nning
consistently through his writings. In "Characteristics" he seems to have
had merely glimpses of great truths which he could not clearly express,
and which won him the reputation of being a German transcendentalist.
Its leading idea is the commonplace one of the progress of society,
which no sane and Christian man has ever seriously questioned,--not an
uninterrupted progress, but a general advance, brought about by
Christian ideas. Any other view of progress is dreary and discouraging;
nor is this inconsistent with great catastrophes and national
backslidings, with the fall of empires, and French Revolutions.

We note at this time in Carlyle's writings, on the whole, a cheerful
view of human life in spite of sorrows, hardships, and disappointments,
which are made by Divine Providence to act as healthy discipline. We see
nothing of the angry pessimism of his later writings. Those years at
Craigenputtock were healthy and wholesome; he labored in hope, and had
great intellectual and artistic enjoyment, which reconciled him to
solitude,--the chief evil with which he had to contend, after dyspepsia.
His habits were frugal, but poverty did not stare him in the face, since
he had the income of the farm. It does not appear that the deep gloom
which subsequently came over his soul oppressed him in his moorland
retreat. He did not sympathize with any religion of denials, but felt
that out of the jargon of false and pretentious philosophies would come
at last a positive belief which would once more enthrone God in
the world.

After writing another characteristic article, on Biography, he furnished
for Fraser's Magazine one of the finest biographical portraits ever
painted,--that of Dr. Johnson, in which that cyclopean worker stands
out, with even more distinctness than in Boswell's "Life," as one of the
most honest, earnest, patient laborers in the whole field of literature.
Carlyle makes us almost love this man, in spite of his awkwardness,
dogmatism, and petulance. Johnson in his day was an acknowledged
dictator on all literary questions, surrounded by admirers of the
highest gifts, who did homage to his learning,--a man of more striking
individuality than any other celebrity in England, and a man of intense
religious convictions in an age of religious indifference. We now wonder
why this struggling, poorly paid, and disagreeable man of letters should
have had such an ascendency over men superior to himself in learning,
g