meant to get thither. He sailed according; had compass-card, and rules of navigation-older and greater than these Froth Oceans, old as the Eternal God! Or again, do but think. Windbag in these his probable five years of office has to prosper and get paragraphs: the paragraphs of these five years must be his salvation, or he is a lost man; redemption no where in the Worlds or in the Times discoverable for him. Oliver too would like his paragraphs; successes, popularities in these five years are not undesirable to him; but mark, I say, this Enormous circumstance: after these five years are gone and done, comes an eternity for Oliver. Oliver has to appear before the Most High Judge: the utmost flow of Paragraphs, the utmost ebb of them, is now in strictest arithmetic, verily no matter at all; its exact value zero; an account altogether erased! Enormous ;-which a man, in these days, hardly fancies with an effort! Oliver's paragraphs are all done, his battles, division-lists, successes, all summed; and now in that awful unerring Court of Review, the real question first rises, whether he has succeeded at all? whether he has not been defeated miserably for evermore? Let him come with world-wide, Io pæans, these avail him not. Let him come covered over with the world's execrations, gashed with ignominious death-wounds, the gallows-rope about his neck: what avails that? The word is, Come thou brave and faithful; the word is, Depart quack and accursed! O Windbag, my right honourable friend, in very truth I pity thee. I say, these paragraphs, and low or loud votings of thy poor fellow-blockheads of mankind will never guide thee in any enterprise at all. Govern a country on such guidance? Thou canst not make a pair of shoes, sell a pennyworth of tape, on such. No, thy shoes are vamped up falsely to meet the market; behold the leather only seemed to be tanned; thy shoes melt under me to rubbishy pulp, and are not veritable mud-defying shoes, but plausible, vendible similitudes of shoes-thou unfortunate and — I! O my right honourable friend, when the paragraphs flowed in who was like Sir Jabesh? On the swelling tide he mounted; higher, higher, triumphant, heaven-high. But the paragraphs again ebbed out, as unwise paragraphs needs must: Sir Jabesh lies stranded, sunk and for ever sinking in ignominious ooze; the mud-nymphs, and ever-deepening bottomless oblivion, his portion to eternal time. Posterity! Thou appealest to posterity, thou? My right honourable friend, what will posterity do for thee? The voting of posterity, were it continued through centuries in thy favour, will be quite inaudible, extra-forensic, without any effect whatever. Posterity can do simply nothing for a man; not even seem to do much, if the man be not brainsick. Besides, to tell the truth, the bets are a thousand to one, posterity will not hear of thee, my right honourable friend! Posterity, I have found, has generally his own Windbags sufficiently trumpeted in all market-places, and no leisure to attend to ours. Posterity, which has made of Norse-Odin a similitude, and of Norman William a brute monster, what will or can it make of English Jabesh? O Heavens, Posterity'?

These poor persecuted Scotch Covenanters,' said I to my in

quiring Frenchman, in such stinted French as stood at command, 'ils s'en appelaient à'-' A la Postérité,' interrupted he, helping me out.-Ah, Monsieur, non, mille fois non! They appealed to the Eternal God, not to posterity at all!' C'était différent.'-pp. 299

-302.

