not for a long time met with so pleasant and promising a production.

The first article is on Francis Jeffrey, the Edinburgh Reviewer, the merit of which is equalled by the succeeding one on Godwin, and both are surpassed by the third—that on William Hazlitt. The essay on Robert Hall is clever, and the one on Shelley powerful and original, that on Chalmers also deserves praise, but better than all is that on Carlyle. From this latter we will extract one or two passages, which we think are happily written.

"Thomas Carlyle is the truest Diogenes of these times. Pushed aside by the strong hand of a peculiar genius into a corner, he has thence marked and remarked strangely, angularly, yet truly, upon man and the universe; and to that corner men are now beginning to flock, and the tub is towering into an oracle, and those rugged flame words are fast becoming law! In the course of his career, his mind has gone through two different phases. In the first, he was little more than the chief interpreter between the German and the English mind; in the second, he has shot upwards like a pyramid of fire,' into a gigantic original. In the first, he was only a distinguished member of the corps literaire; in the second, he has started from the ranks, and become a separate and independent principality in the kingdom of letters.

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But,

Carlyle is a Scottish German: he has grafted on a strong original stock of Scottish earnestness, simplicity, shrewdness, and humour, much of the mysticism, exaggeration, and eccentricity of his adopted country. Even though he had never read a page of the Teutonic grammar, he would have been distinguished as a man of original powers, profound sincerity, and indomitable perseverance. having studied and swam, for years together, in the sea of German learning, like a leviathan, he has become a kind of literary monster, German above and Scottish below. The "voice is Jacob's, the hands are Esau's." He is a hybrid. The main tissue of his mind is homely worsted; but he has died it in the strangest colours, derived from Weimar and Bayreuth. Endued by nature with a strong in-keyed soul,' and fitted to be a prose Burns, he has become a British Richter. We have sometimes doubted if he did not think in German. Assuredly, he writes in it, uses its idioms, practises its peculiarities of construction; not merely defends, but exemplifies its most daring liberties, and spreads his strong wing over its glaring defects. Although possessed of undoubted originality, he long contented himself with being a gigantic echo-cliff to the varied notes of the German lyre, rendering back its harsh discords, as well as its soft and soul-like sounds. And here lies at once the source of his defects and his merits. One who is unacquainted with German Authors, reads Carlyle with the utmost amazement: he is so utterly different from every other writer; his unmeasured sentences; his irregular density; his electric contrasts; his startling asseverations; his endless repititions; the levity in which his most solemn and serious statements

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seem to swim; the air of mild, yet decisive scorn, with which he tosses about his thoughts, and characters, and the incidents of his story; the unearthly lustre at which he shows his shifting panoramas; his peculiar, and patched-up dialect; the singular terms and terminations which he uses, in unscrupulous abundance; the far and foreign strain of his allusious and associations; the recondite profundity of his learning; and those bursts of eloquent mysticism which alternate with yet wilder bursts of uncontrollable mirth and fuliginous irony-produce an altogetherness' of impression exceedingly startling. But, to one acquainted with German, the mystery is explained. Some, at least, of the peculiarities we have mentioned, are seen to be those of a whole literature, not of a solitary literateur; and he who laughs at Carlyle must be prepared to extend his derision to the sum and substance of German genius. Still we doubt, along with Johnson, Foster, and critics of equal name, if any human understanding has a right to form, whether by affectation, or imitation, or translation, a dialect entirely and ostentatiously singular. A peculiar diction, it is true, has been considered by some, one of the immunities of intellectual sovereignty; but he who adopts a uniformly uncommon mode of enunciating his ideas, and, still more, he who transplants his style from a foreign country, does it at his peril, subjects himself to ugly and unjust charges, injures his popularity and influence, and must balance the admiration of the initiated few, with the neglect or disgust of the ignorant or malignant many.

