'Speak your opinions of to-day,' says Carlyle, 'in words hard as rocks, and your opinions of to-morrow in words just as hard, even though your opinions of to-morrow may contradict your opinions of to-day.'

a question which Mr. Carlyle clenches by the addition, What right, a short time ago, hadst thou even to be?

one says to oneself in despair, re-echoing Mr. Carlyle.

And yet, after all, man will write poetry, in spite of Mr. Carlyle: nay, beings who are not men, but mere forked radishes, will write it.

It is better, with Mr. Carlyle's leave, to believe that the existence of poetry indicates some universal human hunger, whether after "the beautiful," or after "fame," or after the means of paying butchers' bills, and accepting it as a necessary evil which must be committed, to see that it be committed as well, or at least a little ill, as possible.

In excuse of which we may quote Mr. Carlyle against himself, reminding him of a saying in Goethe once bepraised by him in print,"we must take care of the beautiful for the useful will take care of itself.

Nor is the first order always more constructive; for Byron, Oscar Wilde, and Larochefoucauld did not get further in positive philosophy than Ruskin and Carlyle, though they could snuff Ruskin's Seven Lamps with their fingers without flinching.

The Scotch were mostly raw troops, and soon fell into confusion; and then came one of those scenes of slaughter which were so common after the Cromwellian victories, and which, in spite of Mr. Carlyle's crazy admiration of them, must ever be regarded by sane and humane people as the work of the Devil.

"Blessed is he who has found his work," writes Carlyle; "let him ask no other blessedness.

Carlyle and others have for years been laying to the charge of representative and parliamentary government the same evils whose germ certain British critics, as ignorant of our national character as of our geography, are so kindly ready to find in our democracy.

RUSKIN writes to CARLYLE, addressing him as "Dearest Papa," and signing himself "Ever your faithful and loving son."

"Men in our own lives almostWhitman, Lincoln, Thoreau, Emerson, Carlyle, Wordsworth.

His wholly un-English tolerance and constant effort to put himself in the place of others whom the world condemned, procured for him from Carlyle (who genuinely loved him) the title of "President of the Heaven-and-Hell-Amalgamation Company."

Bishop Wilberforce wrote, describing a dinner-party in 1847: "Carlyle was very great.

Carlyle broke out on him with, 'None of your Heaven-and-Hell-Amalgamation Companies for me.

The story of its beginning is one of the many touching anecdotes in that history of authorship which Carlyle compared to the Newgate Calendar.

Zola is perhaps unduly depreciated nowadays, but certainly, if Carlyle's "infinite capacity for taking pains" as a recipe for genius ever was put to the test, it was by the author of the Rougon-Macquart series.

Shakespeare and Milton, yes, even Pope; Johnson, Fielding, Sterne, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle, Dumas, Balzac, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Poetheir very faces seem to look out at us from the bindings, such vividly human beings were they, with a vision of the world, or a definition of character, so much their own and no one else's.

One of his contemporaries, Thomas Carlyle, for all his genius, was on one important subjectthat of poetryas much of a bull in a china-shop as Ruskin was in art.

Carlyle was a great writer, but the names of these four gentlemen who, according to his standard, never did any "work" have a strangely permanent look about them compared with that of the prophet-journalist of Chelsea and Ecclefechan.

A similar "sage," another of the great conversational brow-beaters of English literature, Samuel Johnson, though it was his chief business to be a critic of poetry, was hardly more in court on the matter than Carlyle.

In an equal degree, though with a further departure from accredited beliefs, and with a greater effect from philosophical or humanitarian influences, has it wrought itself into the genius of Goethe, Carlyle and Hugo.

Have we a right to think that man can govern himself, or must we go back and say with Carlyle and Ruskin and Voltaire that the great body of men are incompetent to govern themselves, and a few wise rulers must govern them?

CARLYLE, THOMAS.

The best of Carlyle; selected essays and passages, edited with introd.