Yea.'

One's remarks might here naturally come to an end, with a word or two
of hearty praise of the brave course of life led by the man who awhile
back stood the acknowledged head of English letters. But the present
time is not the happiest for a panegyric on Carlyle. It would be in
vain to deny that the brightness of his reputation underwent an
eclipse, visible everywhere, by the publication of his 'Reminiscences.'
They surprised most of us, pained not a few, and hugely delighted that
ghastly crew, the wreckers of humanity, who are never so happy as when
employed in pulling down great reputations to their own miserable
levels. When these 'baleful creatures,' as Carlyle would have called
them, have lit upon any passage indicative of conceit or jealousy or
spite, they have fastened upon it and screamed over it, with a
pleasure but ill-concealed and with a horror but ill-feigned.
'Behold,' they exclaim, 'your hero robbed of the nimbus his inflated
style cast around him--this preacher and fault-finder reduced to his
principal parts: and lo! the main ingredient is most unmistakably
"bile!"'

The critic, however, has nought to do either with the sighs of the
sorrowful, 'mourning when a hero falls,' or with the scorn of the
malicious, rejoicing, as did Bunyan's Juryman, Mr. Live-loose, when
Faithful was condemned to die: 'I could never endure him, for he would
always be condemning my way.'

The critic's task is to consider the book itself, _i. e._, the
nature of its contents, and how it came to be written at all.

When this has been done, there will not be found much demanding moral