enriches the nature like wide sympathy and many-coloured
appreciativeness. To a man like Macaulay, for example, criticism was
only a tribunal before which men were brought to be decisively tried by
one or two inflexible tests, and then sent to join the sheep on the one
hand, or the goats on the other. His pages are the record of sentences
passed, not the presentation of human characters in all their fulness
and colour; and the consequence is that even now and so soon, in spite
of all their rhetorical brilliance, their hold on men has grown slack.
Contrast the dim depths into which his essay on Johnson is receding,
with the vitality as of a fine dramatic creation which exists in Mr.
Carlyle's essay on the same man. Mr. Carlyle knows as well as Macaulay
how blind and stupid a creed was English Toryism a century ago, but he
seizes and reproduces the character of his man, and this was much more
than a matter of a creed. So with Burns. He was drunken and unchaste and
thriftless, and Mr. Carlyle holds all these vices as deeply in
reprobation as if he had written ten thousand sermons against them; but
he leaves the fulmination to the hack moralist of the pulpit or the
press, with whom words are cheap, easily gotten, and readily thrown
forth. To him it seems better worth while, having made sure of some
sterling sincerity and rare genuineness of vision and singular human
quality, to dwell on, and do justice to that, than to accumulate
commonplaces as to the viciousness of vice. Here we may perhaps find the
explanation of the remarkable fact that though Mr. Carlyle has written
about a large number of men of all varieties of opinion and temperament,
and written with emphasis and point and strong feeling, yet there is
hardly one of these judgments, however much we may dissent from it,
which we could fairly put a finger upon as indecently absurd or futile.
Of how many writers of thirty volumes can we say the same?

That this broad and poetic temper of criticism has special dangers, and
needs to have special safeguards, is but too true. Even, however, if we
find that it has its excesses, we may forgive much to the merits of a
reaction against a system which has raised monstrous floods of sour cant
round about us, and hardened the hearts and parched the sympathies of
men by blasts from theological deserts. There is a point of view so
lofty and so peculiar that from it we are able to discern in men and
women something more than, and ap