down-trodden, prepare, through such means as are at hand, a better ground for the next generation.  If to such workers, instead of God-speed, a writer of force and influence gives jeers and gibes, and ever-repeated shrieks about “semblance and quackery, and cant and speciosity, and dilettantism,” and deems himself profound and original, as well as hopeful, when he exclaims:  “Dim all souls of men to the divine, the high and awful meaning of human worth and truth, we shall never by all the machinery in Birmingham discover the true and worthy:”  in that case, does he not expose him to the taunt of being himself very like a mouthing quack, and his words, which should be cordial, brotherly, do they not partake of the hollow quality of what Mr. Carlyle holds in such abhorrence, namely, of cant?  The sick lion crouches growling in his lair; he cannot eat, and he will not let others eat.

Many grateful and admiring readers Mr. Carlyle wearies with his ever-recurrent fallacy that might is right.  In Heaven’s name, what are all the shams whose presence he so persistently bemoans,—­worldly bishops, phantasm-aristocracies, presumptuous upstarts, shallow sway-wielding dukes,—­what are all these, and much else, but so many exemplications of might that is not right?  When might shall cease to bully, to trample on right, we shall be nearing Utopia.  Utopia may be at infinite distance, not attainable by finite men; but as surely as our hearts beat, we are gradually getting further from its opposite, the coarse rule of force and brutality, such rule as in the twelfth century was rife all around “Abbot Sampson.”

Like unto this moral fallacy is an aesthetic fallacy which, through bright pages of criticism, strikes up at times to vitiate a judgment.  “I confess,” says Mr. Carlyle, “I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men.”  Could Newton have written the “Fairy Queen?” Could Spenser have discovered the law of gravitation?  Could Columbus have given birth to “Don Quixote?” One of Mr. Carlyle’s military heroes tried hard to be a poet.  Over Frederick’s verses, how his friend Voltaire must have grinned.  “I cannot understand how a Mirabeau, with that great glowing heart, with the fire that was in it, with the bursting tears that were in it, could not have written verses, tragedies, poems, and touched all hearts in that way, had his course of life and education led him thitherward.”  Thus Mr. Carlyle writes in “Heroes and Hero-Worship.”  If Mirabeau, why not Savonarola, or Marcus Aurelius.  In that case a “Twelfth Night,” or an “Othello,” might have come from Luther.  Nature does not work so loosely.  Rich is she, unspeakably rich, and as artful as she is profuse in the use of her riches.  She delights in variety, thence her ineffable radiance, and much of her immeasurable efficiency.  Diverseness in unity is a source of her power as well as of her beauty.  Her wealth of material being infinite, her specifications are