such a change of ministry. It is incoherences of this sort which undo
so much of the splendid service that Carlyle gave to his age.

But we are not willing to let the defects of Carlyle's philosophy drive
out of mind the permanent and beautiful things in his literary work.
_Past and Present_ (1843) is certainly a success--a happy and true
thought, full of originality, worked out with art and power. The idea
of embedding a living and pathetic picture of monastic life in the
twelfth century, and a minute study of the labours of enlightened
churchmen in the early struggles of civilisation--the idea of embedding
this tale, as if it were the remains of some disinterred saint, in the
midst of a series of essays on the vices and weaknesses of modern
society--was a highly original and instructive device, only to be
worked to success by a master. And the master brought it to a
delightful success. In all his writings of thirty volumes there are
few pages more attractive than the story of Jocelin of Brakelond, Abbot
Hugo, Abbot Samson, and the festival of St. Edmund, which all pass away
as in a vision leaving "a mutilated black ruin amidst green
expanses"--as we so often see in our England to-day after the trampling
of seven centuries over the graves of the early monks.

And then, when the preacher passes suddenly from the twelfth century to
the nineteenth, from toiling and ascetic monks to cotton spinners and
platform orators--the effect is electric--as though some old
Benedictine rose from the dead and began to preach in the crowded
streets of a city of factories. Have we yet, after fifty years of this
time of tepid hankering after Socialism and Theophilanthropic
experiments, got much farther than Thomas Carlyle in his preaching in
Book IV. on "Aristocracies," "Captains of Industry," "The Landed," "The
Gifted"? What truth, what force in the aphorism:--"To predict the