understand Rousseau and Burns than did Southey, laureate and critic as
he was hailed in his time. The book is a collection of Lectures, and
we now know how entirely Carlyle loathed that kind of utterance, how
much he felt the restraints and limits it involved. And for that
reason, the book is the simplest and most easily legible of his works,
with the least of his mannerism and the largest concessions to the
written language of sublunary mortals. Nearly all the judgments he
passes are not only sound, but now almost universally accepted. To
deal with the heroic in history, he needed, as he said, six months
rather than six days. It was intended, he told his hearers, "to break
ground," to clear up misunderstandings. It has done this: and a rich
crop has resulted from his ploughshare.

Nothing but a few sketches could be compressed into six hours. But it
is curious how many things seem omitted in this survey of the heroic.
At the age of forty-five Carlyle had not recognised Friedrich at all,
for he does not figure in the "Hero as King." Napoleon takes his
place, though Bonaparte was a "hero" only in the bad sense of hero
which Carlyle was seeking to explode. It is well that, since he
finished the _French Revolution_, Carlyle seems to have found out that
Bonaparte "parted with Reality," and had become a charlatan, a sham.
Still for all that, he remains "our last great man." Mazzini was
present at the delivery of these lectures: and when he had listened to
this last, he went up to Carlyle and told him that he had undone his
Hero-Worship and had fallen from the truth; and from that hour Mazzini
would hold no terms with the gospel of One-Man. To make Hero-Worship
close with the installation of Napoleon as "our last great man," was to
expose the inherent weakness of the Sartorian creed--that humanity
exists for the sake of its great men. The other strange delusion is
the entire omission from the "Hero as Priest" of any Catholic hero.