By the time that Cromwell was published, Thomas Carlyle was turned of fifty, and had produced nearly two-thirds of his total work.  It may be doubted if any later book will be permanently counted amongst his masterpieces. Friedrich, for reasons set forth, was an attempt in late life to repeat the feat of the Cromwell:  it was a much less urgent task:  and it was not so well performed.  The Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850) do not add much that is new to Past and Present (1843) or to Sartor (1831); and little of what they add is either needful or true.  The world had been fully enlightened about Wind-bags, Shams, the approach to Tophet, Stump-orators, Palaver-Parliaments, Phantasm-Captains, and the rest of the Sartorian puppet-pantomime.  There was a profound truth in all of these invectives, warnings, and prophecies.  But the prophet’s voice at last got so shrieky and monotonous, that instead of warning and inspiring a second generation, these terrific maledictions began to pall upon a practical world.  An ardent admirer of the prophet has said that, when he first heard Carlyle speak face to face, he could hardly resist the impression that he was listening to an actor personating the Sage of Chelsea, and mimicking the stock phrases of the Latter-Day Pamphlets.  Certainly no man of sense can find any serious guidance on any definite social problem from these “Pamphlets” of his morbid decline.  Carlyle at last sat eating his heart out, like Napoleon on St. Helena.  His true friends will hasten to throw such a decent covering as Japhet and Shem threw around Noah, over the latest melancholy outbursts about Negroes, Reformers, Jamaica massacres, and the anticipated conflagration of Paris by the Germans.  It is pitiful indeed to find in “the collected and revised works,” thirty-six volumes, the drivel of his Pro-Slavery advocacy, and of ill-conditioned snarling at honest men labouring to reform ancient abuses.

It is perilous for any man, however consummate be his genius, to place himself on a solitary rock apart from all living men and defiant of all before him, as the sole source of truth out of his own inner consciousness.  It is fatal to any man, however noble his own spirit, to look upon this earth as “one fuliginous dust-heap,” and the whole human race as a mere herd of swine rushing violently down a steep place into the sea.  Nor can the guidance of mankind be with safety entrusted to one who for eighty-six years insisted on remaining by his own hearth-stone a mere omnivorous reader and omnigenous writer of books.  Carlyle was a true and pure “man of letters,” looking at things and speaking to men, alone in his study, through the medium of printed paper.  All that a “man of letters,” of great genius and lofty spirit, could do by consuming and producing mere printed paper, he did.  And as the “supreme man of letters” of his time he will ever be honoured and long continue to be read.  He deliberately cultivated a form