t phrase, and graphic power, which may be found
scattered through Mr Carlyle's best performances, there is here a
substratum of sheer and violent absurdity, which all these together
would fail to disguise or compensate. Certainly there are pages of
writing in this Introduction which contain such an amount of extravagant
assertion, uttered in such fantastic jargon, as we think could nowhere
be paralleled. Dulness could never have attained to any thing so
extraordinary; and surely genius never before condescended to such
workmanship.

"What and how great," thus commences the book, "are the interests which
connect themselves with the hope that England may yet attain to some,
practical belief and understanding of its history during the seventeenth
century, need not be insisted on at present, such hope being still very
distant, very uncertain. We have wandered far away from the ideas which
guided us in that century, _and indeed which had guided us in all
preceding centuries, but of which that century was the ultimate
manifestation_. We have wandered very far, and must endeavour to return
and connect ourselves therewith again! It is with other feelings than
those of poor peddling dilettantism, other aims than the writing of
successful or unsuccessful publications, that an earnest man occupies
himself in those dreary provinces of the dead and buried. The _last
glimpse of the godlike_ vanishing from this England; conviction and
veracity giving place to hollow cant and formalism--antique 'Reign of
God,' which all true men in their several dialects and modes have always
striven for, giving place to the modern reign of the No-God, whom men
name devil; this, in its multitudinous meanings and results, is a sight
to create reflections in the earnest man! One wishes there were a
history of English Puritanism, _the last of all our heroisms_, but sees
small prospect of such a thing at present."

Then, beginning to quote himself, as his manner is, changing his voice
and adopting another key, as if by this thin disguise to obtain somewhat
more license for the wildness and vehemence of his speech--an artifice
surely not necessary here--he thus continues:--

"'Few nobler heroisms,' says a well-known writer, long occupied on this
subject, 'at bottom, perhaps, _no nobler heroism_, ever transacted
itself on this earth; and it lies as good as lost to us, overwhelmed
under such an avalanche of human stupidities as no heroism before ever
did.