there wreck of wheel-vehicles like this in the sea of fire. Desolate, as ashes, as gases, shall they wander in the wind. Higher, higher, yet flames the fire-sea; crackling with new dislocated timber; hissing with leather and prunella. The metal images are molten; the marble images become mortar-lime; the stone mountains sulkily explode. RESPECTABILITY, with all her collected gigs inflamed for funeral pyre, wailing, leaves the earth: not to return save under new Avatar. Imposture, how it burns, through generations: how it is burnt up, for a time. The world is black ashes which, ah, when will they grow green? The images all run into amorphous Corinthian brass; all dwellings of men destroyed; the very mountains peeled and riven, the valleys black and dead; an empty world! Woe to them that shall be born then! A king, a queen (ah me!) were hurled in; did rustle once; flew aloft, crackling like paper scroll. Iscariot Egalité was hurled in; thou grim De Launay, with thy grim Bastile; whole kindreds and people; five millions of mutually destroying men. For it is the end of the dominion of IMPOSTURE (which is darkness and opaque firedamp); and the burning up, with unquenchable fire, of all the gigs that are in the earth.' This prophecy, we say, has it not been fulfilled, is it not fulfilling?

And so here, O reader, has the time come for us two to part. Toilsome was our journeying together; not without offence; but it is done. To me thou wert as a beloved shade, the disembodied, or not yet embodied spirit of a brother. To thee I was but as a voice. Yet was our relation a kind of sacred one; doubt not that! Whatsoever once sacred things become hollow jargons, yet while the voice of man speaks with man, hast thou not there the living fountain out of which all sacrednesses sprang, and will yet spring? Man, by the nature of him, is definable as an incarnated word. Ill stands it with me if I have spoken falsely: thine also it was to hear truely. Farewell.'

In Mr. Carlyle's other articles, the French revolution is spoken of, especially in the Miscellaneous Reviews, entitled, 'Mirabeau,' and The Parliamentary History of the French Revo'lution.'*

'CHARTISM' is a thin octavo volume of 113 pages, in which Mr. Carlyle embodies such thoughts 'as have occurred to him on the condition and prospects of the working classes of the English nation. The germs of these thoughts are in sundry passages scattered through the French Revolution.' He urges, with sad and sober earnestness, the importance of this question. He discusses the New Poor Law with wisdom and fairness. The Irish peasantry are described with the severity of truth, and the future effects of their immigration into this country are strongly, and, we fear, accurately set forth. Most of the delu

*We hope, ere long, to lay before our readers a view of that great event gested from a large body of works in our own and other languages.

sions and fallacies which abound on these subjects are demolished. The right of every man to justice is maintained; the duty of every man to assert it is enforced; the deep, indestructible desire of every man to have it is vindicated; the determination of some men to have it is illustrated; and the power of believing, wise and good men, finally to secure it, is affirmed and proved.

Endeavouring to discriminate the circumstances in which it is true that the best thing government can do for working men is to let them alone, Mr. Carlyle says, that in Europe generally, but especially in England, the time for that is past. He does not believe that the tendencies of modern society are towards democracy, or that democracy can do any good in these nations; but he discerns through all the turbulence of the times a struggle for 'government by the wisest.' He prognosticates the disappearance from the earth of 'aristocracies that do not govern, and of priesthoods that do not teach.' On these things he invites the British reader to meditate earnestly.'

Seldom have we read any thing so beautifully eloquent, combining the interest of history with the sagacity of political philosophy, as the chapter headed New Eras, in which, under the transparent veil of another German professor, Mr. Carlyle follows the development of British energy, and freedom, from the landing of the Saxons to the present age. It is as part of this slow, but irresistible, development that he regards reform, radicalism, chartism, church-rate agitations, justice to Ireland, and so forth, -all natural phenomena working in one direction.

