they would appear to belong), it is surely something to have said the
_first_ sensible words uttered in English on these important
subjects. We ought not to forget the early days of the _Foreign and
Quarterly Review_. We have critics now, quieter, more reposeful
souls, taking their ease on Zion, who have entered upon a world ready
to welcome them, whose keen rapiers may cut velvet better than did the
two-handed broadsword of Carlyle, and whose later date may enable them
to discern what their forerunner failed to perceive; but when the
critics of this century come to be criticized by the critics of the
next, an honourable, if not the highest place will be awarded to
Carlyle.

Turn we now to the historian and biographer. History and biography
much resemble one another in the pages of Carlyle, and occupy more
than half his thirty-four volumes; nor is this to be wondered at,
since they afford him fullest scope for his three strong points--his
love of the wonderful; his love of telling a story, as the children
say, 'from the very beginning;' and his humour. His view of history is
sufficiently lofty. History, says he, is the true epic poem, a
universal divine scripture whose plenary inspiration no one out of
Bedlam shall bring into question. Nor is he quite at one with the
ordinary historian as to the true historical method. 'The time seems
coming when he who sees no world but that of courts and camps, and
writes only how soldiers were drilled and shot, and how this
ministerial conjurer out-conjured that other, and then guided, or at
least held, something which he called the rudder of Government, but
which was rather the spigot of Taxation, wherewith in place of
steering he could tax, will pass for a more or less instructive
Gazetteer, but will no longer be called an Historian.'