Not only are St. Bernard, and St. Francis, Becket and Lanfranc--all the
martyrs and missionaries of Catholicism--consigned to oblivion:--but
not a word is said of Alfred, Godfrey, St. Louis, St. Ferdinand, and
St. Stephen. In a single volume there must be selection of types. But
the whole idea of Hero-Worship was perverted in a plan which had no
room for a single Catholic chief or priest.

This perverse exaggeration of Puritan religion, and the still more
unjust hatred of Catholic religion, unfortunately runs through all
Carlyle's work, and perhaps nowhere breaks out in so repulsive a form
as in the piece called "Jesuitism" (1850), in the _Latter-Day
Pamphlets_ (No. VIII.). Discarding the creed, the practice, and the
language of Puritanism, Carlyle still retained its narrowness, its
self-righteousness, its intolerance, and its savagery. The moralist,
to whom John Knox was a hero, but St. Bernard was not, but only a
follower of the "three-hatted Papa," and an apostle of "Pig's-wash,"
was hardly the man to exhaust the heroic in history. In the "Hero as
Man-of-Letters," Carlyle was at home. If ever pure letters produced a
hero, the sage of Chelsea was one. With Johnson, with Rousseau, he is
perfectly rational, and the mass of literature which has accumulated
round the names of these two, only tends to confirm the essential
justice of Carlyle's estimate. Nor need we dispute his estimate of the
vigour and manliness of Burns. It is only when Carlyle describes him
as "the most gifted British soul" in the eighteenth century--the
century of Hume, Adam Smith, Fielding, and Burke--that we begin to
smile. Burns was a noble-hearted fellow, as well as a born poet. But
perhaps the whole cycle of Sartorian extravaganza contains no saying so
futile as the complaint, that the British nation in the great war with
France entrusted their destinies to a phantasmic Pitt, instead of to
"the Thunder-god, Robert Burns." Napoleon would no doubt have welcomed