of our popular literature, insists on it that men should assume their full moral strength, and declares that herein lies the salvation of the world?  But what can he do if the external circumstances of life are against him?—­if they crush this moral energy?—­if they discountenance this elevation of character?  Alone—­perhaps nothing.  He with both hands is raising one end of the beam; go you with your tackle, with rope and pulley, and all mechanical appliances, to the other end, and who knows but something may be effected?

It is not by teaching this or that dogma, political, philosophical, or religious, that Mr Carlyle is doing his work, and exerting an influence, by no means despicable, on his generation.  It is by producing a certain moral tone of thought, of a stern, manly, energetic, self-denying character, that his best influence consists.  Accordingly we are accustomed to view his works, even when they especially regard communities of men, and take the name of histories, as, in effect, appeals to the individual heart, and to the moral will of the reader.  His mind is not legislative; his mode of thinking is not systematic; a state economy he has not the skill, perhaps not the pretension, to devise.  When he treats of nations, and governments, and revolutions of states, he views them all as a wondrous picture, which he, the observer, standing apart, watches and apostrophizes, still revealing himself in his reflections upon them.  The picture to the eye, he gives with marvellous vividness; and he puts forth, with equal power, that sort of world-wide reflection which a thinking being might be supposed to make on his first visit to our planet; but the space between—­those intermediate generalizations which make the pride of the philosophical historian—­he neglects, has no taste for.  Such a writer as Montesquieu he holds in manifest antipathy.  His History of the French Revolution, like his Chartism, like the work now before us, his Past and Present, is still an appeal to the consciousness of each man, and to the high and eternal laws of justice and of charity—­lo, ye are brethren!

And although it be true, as our critic has suggested, that to enlarge upon the misery which lies low and wide over the whole ground-plot of civilized society, without at the same time devising an effectual remedy, is a most unsatisfactory business; nevertheless, this also must be added, that to forget the existence of this misery would not be to cure it—­would, on the contrary, be a certain method of perpetuating and aggravating it; that to try to forget it, is as little wise as it is humane, and that indeed such act of oblivion is altogether impossible.  If crowds of artizans, coming forth from homes where there is neither food nor work, shall say, in the words that our author puts into their mouths, “Behold us here—­we ask if you mean to lead us towards work; to try to lead us?  Or if you declare that