We may now fulfil our promise of presenting what we wish to be a fair view of Mr. Carlyle as an English writer. We are the more disposed to do this, because in such critical notices of him as have come in our way, and in the general tone of alluding to him in some literary and religious circles, we do not think that he is justly appreciated. This is very much his own fault. His style is queer; and its queerness is increased by an apparent straining after eccentricities of expression, which is unworthy alike of his genius, of his attainments in polite literature, and of the delicious proofs he has given of ability to do better. We have not the vanity to think that he who wrote the Essay on Novalis, would condescend to read what we have here written, or if he did, that we could do any good by shewing him that our admiration is discouraged by such blemishes as are scattered through these volumes. But, in accounting for the distaste we find towards his writings, we stumble at once on this fact that these blemishes stare every reader in the face. We are not advocates for a rigid uniformity of the dress. in which men clothe their thoughts: for we have been nauseated a thousand times with the tricking out of common notions and trite images in language borrowed, and in periods imitated, from those masters of composition who always wrote as they thought and felt; neither can we sympathise with the Anti-German prejudice, which talks with ignorant flippancy of mysticism and pantheism, and neology, and other bugbears which fright our good English isle from its propriety for we are of opinion that the philosophers and poets of Germany are worth understanding, and that they will in due time be understood in England;-still we hold that our own idioms are of too much value to be cast away; that there is in them a power for us which every writer of our language ought to reverence; and that neither philosophy nor taste allows us to abandon them for grotesque and barbarous novelties. We have outlived the euphuisms of the age of James, and the Gallicisms of a later day. We barely tolerate the unwieldy latinity of Johnson. There is a ripeness in the best parts of our most admired authors which will be felt and relished wherever our language is spoken. All men who have power to instruct and interest the English mind would do well to lay to heart the words of Sir Philip Francis to Burke: Once for all I wish you would let me teach you to write English: to me, who

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am to read every thing you write, it would be a great comfort, and to you no sort of disparagement. Why will you not allow yourself to be persuaded that polish is essential to preservation?' Mr. Carlyle's sentences are sometimes vague diffuse - labouring to say something which is not said. He is now and then most provokingly heavy and prosy. Very often there is a sneer of contemptuousness: as when he treats us to such elegancies as 'brother blockhead' 'goose'—'ass' 'poor devil' a class of substantives not much improved by transplantation from the slang of the rabble, and not very particularly adapted to improve either the manners or the dialect of the young gentlemen who can afford to read the not extravagantly cheap merchandize of Mr. Carlyle. The vexatious part of it is that these odious vulgarities intrude on us in company with so much that is chaste, exquisitely polished, and delightful for its originality.-A more serious objection lies against the ambiguity that shrouds some of our author's opinions. We do not say that this is studied. Yet we trace throughout a great part of his compositions a sort of lurking fondness for putting his reader on the wrong scent: there are some clumsy devices of this kind to be placed to the account of those inconsistencies which most men have to answer for, and which make an inconvenient demand on our confidence in this gentleman's exercise of that one virtue which, with much earnestness, he preaches to his brother men-sincerity.

We have examined these volumes at separate periods of leisure, with a deep sense of our responsibility as writers who profess to regard human life as intended for nobler work than literature, and who are more concerned for the purity of our national religious belief than for any other interest. We are far from thinking that Mr. Carlyle is what is meant by being a pantheist. We could quote many admirably expressed passages to prove that he is not. Few writers indeed so often suggest the recollection of an eternal Creator, a moral ruler of the world. Yet in his quotations, genuine or simulated, from favourite books, and in his unfolding of his idea of the world, there are things which startle healthy minds, and which drive sickly minds off to regions of mist, where neither truth nor happiness, nor virtue, has been ever known to flourish.

We cannot say that we are at all edified by his frequent mode of using Scripture language. We are pained, rather, and some. times shocked. It may be prejudice: nay, we know it to be prejudice; but are there not prejudices which it is safe to have, and not safe to tamper with? It is no part of our pleasure in reading Mr. Carlyle's writings, that we are sometimes made to feel as though he did not understand Christianity, seeing that he takes upon him to say civil things in its favour, as a

