Whether we agree with Carlyle or not, we must accept for the moment his peculiar view of history, else Heroes can never open its treasures to us.  The book abounds in startling ideas, expressed with originality and power, and is pervaded throughout by an atmosphere of intense moral earnestness.  The more we read it, the more we find to admire and to remember.

Carlyle’s French Revolution (1837) is to be taken more seriously as a historical work; but here again his hero worship comes to the front, and his book is a series of flashlights thrown upon men in dramatic situations, rather than a tracing of causes to their consequences.  The very titles of his chapters—­“Astraea Redux,” “Windbags,” “Broglie the War God”—­do violence to our conception of history, and are more suggestive of Carlyle’s individualism than of French history.  He is here the preacher rather than the historian; his text is the eternal justice; and his message is that all wrongdoing is inevitably followed by vengeance.  His method is intensely dramatic.  From a mass of historical details he selects a few picturesque incidents and striking figures, and his vivid pictures of the storming of the Bastille, the rush of the mob to Versailles, the death of Louis XVI, and the Reign of Terror, seem like the work of an eyewitness describing some terrible catastrophe.  At times, as it portrays Danton, Robespierre, and the great characters of the tragedy, Carlyle’s work is suggestive of an historical play of Shakespeare; and again, as it describes the rush and riot of men led by elemental passion, it is more like a great prose epic.  Though not a reliable history in any sense, it is one of the most dramatic and stirring narratives in our language.

Two other historical works deserve at least a passing notice.  The History of Frederick the Great (1858-1865), in six volumes, is a colossal picture of the life and times of the hero of the Prussian Empire. Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches is, in our personal judgment, Carlyle’s best historical work.  His idea is to present the very soul of the great Puritan leader.  He gives us, as of first importance, Cromwell’s own words, and connects them by a commentary in which other men and events are described with vigor and vividness.  Cromwell was one of Carlyle’s greatest heroes, and in this case he is most careful to present the facts which occasion his own enthusiasm.  The result is, on the whole, the most lifelike picture of a great historical character that we possess.  Other historians had heaped calumny upon Cromwell till the English public regarded him with prejudice and horror; and it is an indication of Carlyle’s power that by a single book he revolutionized England’s opinion of one of her greatest men.