eighteenth century--the
century of Hume, Adam Smith, Fielding, and Burke--that we begin to
smile. Burns was a noble-hearted fellow, as well as a born poet. But
perhaps the whole cycle of Sartorian extravaganza contains no saying so
futile as the complaint, that the British nation in the great war with
France entrusted their destinies to a phantasmic Pitt, instead of to
"the Thunder-god, Robert Burns." Napoleon would no doubt have welcomed
such a change of ministry. It is incoherences of this sort which undo
so much of the splendid service that Carlyle gave to his age.

But we are not willing to let the defects of Carlyle's philosophy drive
out of mind the permanent and beautiful things in his literary work.
_Past and Present_ (1843) is certainly a success--a happy and true
thought, full of originality, worked out with art and power. The idea
of embedding a living and pathetic picture of monastic life in the
twelfth century, and a minute study of the labours of enlightened
churchmen in the early struggles of civilisation--the idea of embedding
this tale, as if it were the remains of some disinterred saint, in the
midst of a series of essays on the vices and weaknesses of modern
society--was a highly original and instructive device, only to be
worked to success by a master. And the master brought it to a
delightful success. In all his writings of thirty volumes there are
few pages more attractive than the story of Jocelin of Brakelond, Abbot
Hugo, Abbot Samson, and the festival of St. Edmund, which all pass away
as in a vision leaving "a mutilated black ruin amidst green
expanses"--as we so often see in our England to-day after the trampling
of seven centuries over the graves of the early monks.

And then, when the preacher passes suddenly from the twelfth century to
the nineteenth, from toiling and ascetic monks to cotton spinners and
platform orators--the effect is el