To all sane men is allotted a complete endowment of mental faculties, of capacities of intellect and feeling; the degree to which these are energized, are injected with nervous flame, makes the difference between a genius and a blockhead.  There being high vital pressure at a full, rich, interior source, and thence, strong mental currents, through what channels the currents shall flow depends on individual aptitudes, these aptitudes shaping, in the one case, a Dante, in another, a Newton, in another, a Mirabeau.  And Nature, with all her generosity, being jealous of her rights, allows no interchange of gifts.  Even the many-sided Goethe could not, by whatever force of will and practice, have written a bar in a symphony of Beethoven.  In his dominant aptitudes, Mr. Carlyle is not more one-sided than many other intellectual potentates; but, like some others, his activity and ambition have at times led him into paths where great deficiencies disclose themselves by the side of great superiorities.  His mind is biographical, not historical; stronger in details than in generalization; more intuitive than scientific; critical, not constructive; literary, not philosophical.  Mr. Carlyle is great at a picture, very great; he can fail in a survey or an induction.  Wealth of thought, strokes of tenderness, clean insight into life, satire, irony, humor, make his least successful volumes to teem with passages noteworthy, beautiful, wise, as do his “Cromwell” and his “Frederick.”  Such giants carrying nations on their broad fronts, Mr. Carlyle, in writing their lives with duteous particularity, has embraced the full story of the epoch in which each was the leader.  To him they are more than leaders.  Herein he and Mr. Buckle stand at opposite poles; Mr. Buckle underrating the protagonists of history, them and their share of agency; Mr. Carlyle overrating them,—­a prejudicial one-sidedness in both cases.  Leader and led are the complements the one of the other.

History is a growth, and a slow growth.  Evils in one age painfully sow the seed that is to come up good in another.  The historian, and still more the critical commentator on his own times, needs to be patient, calm, judicial, hopeful.  Mr. Carlyle is impatient, fervid, willful, nay, despotic, and he is not hopeful, not hopeful enough.  One healthily hopeful, and genuinely faithful, would not be ever betaking him to the past as a refuge from the present; would not tauntingly throw into the face of contemporaries an Abbot Sampson of the twelfth century as a model.  A judicial expounder would not cite one single example as a characteristic of that age in contrast with this.  A patient, impartial elucidator, would not deride “ballot-boxes, reform bills, winnowing machines:”  he would make the best of these and other tools within reach; or, if his part be to write and not to act, would animate, not dishearten, those who are earnestly doing, and who, by boldly striking at abuses, by steadily striving for more justice, by aiming to lift up the