announce the burning, and stayed two mortal hours! What reparation Mill could make, he did by giving a check for £200, only half of which Carlyle could be persuaded to accept. Doggedly Carlyle set to work to rewrite, though he had no notes, no copy to help him, though the act of composition was like walking through torturing flames. When, at last, it was done, he burst forth to his wife: "You have not had for a hundred years any book that comes more directly and flamingly from the heart of a living man.'

The French Revolution is a magnificent epic, a vast prose poem, written in flames, full of episodes, dramatic situations, brilliant character studies. Such history, with all the glamour of fiction, the intensity, the passion, the concreteness, the prodigality, was never seen of man before, and remains to-day a marvel of constructive boldness and realism. No one should miss acquaintance with some of the great passages in the book, such as the fall of the Bastille, the court at Versailles, the death of Mirabeau, and the Reign of Terror. This historic material is but another version in more dramatic and poetic form of what Carlyle preached in Sartor, of what in all his books he continued to preach the fate of shams. Dickens is said to have "carried a copy of The French Revolution with him wherever he went. Southey read it six times over. Thackeray reviewed it enthusiastically. Even Jeffrey generously admitted that Carlyle had succeeded upon lines in which he had himself foretold inevitable failure." Macaulay, Hallam, and Brougham could no longer withstand their recognition that "a star of the first magnitude in English literature" had arisen. The French Revolution, written in Carlyle's prime of manhood, is, in the opinion of many, incomparably his masterpiece.

But the book did not immediately bring money to its

author, who was reduced to his last resources. Miss Martineau and other friends arranged for a course of lectures in London, secured enough subscribers to insure a year's living expenses for the thrifty Cheyne Row household. This was the beginning of four courses of lectures—on German Literature, the History of European Literature, Revolutions, and Heroes. The lectures were entirely successful in spite of Carlyle's blackest forebodings; and fashionable audiences went away deeply impressed by his sincere and noble intelligence. Carlyle was now himself a duly recognized great man, yet with all the simplicity of his up-bringing on a peasant farm and with a strong Scotch accent. "There he stood, a spare figure, lacking one inch of six feet, ... rugged of feature; brow abrupt like a low cliff, craggy over eyes deep-set, . . . full of rolling fire; . . . dark, short, thick hair, not crisp but wavy as rock-rooted, tide-swayed weed."

Carlyle's first audience among readers, his first ardent following, was in America. Emerson, ever the most loyal of friends, conceived the idea of publishing Carlyle's books in this country, later assuming even the financial responsibility; "I will," he protests enthusiastically, “ summon to the bargain all the Yankee in my constitution, and multiply and divide like a lion." Of the venture Carlyle writes to his brother: "When not a penny had been realized in England, £150 sent by Emerson for The French Revolution! Was any braver thing ever heard of? £150 from beyond the salt seas, while not a sixpence could be realized here in one's own country by the thing! I declare my American friends are right fellows, and have done their affairs with effect!" Emerson also published Carlyle's essays in book form, and seems thus to have set the fashion for other writers to do likewise with their magazine articles. With the success of the lectures and later of The French

Revolution, and with a competence left to Mrs. Carlyle at her mother's death, Carlyle was relieved from money difficulties for the rest of his life. "The battle was over and we were sore wounded."

