ethought. Some Christians
claim Goethe as really one of themselves, but Mr. Watkinson will have
none of him. "The actual life of Goethe," he tells us, "was seriously
defective." Perhaps so, and the same might have been said of hundreds
of Christian teachers who lived when he did, had they been big enough
to have their lives written for posterity. Goethe's fault was a too
inflammable heart, and with the license of his age, which was on the
whole remarkably pious, he courted more than one pretty woman; or, if
the truth must be told, he did not repel the pretty women who threw
themselves at him. But there were thousands of orthodox men who acted in
the same way. The distinctive fact about Goethe is that he kept a high
artistic ideal always before him, and cultivated his poetic gifts
with tireless assiduity. His sensual indulgences were never allowed to
interfere with his great aim in life, and surely that is something. The
result is that the whole world is the richer for his labors, and only
the Watkinsons can find any delight in dwelling on the failings he
possessed in common with meaner mortals. To say that Goethe should be
"an object of horror to the whole self-respecting world" is simply to
indulge in the twang of the tabernacle.

Carlyle is the next sinner; but, curiously, the _Rock_, while praising
Mr. Watkinson's lecture, says that "Carlyle ought not to be classed with
the sceptics." We dissent from the _Rock_ however; and we venture to
think that Carlyle's greatest fault was a paltering with himself
on religious subjects. His intellect rejected more than his tongue
disowned. Mr. Watkinson passes a very different criticism. Taking
Carlyle as a complete sceptic, he proceeds to libel him by a process
which always commends itself to the preachers of the gospel of charity.
He picks from Mr. Froude's four volumes a number of tid-bits, setting
forth Carlyle's querulousness, arrogance, and domestic storms with Mrs.
Carlyle. Behold the man! exclaims Mr. Watkinson. Begging his pardon,
it is not the man at all. Carlyle was morbidly sensitive by nature,
he suffered horribly from dyspepsia, and intense literary labor, still
further deranging his nerves, made him terribly irritable. But he had a
fine side to his nature, and even a sunny side. Friends like Professor
Tyndall, Professor Norton, Sir James Stephen, and Mrs. Gilchrist, saw
Carlyle in a very different light from Mr. Froude's. Besides, Mrs.
Carlyle made her own choice.