gedy of real life which knows no limits. Carlyle is no raconteur; he is a spectator, looking on while those confused yet tragic combinations roll up, form, and disperse, breaking away again into fragments, like the storm-clouds upon the sky, and while the torrents of blood burst forth, and the demons rage, and carnage fills the streets. He sees, what no mere historian can see, the murderers of September at their horrible work in one corner of the great and terrible city, while in another the children play and the women chatter, and humble life goes on as if such things could never be. Sometimes a tone of heart-breaking pathos comes in, sometimes that laugh which is more terrible than tears. The pathetic groups in the prisons, the livid fanatic at the head of affairs, the theorists, the avengers, the little human vanities all in flower upon the very edge of the scaffold, are in movement before our eyes, the terrible panorama opening out in scene after scene. There may be some upon whom the grim humour will jar, and some to whom the confusion of the tragic scene will be increased by the peculiarities of the diction, the rolling clouds of words heaped upon each other in vaporous stormy sentences, altogether unlike the polished calm of a restrained and dignified historical style. But no one can deny the force and splendour of the picture, or the supreme and shuddering interest with which the reader is made to enter into sight and hearing of this terrible world convulsion and crisis of national existence.

The history of Oliver Cromwell and his period, which followed from the same hand, at a considerable interval of years, was of a nature to excite greater discussion and a warmer criticism. But there can

be little doubt that it modified to a very great degree the common opinion upon that great figure in English history, and to a large extent vindicated the Protector from those imputations of hypocrisy and selfish ambition which had become the commonplaces of history. It is not necessary to paint everything concerning a great actor in history in the most odious colours, in order to emphasise our disagreement with him, or even moral disapproval of the part he had taken; but this was what preceding historians, with almost one accord, had done. Apart from Carlyle's success in this respect-if anything in the book can be considered apart from the one great image which fills it— the picture of the time is as vivid as that of the French Revolution, and made in a similar way, as by the hand of a spectator, more actively engaged than in the former casehimself almost acting, expounding, elucidating all that passes before his eyes, with a sentiment much stronger, identifying himself with all that takes place. Indeed Carlyle is as present as Cromwell, interpreting in the strong medium of his natural Scotch Calvinism and religionism, deeply tinctured by the Old Testament, the other rugged personality, the Puritan, in which so many predominating principles were the same. We cannot but feel that the choice of Frederick as the hero of Carlyle's later life was something of a mistake; for there was no such point of contact by which the biographer could enter into the most intimate relations with his subject: and that wonderful mass of learning and research, which was the burden of his own life for years, has not succeeded in impressing upon the general mind anything like so remarkable an apprehension of the questionable hero and his time as

was conveyed to us by the other two great historical studies. The work perhaps was too great, the material too immense, the details too minute and voluminous. There was less unity in the interest, and consequently less force in the picture. The comparatively brief narrative of the Abbot Samson and his surroundings in Past and Present,' perhaps the most completely lovable and delightful of all Carlyle's work, shows his power of throwing himself into the scene he depicts, and his wonderful sympathetic realisation of character and power of poetic vision at their very best.

To make a list of all the remarkable historical works which have distinguished our age, would be of itself a laborious undertaking. Chief among them are the highly coloured, and in many respects most effective and picturesque, studies of Mr. Froude, in which the strong parti pris, the incapacity for regarding almost any event or character simply, and on its own merits, do not hindernay, perhaps rather help to secure -the absorbed attention of the reader. Nor does the singular heat of hostile feeling with which he pursues not only certain favourite personages, but even such a great institution as the Church of England for example-or the remarkable peculiarity of moral vision, which raises so many grievances along his path wherever that distinguished writer has passed detract from the interest. The reader, who cannot fail to have been impressed and stirred by his vivid pictures, will yet remember with what relentless hatred he pursued Mary Stuart to the block and the grave, untouched by even that natural sentiment which is impressed by every courageous and dignified death-scene, whoever the

sufferer may be. But indeed this historian's love is as much to be dreaded as his hatred -as his recent works have proved. The picturesque and vivid workmanship of Mr Kinglake, the epic of a great campaign; the valuable labours of Dr Stubbs, of Mr Freeman, and of other wellknown living writers, who still continue to enrich our records, and whose work we hope will not yet for a long time be recognisable as complete, do not require more than a mention. There is now a great school of historical investigation, bringing to the elucidation of our national records much fine understanding and manly work, a few crotchets, and a great deal of admirable talent and skill. Instead of long silence, broken now and then by a chapter of classical history, or a learned prelection on some distant and unattractive theme, we have a crowd of energetic workers, clearing the very springs of history, and spreading enlightenment and knowledge round. In Scotland, too, a group of devoted patriotic students have given their best efforts to the authen

tication of our ancient history, among whose names that of the late John Hill Burton-whose excellent and valuable History of Scotland' is scarcely less remarkable than the delightful BookHunter,' which has originated quite a little school of its ownwas for a long time the first. And a corresponding group in Ireland has been labouring, unmoved by all external clamour, upon the primitive records of the Isle of Saints. popular acceptance of the brilliant little History for the People of the late Rev. J. R. Green, did that ingenious writer wrong; for it forced into the position of an independent work of personal research and

The great

thought what was intended only for a more lucid and attractive statement of the work done by others; and thus perhaps wore out more quickly than otherwise might have been, the strength and life of the writer, whose forces were unequal, and whose time was too short for such a task.

