as
of private relations, that hatred is not so far removed from love as
indifference is. Be that as it may, the Carlylean view of the eighteenth
century as a time of mere scepticism and unbelief, is now clearly
untenable to men who remember the fervour of Jean Jacques, and the more
rational, but not any less fervid faith of the disciples of
Perfectibility. But this was not so clear fifty years since, when the
crash and dust of demolition had not so subsided as to let men see how
much had risen up behind. The fire of the new school had been taken from
the very conflagration which they execrated, but they were not held back
from denouncing the eighteenth century by the reflection that, at any
rate, its thought and action had made ready the way for much of what is
best in the nineteenth.

[5] The dates of Mr. Carlyle's principal compositions are these:--_Life
of Schiller_, 1825; _Sartor Resartus_, 1831; _French Revolution_, 1837;
_Chartism_, 1839; _Hero-Worship_, 1840; _Past and Present_, 1843;
_Cromwell_, 1845; _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, 1850; _Friedrich the Second_,
1858-1865; _Shooting Niagara_, 1867.

Mr. Carlyle himself has told us about Coleridge, and the movement of
which Coleridge was the leader. That movement has led men in widely
different ways. In one direction it has stagnated in the sunless swamps
of a theosophy, from which a cloud of sedulous ephemera still suck a
little spiritual moisture. In another it led to the sacramental and
sacerdotal developments of Anglicanism. In a third, among men with
strong practical energy, to the benevolent bluster of a sort of
Christianity which is called muscular because it is not intellectual. It
would be an error to suppose that these and the other streams that have
sprung from the same source, did not in the days of their fulness
fertilise and gladden many lands. The wordy pietism of one school, the
mimetic rites of another, the romping heroics of the third, are
degenerate forms. How long they are likely to endure, it would be rash
to predict among a nation whose established teachers and official
preachers are prevented by an inveterate timidity from trusting
themselves to that disciplined intelligence, in which the superior minds
of the last century had such courageous faith.

Mr. Carlyle drank in some sort at the same fountain. Coleridgean ideas
were in the air. It was there probably that he acquired that sympathy
with the past, or with certain portions of the past, that