eeded in placing, any thing or person. He could not in the least
judge literature--of which he was so great a practitioner always, and
sometimes so great a judge--from the point of view of form: he would
have scorned to do so, and did scorn those who did so. His deficiencies
in abstract philosophy, whether political, theological, metaphysical,
or other, arise directly from this--that he could never contemplate any
of these things as abstract, but only in the common conduct of men
towards their fellows, towards themselves, and towards God. For Carlyle
never "forgot God," though he might speak unadvisedly with his lips of
other men's ways of remembering Him. The "human document," as later
slang has it, was in effect the only thing that interested him; and he
was content to employ it in constructing human history. More than once
he put his idea of this history formally under a formal title. But his
entire work is a much better exposition of that idea than these
particular essays; and it is not easy to open any page of it in which
the idea itself is not vividly illustrated and enforced upon the reader.

But once more, this is no place for even a summary, much less for a
discussion, of the much discussed Carlylian "Gospel of Work"; of its
apostle's less vague, but also less disputable, condemnations of shams
and cants; or of the innumerable applications and uses to which he put
these doctrines. The important thing for our purpose is that these
applications took form in thirty volumes of the most brilliant, the most
stimulating, the most varied, the most original work in English
literature. The titles of this work have been given; to give here any
notion of their contents would take the chapter. Carlyle could be--as in
the _Cromwell_, where he sets himself and confines himself to the double
task of elucidating his hero's rugged or crafty obscurities of speech
and writing and of piecing them into a connected history, or where he
wrestles with the huge accumulation of documents about Frederick--as
practical as the driest of Dry-as-dusts. But others could equal, though
few surpass him, in this. Where he stands alone is in a fantastic
fertility of divagation and comment which is as much his own as the
clear, neat directness of Macaulay is his. Much of it is due to his
gospel, or temper, or whatever it is to be called, of earnest suasion to
work and scornful denunciation of cant; something to his wide reading
and apt faculty of ill