endless, countless, superfinely minute.  Even no two of the commonest men does she make alike; her men of genius she diversifies at once grandly and delicately, broadly and subtly.  “Petrarch and Boccaccio did diplomatic messages,” says Mr. Carlyle.  We hope they did, or could have done, in the prosaic field, much better than that.  We Americans know with what moderate equipment diplomatic messages may be done.

On poetry and poets Mr. Carlyle has written many of his best pages, pages penetrating, discriminative, because so sympathetic, and executed with the scholar’s care and the critic’s culture.  His early papers on Goethe and Burns, published more than forty years ago, made something like an epoch in English criticism.  Seizing the value and significance of genuine poetry, he exclaims in “Past and Present,”—­“Genius, Poet! do we know what these words mean?  An inspired soul once more vouchsafed us, direct from Nature’s own great fire-heart, to see the truth, and speak it and do it.”  On the same page he thus taunts his countrymen:  “We English find a poet, as brave a man as has been made for a hundred years or so anywhere under the sun; and do we kindle bonfires, thank the gods?  Not at all.  We, taking due counsel of it, set the man to gauge ale-barrels in the Burgh of Dumfries, and pique ourselves on our ‘patronage of genius.’” “George the Third is Defender of something we call ‘the Faith’ in those years.  George the Third is head charioteer of the destinies of England, to guide them through the gulf of French Revolutions, American Independences; and Robert Burns is gauger of ale in Dumfries.”  Poor George the Third!  One needs not be a craniologist to know that the eyes which looked out from beneath that retreating pyramidal forehead could see but part even of the commonest men and things before them.  How could they see a Robert Burns?  To be sure, had Dundas, or whoever got Burns the place of gauger, given him one of the many sinecures of two or three hundred pounds a year that were wasted on idle scions of titled families, an aureole of glory would now shine through the darkness that environs the memory of George III.  So much for George Guelf.  Now for Thomas Carlyle.

If, for not recognizing Burns, poor George is to be blamed, what terms of stricture will be too harsh for rich Thomas, that by him were not recognized poets greater than Burns, at a time when for England’s good, full, sympathetic recognition of them was just what was literarily most wanted?  Here was a man, for the fine function of poetic criticism how rarely gifted is visible in those thorough papers on Burns and Goethe, written so early as 1828, wherein, besides a masterly setting forth of their great subjects, are notable passages on other poets.  On Byron is passed the following sentence, which will, we think, be ever confirmed by sound criticism.  “Generally speaking, we should say that Byron’s poetry is not true.  He refreshes us, not with the divine