who himself reached that station only a few months prior to the time when Disraeli was first elected to parliament in 1837.

c

He entered the House of Commons with the accession of Victoria, and lived to confer upon his Sovereign the title of Empress of India. He published his first novel, "Vivian Grey " at twentyone with his eyes fixed longingly on parliament as the predestined theater of his fame. He published his last novel, " Endymion," at seventysix when he had attained the fulness of his aspirations. He had drank deeply of the bitterness of successive defeats, he had seen and known human nature in all its varying aspects from petty meanness to self-denying generosity and was at last crowned with the victor's laurels in the race of life.

1

THOMAS CARLYLE.

(1795-1881.)

If I were asked what writer of the nineteenth century had made the greatest impress on his time, I think I would say Thomas Carlyle. I am aware that there are others who have influenced in a high degree the thought and expression of modern life. There are Macaulay and Thackeray and Dickens and Tennyson. There are others in less degree that everybody can call to mind, who are entitled to a high place in literature. There are the early poets, like Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Keats. There are the critics like Coleridge and Hazlitt. But above and beyond them all, towering like one of his own Scottish crags, stands Carlyle, rugged and beetle-browed, although with many unpleasant and misty phenomena about him. He stands there, unscalable and unknowable on one side, and yet on the other, the merest prey to gossip and to fortune. Carlyle the genius, appears to

have been one person; Carlyle the man, quite another.

It is not a pleasant thing to have our idols smashed, but that is what happened to many an American when Froude published the "Reminiscences and Letters of Carlyle." We stood aghast, for we had been brought up to the idea that preaching and practice went hand in hand. We believed that when a prophet arrived who taught not only the "Everlasting yea and nay "-the absolute truthfulness of life-but also the virtues of self-sacrifice and duty, that we might find in him an exemplar of all these things. What then was our surprise to know that so far from being a private saint, he was above all others one of the most querulous, unhappy and discontented souls that was ever suffered to inhabit a tenement of clay. He could speak no good of any one. His recorded utterances have nothing but contempt for Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Balzac, Hugo, Lamb, Jeffrey, Macaulay, John Stuart Mill and Mazzini. To many of these men he was under great obligations, but that was of no significance. Never was there a man born in the world with so

strange a conscience. His egotism was so great that he believed that the thing he could not or would not do was not worth doing, and that those

who differed with him were little better than a pack of fools. Mr. Froude in his biography of him is compelled to say, "Of all men I have ever seen, Carlyle was the least patient of the common woes of humanity." And to show the obverse of his character in respect to minor ills Mrs. Carlyle once wrote "A positive Christian in bearing others' pain, he is himself a roaring Thor when himself is pricked by a pin."

These, and a thousand other things that may be laid to his personal account must be steadily and religiously ignored by those who would really know Carlyle in his works.

may

These be read with endless delight. Doubtless we must get accustomed to the stylein every enterprise we must understand the tools that are to be worked with. But when we understand the language in which he speaks-it is sometimes called Carlylese-we gain immense enjoyment. The "French Revolution" is the finest and most dramatic story that has been told in modern times. It is not a narrative, but a picture, a panorama. The artist stands at one side and unrolls before us that tremendous story of passion and vengeance, when gods and demons contended, and when faith found its avenger in the "olive complexioned" Corsican. From the fearful

chapter where "Louis the well-beloved," lies dying, “unhousell'd, disappointed, unaneled,” down to the "whiff of grape-shot," every page is livid, every character described is alive and bleeding. In all English literature there is no such book.

The "Cromwell," too, is masterly. That strange hero, half hypocrite, half saint, is so described by documents and records, bound together by the merest ligament of comment in a way that is unforgettable in English speech. And it is, too, most artistically done. Think what we may, Carlyle's "Cromwell" is the last and most authentic story of the man.

"Frederick the Great" is his masterpiece, the most decidedly complete combination of history and biography yet delivered to man in the English tongue.

In that great book you may see the famous Prussian King as the one genuine figure in the European history of the eighteenth century. It is a marvelous portraiture, and even at a single reading one may carry in his mind its pictures forever. If you would understand eighteenth century politics and war, read Carlyle's Frederick the Great.

We Americans have a very fair right to talk. of Carlyle and praise him. It was we who discovered him. He was without honor in Britain