stified in describing the imperative duty of work as the theme of many
an hour of strenuous idleness, and the superiority of golden silence
over silver speech as the text of endless bursts of jerky rapture, while
a too constant invective against cant had its usual effect of developing
cant with a difference. To the incorrigibly sentimental all this was
sheer poison, which continues tenaciously in the system. Others of
robuster character no sooner came into contact with the world and its
fortifying exigencies, than they at once began to assimilate the
wholesome part of what they had taken in, while the rest falls gradually
and silently out. When criticism has done its just work on the
disagreeable affectations of many of Mr. Carlyle's disciples, and on the
nature of Mr. Carlyle's opinions and their worth as specific
contributions, very few people will be found to deny that his influence
in stimulating moral energy, in kindling enthusiasm for virtues worthy
of enthusiasm, and in stirring a sense of the reality on the one hand,
and the unreality on the other, of all that man can do or suffer, has
not been surpassed by any teacher now living.

One of Mr. Carlyle's chief and just glories is, that for more than forty
years he has clearly seen, and kept constantly and conspicuously in his
own sight and that of his readers, the profoundly important crisis in
the midst of which we are living. The moral and social dissolution in
progress about us, and the enormous peril of sailing blindfold and
haphazard, without rudder or compass or chart, have always been fully
visible to him, and it is no fault of his if they have not become
equally plain to his contemporaries. The policy of drifting has had no
countenance from him. That a society should be likely to last with
hollow and scanty faith, with no government, with a number of
institutions hardly one of them real, with a horrible mass of
poverty-stricken and hopeless subjects; that, if it should last, it
could be regarded as other than an abomination of desolation, he has
boldly and often declared to be things incredible. We are not promoting
the objects which the social union subsists to fulfil, nor applying with
energetic spirit to the task of preparing a sounder state for our
successors. The relations between master and servant, between capitalist
and labourer, between landlord and tenant, between governing race and
subject race, between the feelings and intelligence of the legisl