The forms of government appear to him almost without meaning; such subjects as the extension of suffrage, the guarantee of any kind of political right, are evidently in his eyes pitiful things, materialism more or less disguised. What he requires is that men should grow morally better, that the number of just men should increase: one wise man more in the world would be to him a fact of more importance than ten political revolutions.

At the Atheneum I read Carlyle's Trash—Latterday something or other—beneath criticism—yet his evidence before the Commissioners of the British Museum is even more absurd. Surely the world will not be duped for ever by such an empty-headed bombastic dunce.

Then—with confessional tears—I tried, through something Haldane said when I told him you had been reading Carlyle's French Revolution, to read his Frederic the Great. I couldn't do more than the first volume. The manner drove me wild. The continuous exhibition of the Medicine-Man's paraphernalia made it like a mad mullah's dance.

I found him as usual sitting at his table, but evidently in a condition of great suppressed irritability; with Mill's treatise On Liberty lying before him... [H]e rose angrily from the table with the book in his hand, and gave vent to such a torrent of anathema (glancing at Christianity itself, as if Christianity had been the inspiration of it), as filled me with pain and amazement. He addressed himself directly to me, almost as if I had written the book, or had sent it to him, or was in some way mixed up with it in his mind. I felt terribly hurt; but what could I say in protest against such a wide-rushing torrent of invective? ... I know the book well enough now, and the ghastly issues to which it inevitably points, with its accurate balancing of enlightened self-interests, and its deification of every man's own heart; and I will only say that, putting myself honestly in Carlyle's place, I do not wonder that his indignation was beyond endurance. It must have been to him, in the incisiveness of its attack and the taking popularity of its style, like a vision of the great red dragon standing triumphant before him, ready to devour the fruit of his soul's travail as soon as it was born. Since that day, I have never heard him express more utter abhorrence of anything than I have, more than once in late years, heard him express of the crowing, God denying, death-stricken spirit, now making such ‘great signs’ with our fashionable sciences and life-philosophies,—and all the world wondering after it!

It is really, as Coleridge I think said of something else, like reading a story by flashes of lightning!

About that age [16], or perhaps a year later, a friend sent me Sartor Resartus, and one of the most abiding remembrances of those days is the attic in which I used to read by the light only of my collier's lamp whilst going through Carlyle's most impressive book. I felt I was in the presence of some great power, the meaning of which I could only dimly guess at. I mark the reading of Sartor, however, as a real turning point, and went through the book three times in succession until the spirit of it somewhat entered into me. Since then I have learned much of the human failings and weaknesses of Carlyle, but I still remain a worshipper at his shrine. He was, indeed, to me in those days a hero, more particularly when Past and Present and the French Revolution followed in the wake of Sartor.

For Cromwell, the primary authority is Mr. Carlyle's "Life and Letters," an invaluable store of documents, edited with the care of an antiquarian and the genius of a poet.

If the "Frederick" thus fails both as a biography and a history of the reign and adds little to knowledge, it is none the less full of purple patches. It has been called the largest and most varied show-box in historical literature. Mrs. Carlyle, an exacting critic, pronounced it the best of her husband's works. It exhibits an undiminished power of mise-en-scène, freshness of humour, and mastery of character-painting. Emerson pronounced it the wittiest book ever written. Carlyle never composed anything more brilliant than the story of Voltaire's visit to Potsdam, and the portraits of the rulers of Europe are in his best style.

I have recently been reading Thomas Carlyle's book on Frederick the Great. This biography is extraordinarily instructive and uplifting. Carlyle is an ardent admirer of Frederick the Great and the picture he draws of his life is that of an heroic epic.

He was a teacher and a prophet in the Jewish sense of the word. The prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah have become a part of the permanent spiritual inheritance of mankind, because events proved that they had interpreted correctly the signs of their own times, and their prophecies were fulfilled. Carlyle, like them, believed that he had a special message to deliver to the present age. Whether he was correct in that belief, and whether his message was a true message, remains to be seen. He has told us that our most cherished ideas of political liberty, with their kindred corollaries, are mere illusions, and that the progress which has seemed to go along with them is a progress towards anarchy and social dissolution. If he was wrong, he has misused his powers. The principles of his teaching are false. He has offered himself as a guide upon a road of which he had no knowledge; and his own desire for himself would be the speediest oblivion both of his person and his works. If, on the other hand, he has been right; if, like his great predecessors, he has read truly the tendencies of this modern age of ours, and his teaching is authenticated by facts, then Carlyle, too, will take his place among the inspired seers, and he will shine on, another fixed star in the intellectual sky.Time only can show how this will be.