orship." If Mirabeau, why
not Savonarola, or Marcus Aurelius. In that case a "Twelfth Night," or
an "Othello," might have come from Luther. Nature does not work so
loosely. Rich is she, unspeakably rich, and as artful as she is
profuse in the use of her riches. She delights in variety, thence her
ineffable radiance, and much of her immeasurable efficiency.
Diverseness in unity is a source of her power as well as of her
beauty. Her wealth of material being infinite, her specifications are
endless, countless, superfinely minute. Even no two of the commonest
men does she make alike; her men of genius she diversifies at once
grandly and delicately, broadly and subtly. "Petrarch and Boccaccio
did diplomatic messages," says Mr. Carlyle. We hope they did,
or could have done, in the prosaic field, much better than that. We
Americans know with what moderate equipment diplomatic messages may be
done.

On poetry and poets Mr. Carlyle has written many of his best pages,
pages penetrating, discriminative, because so sympathetic, and
executed with the scholar's care and the critic's culture. His early
papers on Goethe and Burns, published more than forty years ago, made
something like an epoch in English criticism. Seizing the value and
significance of genuine poetry, he exclaims in "Past and
Present,"--"Genius, Poet! do we know what these words mean? An
inspired soul once more vouchsafed us, direct from Nature's own great
fire-heart, to see the truth, and speak it and do it." On the same
page he thus taunts his countrymen: "We English find a poet, as brave
a man as has been made for a hundred years or so anywhere under the
sun; and do we kindle bonfires, thank the gods? Not at all. We, taking
due counsel of it, set the man to gauge ale-barrels in the Burgh of
Dumfries, and pique ourselves on our 'patronage of genius.'" "George
the Third is Defender of something we call 'the Faith' in
those years. George the Third is head charioteer of the destinies of
England, to guide them through the gulf of French Revolutions,
American Independences; and Robert Burns is gauger of ale in
Dumfries." Poor George the Third! One needs not be a craniologist to
know that the eyes which looked out from beneath that retreating
pyramidal forehead could see but part even of the commonest men and
things before them. How could they see a Robert Burns? To be sure, had
Dundas, or whoever got Burns the place of gauger, given him one of the
many sinecures of tw