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"But the defects to which we have referred, being chiefly of style and manner, rarely of substance, and never of spirit, form but a feeble counterpoise to his merits; his pictorial omnipotence;' his insight into the motives and minds of men; his art of depicting character, often by one lightning word; his sardonic and savage humour; his intense hatred of the false, and love of the true; his bursts of indignant declamation and spiritual pathos; his sympathies with all power which is genuine; all genuis which is unaffected, and all virtue which is merciful; his philosophy, at once mystic and homely, -obscure, indeed, in its premises, but most practical in its results; and, above all, that almost religious earnestness, which casts over all his writings the shadow of deep seriousness. We know not what Carlyle's creed may be, but we honour his reverence for the religious principle in man. No one has a deeper sense of the Infinite and of the Eternal; no one has knelt with more solemn awe, under the soul-quelling shadow of the universe, or looked up with a more adoring eye to the silent immensity and palace of the Eternal, of which our sun is but a porch-lamp.' No one has expressed a higher reverence for the "Worship of Sorrow;" and it was worth a thousand homilies" to hear him, as we were privileged to do, talking for four miles of moonlit road, with his earnest, sagacious voice, of religion, baring, ever and anon, his head, as if in worship, amid the warm, slumberous August air. His intimacy with such men as Irving, Thomas Erskine, and Scott of Woolwich, is itself a voucher for his sincerity. And who that has read his spiritual autobiography in Sartor,' whether he adopt or understand his conclusions or not,

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can resist admiration for the intense fervor, and the awful struggle discovered in that immortal search ?"

Of Carlyle's wonderful book, "Sartor Resartus," Gilfillan thus ably speaks :

"We have only of late become acquainted with this singular production, but few books have ever moved us more. It turned up our whole soul like a tempest. It reminded us of nothing so much as of Bunyan's Autobiography. With a like dreadful earnestness does Carlyle describe his pilgrimage from the Everlasting No' of darkness and defiance-his City of Destruction-on to that final Beulah belief, that Blessedness is better than happiness,' which he calls the Everlasting Yea,' and on which, as on a pillow, he seems disposed to rest his head against eternity. In writing it, he has written, not his own life alone, but the spiritual history of many thinking and sincere men of the time. Whoever has struggled with doubts and difficulties almost to strangling-whoever has tossed for nights upon his pillow, and in helpless wretchedness cried out with shrieks of agony to the God of heaven-whoever has covered with his cloak a Gehenna of bitter disappointment and misery, and walked out, nevertheless, firm, and calm, and silent, among his fellow-men-whoever has mourned for all the oppressions which are done under the sun,' and been mad for the sight of his eyes that he did see'-whoever has bowed down at night upon his pillow, in the belief that he was the most wretched and God-forsaken of mortal men-whoever has felt all the wanderer in his soul,' and a sense of the deepest solitude, even when mingling in the business and in the crowded thoroughfares of his kind-whoever at one time has leaned over the precipices of Mount Danger, and at another adventured a step or two on that dreary path of destruction' which led to a wide field full of dark mountains, where he stumbled and fell, and rose no more;' and at a third, walked a gloom amid the glooms of the Valley and the shadow of death-whoever has at last attained, not peace, not happiness, not assurance, but child-like submission, child-like faith, and meek-eyed blessedness'-let him approach, and study, and press to his breast, and carry to his bed, and bedew with his tears, Sartor Resartus, and bless the while its brave and true-hearted author. But whoever has not had a portion of this experience, let him pass onthe book has nothing to say to him, and he has nothing to do with the book. It is above him like a star-it is apart from him like a spirit. Let him laugh at it if he will-abuse it if he will-call it German trash, transcendental Neologism, if he will-only let him not read it. Its sweet and solemn 'Evangel'-its deep pathos-its earnestness-its trenchant and terrible anatomy of not the least singular or least noble of human hearts-its individual passages and pictures, unsurpassed in power and Grandeur, as that of the Night Thoughts of Teufelsdrockh, when he sat in his high attic, 'alone with the stars' -the description of his appearance on the North Cape, 'behind him all Europe and Asia fast asleep, and before him the silent immensity and Palace of the Eternal, to which our sun is but a porch-lamp'his wanderings in vain effort to escape from his own shadow'-the

picture of the power and mystery of symbols-with all this, what has he, the reader of 'Martin Chuzzlewit' and the 'New Monthly,' to do? Let him go, however, and chuckle over the sketch of the worst of all possible Universities,' Edinburgh, as Carlyle found it, and its picture of the two sects,—of dandies and poor Irish slaves. These he may comprehend and enjoy, but the other-!

After this appears some exquisite criticism on that extraordinary work, the "French Revolution, a History;" a book of such extrordinary interest, that Sir William Hamilton, who took it up one day at three o'clock in the afternoon, was chained to its pages till four in the morning, being thirteen hours at a stretch. Turning from the works to their author, the writer of this agreeable volume tells us something about Carlyle himself.

