pecific evils, and are deeply
participant in too many, not to share the gloom and thank the
love and the courage of the counselor. This book is full of
humanity, and nothing is more excellent in this as in all Mr.
Carlyle's works than the attitude of the writer. He has the
dignity of a man of letters, who knows what belongs to him, and
never deviates from his sphere; a continuer of the great line of
scholars, and sustains their office in the highest credit and
honour. If the good heaven have any good word to impart to this
unworthy generation, here is one scribe qualified and clothed for
its occasion. One excellence he has in an age of Mammon and of
criticism, that he never suffers the eye of his wonder to close.
Let who will be the dupe of trifles, he cannot keep his eye oft
from that gracious Infinite which embosoms us.

As a literary artist he has great merits, beginning with the main
one that he never wrote one dull line. How well-read, how
adroit, what thousand arts in his one art of writing; with his
expedient for expressing those unproven opinions which he
entertains but will not endorse, by summoning one of his men of
straw from the cell,--and the respectable Sauerteig, or
Teufelsdrockh, or Dryasdust, or Picturesque Traveler, says what
is put into his mouth, and disappears. That morbid temperament
has given his rhetoric a somewhat bloated character; a luxury to
many imaginative and learned persons, like a showery south-wind
with its sunbursts and rapid chasing of lights and glooms over
the landscape, and yet its offensiveness to multitudes of
reluctant lovers makes us often wish some concession were
possible on the part of the humorist. Yet it must not be
forgotten that in all his fun of castanets, or playing of tunes
with a whip-lash like some renowned charioteers,--in all this
glad and needful venting of his redundant spirits, he does yet
ever and anon, as if catching the glance of one wise man in the
crowd, quit his tempestuous key, and lance at him in clear level
tone the very word, and then with new glee return to his game.
He is like a lover or an outlaw who wraps up his message in a
serenade, which is nonsense to the sentinel, but salvation to the
ear for which it is meant. He does not dodge the question, but
gives sincerity where it is due.

One word more respecting this remarkable style. We have in
literature few specimens of magnificence. Plato is the purple
ancient, and Bacon and Mil