feet and chariots of "Dubarrydom" hurrying from the "Armida Palace,"
where Louis XV. and the _ancien regime_ lay dying; later to the ticking
of the clocks in Launay's doomed Bastile; again to the tocsin of the
steeples that roused the singers of the _Marseillaise_ to march from
"their bright Phocaean city" and grapple with the Swiss guard, last
bulwark of the Bourbons. "The Swiss would have won," the historian
characteristically quotes from Napoleon, "if they had had a commander."
Already, over little more than the space of the author's life--for he was
a contemporary of Keats, born seven months before the death of Burns,
Shelley's junior by three, Scott's by twenty-four, Byron's by seven
years--three years after Goethe went to feel the pulse of the
"cannon-fever" at Argonne--already these sounds are across a sea. Two
whole generations have passed with the memory of half their storms.
"Another race hath been, and other palms are won." Old policies,
governments, councils, creeds, modes and hopes of life have been
sifted in strange fires. Assaye, Trafalgar, Austerlitz, Jena, Leipzig,
Inkermann, Sadowa,--Waterloo when he was twenty and Sedan when he was
seventy-five,--have been fought and won. Born under the French Directory
and the Presidency of Washington, Carlyle survived two French empires,
two kingdoms, and two republics; elsewhere partitions, abolitions,
revivals and deaths of States innumerable. During his life our sway in
the East doubled its area, two peoples (the German with, the Italian
without, his sympathy) were consolidated on the Continent, while another
across the Atlantic developed to a magnitude that amazes and sometimes
alarms the rest. Aggressions were made and repelled, patriots perorated
and fought, diplomatists finessed with a zeal worthy of the world's most
restless, if not its wisest, age. In the internal affairs of the leading
nations the transformation scenes were often as rapid as those of a
pantomime. The Art and Literature of those eighty-six years--stirred to
new thought and form at their commencement by the so-called Romantic