trines of Christianity. How expressive, in the light of a new example, do our Saviour's words become :- Art thou a teacher in Israel, and understandest not these things? If I have told you of earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things?' This bastard regeneration,—this counterfeit of earthly alloy, whereon is profanely stamped the image of the heavenly King, we are familiar with in Fichte and elsewhere; but nowhere have we seen it put forth so ingeniously as in the volume before us. It is the warp of the whole book, and therefore the more insidious, concealed as it is beneath such rich figures and patterns; and the deeper one gets into the heart of the volume, the more one feels, that, all unintentional it may have been, a high outrage has been committed against the very holiest of our beliefs. True, he abstains from precise deliverances, but we need not Horace to tell us that pictures speak often more significantly than words. It was quite possible for Mr Carlyle to have treated his subjects as distinct classes of men, and then we should not have had so sad a task assigned us. For a short space our work is of a more agreeable character. As a critic we know not his fellow in Britain; and by critic we mean an interpreter of the word or thought of a brother man. He reveals to us the inner working of the men he writes about, with such startling truth and force, as indicate that we have a true seer once more among us. To employ words whose author we need not name, he writes from the heart outwardly, and not from the skin inwardly. Men the most opposite to himself, and of all classes,the scholar, as Heyne, our own rough heroic Johnson, Burns, Mirabeau, Schiller, Goëthe, Richter, Hardenberg, Luther, Cromwell, Dante, and Shakspere, Diderot, Voltaire, Robespierre, Walter Scott, he makes us so acquainted with, that we ever after feel ourselves at home in their society. We know them in their inward life and in their outward walk, as few of their cotemporaries could have known them. His mission is to interpret for us our fellow-men; and it is well that he considers biography as the scientia scientiarum. He has taught us a new way of reading and of writing history; and he has done so by showing us that history can be written epically, and yet, perhaps therefore, most truthfully. The history of the French Revolution, while full of extraordinary reading and the fruits of painful industry, is liker to Homer than any socalled heroic poem we ever read. Its different chapters, and we speak not to raise a smile, we can liken to nothing so much as the rhapsodies of the Iliad. The stiff graces of Robertson and the cold clear formulism of Hume we find not here. But we gain what we never gained from them, a living embodiment of men. - It is not an icy analysis of state papers, and tedious skepsis of causes and effects, and characterless predicates heaped on kings and ambassadors, that could ever bring us into familiar fellowship with men of like passions with ourselves in other days; while the daily life of communities was passed over in silence, as beneath the dignity of history. And hence it is that Carlyle's history is so intensely interesting and home-going, for it is in quite a peculiar sense, a holding of the mirror up to nature, an exhibition of the going out and coming in of men,-a lighting up of the stage whercon the drama of life was enacted,-so vividly, that we become as if familiar dwellers in the past, and weep, or laugh, or hope, or fear, as if we were not reading of yesterday, but acting ourselves to-day, or were looking forward to the morrow. Of his style we do not mean to say much at present; for we quite agree with himself that, in general, a man's style is but as it were the clothes or body of him, not anyway his spirit. Mr Carlyle's way of putting his thoughts in words varies with the subject he handles; it is grave or gay, solemn or grotesque, following the sudden whirls, whims, and crotchets of his own fancy, or the deeper movements of his passionate heart. Certainly it is not what we are used to in Britain; nor,-with the exception of Richter's, to whom stylists will find, in our author's phantasmagoric pieces, such as Cagliostro' and the Diamond Necklace," a considerable resemblance, is it all a German style; Schiller, for instance, writes history very much as ordinary historians do, while Goëthe's prose is so polished and precise, that not even Blair himself could detect a flaw in it. era. Our author's style, however, has a peculiarity that does not meet the vulgar eye, and its peculiarity is not in its differing from ordinary forms, but in its being so symbolic of the man and his His very style is recoil; and in every turn of it, like the dress of the old Germans, as described by Tacitus, which fitted so closely that