death: "Sterling's face still; the same that we had long known, but painted now as on the azure of eternity, serene, victorious, divinely sad; the dust and extraneous disfigurements imprinted on it by the world now washed away forever."

Not the least attractive feature of this book is the fact that it presents Carlyle himself in an altogether more lovable form than anything else that has ever been written about him. It is gratifying to see our gloomy iconoclast thoroughly enjoying an entirely human friendship. Their differences of opinion were many; but in their intercourse, with Sterling's revivifying influence to encourage him, I have no doubt that Carlyle blossomed out into more tenderness and hopefulness than he ever showed to any other creature. Even he could not help turning his sunny side toward this radiant young son of the morning. What the friendship was to Sterling himself is best told in his brief letter of farewell to Carlyle, written a few weeks before his death :

"MY DEAR CARLYLE: For the first time in many months it seems possible to send you a few words, merely, however, for Remembrance and Farewell. On higher subjects there is nothing to say. I tread the common road into the great darkness without any thought of fear and with very much of hope. Certainty, indeed, I have none. With regard to you and me I cannot begin to write; having nothing for it but to keep shut the lid of those secrets with all the iron weights that are in my power. Toward me it is still more true than toward England, that no man has been and done like you. Heaven bless you! If I can lend a hand when there, that shall not be wanting."

Of the second division of Carlyle's works, his criticisms, I have little or nothing new to say, criticising a critic being a work of supererogation for which I have neither the ability nor inclination. He brought to this department of his work what few critics have to bring,—a clear, penetrating glance into the beauty or deformity of every life and mind. He sees straight down into the heart, and if, in its darkest corners, unknown to ourselves or others, there is one unworthy motive lurking, he hunts it to its gloomy hiding-place and drags it cowering to the light. Of all his critiques that I have read, perhaps the two on Burns and Voltaire pleased me most. What can I say of the tender touch of that hand which sketched for us Robert Burns as no

other hand could have done? The sympathy which thrills through every word, even the words of censure; the ready genius which has transfigured that poor life-picture, spreading even athwart its dark clouds the bright arch of the rainbow-these are things that I have no power to describe. The criticism on Voltaire is essentially a masterpiece. Never before had this man had simple justice done him. His cohorts of admirers had written lives without number, many of which might better have been called the apotheosis of Voltaire ; his defamers, looking at him always with the chancel-rail between them, have been more than ready to make a warning auto-da-fé of him and his writings, and to paint him almost as the archfiend himself. Not so Carlyle. He looks at Voltaire as a man, and as a brother-man he does him justice, a justice in whose fierce, white light we see Voltaire, a shrunken figure, indeed, but still not less than human. He shows that it was quite impossible such a thorough child of that age could be in any true sense a great or deep thinker, for what was the age itself but one of superficial polish, mockery, selfishness, and skepticism? He frankly reminds us, though, that we yet owe to Voltaire one debt of gratitude, for it was he who dealt the death-blow to superstition, which "now lies cowering in its lair; its last agonies may endure for centuries, perhaps, but it carries the iron in its soul and cannot vex the earth any more."

These, and all his other criticisms, show Carlyle to be a discriminating, sympathetic, and thoroughly just judge. A man with such a consuming spirit of earnestness is not apt to slur over any part of his work, or be satisfied with anything short of his very best efforts. Indeed, next to the varied and profound genius of this author, it is his great earnestness which most impresses the candid reader. I am aware, of course, that Mr. Henry James, in a recent "Atlantic Monthly," has informed the world that Carlyle was simply a great comedian, caring nothing for sincerity, truth, and work, except as convenient subjects to write and rant about. Mr. James complacently announces himself as one of Carlyle's intimate friends,— strange, by the way, how many intimate friends have come to light since the poor man's death,as one who thoroughly understood and respected him. And this base caricature is the outcome of his devotion ! It is a veritable Brutus-stab, it seems to me, for certainly, if Carlyle were not in

earnest, he was the most contemptible of men. A huge sham, spending a life-time in the effort to upset and explode all other shams, and conscious all the time of his own duplicity, is a monster not even deserving Mr. James's admiration. Carlyle was desperately in earnest; his sincerity and his gloom are alike unquestionably all-pervading in the remaining department of his work which we are now to consider. By this class of his writings he is usually judged, and it is this which has given him his individual and peculiar position in literaI am convinced, though, that his most honorable and lasting laurels have been won on other fields, and rather regret that, after considering him as a critic and an historian, my work is still incomplete. There is yet another path in which we must follow him. About fifty years ago this modern Jeremiah first lifted up his voice in wailing for the sins of his people, a voice heartpiercing in its pathos, appalling in its hopelessness. It awoke dismal echoes in many a thoughtful heart: like an elegy of tears, it arrested, for the moment, at least, the astonished and indignant notice even of that large class of people who may aptly be termed the ephemera of life. Their place in the world is like that of the evanescent foam above the great, busy, restless heart of the ocean. Today they toss and froth and sparkle perhaps, to morrow they are not, and there is no added moan in the great waves of society to show where they have gone down. Like the surging of the billows beneath this foam was the influence of that mighty mind which now, at last, knows what "the doubt ful prospects of this painted dust" may be. From the first, Carlyle felt himself the one real man looking with clear, sad eyes upon the real problems of life, which the rest of us phantoms, as he calls us, peep at through the holes in our masks, or touch but with phantom lances. A desolate isolation, indeed, to be the one philosopher in this mammoth masquerade. Ah! well; he had never been one of the ephemera. Perhaps if he had, he would have known that even among them there is a little more eager questioning of Fate, a little more bitter disappointment at its sphinx-like silence, than he ever imputed to them. It is something to be a giant among pigmies, certainly, but to be a Giant Despair is an appalling and mournful destiny. An intolerable gloom, a hopeless, overwhelming sadness of heart, enthralled this man, who was never king over himself. He had passed far beyond the

