remarks he, with a gigantic calmness, ’illiterate writers will rise into renown:’  it is a portion of the history of English literature; a perennial thing, this same popular delusion; and will—­alter the character of the language....

“The life of this man has been, as it were, turned inside out, and examined with microscopes by friend and foe; yet was there no lie found in him.  His doings and writings are not shows, but performances:  you may weigh them in the balance, and they will stand weight.  Not a line, not a sentence is dishonestly done, is other than it pretends to be.  Alas! and he wrote not out of inward inspiration, but to earn his wages; and with that grand perennial tide flowing by, in whose waters he nevertheless refused to fish, to whose rich oyster-beds the dive was too muddy for him.  Observe, again, with what innate hatred of cant he takes to himself, and offers to others, the lowest possible view of his business, which he followed with such nobleness.  Motive for writing he had none, as he often said, but money; and yet he wrote so.  Into the region of poetic art he indeed never rose; there was no ideal without him, avowing itself in his work; the nobler was that unavowed ideal which lay within him, and commanded, saying, Work out thy artisanship in the spirit of an artist!  They who talk loudest about the dignity of art, and fancy that they too are artistic guild-brethren, and of the celestials, let them consider well what manner of man this was, who felt himself to be only a hired day-labourer.”—­Misc. vol. iv. p. 19.

The History of the French Revolution deserves, no doubt, notwithstanding the sort of partiality we have intimated for its wild predecessor, to be considered as the greatest work of Mr Carlyle; but it is the work of which criticism, if she ventures to speak at all, must speak with the loudest and most frequent protests.  There are certain grave objections which cannot be got over.  As to the style, indeed, Mr Carlyle is, on this head, (except, occasionally, when writing for some Review in which a very violent departure from the English language would not be advisable,) far above all criticism.  The attempt to censure the oddities with which it abounds—­the frequent repetition—­the metaphor and allusion used again and again till the page is covered with a sort of slang—­would only subject the critic himself to the same kind of ridicule that would fall upon the hapless wight who should bethink him of taking some Shandean work gravely to task for its scandalous irregularities, and utter want of methodical arrangement.  Such is Carlylism; and this is all that can be said upon the matter.  But the style which seemed not altogether unnatural, and far from intolerable, in Herr Teufelsdrockh, becomes a strangely inconvenient medium of communication where a whole history is to be told in it.  The mischief is, that it admits