deal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition
is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of ..."

The French Revolution.--In 1837 when Carlyle finished the third
volume of his historic masterpiece, _The French Revolution_, he handed
the manuscript to his wife for her criticism, saying: "This I could
tell the world: 'You have not had for a hundred years any book that
comes more direct and flamingly from the heart of a living man.'" His
Scotch blood boiled over the injustice to the French peasants. His
temperature begins to rise when he refers to the old law authorizing a
French hunter, if a nobleman, "to kill not more than two serfs."

Carlyle brings before us a vast stage where the actors in the French
Revolution appear: in the background, "five full-grown millions of
gaunt figures with their hungry faces"; in the foreground, one young
mother of seven children, "looking sixty years of age, although she is
not yet twenty-eight," and trying to respond to the call for seven
different kinds of taxes; and, also in the foreground, "a perfumed
Seigneur," taking part of the children's dinner. The scene changes;
the great individual actors in the Revolution enter: the tocsin
clangs; the stage is reddened with human blood and wreathed in flames.
We feel that we are actually witnessing that great historic tragedy.

Carlyle had something of Shakespeare's dramatic imagination, which
pierced to the heart of men and movements. More detailed and scholarly
histories of this time have been written; but no other historian has
equaled Carlyle in presenting the French Revolution as a human tragedy
that seems to be acted before our very eyes.

He did not attempt to write a complete history of the time. He used
the dramatist's legitimate privilege of selection. From a mass of
material that would have bewildered a writer of less ability, he chose
to present on the center of the stage the most significant actors and
picturesque incidents.

Carlyle's "Real Kings."--Carlyle believed that "universal history,
the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom
the history of the great men who have worked here." In accordance with
this belief, he studied, not the slow growth of the people, but the
lives of the world's great geniuses.

In his course of lectures entitled _Heroes and Hero Worship_ (1841),
he considers _The Hero as Prophet, The Hero as Poet, The Hero as
Priest_, and _The Hero as