feeling of the
unity of history, and that conviction of the necessity of binding our
theory of history fast with our theory of other things, in all of which
he so strikingly resembles the great Anglican leaders of a generation
ago, and in gaining some of which so strenuous an effort must have been
needed to modify the prepossessions of a Scotch Puritan education. No
one has contributed more powerfully to that movement which, drawing
force from many and various sides, has brought out the difference
between the historian and the gazetteer or antiquary. One half of _Past
and Present_ might have been written by one of the Oxford chiefs in the
days of the Tracts. Vehement native force was too strong for such a man
to remain in the luminous haze which made the Coleridgean atmosphere. A
well-known chapter in the _Life of Sterling_, which some, indeed, have
found too ungracious, shows how little hold he felt Coleridge's ideas
to be capable of retaining, and how little permanent satisfaction
resided in them. Coleridge, in fact, was not only a poet but a thinker
as well; he had science of a sort as well as imagination, but it was not
science for headlong and impatient souls. Mr. Carlyle has probably never
been able to endure a subdivision all his life, and the infinite
ramifications of the central division between object and subject might
well be with him an unprofitable weariness to the flesh.

In England, the greatest literary organ of the Revolution was
unquestionably Byron, whose genius, daring, and melodramatic
lawlessness, exercised what now seems such an amazing fascination over
the least revolutionary of European nations. Unfitted for scientific
work and full of ardour, Mr. Carlyle found his mission in rushing with
all his might to the annihilation of this terrible poet, who, like some
gorgon, hydra, or chimera dire planted at the gate, carried off a yearly
tale of youths and virgins from the city. In literature, only a
revolutionist can thoroughly overpower a revolutionist. Mr. Carlyle had
fully as much daring as Byron; his writing at its best, if without the
many-eyed minuteness and sustained pulsing force of Byron, has still the
full swell and tide and energy of genius: he is as lawless in his
disrespect for some things established. He had the unspeakable advantage
of being that which, though not in this sense, only his own favourite
word of contempt describes, respectable; and, for another thing, of
being ruggedly si