ble, and to the purpose, that no book of the day can be found more wordy, diffuse, and irrelevant than the one before us, that is, if we have been at all successful in seizing and following out his thoughts, about which we would not be presumptuous. It is a volume of tortured phraseology, of printed darkness, and little else. Imagine it placed by a bookseller on its first appearance in the hands of a minister of the Home Department, of a member of Parliament, of a philanthropist like Wilberforce, anxious for new light from any quarter on the hard questions it professes to discuss, and which might then be agitating the public mind, nay, shaking a kingdom to its centre; and with what indignation, as he puzzled himself over the swollen vanity, would he squir it from his window into the kennel, or consign it to the flames. Let Mr. Carlyle, the Romance writer, when he evolves his Sartors and Diamond Necklaces, be wayward as he will, let him dress up his ideas in literary swaddling clothes of every imaginable hue, let him don his party-colored coat, mount his cap and bells, and with every variety of grimace amuse, astonish, or befool such as may try to read, and we should be tempted to let the show proceed without a word of remonstrance; nay, as in the case of Professor Teufelsdröckh, we might heartily applaud the successful harlequin. But when this ludicrous exhibition is brought upon what may justly be regarded as holier ground, when it thrusts itself in where the great rights of humanity are discussed, diverting the attention from the gravest themes by the most offensive displays of personal vanity, we think that common people, those not by nature transcendentally strung, may be pardoned if they raise an objection. We do object accordingly. We took up his book for information, but found little else than a fresh theatrical parading of the author. The records of literature, of English literature at least, furnish, we suppose, no example, in their whole extent, of so bold and long continued an experiment on the public taste, as this of Mr. Carlyle. That the public, in one considerable portion of it, should have contributed to the partial success of the experiment, or rather have caused such success and rejoiced in it, is certainly on every account, in our judgment, to be regretted. We can discern no new grace imparted to our language, nor any added power, in the lucubrations of any of the crowd of disciples, who have approached nearest to the sublime absurdity of the Master, but every where the contrary. Lessons of affectation, which need never to be taught, are the only ones which appear to have been learned. Wherever the influence of Carlyle as a writer is to be detected, it is, we think, only in ン some oddities and effeminacies of speech, by which the writings of his admirers and followers are deformed. Their own mother English, though never so homely, were a better dialect. Not that there are "unities" in respect to style to be superstitiously observed; not that style must be run in one and the same mould; not that Carlyle must write like Macaulay, or both like Jeffrey. But that neither should write like a fool; neither make of his style merely or chiefly a medium of his vanity, a stalking-horse on which to play fantastic tricks before the world. Diversity and variety are greatly to be desired. Let style like costume continually take new forms and fashions. But let it not degenerate into ridiculous affectation, or preposterous oddity. A fop is always despicable, whether in letters or dress. And he is so because vanity, seeking notoriety by the very smallest arts, is his central idea. As we judge, Mr. Carlyle and some of his imitators come under this category. It is not philosophy, new or striking thought, that constitutes the peculiarity by which he and they are distinguished from others, but, solely or chiefly, eccentric and affected speech a modern Euphuism, a refined literary dandyism. The unhappy effect of this has been greatly to diminish, with many utterly to annihilate their power as moral and religious writers. The splendid genius of Carlyle may win, nay, it compels admiration; but he does not secure respect. To affectation of any kind -a sort of falsehood we can never accord what we mean by that word. It is reserved for simplicity and truth. That we have done Mr. Carlyle no injustice in describing the present work as equally grotesque with any that has gone before it, will appear from a few quotations. We would offer an analysis of the volume, but we frankly acknowledge our incompetency to the task. And what class of readers the author can have had in his mind, as those who were to read and profit by his book, we cannot conjecture. The class of practical politicians and statesmen, we think, would turn from it instinctively, as