1841.) Vol. ii., p. 152.]

The following year he delivered a second course on the 'History of
Literature, or the Successive Periods of European Culture,' at
the Literary Institution in Edwards-street, Portman-square. 'The
Revolutions of Modern Europe' was the title given to the third course,
delivered twelve months later. The fourth and last series, of six
lectures, is the best remembered, 'Heroes and Hero-worship.' This
course alone was published, and it became more immediately popular
than any of the works which had preceded it. Concerning these
lectures, Leigh Hunt remarked that it seemed "as if some Puritan
had come to life again, liberalized by German philosophy and his own
intense reflections and experience." Another critic, a Scotch writer,
could see nothing but wild impracticability in them, and exclaimed,
"Can any living man point to a single practical passage in any of
these lectures? If not, what is the real value of Mr. Carlyle's
teachings? What is Mr. Carlyle himself but a phantasm!"

The vein of Puritanism running through his writings, composed upon
the model of the German school, impressed many critics with the belief
that their author, although full of fire and energy, was perplexed and
embarrassed with his own speculations. Concerning this Puritan element
in his reflections, Mr. James Hannay remarks, "That earnestness, that
grim humour--that queer, half-sarcastic, half-sympathetic fun--is
quite Scotch. It appears in Knox and Buchanan, and it appears in
Burns. I was not surprised when a school-fellow of Carlyle's told me
that his favourite poem was, when a boy, 'Death and Doctor Hornbook.'
And if I were asked to explain this originality, I should say that he
was a covenanter coming in the wake of the eighteenth century and the
transcendental philosophy. He has gone into the hills against 'shams,'