" attracts and softens him. He grows enthusiastic and--a rare
thing for Carlyle--apologizes for his enthusiasm in the striking sentence,
"We love Burns, and we pity him; and love and pity are prone to magnify."
So he gives us the most tender and appreciative of his essays, and one of
the most illuminating criticisms of Burns that has appeared in our
language.

The central idea of Carlyle's historical works is found in his _Heroes and
Hero Worship_ (1841), his most widely read book. "Universal history," he
says, "is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here." To
get at the truth of history we must study not movements but men, and read
not state papers but the biographies of heroes. His summary of history as
presented in this work has six divisions: (1) The Hero as Divinity, having
for its general subject Odin, the "type Norseman," who, Carlyle thinks, was
some old heroic chief, afterwards deified by his countrymen; (2) The Hero
as Prophet, treating of Mahomet and the rise of Islam; (3) The Hero as
Poet, in which Dante and Shakespeare are taken as types; (4) The Hero as
Priest, or religious leader, in which Luther appears as the hero of the
Reformation, and Knox as the hero of Puritanism; (5) The Hero as Man of
Letters, in which we have the curious choice of Johnson, Rousseau, and
Burns; (6) The Hero as King, in which Cromwell and Napoleon appear as the
heroes of reform by revolution.

It is needless to say that _Heroes_ is not a book of history; neither is it
scientifically written in the manner of Gibbon. With science in any form
Carlyle had no patience; and he miscalculated the value of that patient
search for facts and evidence which science undertakes before building any
theories, either of kings or cabbages. The book, therefore, abounds in
errors; but they are the errors of carelessness and are perhaps of small
consequence. His misconception of history, however, is more serious. With
the modern idea of history, as the growth of freedom among all classes, he
has no sympathy. The progress of democracy was to him an evil thing, a
"turning of the face towards darkness and anarchy." At certain periods,
according to Carlyle, God sends us geniuses, sometimes as priests or poets,
sometimes as soldiers or statesmen; but in whatever guise they appear,
these are our real rulers. He shows, moreover, that whenever such men
appear, multitudes follow them, and that a man's following is a sure index
of his heroism