We are inclined to think that he failed in both of the objects of his highest ambition.  His philosophic Method is demonstrably a failure; his attempt to convert James and Buckingham to his views resulted in his own unjust disgrace with contemporaries and posterity.  The truth is, that, cool, serene, comprehensive, and unimpassioned as he appears, he was from his youth actuated by a fanaticism which seems less intense than the fanaticism of a man like Cromwell only because it was infinitely more broad.  Had he succeeded in the design he proposed to himself, his intellectual domination would not be confined to England, or the kingdoms of the civilized world, but would be commensurate with the whole domain of Nature and man.

We are so grateful to Mr. Dixon for what he has done, that we are not disposed to quarrel with him for what he has left undone.  He has added such a mass of incontrovertible facts to the materials which must enter into the future biography of Bacon, that his book cannot fail to exact cordial praise from the most captious critics.  Bacon, in his aspirations and purposes, was a very much greater man than he appears in Mr. Dixon’s biography; but still to Mr. Dixon belongs the credit of rescuing his personal reputation from undeserved ignominy.  If we add to this his vivid pictures of the persons and events of the Elizabethan age, and his bright, sharp, and brief way of flashing his convictions and discoveries on the mind of the reader, we indicate merits which will make his volume generally and justly popular.  The letters of Lady Ann Bacon, the mother of the philosopher and statesman-letters for which we are indebted to Mr. Dixon’s exhaustive research—­would alone be sufficient to justify the publication of his interesting book.

Autobiography of Dr. Alexander Carlyle, Minister of Inveresk.  With Memorials of the Men and Events of his Time.  Boston:  Ticknor & Fields. 12mo. pp. 480.

Who was he? and what was he like?—­Sir Walter Scott answered these interrogatories more than thirty years ago, in this wise.  He says, in his “Review of the Life and Works of John Home,”—­“Dr. Carlyle was, for a long period, clergyman of Musselburgh; his character was as excellent as his conversation was amusing and instructive; his person and countenance, even at a very advanced age, were so lofty and commanding, as to strike every artist with his resemblance to the Jupiter Tonans of the Pantheon.”

Sixty years ago, this old Scottish clergyman sat down, one January day, in Musselburgh, and began to write his “Autobiography.”  He had lived seventy-nine years among scenes of great interest, and had known men of remarkable genius.  He wrote and died.  The manuscript he left has been often read and enjoyed by clever men and women, who in their turn have gone to the churchyard to sleep with the venerable old man the story of whose life they had perused.  Sir Walter himself once caught a glimpse of the time-stained sheets.  All are now dead who could by any chance he pained by the publication of facts in which their relatives look part long years ago.  So the world has now another volume to add to the store of biography, and the future historian will have another treasury of facts from which to illumine his pages.