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THOMAS CARLYLE.

xviii., xix,, xx., xxi., xxii., xxiii., History of Frederick the Second. Add: Early Kings of Norway, etc., 1 vol. People's Edition, 37 vols., sin. cr. 8vo: vol. i., Sartor Resartus ; ii., iii., iv., French Revolution; v., Life of John Sterling; vi., vii., viii., ix., x., Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches; xi., On Heroes and Hero Worship; xii., Past and Present; xiii., xiv., xv., xvi., xvii., xviii., xix., Critical and Miscellaneous Essays; xx., Latter-Day Pamphlets; xxi., Life of Schiller; xxii., xxiii., xxiv., xxv., xxvi., xxvii., xxviii., xxix., xxx., xxxi., History of Frederick the Second; xxxii., xxxiii., xxxiv., Wilhelm Meister; xxxv., xxxvi., Translations from Musaeus, Tieck, and Richter; xxxvii., General Index. Add: Early Kings of Norway, etc., 1 vol., and Passages Selected from the Writings of Thomas Carlyle, by Thomas Ballantyne, Lond., 1855, p. 8vo; Carlyle: His Life, His Books, His Theories, by A. II. Guernsey, New York, 1879. See also Selection from the Correspondence of the late Macvey Napier, Esq., Lond. 1879, 8vo.

"Carlyle as a historian is notably exact. What he himself calls a transcendent capacity of taking trouble, and a genius for accuracy, preserves him from being carried away from the strict confines of fact. Ile has a keen eye for nature, and the reliance we come to have on their fidelity adds a new charm to his pictures. His descriptions of places and events, even the most trivial, have a freshness which one hardly finds anywhere else out of Homer.... Much of the power of this writing is connected with the peculiar fascination of the author's later style. Questionable as a model for others, his own manner suits him, for it is emphatically part of his matter. His abruptness corresponds with the abruptness of his thought, which proceeds often by a series of electric shocks,

as if to borrow a simile from a criticism on St.

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Paul-it were breaking its bounds and breaking the sentence. It has a rugged energy which gests a want of fluency in the writer, and gives the impression of his being compelled to write. He is at all hazards determined to convey his meaning: willing to borrow expressions from all lines of life and all languages, and even to invent new sounds and coin new words, for the expression of a new thought. He cares as little for rounded

phrases as for logical arguments, and rather convinees and persuades by calling up a succession of feelings than a train of reasoning."-JOHN NICHOL, of Balliol College, Oxford: Imperial Dict. of Univ. Biog., i. 906.

WORK.

There is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works; in idleness alone is there perpetual despair. Work, never so Mammonish, mean, is in communication with Nature; the real desire to get work done

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will itself lead one more and more to truth, to Nature's appointments and regulations, which are truth.

The latest Gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it. "Know thyself!" long enough has that poor "self" of thine tormented thee: thou wilt never get to know it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual; know what thou canst work at, and work at it like a Hercules! That will be thy better plan.

It has been written 66 an endless significance lies in work ;" as man perfects himself by writing, foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal the man himself first ceases to be a jungle and foul unwholesome desert thereby. Consider how, even in the meanest sorts of Labour, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony, the instant he sets himself to work! Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these like hell-dogs lie beleaguering the soul of the poor day-worker, with free valour against his task, all these as of every man; but as he bends himself are stilled, all these shrink murmuring afar off into their caves. The man is now a man. The blessed glow of Labour in him, is it not a purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there is made bright blessed fame?

Destiny, on the whole, has no other way of cultivating us. A formless Chaos, once set it revolving, grows round and ever rounder; ranges itself by mere force of gravity, into strata, spherical courses; is no longer a Chaos, but a round compacted did she cease to revolve? In the poor old World. What would become of the Earth, Earth, so long as she revolves, all inequalities, irregularities, disperse themselves; all irregularities are incessantly becoming regular. Hast thou looked on the Potter's

wheel, one of the venerablest objects; old as the prophet Ezekiel, and far older? Rude lumps of clay; how they spin themselves up, by mere quick whirling, into beautiful circular dishes. And fancy the most assiduous Potter, but without his wheel, reduced to make dishes, or other amorphous botches, by mere kneading and baking! Even such a Potter were Destiny, with a human soul that would rest and lie at ease, that would not work and spin! Of an idle unrevolving man, the kindest Destiny, like the most assiduous Potter without wheel, can bake and knead nothing other than a botch; let her spend on him what expensive colouring, what gilding and enamelling she will, he is but a botch. Not a dish; no, a bulging, kneaded, crooked, shambling.

squint-cornered, amorphous botch, a mere enamelled vessel of dishonour!

