fountain, but too often with vulgar strong waters, stimulating indeed to the taste, but soon ending in dislike, or even nausea.  Are his Harolds and Giaours, we would ask, real men; we mean, poetically consistent and conceivable men?  Do not these characters, does not the character of their author, which more or less shines through them all, rather appear a thing put on for the occasion; no natural or possible mode of being, but something intended to look much grander than nature?  Surely, all these stormful agonies, this volcanic heroism, superhuman contempt, and moody desperation, with so much scowling and teeth-gnashing, and other sulphurous humor, is more like the brawling of a player in some paltry tragedy, which is to last three hours, than the bearing of a man in the business of life, which is to last threescore and ten years.  To our minds, there is a taint of this sort, something which we should call theatrical, false, affected, in every one of these otherwise so powerful pieces.”

In the same paper, that on Burns, Mr. Carlyle thus opened the ears of that generation,—­partially opened, for the general aesthetic ear is not fully opened yet,—­to a hollowness which was musical to the many:  “Our Grays and Glovers seemed to write almost as if in vacuo; the thing written bears no mark of place; it is not written so much for Englishmen as for men; or rather, which is the inevitable result of this, for certain generalizations which philosophy termed men.”  And in the paper on Goethe, he calls Gray’s poetry, “a laborious mosaic, through the hard, stiff lineaments of which, little life or true grace could be expected to look.”  Thus choicely endowed was Mr. Carlyle to be, what is the critic’s noblest office, an interpreter between new poets and the public.  Such an interpreter England grievously needed, to help and teach her educated and scholarly classes to prize the treasures just lavished upon them by Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and Shelley, and Keats.  The interpreter was there, but he spoke not.  Better than any man in England Mr. Carlyle could, if he would, have taught the generation that was growing up with him, whose ear he had already gained, what truth and fresh beauty and deep humanity there was in the strains of this composite chorus of superlative singers.  Of such teaching, that generation stood in especial need, to disabuse its ear of the hollowness which had been mistaken for harmony; to refresh, with clear streams from “the divine fountain,” hearts that were fevered by the stimulus of Byronic “strong waters;” to wave before half-awakened eyes the torch which lights the way to that higher plane where breathe great poets, whose incomparable function it is, to impart to their fellow-men some of the enlargement and the purification of consciousness in which themselves exult through the influx of fresh ideas and the upspringing of prolific sentiment.  The gifted interpreter was dumb.  Nay, he made diversions into Scotland