it seemed rather the skin of the body than the vesture of it, tells of the tension and athletic effort of his spirit; his very style is a struggle; not St Mary's lake, with the heavens and green slopes mirrored in its tranquil depths, but the rush and thunder of a waterfall, whose spray is lashed up in rude tumult, yet with countless irisforms spanning in calm beauty the restless flood, were its type in external nature. Stating no opinions formally, we would yet hold Carlyle to be, in a wide sense, the radical reformer of his day; for, seeing deeply into all existing habits and institutions, he has thrust a powerful lever beneath them, which one day will work an overthrow. In America his works have had a large circulation; but we cannot congratulate him on the gencral character of his disciples in that country. Among ourselves he has, too, almost silently, produced a school of thinkers,-embracing, however, two different classes of men. In the hands of the one, though himself the most anti-utilitarian mind in England, and nobly such, he will speed on the work which Bentham began; in the hands of the other, he will become an ally of a sounder and purer philosophy. Before taking up a very serious question, for which our readers will be prepared, and which Mr Carlyle forces upon us, we would remark here that, in his antagonism to the prevalent influences of the age, he has taught it not a few important lessons,—such as the necessity of beginning with individual reformation,-that in the work of life, the first duty is the duty that lies nearest us,—that the dynamical force of our own will moulds, and is not moulded by, if we would believe it, the mechanical circumstances about us,— faith in individual endeavour,-the infinite significance of duty; that, evil as the day is, unspeakable still is the influence of one earnest, believing man; that no work, how humble soever it be, no word spoken from the fulness of the heart, ever dies at all,—for that every true thing, small though it be as an acorn, will root itself and bear fruit in its season,-while, in no circumstances, will the false, the most showy simulacrum, yield us any other than chaff yields, whose end is to be burnt,-bringing us volcanic revolutions, what he calls national blood-baths as the fifth act; that doing is the life for all of us, and that he who does nothing is one whose use and meaning is not yet discovered; that all affectation is weakness, is insincerity; that naturalness is real strength, is originality, is oftentimes courage; in a word, that this world of ours is constituted on quite other principles than a Benthamee-dead Enginery sets forth,-principles, the requirements of which, though we had Cocker and the almanack brought to the acme of calculable preciseness, so as to take in and register to a nicety the amount of profit and loss, happiness, or mechanical advantages that would follow from a certain class of actions, we can never fulfil, or harmonize with, in virtue of any process of mere addition and subtraction. Nor are these all,-they are samples, however, picked hastily from recollection, or that amount of impression, in the form of ideas, which this writer indents on his readers. To some they may appear common-place; but what are truisms to one mind, are awful truths to another, when translated into action, or quickened into deed by severe though silent reflection; while in these days it is a pregnant sign of the times, that there is a literary man among us, who comes forward as a teacher of truth. In a rude outline, as this first article is, much of course is deficient. But we should not be satisfied without pointing out two important characteristics of Thomas Carlyle as a teacher, though others are for the present omitted. The one of them is superficially considered as a sign of poverty of intellect; the other marks him the man of true genius. The first is, the individuality of all he does; that is to say, under any one of his portraits one could write wherever one met with it, Thomas Carlyle fecit.' Men tell us, as a grievous fault, he is always repeating himself; a charge also brought against another Thomas, as great in his own labour-field. A sufficient answer to the allegation will be found in this, that first of all, this writer of books,' has for remedy of the age certain specific antidotes, which he believes, and rightly, he cannot too frequently urge on acceptance; for truth, though it has been said that every soul is unwillingly deprived of it, is not in general too willingly embraced; and, secondly, that it is a property of deep and earnest souls to mount upwards so high in generalization that, in their approaches towards the absolute, they find the multiform disappearing, and the notions of the understanding giving place to a few fontal ideas. Just