and
egotistical. The critic ascribes his power to ridicule,--a Lucian, who
destroyed but did not reconstruct; worldly, material, sceptical,
defiant, utterly lacking that earnestness without which nothing
permanently great can be effected. Carlyle says:--

"Voltaire read history, not with the eye of a devout seer, or even
critic, but through a pair of mere anti-Catholic spectacles. It is not a
mighty drama, enacted on the theatre of infinitude, with suns for lamps
and eternity as a background, whose author is God and whose purport
leads to the throne of God, but a poor, wearisome debating-club dispute,
spun through ten centuries, between the Encyclopedie and the Sorbonne."

Carlyle's essays for the next two years, chiefly on German literature,
which he admired and sought to introduce to his countrymen, were
published in various Reviews. I can only allude to one on Richter, whose
whimsicality of style he unconsciously copied, and whose original ideas
he made his own. In this essay Carlyle introduced to the English people
a great German, but a grotesque, whose writings will probably never be
read much out of Germany, excellent as they are, on account of the
"jarring combination of parentheses, dashes, hyphens, figures without
limit, one tissue of metaphors and similes, interlaced with epigrammatic
bursts and sardonic turns,--a heterogeneous, unparalleled imbroglio of
perplexity and extravagance." There was another, on Schiller, not an
idol to Carlyle as Goethe was, yet a great poet and a true man, with
deep insight and intense earnestness. "His works," said Carlyle, "and
the memory of what he was, will arise afar off, like a towering landmark
in the solitude of the past, when distance shall have dwarfed into
invisibility many lesser people that once encompassed him, and hid them
forever from the near beholder."

Thus far Carlyle had confined himself to biography and essays on German
literature, in which his extraordinary insight is seen; but now he
enters another field, and writes a strictly original essay, called
"Characteristics," published in the Edinburgh Review in the prolific
year of 1831, in which essay we see the germs of his philosophy. The
article is hard to read, and is disfigured by obscurities which leave a
doubt on the mind of the reader as to whether the author understood the
subject about which he was writing,--for Carlyle was not a philosopher,
but a painter and prose-poet. There is no stream of logic ru