The next major achievement of Carlyle was his Cromwell, published in 1845. As far back as 1822, in a letter to Jane Welsh, he spoke of this project; "Four months ago, I had a splendid plan of treating the history of England during the Commonwealth in a new style. . . by grouping together the most singular manifestations of mind that occurred then. Already my characters were fixed upon-Laud, Fox, Clarendon, Cromwell, Milton, Hampden." At sixty-three he took up the work, in modified form, and poured years of unremitting toil and energy on dry-as-dust folios of that long-winded period. He visited the battle-fields in person; he collected all available records of the times. The book is not a life of Cromwellthat remains to be written; it is The Letters and Speeches of Cromwell with notes and connecting narrative by Carlyle. Of unity and artistic form it obviously possesses little; the nature of the material makes it difficult to weave a wellregulated narrative about so many scattered gleanings. Broken as it is, it has passages of matchless poetry in prose, of swift, characterizing flashes of genius; of memorable description, such as the Battle of Dunbar; it has, moreover, revised the judgment of the English people on Cromwell and his period. Cromwell is, of course, the kind of grim forceful hero with whom Carlyle had peculiar sympathy. Even those who do not admit Carlyle's view of Cromwell, admit the service he rendered in his interpretation of the English Revolution, the eloquence and fervid beauty of his style.

All Carlyle's history is only extended biography. Certainly Frederick the Great (1858–65) is a vast portrait gal

lery of important and unimportant figures; of high court princes and princelings, of back-stair favorites, of intolerable German fraus, and corpulent generals. Against this intricate background, stands the figure of Frederick with his god-given right to rule, a right accorded all Carlyle's heroes. The colossal proportions of the book, the endless anecdotes and episodes, leave an impression of hurlyburly. While not many to-day except hardy Teutons, read all these volumes from cover to cover, every one reads with delight certain parts of this kaleidoscopic survey of German life in the eighteenth century, and carries away a new sense of the organizing force of Frederick, even if Carlyle fails to make of him wholly a hero. A German translation of Frederick appeared and met warm acclaim. Carlyle was decorated in 1874 with the Prussian order Pour le Merité, founded by Frederick.

There remains a group of shorter writings by Carlyle, some of which rank as of first importance. The lectures on heroes published in book form have become, perhaps of all Carlyle's writings, the most widely known. Heroes and Hero Worship reveals sharply Carlyle's favorite theory of the great man-that the world is ever in need of him, is ever refashioned after his ideals, is lifted out of impotence mainly by his clarion call. The great man as leader is the subject of Hero Worship, of The Life of Schiller, of the essays on Goethe, of the chief actors in The French Revolution, of Cromwell, of Frederick. Emerson significantly points out the limitation in this point of view,-"He (Carlyle) had his eye fixed mainly on the doings of certain leaders, and far too little on the general stream of thought and life which carried both leaders and followers along with it." Characteristics, Chartism, Past and Present, Latter-Day Pamphlets, represent Carlyle's political theories, his distrust of the ballot as a cure for all evils, his protest

against sentimental legislation, his arraignment of our age for depending on external machinery instead of spiritual regeneration. This aspect of his work need not detain us, though no one should miss acquaintance with the exquisite and unforgettable sketch of twelfth century life in Past and Present.

The later years of Carlyle were full of honors. In 1865 he accepted the Lord Rectorship of Edinburgh University, following Gladstone. His address on that occasion is for every student an eternal possession, so full is it of vital matter and mellow beauty. A public oration followed the address; students pressed about him, some shedding tears; they followed him to his brother's lodging, crowding and hurrahing. "They gave me one cheer more—something in the tone of it which did for the first time go into my heart. Poor young men, so well affected toward the poor old brother or grandfather here, and in such a black whirlpool of a world, all of us." The effect of this speech, which was published in full by newspapers all over the land, was to create a fresh interest in his works. Sartor Resartus, which had lain for more than a decade in neglected contempt, had twenty thousand copies sold now in a shilling edition. Times had changed, indeed, from the day when it had only two admirers, a Catholic priest in Cork and Emerson in Concord. In 1874 Lord Beaconsfield, the Prime Minister, desired to confer on him, on the part of the queen, the Grand Cross of Bath and a pension, a distinguished honor which Carlyle declined, waiting, with delicate consideration until after Tennyson, to whom a baronry was offered, had signified his acceptance. The high place which Carlyle had won was henceforth uncontested, and until his death all sharp criticism seemed to be stilled. The age at last was moved to do full honor to its great man.