ts to his relatives
in Scotland, travels on the Continent, and interviews with distinguished
men. His mind at this period (1842) was most occupied with the sad
condition of the English people,--everywhere riots, disturbances,
physical suffering and abject poverty among the masses, for the Corn
Laws had not then been repealed; and to Carlyle's vision there was a
most melancholy prospect ahead,--not revolution, but universal
degradation, and the reign of injustice. This sad condition of the
people was contrasted in his mind with what it had been centuries
before, as it appeared from an old book which he happened to read,
Jocelin's Chronicles, which painted English life in the twelfth century.
He fancied that the world was going on from bad to worse; and in this
gloomy state of mind he wrote his "Past and Present," which appeared in
1843, and created a storm of anger as well as admiration. It was a sort
of protest against the political systems of economy then so popular.
Lockhart said of it that he could accept none of his friend's inferences
except one,--"that we were all wrong, and were all like to be damned."

Gloomy and satirical as the book was, it made a great impression on the
thinkers of the day, while it did not add to the author's popularity. It
seemed as if he were a prophet of wrath,--an Ishmaelite whose hand was
against everybody. He offended all political parties,--"the Tories by
his radicalism, and the Radicals by his scorn of their formulas; the
High Churchman by his Protestantism, and the Low Churchman by evident
unorthodoxy." Yet all parties and sects admitted that much that he said
was true, while at the same time they had no sympathy with his
fierce ravings.

For ten years after the publication of the "French Revolution" Carlyle
assumed the functions of a prophet, hurling anathemas and pronouncing
woes. To his mind everything was alike disjointed or false or
pretentious, in view of which he uttered groans and hisses and
maledictions. The very name of a society designed to ameliorate evils
seemed to put him into a passion. Every reformer appeared to him to be a
blind teacher of the blind. Exeter Hall, then the scene of every variety
of social and religious and political discussion, was to him a veritable
pandemonium. Everybody at that period of agitation and reform was giving
lectures, and everybody went to hear them; and Carlyle ridiculed them
all alike as pedlers of nostrums to heal diseases which wer