fact that while in the reign of Queen Victoria there was initiated,
formulated, and methodised an entirely new cosmogony, its most powerful
and highly-gifted man of letters was preaching a polity and a philosophy
of history that would have better harmonised with the time of Queen
Semiramis. . . . Long before he launched his sarcasms at human progress,
there had been a conviction among thinkers that it was not the hero
that developed the race, but a deep mysterious energy in the race that
produced the hero; that the wave produced the bubble, and not the bubble
the wave. But the moment a theory of evolution saw the light it was a
fact. The old cosmogony, on which were built _Sartor Resartus_ and the
Calvinism of Ecclefechan, were gone. Ecclefechan had declared that the
earth did not move; but it moved nevertheless. The great stream of modern
thought has advanced; the theory of evolution has been universally
accepted; nations, it is acknowledged, produce kings, and kings are
denied the faculty of producing nations."

_Taliter, qualiter;_ but one or two remarks on the incisive summary
of this adroit and able theorist are obvious. First, the implied
assertion,--"Ecclefechan had declared that the earth did not move,"--that
Carlyle was in essential sympathy with the Inquisitors who confronted
Galileo with the rack, is perhaps the strangest piece of recent criticism
extant: for what is his _French Revolution_ but a cannonade in three
volumes, reverberating, as no other book has done, a hurricane of
revolutionary thought and deed, a final storming of old fortresses, an
assertion of the necessity of movement, progress, and upheaval? Secondly,
every new discovery is apt to be discredited by new shibboleths, and
one-sided exaggerations of its range. It were platitude to say that Mr.
Darwin was not only an almost unrivalled student of nature, as careful
and conscientious in his methods, as fearless in stating his results,
but--pace Mr. Carlyle--a man of genius, who has thrown Hoods of light on