The work of the present day which this earnest writer presses on every man in England is two-fold-universal education and general emigration. His thoughts on public instruction are certainly not unworthy of attention from churchmen, dissenters, and, if we may say so, statesmen; but there is an overlooking of the present elements of English society, and an anticipation of some mysterious advent, which to us is-moonshine. His views of emigration connect themselves with the theories and the facts of population, with the cultivation of the wastes and forests of the world, and with the peculiar motives and facilities which England has for sending out her crowded sons to subdue the earth, and cover it with fruits and habitations.

The LECTURES ON HERO-WORSHIP are designed to illustrate the native reverence of mankind for superior power, as that reverence is seen in the Scandinavian mythology, Islamism, poetry, literature, and political revolutions. The same opinions abound in these lectures which have been set forth in Mr. Carlyle's previous writings; and we are struck, almost in every page, with the freshness of his thoughts, and the gleaming splendour of his language. Paganism is regarded by him as a

bewildering, inextricable jungle of delusions, confusions, falsehoods and absurdities, and this mis-worship' is not allowed to be the quackery of priests or the allegory of poets, but it is said to be the wonder with which the wild children of nature gazed on the power that spread its mysteries around them. This is not the whole truth, and, given as the whole, it is false. In the Norse religion he sees the impersonation of the visible workings of nature; in the mythic chaunts of the Iceland Edda, and the sagas, he traces the successions of ancestral beliefs; in the Runes of Odin, and in the divine honours paid to him, as the father of letters and poetry, by the rude men of the north, he admires the ancient reverence of sincerity, valour, and destiny; and in the Skald, which records the exploits of Thor, he hails the deep thought, the manly sincerity, the broad humour, and the fantastic imagination, from which have come many of the tales of our modern nursery, some of the Scottish ballads, and one of the greatest poems in our language-the Hamlet of Shakespeare.

Whoever has visited the Library and Museum of Northern Antiquities at Copenhagen, must have been impressed by the power with which the minds of these forgotten northmen are ruling our spirits even in the present day: and such readers can enter heartily with us into Mr. Carlyle's feelings.*

There is much fascination, and, as it appears to us, some truthfulness, in Mr. Carlyle's delineation of the character of Mahomet; of the country, and natural features of the Arabs, the Italians of the East, and of the religion and the propagation of the Koran; and we are ready to admire the frankness with which he means to say of the prophet all the good he justly can.' We give up, with all modern scholars, the story of the pigeon. We are sure that there must be a basis of truth for every error that lasts long. We are willing to believe, as far as we can, that Mahomet was in some sort sincere; that taciturn as he was, in his good laugh-his beaming black eyes-his swelling vein in the brow-there was the heartiness of a genuine man; and that his religion was, in many respects, an improvement on the formalities which it destroyed. At the same time we must say that we have read this lecture again and again, and always with increased regret and-Mr. Carlyle would forgive our plainnessdisapprobation.

When Mahomet is styled 'a true prophet' the words ought to mean, and their connection shews they do mean that, in his degree, he was as true a prophet as Moses or Isaiah. We

* See a Review of Works on the Northern Antiquities in the present series of the Eclectic, vol. I., Feb. 1837.

cannot think that this is Mr. Carlyle's deliberate belief: he is too enlightened and too sincere a man for that. Indeed when he is speaking, afterwards, of Shakespeare as a greater prophet than Mahomet, he candidly acknowledges that 'it is a questionable step for me here, and now to say, as I have done, that Mahomet was a true speaker at all, and not rather an ambitious charlatan, perversity and simulacrum, no speaker, but a babbler.' Why, we would ask Mr. Carlyle, with all possible respect, why leave uncorrected the more than questionable passages about Mahomet's true prophet-dom, and his freedom from cant? We are staggered by the bold declaration that 'Mahomet was not a sensual man.' Has Mr. Carlyle not examined Abulfeda, or has he not read in Sale's translation, the fourth and thirty-fourth suraton, of the Koran? or has he forgotten the difficulties out of which he calls his great master, Goethe, to help him? We believe that Golius, Hottinger, Erpenius, and all the Arabic scholars would dissent from Goethe's notion of Islam, which Mr. Carlyle borrows.

