ous of her rights, allows no interchange
of gifts. Even the many-sided Goethe could not, by whatever force of
will and practice, have written a bar in a symphony of Beethoven. In
his dominant aptitudes, Mr. Carlyle is not more one-sided than many
other intellectual potentates; but, like some others, his activity and
ambition have at times led him into paths where great deficiencies
disclose themselves by the side of great superiorities. His mind is
biographical, not historical; stronger in details than in
generalization; more intuitive than scientific; critical, not
constructive; literary, not philosophical. Mr. Carlyle is great at a
picture, very great; he can fail in a survey or an induction. Wealth
of thought, strokes of tenderness, clean insight into life, satire,
irony, humor, make his least successful volumes to teem with
passages noteworthy, beautiful, wise, as do his "Cromwell" and his
"Frederick." Such giants carrying nations on their broad fronts, Mr.
Carlyle, in writing their lives with duteous particularity, has
embraced the full story of the epoch in which each was the leader. To
him they are more than leaders. Herein he and Mr. Buckle stand at
opposite poles; Mr. Buckle underrating the protagonists of history,
them and their share of agency; Mr. Carlyle overrating them,--a
prejudicial one-sidedness in both cases. Leader and led are the
complements the one of the other.

History is a growth, and a slow growth. Evils in one age painfully sow
the seed that is to come up good in another. The historian, and still
more the critical commentator on his own times, needs to be patient,
calm, judicial, hopeful. Mr. Carlyle is impatient, fervid, willful,
nay, despotic, and he is not hopeful, not hopeful enough. One
healthily hopeful, and genuinely faithful, would not be ever betaking
him to the past as a refuge from the present; would not tauntingly
throw into the face of contemporaries an Abbot Sampson of the twelfth
century as a model. A judicial expounder would not cite one
single example as a characteristic of that age in contrast with this.
A patient, impartial elucidator, would not deride "ballot-boxes,
reform bills, winnowing machines:" he would make the best of these and
other tools within reach; or, if his part be to write and not to act,
would animate, not dishearten, those who are earnestly doing, and who,
by boldly striking at abuses, by steadily striving for more justice,
by aiming to lift up the down-tr