of “the sensuous literature of the Greeks,” and preferred the Norse to the Hellenic mythology.  Even in his admirable critical essays on Burns, on Richter, on Scott, Diderot, and Voltaire, which are free from his later mannerism—­written in English, and not in Carlylese—­his sense of spirit is always more lively than his sense of form.  He finally became so impatient of art as to maintain—­half-seriously—­the paradox that Shakspere would have done better to write in prose.  In three of these early essays—­on the Signs of the Times, 1829; on History, 1830, and on Characteristics, 1831—­are to be found the germs of all his later writings.  The first of these was an arraignment of the mechanical spirit of the age.  In every province of thought he discovered too great a reliance upon systems, institutions, machinery, instead of upon men.  Thus, in religion, we have Bible societies, “machines for converting the heathen.”  “In defect of Raphaels and Angelos and Mozarts, we have royal academies of painting, sculpture, music.”  In like manner, he complains, government is a machine.  “Its duties and faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable.”  Against the “police theory,” as distinguished from the “paternal” theory, of government, Carlyle protested with ever shriller iteration.  In Chartism, 1839, Past and Present, 1843, and Latter-day Pamphlets, 1850, he denounced this laissez faire idea.  The business of government, he repeated, is to govern; but this view makes it its business to refrain from governing.  He fought most fiercely against the conclusions of political economy, “the dismal science” which, he said, affirmed that men were guided exclusively by their stomachs.  He protested, too, against the Utilitarians, followers of Bentham and Mill, with their “greatest happiness principle,” which reduced virtue to a profit-and-loss account.  Carlyle took issue with modern liberalism; he ridiculed the self-gratulation of the time, all the talk about progress of the species, unexampled prosperity, etc.  But he was reactionary without being conservative.  He had studied the French Revolution, and he saw the fateful, irresistible approach of democracy.  He had no faith in government “by counting noses,” and he hated talking Parliaments; but neither did he put trust in an aristocracy that spent its time in “preserving the game.”  What he wanted was a great individual ruler; a real king or hero; and this doctrine he set forth afterward most fully in Hero Worship, 1841, and illustrated in his lives of representative heroes, such as his Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, 1845, and his great History of Frederick the Great, 1858-1865.  Cromwell and Frederick were well enough; but as Carlyle grew older his admiration for mere force grew, and his latest hero was none other than that infamous Dr. Francia, the South American dictator, whose career of bloody and crafty crime horrified the civilized world.