Mr. Carlyle says, 'it seems to be the true opinion that Mahomet never could write.' Then, who wrote the Koran? Gabriel? Does not Al Bochari tell us that he did write certain words at the gate of Mecca? And does not Abulfeda say that in his last sickness he asked for ink and paper that he might write a book?

We are sorry that Mr. Carlyle should be unconscious of the confusion that disfigures his defence, for it looks like a vindication of Mahomet's propagation of his religion by the sword. Instead of comparing him to Charlemagne, we should have thought of the divine prophet of the Christian faith, who called his followers, not to fight, but, to deny themselves, and to love their enemies. More than once Mr. Carlyle calls Mahomedanism a kind of Christianity.' So slavery may be a kind of liberty, and arsenic a kind of food. A false, sensual, proud, cruel religion 'a kind of christianity!'—which christianity Mr. Carlyle knows to be true, and pure, and meek, and full of mercy!

Mr. Carlyle's idea of poets and poetry is that which constitutes the charm of the richest literature of Germany. The true poet is a great man, conversing with realities, piercing the sacred mystery, 'the open secret,' of the universe, and dealing earnestly with what he sees. In the degree in which this element is developed in a man, he is counted for a poet. 'Poetry is musical thought expressed in verse.' The types of this class of great men selected for illustration are Dante and Shakespeare. While he describes Dante as embodying musically the religion of the middle ages, and Shakespeare as embodying for us the outer life of our Europe as developed

then-its chivalries, courtesies, humours, ambitions-the Italian deep and fierce; the Englishman wide, placid, and far-seeing; he holds Shakespeare to be the greater poet, indeed the greatest of intellects, and the highest glory of the English nation.

We have but little space to follow Mr. Carlyle through his sketches of the heroes of the reformation, which teem with graphic descriptions, just sentiments, admirable reflections, and noble principles. But we are bound by our reverence for the highest truth to protest against the ill founded and mischievous opinion which he has taken pains to dress in the most attractive colours,-that 'idolatry is to be condemned only when it is insincere.' We have not so read those Hebrew prophets to whose genius Mr. Carlyle does graceful homage, and in whose miraculous inspiration we will presume to hope that he believes.

The idolatry which they denounce, in the name of the living God, is the bowing down of worshippers to any symbol of any god, nay even of HIMSELF; and greater men than any of those whom Mr. Carlyle beatifies with the apotheosis, went out into the world to turn men from the dumb idols which he would have us to leave unmolested.

We cannot but admire Mr. Carlyle's enlightened though somewhat too patronizing vindication of protestantism, and his honest sympathy with the earnestness and the strength of such men as Luther and Knox. It is natural enough for a writer in his position to look at these men and their labours rather in their intellectual and moral characteristics, than in connection with the religious beliefs which braced the firmness of their endurance, and the spiritual feelings which fired the ardour of their zeal. But he does the men justice. He discovers a sharp insight into their function as the lights of their age. He sees, with the eye of a philosopher, the connection of their labours with those of men that went before, and of men who have come after them. His mention of the puritans will be as gratifying to their successors as it is honourable to them, and to him. We hail this as one of the auspicious omens of that better day which is at hand, when these traduced heroes of truth, freedom, and earnest piety will be known and loved as they deserve.

Mr. Carlyle introduces the hero, a man of letters,' as a new and singular phenomenon, slowly recognised by the world, but teaching that world how to think and what to do.

Without questioning, on the contrary, devoutly believingthe higher and more awful inspiration of prophets and apostles, we would not fail to ascribe all superiority of understanding to the 'inspiration of the Almighty;* nor would we rashly charge

* Job xxxii. 8, pp-breath-breathing of the Almighty.

GEN. ii. 7. JOHN XX. 22.