poem with an epic or dramatic plot. It is only a reader thoroughly at
home in the history of the time, who can resist the poet's spell when,
at the end of Part III., Book VII., he is told that the Revolution is
"ended," and the curtain falls. As a matter of real history, this is
an arbitrary invention. For the street fight on the day named in the
Revolutionary Calendar--13 _Vendémiaire, An 4_ (5th October 1795), is
merely a casual point in a long movement, at which the poet finds it
artistic to stop. But the French Revolution does not stop there, nor
did the "Whiff of Grapeshot" end it in any but an arbitrary sense.
When the poet tells us that, upon Napoleon's defeating the sections
around the Convention, "the hour had come and the Man," and that the
thing called the French Revolution was thereby "blown into space,"
nothing more silly, mendacious, and "phantasmic" was ever stated by
sober historian. The Convention was itself the living embodiment and
product of the Revolution, and Bonaparte's smart feat in protecting it,
increased its authority and confidence. If Carlyle's _French
Revolution_ be trusted as real history, it lands us in as futile a _non
sequitur_ as ever historian committed.

Viewed as an historical poem, the _French Revolution_ is a splendid
creation. Its passion, energy, colour, and vast prodigality of
ineffaceable pictures place it undoubtedly at the head of all the
pictorial histories of modern times. And the dramatic rapidity of its
action, and the inexhaustible contrasts of its scenes and
tableaux--things which so fatally pervert its truthfulness as authentic
history--immensely heighten the effect of the poem on the reader's
mind. Not that Carlyle was capable of deliberately manufacturing an
historical romance in the mendacious way of Thiers and Lamartine. But,
having resolved to cast the cataclysm of 1789 and the few years before
and after it into a dramatic poem, he inevitably, and no doubt