from the effusions of a brain-sick dreamer. As for the Chartists themselves, they might as well essay Chinese. It will be read and relished, we imagine, only by his wholesale admirers, besides them by a few fastidious Litterateurs who live on excitement, and whose appetite, like that of the sensualist, must be fired by some pungent dainty or they starve. Here are the heads of the Chapters, a fair sample of the rest of the book. "Condition-of-England Question. Statistics. New Poor Law. Finest Peasantry in the World. Rights and Mights. Laissez Faire. Not Laissez Faire. - Parliamentary Radicalism. Impossible. " VOL. XXIX. -3D S. VOL. XI. NO. I. 16 New Eras. Take another specimen from the Chapter on the New Poor Law. "To believe practically that the poor and luckless are here only as a nuisance to be abraded and abated, and in some permissible manner made away with, and swept out of sight, is not an amiable faith. That the arrangements of good and ill success in this perplexed scramble of a world, which a blind goddess was always thought to preside over, are in fact the work of a seeing goddess or god, and require only not to be meddled with: what stretch of heroic faculty or inspiration of genius was needed to teach one that? To button your pockets and stand still, is no complex recipe. Laissez faire, laissez passer! Whatever goes on, ought it not to go on; the widow picking nettles for her children's dinner, and the perfumed seigneur delicately lounging in the Œil-du-Bœuf, who has an alchemy whereby he will extract from her the third nettle, and name it rent and law?' What is written and enacted, has it not blackon-white to show for itself? Justice is justice; but all attorney's parchment is of the nature of Targum or sacred-parchment. In brief, ours is a world requiring only to be well let alone. Scramble along, thou insane scramble of a world, with thy pope's tiaras, king's mantles and beggar's gabardines, chivalry-ribbons and plebeian gallowsropes, where a Paul shall die on the gibbet and a Nero sit fiddling as imperial Cæsar: thou art all right, and shalt scramble even so; and whoever in the press is trodden down, has only to lie there and be trampled broad: Such at bottom seems to be the chief social principle, if principle it have, which the Poor-Law Amendment Act has the merit of courageously asserting, in opposition to many things. pp. 18, 19. What a burlesque upon eloquenoe is this which follows; yet we rather think this passage would be regarded as the gem of the volume. "It is in Glasgow among that class of operatives that 'Number 60,' in his dark room, pays down the price of blood. Be it with reason or with unreason, too surely they do in verity find the time all out of joint; this world for them no home, but a dingy prisonhouse, of reckless unthrift, rebellion, rancor, indignation against themselves and against all men. Is it a green flowery world, with azure everlasting sky stretched over it, the work and government of a God; or a murky-simmering Tophet, of copperas-fumes, cottonfuz, gin-riot, wrath and toil created by a Demon, governed by a Demon? The sum of their wretchedness merited and unmerited welters, huge, dark, and baleful, like a Dantean Hell, visible there in the statistics of Gin: Gin justly named the most authentic incarnation of the Infernal Principle in our times, too indisputable an incarnation: Gin the black throat into which wretchedness of every sort, consummating itself by calling on delirium to help it whirls down; abdication of the power to think or resolve, as too painful now, on the part of men whose lot of all others would require thought and resolution; liquid Madness sold at ten-pence the quartern, all the products of which are and must be, like its origin, mad, miserable, ruinous, and that only! If from this black unluminous unheeded Inferno, and Prisonhouse of souls in pain, there do flash up from time to time some dismal wide-spread glare of Chartism or the like, notable to all, claiming remedy from all,- are we to regard it as more baleful than the quiet state, or rather as not so baleful? Ireland is in chronic atrophy these five centuries; the disease of nobler England, identified now with that of Ireland, becomes acute, has crises, and will be cured or kill." - pp. 34, 35. Once more. "Accidental all these things and persons look, unexpected every one of them to man. Yet inevitable every one of them; foreseen, not unexpected, by Supreme Power; prepared, appointed from afar. Advancing always through all centuries, in the middle of the eighteenth they arrived. The Saxon kindred, burst forth iuto cotton-spinning, cloth-dropping, iron forging, steamengining, railwaying, commercing and careering towards all the winds of heaven, in this enexplicable noisy manner; the noise of which, in