with pantheism the writers who-though it be in phraseology which we condemn as not only vague but mischievous-are calling on a sensual, mechanical, and formal age to see in every man and in every thing the presence of the unseen God.

Such is Mr. Carlyle's view of the highest rank of literary men. In his estimation the writer is the modern teacher of the people, preaching to all men in all times and places; books are the purest embodiment of that thought which has built cities and cathedrals; libraries are the true universities of these days; and the press in fact, not in figure, is, as Burke expressed it, 'a fourth estate.' With the seriousness of a practical man Mr. Carlyle discusses the standing of the men of letters in our present social condition, and the importance to the whole society of some new arrangement which will secure for them an acknowledged status. He makes the Chinese teach us something in this matter; and from the examples of Prussia and of France he augurs hopes even for England. He might have added Denmark and Russia. The heaviest evil through which he sees the thinking men of the eighteenth century struggling, is not the poverty of writers, nor their obscurity, nor their want of patronage or public organization; but the scepticism and utilitarianism and atheistic insincerity of their times.

Mr. Carlyle's type of the class of men of whom he is now speaking would of course be GOETHE. He considers him a true hero, by far the greatest, though one of the quietest of the great things, that have come to pass in these times.' But, finding that the general state of English knowledge about Goethe makes it impossible for him to convey his own impression to others, he leaves him to future times, and passes to earlier though inferior names as better suited to his present purposes; those names are Johnson, Rousseau and Burns. Most Englishmen will smile at Mr. Carlyle's adoration of a man whom the most literary nation in the world has hailed as the greatest genius of the age, and whom most men of other nations who have seen him, or made themselves acquainted with his voluminous and varied works, have been accustomed to regard with a reverence and admiration which, however excessive they may seem, and sometimes extravagantly expressed, are certainly not without some reasonable foundation. For Mr. Carlyle's partiality, it would not, we think, be difficult to account, from the temperament of his intellect, from his literary habits, and from early personal intercourse with the patriarch of Weimar, who is said to have been greatly interested in the young Englishman. It may not perhaps be amiss to inform or to remind our readers that neither all Germans, nor all Englishmen conversant with their literature are such Goethianer.' Among the Germans and comparatively among ourselves, there

are large numbers of well-read and thoughtful men who look on this enthusiasm as an evil, chiefly from its tendency to increase that love of the ideal which keeps the Germans from the practical. Of no other literary man has so much been written and spoken. His great distinction was the healthy calmness of his nature, producing a singular completeness and equipoise in his great and highly cultivated mental powers. The later and larger portion of his long life was spent in outward circumstances the most auspicious for his tastes and objects; and it seems to have been devoted almost entirely to the culture of one mind; and that one mind-his own;-the man thus selfdisciplined, and self-cultured, appears in all his later writings, where he brings out the highest philosophy of criticism, and the most perfect exemplification of the literary art.

We return from this digression to Mr.Carlyle's literary trio,―men differing most remarkably from each other in all respects save one.

To begin with Johnson. Though there are but slender materials for judging of the formation and progress of his mind, there is no man of whom so much is known in the maturity of his life and reputation. It is not the least remarkable thing about Johnson that one of the silliest of men-and not the least sycophantic of hero-worshippers-became, in the narration of his life, the most welcome of biographers, and that the gossiping of Boswell raises our admiration of Johnson higher than the reading of Johnson's own works. Mr. Carlyle's portrait of Johnson in this lecture wants distinctness of outline and fulness of colouring. He touches slightly on his diseased body, his poverty, his high rugged spirit, his reverence for old opinions, his sincerity, his inculcation of practical wisdom, his hatred of cant, his wondrous buckram style, and the 'architectural nobleness of his dictionary,' but he does not here attend to the discrepancies of his character, the etherial and the earthly; the sagacity hoodwinked by credulity; the bigoted denunciation of bigotry; the scrupulosity and formality of his religion; the one-sidedness of his political orthodoxy; his large views and miserably little prejudices; and his natural conversation, contrasted with his turgid writing. His great recommendation, we doubt not, is the brave, true and generous nature which leaves him, after all his foibles and inconsistencies, a truly great man worthy of the affectionate reverence of Englishmen.

