extent and on a limited scale, proved their efficiency; principles which are "mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds, casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God."*

Another objectionable feature in Mr. Carlyle's work, considered as a political production, is the frequency and constancy with which he insists on the necessity of a "French Revolution" in England. The following passage in which he very distinctly expresses this opinion, is only one of many :

"Yes, when fathers and mothers, in Stockport hunger-cellars, begin to eat their children, and Irish Widows have to prove their relationship by dying of typhus-fever; and amid Governing 'Corpora. tions of the Best and Bravest' busy to preserve their game by 'bushing,' dark millions of God's human creatures start up in mad Chartism, impracticable Sacred-Mouths, and Manchester Insurrections; and there is a virtual Industrial Aristocracy only half-alive, spell-bound amid money bags and ledgers; and an actual Idle Aristocracy seemingly near dead in somnolent delusions, in trespasses and double-barrels; sliding,' as on inclined planes, which every new year they soap with new Hansard's-jargon under God's sky, and so on sliding ever faster toward a 'scale' and balance-scale whereon is written, Thou art found wanting; in such days, after a generation or two, I say, it does become, even to the low and simple, very palpably impossible! No Working World, any more than a Fighting World, can be led on without a noble chivalry of Work, and laws and fixed rules which follow out of that-far nobler than any chivalry of Fight

Mr. Carlyle finds some grains of consolation even in this age of Atheism, Mammonism, and all other despicable isms. "Truly it is beautiful to see the brutish Empire of Mammon cracking every where, giving sure promise of dying or being changed. A strange, chill, almost ghastly day-spring strikes up in Yankee-land itself; my Transcendental friends announce there, in a distinct, though somewhat lank-haired, ungainly manner, that the Demiurgus Dollar is dethroned; that new, unheard of Demiurgus-ships, Priesthoods, Aristocracies, Growths and Destructions, are already visible in the gray of coming time. Socinian preachers quit their pulpits in Yankee-land, saying, 'Friends, this has all gone to a colored cobweb, we regret to say!'-and retire to the fields to cultivate onion-beds and live frugally on vegetables. It is very notable." p. 294.

If Socinian preachers are, in any considerable numbers, coming to the conclusion that Socinianism has all gone to a colored cobweb, we will agree with our author that it is a most auspicious symptom.

ing was. As an anarchic multitude on mere supply-and-demand, it is becoming inevitable that we dwindle in blind suicidal convulsion and self-abrasion, frightful to the imagination, into Choctaw Workers. With wigwam and scalps-with palaces and thousand pound bills; with savagery, depopulation, chaotic desolation! Good Heavens, will not one French Revolution and Reign of Terror suffice us, but must there be two? There will be two if needed, there will be twenty if needed; there will be precisely as many as are needed. The Laws of Nature will have themselves fulfilled. That is a thing certain to me." p. 271.

We will not undertake to say how excitable the English people are, but we should think that amidst anti-corn-law leagues, chartisms, and insurrections of a people goaded on to madness and despair by grim starvation, it were of doubtful utility to tell them that the overturning of the Government and the violent death of the nobility is as inevitable as the unaltera. ble laws of Destiny. His final hope is a hero-king: "Yes, friends: Hero-kings, and a whole world not unheroic-there lies the port and the happy haven towards which, through all these storm-tost seas, French Revolutions, Chartisms, Manchester Insurrections, that make the heart sick in these bad days, the Supreme Powers are driving us. On the whole, blessed be the Supreme Powers, stern as they are! Towards that haven will we, O friends: let all true men, with what of faculty is in them, bend valiantly, incessantly, with thousandfold endeavor, thither, thither! There, or else in the ocean-abysses, it is very clear to me we shall arrive." p. 35.

Now if there are any considerable number of men in England, who would like to have a Revolution, would not a strain of reasoning like the following be very natural: Mr. Carlyle tells us that the Paradise of Heroes lies beyond a French Revolution, and to that we must tend with thousandfold endeavor; nay, the Supreme Powers are driving us thither with stern necessity, and resistance to them is useless; the sooner we get through that Revolution the better, and the sooner we begin, the sooner we shall get through. Let us bend valiantly, incessantly, thither, thither, O friends!'

But such a conclusion would not depend upon mere inference; the thing is occasionally more plainly spoken.

"In all cases, therefore, we will agree with the judicious Mrs. Glass: First catch your hare! First get your man; all is got: he can learn to do all things, from making boots to decreeing judgments, governing communities; and will do them like a man. Catch your

no-man; alas! have you not caught the terriblest Tartar in the world? Perhaps all the terribler, the quieter and gentler he looks. For the mischief that one blockhead, that every blockhead does, in a world so feracious, teeming with endless results as ours, no ciphering will sum up. The quack bootmaker is considerable; as corn-cutters can testify, and desperate men reduced to buckskin and list-shoes. But the quack priest, quack high-priest, the quack king! Why do not all just citizens rush, half-frantic, to stop him, as they would a conflagration? Surely a just citizen is admonished by God and his own Soul, by all silent and articulate voices of this Universe, to do what in him lies toward relief of this poor blockhead-quack, and of a world that groans under him. Run swiftly; relieve him, were it even by extinguishing him! For all things have grown so old, tinder-dry, combustible; and he is more ruinous than conflagration. Sweep him down, at least." p. 87.

"The most Conservative English People, thickest-skinned, most patient of Peoples, is driven alike by its Logic and its Unlogic, by things 'spoken,' and by things not yet spoken or very speakable, but only felt and very unendurable, to be wholly a Reforming People. Their Life as it is has ceased to be longer possible for them.