Power-mills, in progress-of-thespecies Magazines, still deafens us somewhat. Most noisy, sudden! The Staffordshire coal-stratum, and coal-strata, lay side by side with iron-strata, quiet since the creation of the world. Water flowed in Lancashire and Lanarkshire; bituminous fire lay bedded in rocks there too, over which how many fighting Stanleys, black Douglases, and other the like contentious persons, had fought out their bickerings and broils, not without result, we will hope! But God said, Let the iron missionaries be; and they were. Coal and iron, so long close unregardful neighbors, are wedded together; Birmingham and Wolverhampton, and the hundred Stygian forges, with their fire-throats and never-resting sledge-hammers, rose into day. Wet Manconium stretched out her hand towards Carolina and the torrid zone, and plucked cotton there: who could forbid her, her that had the skill to weave it? Fish fled thereupon from the Mersey River, vexed with innumerable keels. England, I say, dug out her bitumenfire, and bade it work: towns rose, and steeple chimneys ; Chartisms also, and Parliaments they name Reformed.” pp. 87, 88. And so on through the volume. We should not have said these things of a man less great than Mr. Carlyle. But when monarchs play the clown plebeians may play the rebel. A far more pregnant chapter on this same subject of Chartism is to be found in the essay of Mr. Brownson, named at the head of our Article, and which has been reprinted from the Boston Quarterly. This is a tract as much superior to Mr. Carlyle's in the manliness and energy of its English, as it is more startling in its doctrines. To give the reader some idea of its character and drift we offer a brief abstract. Comparing together, at the close of his introduction, the mischief and danger to be apprehended from monarchy and nobility, with those which may be feared from the middle classes, Mr. Brownson thinks that the laborer has much more to apprehend from the latter. These he looks upon as the real tyrants of the operative. "The only enemy of the laborer is your employer, whether appearing in the shape of a Master Mechanic or in the owner of a factory. A Duke of Wellington is much more likely to vindicate the rights of labor than an Abbot Lawrence." The remedies proposed for the relief of the working-men by Mr Carlyle, universal education, and emigration, Mr. Brownson considers wholly inadequate. He sees a remedy equal to the evil only in revolutionary movements of the poor, darkly foreboded in such language as the following: "No one can observe the signs of the times with much care, without perceiving that a crisis as to the relation of wealth and labor is approaching. It is useless to shut our eyes to the fact, and like the ostrich fancy ourselves secure because we have so concealed our heads that we see not the danger. We or our children will have to meet this crisis. The old war between the King and the Barons is well nigh ended, and so is that between the Barons and the Merchants and Manufacturers, landed capital and commercial capital. The business man has become the peer of my Lord. And now commences the new struggle between the operative and his employer, between wealth and labor. Every day does this struggle extend further and wax stronger and fiercer; what or when the end will be God only knows. "In this coming contest there is a deeper question at issue than is commonly imagined; a question which is but remotely touched in your controversies about United States Banks and Sub Treasuries, chartered Banking and free Banking, free trade and corporations, although these controversies may be paving the way for it to come up. We have discovered no presentiment of it in any king's or queen's speech, nor in any president's message. It is embraced in no popular political creed of the day, whether christened Whig or Tory, Juste-milieu or Democratic. No popular senator, or deputy, or peer seems to have any glimpse of it; but it is working in the hearts of the million, is struggling to shape itself, and one day it will be uttered, and in thunder tones. Well will it be for him, who, on that day, shall be found ready to answer it." - pp. 9, 10. Mr. Brownson then paints at length the oppressed condition of the laborer- both freeman and slave · giving, however, a preference to the state of the slave over the free laborer, as on the whole one of less oppression. How, he next inquires, is the laborer to be emancipated? Not by any moral or religious reform of the individual. Not by any processes of "self-culture." The evil under consideration is a social evil, and can be removed only by social changes. As the grand cause of the depression and poverty of the laboring classes is to be found not any arrangements of Providence, but in institutions of man's in |