It would not be easy at the first glance to see the classifying principle which associates Johnson with Rousseau. In the presence of the massive Englishman who thought Rousseau a fellow that deserved to be hanged,' the vain and shallow Genevese republican reminds us of a grasshopper teasing a giant with his chirp. Mr. Carlyle himself says most truly, he is

not a strong man, a morbid, excitable, spasmodic man,' at best rather intense than strong: 'not a right man.' In fact Rousseau wanted the foundations of a great mind. But he is placed here side by side with 'brave old Samuel' because he is in earnest. Now of this earnestness of Rousseau we cannot easily persuade ourselves; at any rate it was a very different kind of earnestness from that of Johnson. Johnson's is the earnestness of a manly moralist; Rousseau's the earnestness of a fickle, paradoxical, and grossly immoral charlatan. His story is soon told. After a wayward childhood, a sensual youth, and a disgusting course of meanness, impudence, and childish superstition, he picked up at Paris some habits of business and a smattering of the new philosophy. His first effort as an author was an ingenious attack on the refinements of literature and the embellishments of art. His next production was aimed at the institutions of civilization, and this prepared the way for the Social Contract,' a really wonderful specimen of irresistible logic on false premises. He then produces one novel for the purpose of contrasting the country with the town; and another to overturn the existing modes of education. Driven by his anti-social and anti-christian writings from Switzerland, he is brought to England by Hume, with whom he quarrels, and then returns to France to receive the caresses of the Parisians. There he dies-a maniac, and it has been thought-a suicide. We are not insensible to the general brilliancy of Rousseau's writings, or to the strange shew of sincerity in his confessions. But the extraordinary popularity which they obtained was owing, as no man knows better than Mr. Carlyle, to the excited state of Europe in general, and especially of France, at the time when they appeared. We profess no difference of opinion with Mr. Carlyle about the effect which, in the circumstances of his age, the writings of this spasmodic man produced; but we should greatly lament it, if the sanction of so eminent an authority were to tempt the young readers of our nation to touch the poison-cup which this delicious dreamer left behind him.

Burns is likened to a rock with wells of living softness,' and he is styled an original man,' born in a poor Ayrshire hut, the son of a toiling and harassed peasant-himself a hero of the silent order, who, though obscure lived not in vain. The poet was a laughter-loving youth, his mind naturally vigorous and original, 'the most gifted soul of the last century.' Mr. Carlyle compares him to Mirabeau, in his physical robustness and intellectual insight, in his raging passions and tender affections, in his wit, in his merriment, energy, directness and sincerity. His songs and his life are both admired for 'wrestling with the naked truth of things.' Worshipped by the great, he is not inflated. Yet he fares like the fire-flies of Sumatra, which

people stick upon spits and illuminate the ways with at night : -Great honour to the fire-flies :-But-'!

The sketch of CROMWELL is, in our judgment, the masterstroke of this curious volume. We pass it by in silent admiration, merely quoting one weighty sentence, 'it was not to men's judgment that he appealed, nor have men judged him very well.' NAPOLEON does not seem to Mr. Carlyle to be so great a man as Cromwell. He does not think him sincere in the same way. He had no religion but the atheism of the Encyclopédie. Nurtured in democracy, but instinct with the love of order, he rose naturally to the head of affairs, and then he was dazzled, blinded, and ruined.

