the intelligence. This would have been the solid
foundation of the true hero-worship.

* * * * *

Let thus much have been said on the head of temperament. The historic
position also of every writer is an indispensable key to many things in
his teaching.[5] We have to remember in Mr. Carlyle's case, that he was
born in the memorable year when the French Revolution, in its narrower
sense, was closed by the Whiff of Grape-shot, and when the great century
of emancipation and illumination was ending darkly in battles and
confusion. During his youth the reaction was in full flow, and the lamp
had been handed to runners who not only reversed the ideas and methods,
but even turned aside from the goal of their precursors. Hopefulness and
enthusiastic confidence in humanity when freed from the fetters of
spiritual superstition and secular tyranny, marked all the most
characteristic and influential speculations of the two generations
before '89. The appalling failure which attended the splendid attempt to
realise these hopes in a renewed and perfected social structure, had no
more than its natural effect in turning men's minds back, not to the
past of Rousseau's imagination, but to the past of recorded history. The
single epoch in the annals of Europe since the rise of Christianity, for
which no good word could be found, was the epoch of Voltaire. The
hideousness of the Christian church in the ninth and tenth centuries was
passed lightly over by men who had only eyes for the moral obliquity of
the church of the Encyclopaedia. The brilliant but profoundly inadequate
essays on Voltaire and Diderot were the outcome in Mr. Carlyle of the
same reactionary spirit. Nobody now, we may suppose, who is competent to
judge, thinks that that estimate of 'the net product, of the tumultuous
Atheism' of Diderot and his fellow-workers, is a satisfactory account of
the influence and significance of the Encyclopaedia; nor that to sum up
Voltaire, with his burning passion for justice, his indefatigable
humanity, his splendid energy in intellectual production, his righteous
hatred of superstition, as merely a supreme master of _persiflage_, can
be a process partaking of finality. The fact that to the eighteenth
century belong the subjects of more than half of these thirty volumes,
is a proof of the fascination of the period for an author who has never
ceased to vilipend it. The saying is perhaps as true in these matters