d, and made cockades of. Camille
descends from his table; "stifled with embraces, wetted with tears;" has
a bit of green riband handed him; sticks it in his hat. And now to
Curtius' Image-shop there; to the Boulevards; to the four winds, and
rest not till France be on fire!'

As a historical work, the _French Revolution_ is unique. It is precisely
the kind of book Isaiah would have written had there been a like
Revolution in the Jewish kingdom; and just as we go to Isaiah, not for
sociological guidance, but for ethical inspiration, so we turn to the
_French Revolution_ when the mind and heart are in a state of torpor in
order to get a series of shocks from the Carlylean electric battery.
From a historian a student expects light as well as heat, guidance as
well as inspiration. It is not enough to have the great French explosion
vividly photographed before his eyes; it is equally necessary to know
the causes which led to the catastrophe. Here, as a historian, Carlyle
is conspicuously weak. His habit of looking for dramatic situations, his
passion for making commonplace incidents and commonplace men merely the
satellites of commanding personalities, in a word, his theory that
history should deal with the doings of great men, prevents Carlyle from
dwelling upon the politico-economic side of national life. So absorbed
is he in painting the Revolution, that he forgets to explain the
Revolution. We have abundance of vague declamations against shams in
high places, plenty of talk about God's judgments, in the style of the
Hebrew prophets, but of patient diagnosis, there is none. As Mr Morley
puts it in his luminous essay on Carlyle: 'To the question whether
mankind gained or lost by the French Revolution, Carlyle nowhere gives a
clear answer; indeed, on this subject more than any other, he clings
closely to his favourite method of simple presentation, streaked with
dramatic irony.... He draws its general moral lesson from the
Revolution, and with clangorous note warns all whom it concerns from
King to Church that imposture must come to an end. But for the precise
amount and kind of dissolution which the West owes to it, for the
political meaning of it, as distinguished from its moral or its dramatic
significance, we seek in vain, finding no word on the subject, nor even
evidence of consciousness that such word is needed.' Had Carlyle, in
addition to his genius as a historical dramatist, possessed the patient
diagnosing power o