of no safe middle path:  it must arrest attention for its novelty, its graphic power, its bold originality; or it must offend by its newfangled phrase, its jerking movement, and its metaphor and allusion reduced into a slang.  Meanwhile, there is so much in a history which needs only to be told—­so much, which even this author, skip how he may, must relate, for the sake merely of preserving a continuous narrative—­and where the perfection of style would be, as all the world knows, that it should draw no attention whatever to itself.  A style like this of our author’s, once assumed, cannot be laid down for a moment; and the least important incident is related with the same curiosity of diction, and the same startling manner, that delighted us in the Siege of the Bastile.  To convey mere information, it seems quite unserviceable.  “How inferior,” says our author somewhere himself,—­“how inferior for seeing by is the brightest train of fireworks to the humblest farthing candle!”

The basis of a history is surely, after all, the narrative, and whatever may be the estimate of others, the historian proceeds on the supposition that the facts he has to relate are, for their own sake, deserving to be had in remembrance.  If not, why is he there recording and verifying them?  But Mr Carlyle proceeds throughout on quite the contrary supposition, that the fact for itself is worth nothing—­that it is valuable only as it presents some peculiar picture to the imagination, or kindles some noteworthy reflection.  He maintains throughout the attitude of one who stands apart, looking at the history; rarely does he assume the patient office of that scribe whom we remember to have seen in the frontispiece of our school histories, recording faithfully what the bald headed Time, sitting between his scythe and his hour-glass, was dictating.

Never, indeed, was history written in so mad a vein—­and that not only as regards style, but the prevailing mood of mind in which the facts and characters are scanned.  That mood is for the most part ironical.  There is philanthropy, doubtless, at the bottom of it all; but a mocking spirit, a profound and pungent irony, are the manifest and prevailing characteristics.  It is a philanthropy which has borrowed the manner of Mephistopheles.  It is a modern Diogenes—­in fact it is Diogenes Teufelsdrockh himself, surveying the Revolution from his solitary watch-tower, where he sits so near the eternal skies, that a whole generation of men, whirling off in wild Sahara waltz into infinite space, is but a spectacle, and a very brief and confused one.  This lofty irony, pungent as it is, grows wearisome.  By throwing a littleness on all things, it even destroys the very aliment it feeds on; nothing, at last, is worth the mocking.  But the weariness it occasions is not its greatest fault.  It leads to a most unjust and capricious estimate of the characters and actions of men.