"Thomas Carlyle was born at Ecclefechan, Annandale. His parents were 'good farmer people,' his father an elder in the Secession church there, and a man of strong native sense, whose words were said to 'nail a subject to the wall.' His excellent mother still lives, and we had the pleasure of meeting her lately in the company of her illustrious son; and beautiful it was to see his profound and tender regard and her motherly and yearning reverence,—to hear her fine old covenanting accents, concerting with his transcendental tones. He studied in Edinburgh. Previous to this, he had become intimate with Edward Irving, an intimacy which continued unimpared to the close of the latter's eccentric career. Like most Scottish students, he had many struggles to encounter in the course of his education, and had, we believe, to support himself by private tuition, translations for the booksellers, &c. The day star of German literature arose early in his soul, and has been his guide and genius ever since. He entered into a correspondence with Goethe, which lasted at intervals, till the latter's death. Yet he has never, we understand, visited Germany. He was, originally, destined for the church. At one period he taught at an Academy in Dysart, at the sametime that Irving was teaching in Kirkaldy. After his marriage, he resided partly at Comely Bank, Edinburgh; and for a year or two in Craigenputtock, a wild and solitary farm house in the upper part of Dumfriesshire. Here, however, far from society, save that of the 'great dumb monsters of mountains,' he wearied out his very heart. A ludicrous story is told of Lord Jeffrey visiting him in this out-of-the-way region when they were unapprized of his coming-had nothing in the house fit for the palate of the critic, and had, in dire haste and pother, to send off for the wherewithal to a market town about fifteen miles off. Here, too, as we may see hereafter, Emerson, on his way home from Italy, dropped in like a spirit, spent precisely twenty-four hours, and then 'forth uprose that lone wayfaring man,' to return to his native woods. He has, for several years of late, resided in Chelsea, London, where he lives in a plain simple fashion; occasionally, but seldom, appearing at the splendid soirées of Lady Blessington, but listened. to, when he goes, as an oracle; receiving, at his tea-table, visitors

from every part of the world; forming an admirable centre for men of the most opposite opinions and professions-Poets and Preachers, Pantheists and Puritans, Tennysons and Scotts, Cavanaighs and Erskines, Sterlings and Robertsons, smoking his perpetual pipe, and pouring out, in copious stream, his rich and quaint philosophy. His appearance is fine, without being ostentatiously singular;-his hair dark, his brow marked, though neither very broad nor very lofty,— his cheek tinged with a healthy red,—his eye, the truest index of his genius, flashing out, at times, a wild and mystic fire from its dark and quiet surface. He is above the middle size, stoops slightly, dresses carefully, but without any approach to foppery. His address, somewhat high and distant at first, softens into simplicity and cordial kindness, His conversation is abundant, inartificial, flowing on, and warbling as it flows, more practical than you would expect from the cast of his writings,-picturesque and graphic in a high measure,— full of the results of extensive and minute observation, often terribly direct and strong, garnished with French and German phrase, rendered racy by the accompaniment of the purest Annandale accent, and coming to its climaxes, ever and anon, in long, deep, chest-shaking bursts of laughter.

Altogether, in an age of singularities, Thomas Carlyle stands peculiarly alone. Generally known, and warmly appreciated, he has of late become ;-popular, in the strict sense, he is not, and may never be. His works may never climb the family library, nor his name become a household word; but while the Thomsons and the Campbells shed their gentle genius, like light, into the hall and the hovel-the shop of the artisan and the sheiling of the shepherd, Carlyle, like the Landors and Lambs of this age, and the Brownes and Burtons of a past, will exert a more limited but profounder power-cast a dimmer but more gorgeous radiance-attract fewer but more devoted admirers, and obtain an equal, and perhaps more enviable immortality.

Next comes Thomas de Quincey, somewhat flatteringly pourtrayed, then John Foster, taken to the life. Of the essay on John Wilson, "Christopher North," we cannot speak so favorably, it is inflated in the extreme, and the Professor is praised in a spirit of blind enthusiasm, and with the most extravagant hyperbole. The article on "Edward Irving, and the Preachers of the day," is rather too Scotchy, but is clever for all that. The one on Walter Savage Landor is but so so, and that on Thomas Campbell is not altogether worthy of its subject. The paper on Lord Brougham is very admirable. The author happily observes "Brougham is an isthmus, uniting two times; he belongs partly to the past and partly to the present. In his habits, intellectual and moral, he is of the 18th century; in his veins and deeper feelings he is the man of his

The much over-rated Coleridge is extravagantly praised, and the dreamy Emerson is enveloped in a mist of words, through