to build upon these foundations, to enlarge
our knowledge of these very heroes, and the estimates of Carlyle in the
first half of this century are for the most part so completely the
commonplaces of the English-speaking world at the close of the century,
that when we open the _Heroes_ again it is apt to seem obvious,
_connu_, the emphatic assertion of a truism that no one disputes. How
infinitely better do we now, in 1895, know Dante and Shakespeare,
Cromwell and Napoleon, than did our grandfathers in 1840! Who,
nowadays, imagines Mahomet to have been an impostor, or Burns to have
been a mere tipsy song-writer? What a copious literature has the last
half-century given us on Dante, on Islam and its spirit, on Rousseau,
on Burns, on the English and the French revolutions! But in 1840 the
true nature of these men was very faintly understood. Few people but
soldiers had the least chance of being called "heroes," and the "heroic
in history" was certainly not thought to include either poets,
preachers, or men of letters. _Heroes and Hero-Worship_, like the
_Cromwell_, has, in fact, done its work so completely that we find it a
little too familiar to need any constant reading or careful study.

To judge fairly all that Carlyle effected by his book on Heroes we must
put ourselves at the point of view of the time when it was written, the
days of Wellington and Melbourne, Brougham and Macaulay, Southey and
Coleridge. None of these men understood the heroic in Norse mythology,
or the grandeur of Oliver Cromwell, or the supreme importance of the
_Divina Commedia_ as the embodiment of Catholic Feudalism. All this
Carlyle felt as no Englishman before him had felt, and told us in a
voice which has since been accepted as conclusive. How far deeper is
the view of Carlyle about some familiar personality like Johnson than
is that of Macaulay, how much farther does Carlyle see into the
Shakesperean firmament than even Coleridge! How far better does he
understand Rousseau and Burns than did Southey, laureate and critic as
he was hailed in his time. The book is a collection of Lectures, and
we now know how entirely Carlyle loathed that kind of utterance, how
much he felt the restraints and limits it involved. And for that
reason, the book is the simplest and most easily legible of his works,
with the least of his mannerism and the largest concessions to the
written language of sublunary mortals. Nearly all the judgments he
passe