odden, prepare, through such means as
are at hand, a better ground for the next generation. If to such
workers, instead of God-speed, a writer of force and influence gives
jeers and gibes, and ever-repeated shrieks about "semblance and
quackery, and cant and speciosity, and dilettantism," and deems
himself profound and original, as well as hopeful, when he exclaims:
"Dim all souls of men to the divine, the high and awful meaning of
human worth and truth, we shall never by all the machinery in
Birmingham discover the true and worthy:" in that case, does he not
expose him to the taunt of being himself very like a mouthing quack,
and his words, which should be cordial, brotherly, do they not partake
of the hollow quality of what Mr. Carlyle holds in such abhorrence,
namely, of cant? The sick lion crouches growling in his lair;
he cannot eat, and he will not let others eat.

Many grateful and admiring readers Mr. Carlyle wearies with his
ever-recurrent fallacy that might is right. In Heaven's name, what are
all the shams whose presence he so persistently bemoans,--worldly
bishops, phantasm-aristocracies, presumptuous upstarts, shallow
sway-wielding dukes,--what are all these, and much else, but so many
exemplications of might that is not right? When might shall cease to
bully, to trample on right, we shall be nearing Utopia. Utopia may be
at infinite distance, not attainable by finite men; but as surely as
our hearts beat, we are gradually getting further from its opposite,
the coarse rule of force and brutality, such rule as in the twelfth
century was rife all around "Abbot Sampson."

Like unto this moral fallacy is an aesthetic fallacy which, through
bright pages of criticism, strikes up at times to vitiate a judgment.
"I confess," says Mr. Carlyle, "I have no notion of a truly great man
that could not be all sorts of men." Could Newton have written the
"Fairy Queen?" Could Spenser have discovered the law of gravitation?
Could Columbus have given birth to "Don Quixote?" One of Mr.
Carlyle's military heroes tried hard to be a poet. Over Frederick's
verses, how his friend Voltaire must have grinned. "I cannot
understand how a Mirabeau, with that great glowing heart, with the
fire that was in it, with the bursting tears that were in it, could
not have written verses, tragedies, poems, and touched all hearts in
that way, had his course of life and education led him thitherward."
Thus Mr. Carlyle writes in "Heroes and Hero-W