taught us to separate
these two sides of a man, and we have learnt from him to love Samuel
Johnson without reading much or a word that the old sage wrote.
'Sterling and I walked westward,' he says once, 'arguing copiously, but
_except_ in opinion not disagreeing.'

It is none the less for what has just been said a weightier and a rarer
privilege for a man to give a stirring impulse to the moral activity of
a generation, than to write in classic style; and to have impressed the
spirit of his own personality deeply upon the minds of multitudes of
men, than to have composed most of those works which the world is said
not willingly to let die. Nor, again, is to say that this higher renown
belongs to Mr. Carlyle, to underrate the less resounding, but most
substantial, services of a definite kind which he has rendered both to
literature and history. This work may be in time superseded with the
advance of knowledge, but the value of the first service will remain
unimpaired. It was he, as has been said, 'who first taught England to
appreciate Goethe;' and not only to appreciate Goethe, but to recognise
and seek yet further knowledge of the genius and industry of Goethe's
countrymen. His splendid drama of the French Revolution has done, and
may be expected long to continue to do, more to bring before our
slow-moving and unimaginative public the portentous meaning of that
tremendous cataclysm, than all the other writings on the subject in the
English language put together. His presentation of Puritanism and the
Commonwealth and Oliver Cromwell first made the most elevating period of
the national history in any way really intelligible. The Life of
Frederick the Second, whatever judgment we may pass upon its morality,
or even upon its place as a work of historic art, is a model of
laborious and exhaustive narration of facts not before accessible to the
reader of history. For all this, and for much other work eminently
useful and meritorious even from the mechanical point of view, Mr.
Carlyle deserves the warmest recognition. His genius gave him a right to
mock at the ineffectiveness of Dryasdust, but his genius was also too
true to prevent him from adding the always needful supplement of a
painstaking industry that rivals Dryasdust's own most strenuous toil.
Take out of the mind of the English reader of ordinary cultivation and
the average journalist, usually a degree or two lower than this, their
conceptions of the French Revolut