We have spoken (with the one exception of Carlyle) only of works of English history. But the historical writers of the half-century have not been confined to this subject. The great work of Grote upon ancient Greece has for a long time put every competitor out of the field, and become in its weighty conscientiousness and power the chief authority upon that ever-interesting theme. We have already referred to the most prodigious piece of work of all, a History which has been perhaps more popular than any big book of its dimensions ever was, and which was for a long time almost as productive as an estate, a most valuable piece of literary property, Sir Archibald Alison's History of Europe.' The History of Civilisation' of the late Mr Buckle was still greater in its conception, and could it ever have been carried out, would no doubt have reached to some prodigious number of volumes, worthy of the huge collection of books in which its author had built himself up with a curious symbolical fitness. For though his theme was mankind, his knowledge was of books alone, and his work is full of those strange ignorances and clever mistakes to which a mind trained in the atmosphere of a literary hothouse, out of reach of all practical contact with the nature he attempted to define and chronicle, is naturally subject. The appearance of his first volume, however, the introduction to his vast subject, created a great sensa

tion in the literary world, and the amiable recluse fouud himself famous to his great surprise and considerable embarrassment. However, he took his fame with much seriousness, and without any misgivings as to the result. Buckle was one of the first of the band of philosophical thinkers rejecting the creed of Christianity and even of Theism, which have made so great an appearance in our day; and his name naturally leads us to those of others in many respects more remarkable than his own, who have given to our philosophical literature a new development, and who have established Natural Science, with all the philosophies dependent on it, as one of the greatest subjects and most intimate occupations of the time.

We have again to recur to the name of Carlyle when we enter, or rather before we enter, this field. His historical works, though so remarkable, perhaps scarcely took so strong a hold upon the mind of his generation as those which for want of a better title we must call philosophical. He had no system of philosophy, however, to set forth, but rather the mind and thoughts upon all things in heaven and earth of one of the most remarkable of human beings, a man half prophet, half iconoclast, in whom a devout heart, instinct with all the lore of a cottage-taught religion, and the austere morality and rustic intolerance of a Scotch peasant, were linked with a spirit which had caught fire at that of Goethe, and had thrown off all allegiance of faith-a spirit full of sardonic humour and powers of mockery and vituperation unrivalled, fiercely unsympathetic with all that was uncongenial to his nature, while tender to every touch of feeling within its own intense but limited range.

The pro

blem of this curiously mingled nature, so open to malign interpretations, yet so attractive to all the enthusiasms, puzzled yet delighted the world as it revealed itself in the often grand and sometimes chaotic literary utterance, a style which was in reality the sublimated but most genuine style of a Scotch peasant of genius, full of reflections from the Hebrew eloquence of the Old Testament, and from that prodigious gigantic ancient German, which were perhaps the two things nearest to his own heroic old Saxon-Scotch. Perhaps it needs an acquaintance with that ponderous and solemn speech of the old shepherds and ploughmen, slow and grandiose in unintended solemnity, "such as grave livers do in Scotland use," to comprehend the naturalness and simplicity of Carlyle's often contorted and sometimes convulsive utterance. And it certainly requires a knowledge no longer at all general of the primitive moorland peasant of the beginning of the century to understand the fashion of a man, all astray among fine English literary folks in Queen Victoria's reign. These curious contradictions and incomprehensibilities will make him always a most interesting figure in literary history, even under the shade which has been thrown over his name, and nothing can impair the splendour of his contributions to literature. Such works as Sartor Resartus' stand detached like great poems from all surroundings, and are indeed more rare than the greatest of poems. It would be difficult to apportion to Carlyle his place in any literature. He stands apart like a great lonely peak in a world of mountains, not loftier perhaps than the great forms about him veiled in summer verdure or eternal snow-but more conspicuous in solitary grandeur,

with crags and precipices and heaven-pointing needles, sometimes resplendent in the glory of setting suns, sometimes clad in the greys and purples of distance, to which neither verdure nor snows will cling.

A very different apparition is that of the philosopher whose contact with Carlyle has afforded a curious anecdote to literary history, and a still more curious contrast between two men as unlike as any two that could be got together at random in any thoroughfare, though both so influential in their different ways and so remarkable. Everybody knows the tragic incident of the destruction of Carlyle's precious manuscript, the first volume of the French Revolution,' upon which all his hopes of fame and even of daily bread hung, by horrible misadventure or carelessness, in the hands of John Stuart Mill; and that memorable scene when the pair of penniless people in London, hearing suddenly of this tremendous misfortune, could not by more than a look communicate to each other their despair, so necessary was it to console the misery of the destroyer, who, "deadly pale," came to tell them of what had happened. What a curious picture! The culprit, rich and at his ease, to whom a hundred or even a thousand pounds was nothing, could that make up for this thing which was irremediable, pale and trembling, before that proud, passionate, eloquent, fiery pair, either of whom could have annihilated with desperate, vehement words any offender. What lava - torrents of indignation and despair ought to have covered him as he stood, turning him to a cinder! As a matter of fact, they were the consolers of his despair, not he of theirs. And everybody knows also the strange training of Mill as disclosed in his Autobio