heights for which we common mortals sigh, the heights bathed forever in the fair sunlight of peace, freshened forever by the glad breezes of heaven. He was one of the few in this generation who have reached the very peaks of intellectual life, the bare peaks which invade the misty cloudland itself. The sunbeams seek humbler eminences; the rainbow itself spreads its bright arch beneath those lofty summits, which are cloud-capped, storm-swept, lightning-blasted. Upon such a towering peak | stood Carlyle, looking down toward us pigmies patiently toiling far beneath him; looking down with withering contempt and pity upon us, because we knew no better than to be happy and glad in our sunlight and bow of promise. We look up to him; inevitably we must look up. His elevation is too great for us to dare to sympathize; but strange to say, pigmies though we are, we do dare to pity the giant who has climbed so far above us that he has even passed the heights of repose and hope. A Goliath, indeed, he may be, but never more a child of light, which is a happier though humbler title. These are the feelings with which one lays down "Past and Present" or "LatterDay Pamphlets."

Carlyle has been aptly termed the iconoclast of the nineteenth century. It is interesting to watch him, hitting straight out from the shoulder every time, and ruthlessly knocking images right and left. It does seem that he is either hopelessly behind what we are pleased to call the spirit of our age, or else about a thousand years ahead of it. It is amusing to see how many of our pet theories are ground to atoms by his vigorous blows. When once he has found what he considers a truth, he rushes impetuously forward with it, never pausing to see whether the crowd be huzzaing at his back or not. Usually the crowd is doing exactly the reverse, but it does not disconcert him. It is certainly not advisable that I should do more than merely mention a few of his peculiar views, all of which one may readily find elaborately presented in the works I have named. Carlyle altogether disapproves of the non-interference theory of government, believes in the oneman power, and particularly admired the Czar of Russia as a consistent exponent of that idea. He objects to the freedom of the press, and declares the first step toward reforming Parliament should be to turn out the ubiquitous reporters. He was a staunch advocate of slavery, and I have an idea

that he never changed his opinions on that subject, Mr. Moncure Conway to the contrary notwithstanding. He abhors democracy; undaunted by the tramp of its million feet in all streets and thoroughfares and the roar of its bewildered, thousand-fold voice in all writings and speakings, he meets it with "Avaunt! Vex not my sight!" To the passionate, stormful outbreak of "Chartism" he has the one reply: "It is the everlasting privilege of the foolish to be governed by the wise. The first inalienable rights of men is to be guided in the right path by those who know it better than they." He has no faith in the future of America, a country where "the votes of Jesus and of Judas have equal weight." The question of Carlyle's religious views as presented in his works would certainly be an interesting one if I had time for it. Suffice it to say simply, that, though Carlyle was a deeply religious man, unlike the man in "Pilgrim's Progress" he did not like religion in her silver slippers. Far from it. When religion walked abroad so attired, Carlyle was all too apt to sit in the seat of the scornful and hoot.

My ardent admiration for Carlyle is qualified

by exactly two objections. The first is one that I have seen urged before. He is not sufficiently practical. It is all very well for him to exhort us to absolute sincerity, ceaseless endeavor, etc., but his directions are all expressed in such very general terms that I do not see how they can be of any special help to the individual worker. There is one other defect that I cannot forbear mentioning. He saw the emptiness, squalor, and falsity of life, and moaned over it bitterly. He would have seemed to me a greater man had he been slightly more of an optimist. He might at least have comforted us with the assurance that eternity would set all things right, however distorted they may become in this life. But he lacked faith in his race, and had little hope for their future. He looked upon man with angry despair, and toward God with awe and dread. He would have been a happier and greater man could he have felt more constantly the full beauty of those dear words of Mrs. Browning:

"I smiled to think God's goodness flows around our incompleteness:

Round our restlessnes, his rest.”

"'SPEC' I 'scober de light ob day, gen'l'm." These words were uttered in a sepulchral tone by an ebony apparition in scant garments, which suddenly appeared through a hole in the attic floor. The strange and startling effect of such a visitation in the early hours before dawn, carrying its own illuminating accessory in the shape of a tallow dip, which threw flickering, ghostly shadows on the wall, aroused us from troubled slumber, and startled us into a sitting posture, with a decided inclination to yawn and rub our eyes.

The little word "us," in this instance, stands for the writer and his three companions; and as to our quarters, where we had spent a portion of the night, they were by no means fashionable -luxurious coverlets, downy pillows, and all that; on the contrary, our bed-chamber was a garret of limited proportions, in which you could not stand upright without bumping your head against

rafters, and our bed consisted of two boards and divers old blankets.

Seeing that we continued to yawn, and still appeared very sleepy, the ebony-colored ghost, with the spluttering candle, which showed us the whites of his rolling eyes in weird relief against their dark background, repeated his remark:

"'Spec' I 'scober de light ob day, gen'l'm." "Uncle Joe" was the landlord of the Civil Rights Hotel, located about midway between Norfolk and South Mills, North Carolina, upon the road leading, in company with a canal, through the great Dismal Swamp. The establishment was not of regal dimensions, and did not possess all the facilities which would be required to make it a favorite resort, but looked more like a barn struck by lightning than anything else; while its proprietor, the sable dispenser of bed and board. referred to, under the name of "Uncle Joe," was