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"Urge not this noble silent People; rouse not the Berserkir-rage that lies in them! Do you know their Cromwells, Hampdens, their Pyms and Bradshaws? Men very peaceable, but men that can be made very terrible! Men who, like their old Teutsch Fathers in Agrippa's days, 'have a soul that despises death;' to whom 'death,' compared with falsehoods and injustices, is light; 'in whom there is a rage unconquerable by the immortal gods! Before this the English People have taken very preternatural-looking Spectres by the beard; saying virtually: And if thou wert "preternatural?" Thou with thy "divine-rights" grown diabolic wrongs? Thou-not even "natural;" decapitable; totally extinguishable! Yes, just so godlike as this People's patience was, even so godlike will and must its impatience be. Away, ye scandalous Practical Solecisms, children actually of the Prince of Darkness; ye have near broken our hearts; we can and will endure you no longer. Begone, we say; depart while the play is good! By the Most High God, whose sons and born missionaries true men are, ye shall not continue here! You and we have become incompatible; can inhabit one house no longer. Either you must go, or we. Are ye ambitious to try which it shall be ?" p. 164.

Nor can it be said that this is a forced construction put upon a single passage or two, wrested from their connection. It is scarcely possible to construct a chapter more calculated to stir up a whole people to violent revolt, than that from which the last extract is taken. But as this is not a subject of practical concernment to us as Americans, we have accomplished our object by simply calling attention to it, as a feature of the work. Whether the present age is to witness a Reign of Terror in England, or not, we shall leave to the political prognostica

SECOND SERIES, VOL. XII. NO II.

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tors to settle among themselves; but if it does, posterity will point to Mr. Carlyle as a direct instigator of it.

There are some passages in the work before us, that we know not whether to characterize as weaknesses, or wilful misrepresentations. The following is one out of many that might be selected:

"God's absolute Laws, sanctioned by an eternal Heaven and an eternal Hell, have become Moral Philosophies, sanctioned by able computations of Profit and Loss, by weak considerations of Pleasures of Virtue and the Moral Sublime.

"It is even so. To speak in the ancient dialect, we have forgotten God;' in the most modern dialect and very truth of the matter, we have taken up the fact of this Universe as it is not. We have quietly closed our eyes to the eternal Substance of things, and opened them only to the Shows and Shams of things. God's Laws are become a Greatest-Happiness Principle, a Parliamentary Expediency: the Heavens overarch us only as an Astronomical Time-Keeper; a butt for Herschel-telescopes to shoot science at, to shoot sentimentalities at: in our and old Jonson's dialect, man has lost the soul out of him; and now, after the due period, begins to find the want of it!" p. 137.

The phrases "Profit and Loss," "Greatest-Happiness Principle," "Benthamee Utility," are of frequent occurrence in the satirical and denunciatory outbreaks of Mr. Carlyle on the morality and religion of the present. And from the use of the epithet" Benthamee," one might suppose he has particular reference to Mr. Bentham, and other writers who have advocated the system of optimism in morals. But however charitable such a supposition might be, it is a supposition which a reading of his book will not sustain. It is perfectly clear that he intends to characterize all the morals and religion of England (which includes America, since the American mind is essentially English in its characteristics), so far as public expression is given to it, as built on a false foundation. Compare the extract above with the following:

"But now in these godless two centuries, looking at England and her efforts and doings, if we ask, What of England's doings the Law of Nature had accepted, Nature's King had actually farthered and pronounced to have truth in them-where is our answer? Neither the Church' of Hurd and Warburton, nor the Anti-church of Hume and Paine; not in any shape the Spiritualism of England: all this is already seen, or beginning to be seen, for what it is; a thing that Nature does not own. On the one side is dreary Cant, with a reminiscence of things noble and divine; on the other is but acrid Candor, with a prophecy of things brutal, infernal. Hurd and Warburton are

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sunk into the sere and yellow leaf; no considerable body of true-seeing men looks thitherward for healing: the Paine-and-Hume Atheistic theory, of 'things well let alone,' with Liberty, Equality and the like, is also in these days declaring itself naught, unable to keep the world from taking fire.

"The theories and speculations of both these parties, and, we may say, of all intermediate parties and persons, prove to be things which the Eternal Veracity did not accept; things superficial, ephemeral, which already a near Posterity, finding them already dead and brownleafed, is about to suppress and forget. The Spiritualism of England, for those godless years, is, as it were, all forgetable. Much has been written: but the perennial Scriptures of Mankind have had small accession: from all English Books, in rhyme or prose, in leather binding or in paper wrappage, how many verses have been added to these? In brief, the Spoken Word of England has not been true."— p. 168.

Here we have it! most unequivocally spoken. If Carlyle is to be charged with obscurity of style, he is surely not guilty of it here. Every thing that has been written in England since 1660, is without exception condemned. Do such sweeping charges require refutation? What if Hume, Adam Smith, Paley, and Bentham have published false systems of morals, and other writers have endorsed them, does it therefore follow that no religious teachers in England, in the last two centuries, have believed that there is such a thing as Eternal Right, and Eternal Wrong, independent of utility? Take the first sentence in the extract from page 137, and although it must be confessed that the religious teaching of England, for the last two centuries, has in plainness and pungency fallen far below the Cromwellian era, yet do not the facts warrant a simple denial of the charge? especially if we include the religious teaching of America, which is essentially English in its intellectual and moral char

acteristics.

But with what grace can Mr. Carlyle make charges of this sort? If he had a right to make them before he published "Past and Present," he certainly has not now. Nothing can be more inconsistent than the fulmination of such charges in that book. With what frequency he points out the evils which England now suffers, as the penalty for her present social organization, and her errors in religion-how constantly he dwells upon the greater miseries impending over her unless a radical reform be effected, the extracts already given are sufficient to show; and if more light on this point were needed, it is sufficient to say that this is the burden of his book-apparently his