and
refinement and wisdom; and therefore, bitterly as we may feel the
suffering of the poor orator, we say to him, "Wait a little, and talk to
us. I do not touch politics--I loathe place-hunters and talkers as much
as you do; but you are speaking about reversing the course of the ages,
and you cannot quite manage that. Let us forget the windy war of the
place-hunters, and speak reasonably and in a broad human way."

I do not by any means hold with those very robust literary characters
who want to see the principle of stern Drill carried into the most
minute branchings of our complex society. (By-the-way, these robust
gentry always put a capital "D" to the word "Drill," as though they
would have their precious principle enthroned as an object of reverence,
or even of worship.) And I am inclined to think that not a few of them
must have experienced a severe attack of wrath when they found Carlyle
suggesting that King Friedrich Wilhelm would have laid a stick across
the shoulders of literary men had he been able to have his own way. The
unfeeling old king used to go about thumping people in the streets with
a big cudgel; and Carlyle rather implies that the world would not have
been much the worse off if a stray literary man here and there could
have been bludgeoned. The king flogged apple-women who did not knit and
loafers who were unable to find work; and our historian apparently
fancies that the dignity of kingship would have been rather enhanced
than otherwise had his hero broken the head of a poet or essayist. This
is a clear case of a disciplinarian suffering from temporary
derangement. I really cannot quite stomach such heroic and sweeping
work. Carlyle, who was a Scotch peasant by birth, raised himself until
he was deservedly regarded as the greatest man of his day, and he did
this by means of literature; yet he coolly sets an ignorant, cruel,
crowned drill-serjeant high above the men of the literary calling. It is
a little too much! Suppose that Carlyle had been flogged back to the
plough-tail by some potentate when he first went to the University;
should we not have heard a good deal of noise about the business sooner
or later? Again, we find Mr. Froude writing somewhat placidly when he
tells us about the men who were cut to pieces slowly in order that their
agony might be prolonged. The description of the dismemberment of
Ballard and the rest, as given in the "Curiosities of Literature," is
too gratuitously horri