_. Certainly
no man of sense can find any serious guidance on any definite social
problem from these "Pamphlets" of his morbid decline. Carlyle at last
sat eating his heart out, like Napoleon on St. Helena. His true
friends will hasten to throw such a decent covering as Japhet and Shem
threw around Noah, over the latest melancholy outbursts about Negroes,
Reformers, Jamaica massacres, and the anticipated conflagration of
Paris by the Germans. It is pitiful indeed to find in "the collected
and revised works," thirty-six volumes, the drivel of his Pro-Slavery
advocacy, and of ill-conditioned snarling at honest men labouring to
reform ancient abuses.

It is perilous for any man, however consummate be his genius, to place
himself on a solitary rock apart from all living men and defiant of all
before him, as the sole source of truth out of his own inner
consciousness. It is fatal to any man, however noble his own spirit,
to look upon this earth as "one fuliginous dust-heap," and the whole
human race as a mere herd of swine rushing violently down a steep place
into the sea. Nor can the guidance of mankind be with safety entrusted
to one who for eighty-six years insisted on remaining by his own
hearth-stone a mere omnivorous reader and omnigenous writer of books.
Carlyle was a true and pure "man of letters," looking at things and
speaking to men, alone in his study, through the medium of printed
paper. All that a "man of letters," of great genius and lofty spirit,
could do by consuming and producing mere printed paper, he did. And as
the "supreme man of letters" of his time he will ever be honoured and
long continue to be read. He deliberately cultivated a form of speech
which made him unreadable to all except English-speaking readers, and
intelligible only to a select and cultivated body even amongst them.
He wrote in what, for practical purposes, is a local, or rather
personal, dialect. And thus he deprived himself of that world-wide and
European influence which belongs to such men as Hume, Gibbon, Scott,
Byron--even to Macaulay, Tennyson, Dickens, Ruskin, and Spencer. But
his name will stand beside theirs in the history of British thought in
the nineteenth century; and a devoted band of chosen readers, wherever
the Anglo-Saxon tongue is heard, will for generations to come continue
to drink inspiration from the two or three masterpieces of the
Annandale peasant-poet.

III

LORD MACAULAY

Macaulay, who