most respectable part of a series of enlightenments, all tending to the grand millennium of poetic manhood, forming, along with Paganism, Islamism, and Goethism, the true religion of our world. The levelling of the Hebrew prophets with poets; the confounding of the natural with the super-natural; the more than doubt (as we read) of miracles in the proper meaning of that word, and of inspiration in the distinctive sense attached to it by christians, are not unlikely to excite the suspicions which may be sighed over as contracted, or ridiculed as 'Methodism; but men who are neither fools, bigots, nor methodists, -nor unfamiliar with the wells at which Mr. Carlyle has been drawing, are prepared to justify these suspicions by clear reasonings and manly sentiments. If Mr. Carlyle does not believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, we are sorry to confess that he is not the first man of genius who has given no sign of having examined the proofs that He did; but if he does believe that fundamental miracle of christianity, we cannot congratulate him on his treatment of our faith and we are free to say that this particular feature in his publications will do more harm than all the rest can possibly do good. We use no stinted phrases in our praise of much that he has written. We greatly admire his natural originality of thought, his fertile suggestiveness, his fine analogies, his pictorial vividness, his conversation-like familiarity, his quiet fun, his hatred of dead formalisms, his love of poetry and learning, his sympathy with man, his exposure of cant and hypocrisy, his fair appreciation of what is good, or great, or beautiful, wherever he can find it; and we are confident of the wisdom and the humanity of his aims; but we cannot look at one or two tendencies of his productions, without perceiving that he has not touched the core of the disease which he exhibits with so much power, and that therefore he is not the physician in whose prescriptions the remedy is to be found. If he would follow out some of the views of actual human nature which he has opened, comparing them with the ideal of the gospel; if he would follow out some of the views of christianity which he has glanced at; if he would look more thoughtfully and more believingly at the high question,' how christianity originated; if he would lay aside essays on miracles for patient study of the miracles themselves; if he would devoutly grasp the grand distinctive peculiarities of the new covenant-which lie deeper than the sage of Wilhelm Meister penetrated, and yet are open to the unsophisticated mind of every genuine believer; if he would clear his mind of cant' on one side as well as on the other, we should then hope to hail him as a writer worthy of higher reverence than any his past works have yet deserved on his behalf.

of

His dreams admit of generous interpretation; we cheerfully

adopt it; but until he has written in a vein more congenial with the spirit of revealed truth, we will accord to him, as heartily as he could wish, the title of wise man,' or 'poet;' but not that of martyr to the true religion, which is to heal our suffering and distracted world. The effects of Mr. Carlyle's writings, like those of any other man, will be modified by all the other influences which act on the minds of readers: his followers and imitators will be no exception, we fear, to the general rule in such cases-they will miss his excellencies, and they will exaggerate his faults. It has been our lot to mark this influence in the first, the second, the third, and even yet lower degrees.

We hold it to be no small advantage to have the attacks of such a writer made with so much frequency and force on the persiflage-the pretension-the apeing-the hollowness-the hypocrisy-which for a long time has been eating like a cankerworm, the strength and pith of English society. To follow him in this noble and manly path is honourable; and we will indulge the hope that his writings will increase the number of such followers.

It is no small advantage which we expect to be derived from the study of these writings, by inducing his readers to think,— to examine the meaning and the power of English words,-to look into the foundations of institutions,-to meditate on the import of facts around them,-to generalize their views,-to learn wisdom from all ages, and from all nations, -to feel and to act for man at large, and for ages yet to come. There is, of course, some danger, as Mr. Carlyle's favourite German writers have painfully illustrated by their example, of generalizing so far as to confound the practicable with the unattainable, and to merge the supernatural in the natural. For preventing this, we must place some reliance on that attachment to the results of actual experience, and that thorough grounding in fundamental principles and distinctions, which we conceive to be the marked superiority of the English over the German education. But on this we cannot rely without some security that the guides of our English youth will themselves master the peculiarities of those Germanisms which writers like Mr. Carlyle are pouring into our literature, honestly examining them, sifting them, and bringing them to those tests which cannot but be familiar to the disciples of Bacon, Newton, and Butler. We may add, that we hold it to be no light matter that Mr. Carlyle should have done so much, and, on the whole, have done it so well, to bring the English reader into some acquaintance with the teeming and varied literature of our German brothers. We have been greatly struck when conversing with learned Germans in their own country, with their notions of the insular and onesided literature of Englishmen. It seemed to them that we