We cannot be expected to give a particular analysis of the Essays which fill the five volumes of Mr. Carlyle's reprints of his contributions to Reviews. They are all distinguished, as might be supposed, by remarkable ability. If we might hint a fault, it would be that of prolixity. But in his reviews of Jean Paul Richter, of Goethe, and other works requiring a knowledge of German literature, the results of much study are given in a style of soft and silvery melody, which makes one wonder and regret that he should have been tempted to desert it. Mr. Carlyle understood himself, in the lecture on Johnson and Burns, to be addressing persons who had read his reviews of Croker's edition of Boswell in Frazer's Magazine, and of Lockhart's Life of Burns in the Edinburgh Review, both of which are here reprinted: they discover a very high degree of that free glance into the heart of men, which is the peculiar power of biographical criticism. We have compared his review of Johnson with another which is well-known and justly celebrated, and we have felt the gentle discrimination and philosophizing quietude of Carlyle to be even more delightful-though in a different way-than the trenchant criticisms and brilliant antitheses of Macauley.

The paper entitled CHARACTERISTICS, embodies within a comparatively small space the greater part of those opinions which Mr. Carlyle's writings are intended to illustrate and to spread. We are sorry that we have not room for some charming little poems in the third volume, and for a paper on Luther's Psalm.

PAST AND PRESENT seems to be the grand ascent of which 'Chartism' was a kind of pilot parachute. It is an attempt to illustrate, after a most quaint fashion, certain general views of National Economy, having a special reference to the Past history and Present condition and prospects of the British empire, for example: that England is poor and discontented in the midst of the richest abundance of material wealth;-that

* We understand that Mr. Carlyle is about to publish a Life of Cromwell.

the cause of this anomaly is found in our departure from the great laws of universal nature;-that justice is permanent, and will come out visibly in her retributions;-that insurrections are signs of national disease, which men in high places should study, but which men in low places should understand, gain little and waste much;-that on the whole the demands of the working classes are substantially just;-that a return to nature and justice is not yet hopeless;-that the Corn Laws are indefensible; that all quackery is an abomination;—that every man's misery is his own fault; and that every nation's misery is its own fault;--that we shall all, men and nations, be scourged till we learn that this is undeniable ;-that the aristocracy of talent is very desirable, but hard to find, and harder still to be appreciated ;—and, that reform, like charity, should begin at home.

The basis of this book is JoCELIN'S CHRONICLES, a Latin manuscript, published by the Camden Society. On this Saxon relique various remarks are founded; and its slender materials are worked up into a series of lively portraitures of monks and monastic, royal, and feudal doings in the twelfth century. These are followed by sundry chapters on the present, all tending to expose the hollowness of modern substitutes for sense, virtue and sound policy. The following may be taken as a fair specimen.

'And now do but contrast this Oliver with my right honourable friend Sir Jabesh Windbag, Mr. Facing-both-ways Viscount Mealymouth, Earl of Windlestraw, or what other Cagliostro, Cagliostrino, Cagliostraccio the course of fortune and parliamentary majorities has constitutionally guided to that dignity any time during these last sorrowful hundred and fifty years. Windbag, weak in the faith of a God, which he believes only at church on Sundays, if even then ; strong only in the faith that paragraphs and plausibilities bring votes; that force of public opinion, as he calls it, is the primal necessity of things, and highest God we have :-Windbag, if we will consider him, has a problem set before him which may be ranged in the impossible class. He is a Columbus, minded to sail to the indistinct country of NOWHERE, to the indistinct country of WHITHERWARD, by the friendship of those same waste tumbling Water-Alps and howling waltz of All the winds; not by conquest of them and in spite of them, but by friendship, when once they have made up their mind. He is the most original Columbus I ever saw. Nay, his problem is not an impossible one; he will infallibly arrive at that same country of Nowhere; his indistinct Whitherward will be a THITHERIn the ocean abysses and Locker of Davy Jones, there, certainly enough, do he and his ship's company, and all their cargo and navigatings, at last find lodgment. Oliver knew that his America lay there, Westward-ho;-and it was not entirely by friendship of the Water-Alps, and yeasty insane Froth Oceans, that he