mockery of good and able men, such ridiculous caricatures as that of the “Feast of Pikes” and the trial of the King, such ribald horse-play as “Grilled Herrings” and “Lion Sprawling,” in spite of blots and blunders in every chapter—­the French Revolution is destined to live long and to stand forth to posterity as the typical work of the master.  It cannot be said to have done such work as the Cromwell; for it is far less true and sound as history, and it is only one out of scores of interpreters of the Revolution, whereas in the Cromwell Carlyle worked single-handed.  But being far more organic, far more imaginative, indeed more powerful than the Cromwell in literary art, the French Revolution—­produced, we may remember, exactly in the middle of the author’s life—­will remain the enduring monument of Carlyle’s great spirit and splendid brain.

The book entitled Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1840), to give it its full and original title, comes next in order of time, and perhaps of abiding value.  It is a book rather difficult for us now to estimate after more than half a century, for so very much has been done in the interval to build upon these foundations, to enlarge our knowledge of these very heroes, and the estimates of Carlyle in the first half of this century are for the most part so completely the commonplaces of the English-speaking world at the close of the century, that when we open the Heroes again it is apt to seem obvious, connu, the emphatic assertion of a truism that no one disputes.  How infinitely better do we now, in 1895, know Dante and Shakespeare, Cromwell and Napoleon, than did our grandfathers in 1840!  Who, nowadays, imagines Mahomet to have been an impostor, or Burns to have been a mere tipsy song-writer?  What a copious literature has the last half-century given us on Dante, on Islam and its spirit, on Rousseau, on Burns, on the English and the French revolutions!  But in 1840 the true nature of these men was very faintly understood.  Few people but soldiers had the least chance of being called “heroes,” and the “heroic in history” was certainly not thought to include either poets, preachers, or men of letters. Heroes and Hero-Worship, like the Cromwell, has, in fact, done its work so completely that we find it a little too familiar to need any constant reading or careful study.

To judge fairly all that Carlyle effected by his book on Heroes we must put ourselves at the point of view of the time when it was written, the days of Wellington and Melbourne, Brougham and Macaulay, Southey and Coleridge.  None of these men understood the heroic in Norse mythology, or the grandeur of Oliver Cromwell, or the supreme importance of the Divina Commedia as the embodiment of Catholic Feudalism.  All this Carlyle felt as no Englishman before him had felt, and told us in a voice which has since been accepted as conclusive.  How far deeper is the