accommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare,
forked animal as thou art;" and borrowing also, perhaps, an ironical
hint from a paragraph in Swift's _Tale of a Tub_: "A sect was
established who held the universe to be a large suit of clothes....If
certain ermines or furs be placed in a certain position, we style them a
judge; and so an apt conjunction of lawn and black satin we entitle a
bishop." In _Sartor Resartus_ Carlyle let himself go. It was willful,
uncouth, amorphous, titanic. There was something monstrous in the
combination--the hot heart of the Scot married to the transcendental
dream of Germany. It was not English, said the reviewers; it was not
sense; it was disfigured by obscurity and "mysticism." Nevertheless even
the thin-witted and the dry-witted had to acknowledge the powerful
beauty of many chapters and passages, rich with humor, eloquence,
poetry, deep-hearted tenderness, or passionate scorn.

[Illustration: Geo. Eliot, Froude, Browning, Tennyson.]

Carlyle was a voracious reader, and the plunder of whole literatures is
strewn over his pages. He flung about the resources of the language with
a giant's strength, and made new words at every turn. The concreteness
and the swarming fertility of his mind are evidenced by his enormous
vocabulary, computed greatly to exceed Shakspere's, or any other single
writer's in the English tongue. His style lacks the crowning grace of
simplicity and repose. It astonishes, but it also fatigues.

Carlyle's influence has consisted more in his attitude than in any
special truth which he has preached. It has been the influence of a
moralist, of a practical rather than a speculative philosopher. "The end
of man," he wrote, "is an action, not a thought." He has not been able
to persuade the time that it is going wrong, but his criticisms have
been wholesomely corrective of its self-conceit. In a democratic age he
has insisted upon the undemocratic virtues of obedience, silence, and
reverence. _Ehrfurcht_, reverence--the text of his address to the
students of Edinburgh University in 1866--is the last word of his
philosophy.

In 1830 Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), a young graduate of Cambridge,
published a thin duodecimo of 154 pages entitled _Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical_. The pieces in this little volume, such as the _Sleeping
Beauty, Ode to Memory_, and _Recollections of the Arabian Nights_, were
full of color, fragrance, melody; but they had a dream-like character,
and wer