as the traveller who sees the Nile emptying its waters by seven outlets into the deep, should, could he reach the far mountain height, find in the unfrequented solitude one crystal well-head, the source of the mighty, many-branched river; or as, if this be not rather the truth itself than an illustration, our chemistry and astronomy will be subjects of one law, when a youthful but deep-visioned and ardent votary of science-Samuel Brown-flashes on the world, that the Abelean monadic idea is the idea of the constitution of matter. The second characteristic is that, athwart it as it may be his own crotchet, and immethodic as his way is, he makes an instant appeal, if we read him as we should, not so much to our attention as to our reproductive power of consciousness. Flinging his thoughts from him, at times one would think in sport, though all is sad earnest, one finds that they could germinate into whole books, as no doubt they will do, for he is also one who writes for writers. In answer to the question: Whether there is Christianity in the writings of Thomas Carlyle-meaning by this the gospel preached by Luther and Paul? there is but one reply, and one which we do not make rashly. Let him speak for himself. We read in a thrilling passage of the French Revolution,' that- Steel Europe shook itself simultaneously at the call of Hermit Peter, and rushed to the sepulchre where God had lain;' and again,-amid the rattle of musketry, and the roar of the cannon, and the deafening multidunous shout of an intoxicated people, and the swell and crash of 12,000 wind instruments on the Champs de Mars, he carries back his reader some eighteen centuries, as a contrast to all the sound and smoke, to an upper chamber, with thirteen most meanly clad Jewish men, whose hearts are initiated into the depths of human sorrow, having no symbol, save a 'Do this in remembrance of me." Still more striking are the words we are about to quote from a passage which, taken as a whole or in detail, is one of the most eloquent, and really pathetic, that we ever met with. Burke's sublimest is tinsel to it. It is thus he pictures the queenly Marie Antoinette, as she is hurried to the guillotine:- Beautiful, high-born, that wert so foully hurled low. Sunt lachrymae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt. Oh! is there a man's heart that thinks without pity of those long months and years of slow-wasting ignominy; of thy birth, soft cradled in imperial Schönbrunn, the winds of heaven not to visit thy face too roughly, thy foot to light on softness, thy eye on splendour; and then of thy death, or hundred deaths to which the guillotine, and Tinville's judgment-bar was but the merciful end? Look there, oh man, born of woman! The bloom of that fair face is wasted, the hair is grey with care; the brightness of those eyes is quenched, their lids hang drooping, the face is stony pale, as one living in death. Mean weeds, which her own hand has mended, attire the queen of the world. The death-hurdle, where thou sittest pale, motionless, which only curses environ, has to stop: a people drunk with vengeance will drink it again in full draught, looking at thee there. Far as the eye reaches a multitudinous sea of maniac heads; the air deaf with their triumphal yell! The living-dead must shudder with yet one other pang; her startled blood yet again suffuses, with the hue of agony, that pale face which she hides with her hands. There is, then, no heart to say, God pity thee? Oh think not of these; think of Him whom thou worshippest, the Crucified, who, also treading the wine-press alone, fronted sorrow still deeper, and triumphed over it, and made it holy, and built of it a sanctuary of sorrow for thee and all the wretched. Thy path of thorns is nigh ended. One long, last look at the Tuilleries, where thy step was once so light, where thy children shall not dwell. Thy head is on the block; the axe rushes-dumb lies the world; that wild-yelling world, and all its madness is behind thee.' (Miscell. vol. v. p. 56.) These are no lightly uttered words, and we find others of equally deep, if not deeper import, scattered over all the writer's works. For instance, he speaks of Luther and Cromwell, and of the great epoch, the turning-point of their histories, in terms which have become as good as antiquated for the generality of our merely literary men. "It must have been a most blessed discovery, that of an old Latin Bible, which Luther found in the Erfurt Library about this time. He had never, then, seen the book before. It taught him another lesson than that of fasts and vigils. A brother monk, too, of pious experience was helpful. Luther learned now that a man was saved not by singing masses, but by the infinite grace of God: a more credible hypothesis. He gradually got himself founded |