in the night with her plate and jewels; for that he was locked up for six months.  On his release, he employed his leisure in the composition of an odious poem.  Then he flung himself head foremost into the revolution.  Blood calcined by study, a colossal pride, a conscience completely unhinged, an imagination haunted by the bloody recollections of Rome and Sparta, an intelligence falsified and twisted until it found itself most at its ease in the practice of enormous paradox, barefaced sophism, and murderous lying—­all these perilous ingredients, mixed in a furnace of concentrated ambition, boiled and fermented long and silently in his breast.”

It is, no doubt, hard to know ourselves.  One may entertain demons unawares, and have calcined blood without being a bit the wiser.  Still, I do not find the likeness striking.  It would have done just as well to call me Nero, Torquemada, Iago, or Bluebeard.

Whether the present writer does or does not deserve all the compliments that history has paid to Saint-Just, is a very slight and trivial question, with which the public will naturally not much concern itself.  But as some use is from time to time made of the writer’s imputed delinquencies to prejudice an important cause, it is perhaps worth while to try in a page or two to give a better account of things.  It is true that he has written on revolutionists like Robespierre, and destructive thinkers like Rousseau and Voltaire.  It is true that he believes the two latter to have been on the whole, when all deductions are made, on the side of human progress.  But what sort of foundation in this for the inference that he “finds his models in the heroes of the French Revolution,” and “looks for his methods in the Reign of Terror”?  It would be equally logical to infer that because I have written, not without sympathy and appreciation, of Joseph de Maistre, I therefore find my model in a hero of the Catholic Reaction, and look for my methods in the revived supremacy of the Holy See over all secular and temporal authorities.  It would be just as fair to say that because I pointed out, as it was the critic’s business to do, the many admirable merits, and the important moral influences on the society of that time, of the New Heloisa, therefore I am bound to think Saint Preux a very fine fellow, particularly fit to be a model and a hero for young Ireland.  Only on the principle that who drives fat oxen must himself be fat, can it be held that who writes on Danton must be himself in all circumstances a Dantonist.

The most insignificant of literary contributions have a history and an origin; and the history of these contributions is short and simple enough.  Carlyle with all the force of his humoristic genius had impressed upon his generation an essentially one-sided view both of the eighteenth century as a whole, and of the French thinkers of that century in particular.  His essay on Diderot, his lecture on Rousseau, his chapters