“There is in this poor Pope, and his practice of the scenic theory of worship, a frankness which I rather honour.  Not half and half, but with undivided heart, does he set about worshipping by stage machinery; as if there were now, and could again be, in nature no other.  He will ask you, What other?  Under this my Gregorian chant, and beautiful wax-light phantasmagory, kindly hidden from you is an abyss of black doubts, scepticism, nay, sans-culottic Jacobinism, an orcus that has no bottom.  Think of that.  ‘Groby Pool is thatched with pancakes,’ as Jeannie Deans’s innkeeper defined it to be!  The bottomless of scepticism, atheism, Jacobinism, behold it is thatched over, hidden from your despair, by stage-properties judiciously arranged.  This stuffed rump of mine saves not me only from rheumatism, but you also from what other isms!”—­P. 187.]

The whole parallel which he runs between past and present is false—­whimsically false.  At one time we hear it uttered as an impeachment against our age, that every thing is done by committees and companies, shares and joint effort, and that no one man, or hero, can any longer move the world as in the blessed days of Peter the Hermit.  Were we disposed to treat Mr Carlye as members of Parliament, by the help of their Hansard, controvert each other, we should have no difficulty in finding amongst his works some passage—­whether eloquent or not, or how far intelligible, would be just a mere chance—­in which he would tell us that this capacity for joint effort, this habit of co-operation, was the greatest boast our times could make, and gave the fairest promise for the future.  In Ireland, by the way, one man can still effect something, and work after the fashion, if not with so pure a fanaticism, as Peter the Hermit.  The spectacle does not appear very edifying.  Pray—­the question just occurs to us—­pray has Mr O’Connell got an eye?  Would Mr Carlyle acknowledge that this man has swallowed all formulas?  Having been bred a lawyer, we are afraid, or, in common Christian speech, we hope, that he has not.

But we are not about to proceed through a volume such as this in a carping spirit, though food enough for such a spirit may be found; there is too much genuine merit, too much genuine humour, in the work.  What, indeed, is the use of selecting from an author who will indulge in all manner of vagaries, whether of thought or expression, passages to prove that he can be whimsical and absurd, can deal abundantly in obscurities and contradictions, and can withal write the most motley, confused English of any man living?  Better take, with thanks, from so irregular a genius, what seems to us good, or affords us gratification, and leave the rest alone.

We will not enter into the account of Abbot Samson; it is a little historical sketch, perfect in its kind, in which no part is redundant, and which, being gathered itself from very scanty sources, will not bear further mutilation.  We turn, therefore, from the Past, although, in a literary point of view, a very attractive portion of the work, and will draw our extracts (they cannot now be numerous) from his lucubrations upon the Present.