yet faded for
England when Mr. Carlyle began his career; nor in the field of public
action can the most prolific era of Greece or of England hold up, for
the admiration of the world and the pride of fellow-countrymen, two
agents more deservedly crowned with honor and gratitude than Nelson
and Wellington. Here are two leaders, who, besides exhibiting rare
personal prowess and quick-eyed military genius on fields of vast
breadth, and in performances of unwonted magnitude and momentousness,
were, moreover, by their great, brave deeds, most palpably
saving England, saving Europe, from the grasp of an inexorable despot.
Surely these were heroes of a stature to have strained to its utmost
the reverence and the love of a genuine hero-worshipper. On the ten
thousand luminous pages of Mr. Carlyle they find no place. Not only
are their doings not celebrated, that they lived is scarce
acknowledged.

Even when its objects are the loftiest and the most honored, jealousy
is not a noble form of

"The last infirmity of noble mind."

Does Mr. Carlyle feel that Nelson and Wellington, Coleridge, Shelley,
Keats, and Wordsworth, stand already so broad and high that they chill
him with their shadow, and that therefore he will not, by eulogy, or
even notice, add to their altitude? Is he repeating the littleness of
Byron, who was jealous not only of his contemporaries, Napoleon, and
Wellington, and Wordsworth, but was jealous of Shakespeare? That a pen
which, with zestful animation, embraces all contemporaneous things,
should be studiously silent about almost every one of the dozen men of
genius who illustrate his era, is a fact so monstrous, that one is
driven to monstrous devices to divulge its motive. In such a case it
is impossible to premise to what clouds of self-delusion an
imaginative man will not rise.

Writing of Thomas Carlyle, the last words must not be censorious
comments on a weakness; we all owe too much to his strength; he is too
large a benefactor. Despite over-fondness for Frederick and the like,
and what may be termed a pathological drift towards political
despotism, how many quickening chapters has he not added to the
"gospel of freedom"? Flushed are his volumes with generous pulses,
with delicate sympathies. From many a page what cordialities step
forth to console and to fortify us; what divine depths we come upon;
what sudden vistas of sunshine through tempest-shaken shadows; what
bursts of splendor through nebul