Let the idle think of this.

Blessed is he who has found his work: let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose: he has found it, and will follow it! How, as the free flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mud-swamp of one's existence, like an ever-deepening river there, it runs and flows; draining off the sour festering water gradually from the root of the remotest grass blade; making, instead of pestilential swamp, a green fruitful meadow with its clear flowing stream. How blessed for the meadow itself, let the stream and its value be great or small! Labour is life: from the inmost heart of the Worker rises his God-given force, the sacred celestial lifeessence, breathed into him by Almighty God; from his inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness, to all knowledge, "self-knowledge" and much else, so soon as Work fitly begins. Knowledge! the knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou to that; for Nature herself accredits that, says Yea to that. Properly thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast got by working; the rest is yet all an hypothesis of knowledge: a thing to be argued of in schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logic vortices, till we try it and fix it. "Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by Action alone."

And, again, hast thou valued Patience, Courage, Perseverance, Openness to light; readiness to own thyself mistaken, to do better next time? All these, all virtues, in wrestling with the dim brute Powers of fact, in ordering of thy fellows in such wrestle, there, and elsewhere not at all, thou wilt continually learn. Set down a brave Sir Christopher in the middle of black ruined stone heaps, of foolish unarchitectural Bishops, red-tape Officials, idle Nell Gwyn Defenders of the Faith; and see whether he will ever raise a Paul's Cathedral out of all that, yea or no! Rough, rude, contradictory are all things and persons, from the mutinous masons and Irish hodmen, up to the idle Nell Gwyn Defenders, to blustering red-tape Officials, foolish unarchitectural Bishops. All these things and persons are there, not for Christopher's sake and his cathedrals; they are there for their own sake mainly! Christopher will have to conquer and constrain all these, if he be able. All these are against him. Equitable Nature herself, who carries her mathematics and architectonics not on the face of her, but deep in the hidden heart of her, Nature herself is but partially for him; will be wholly against him, if he con

strain her not! Iis very money, where is it to come from? The pious munificence of England lies far scattered, distant, unable to speak, and say, "I am here;" must be spoken to before it can speak. Pious munificence, and all help. is so silent, invisible like the gods; impediment, contradictions manifold are so loud and near! O brave Sir Christopher, trust thou in those, notwithstanding, and front all these; understand all these; by valiant patience, noble effort, insight, vanquish and compel all these, and, on the whole, strike down victoriously the last topstone of that Paul's edifice: thy monument for certain centuries, the stamp Great Man" impressed very legibly in Portland stone there!

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Yes, all manner of work, and pious response from Men or Nature, is always what we call silent; cannot speak or come to light till it be seen, till it be spoken to. Every noble work is at first "impossible." In very truth, for every noble work the possibilities will lie diffused through immensity, inarticulate, undiscoverable except to faith. Like Gideon, thou shalt spread out thy fleece at the door of thy tent; see whether, under the wide arch of Heaven, there be any bountcous moisture or none. Thy heart and lifepurpose shall be as a miraculous Gideon's fleece, spread out in silent appeal to Heaven; and from the kind Immensities, what from the poor unkind Localities and town and country Parishes there never could, blessed dewmoisture to suffice thee shall have fallen!

Work is of a religious nature: work is of a brave nature; which it is the aim of all religion to be. "All work of man is as the swimmer's:" a waste ocean threatens to devour him; if he front it not bravely, it will keep its word. By incessant wise defiance of it, lusty rebuke and buffet of it, behold how it loyally supports him, bears him as its conqueror along. "It is so," says Goethe, "with all things that man undertakes in this world."

Brave Sea-captain, Norse Sea-king,-Columbus, my hero, royalist Sea-king of all! it is no friendly environment this of thine, in the waste deep waters; around thee mutinous discouraged souls, behind thee disgrace and ruin, before thee the unpenetrated veil of night. Brother, these wild water-mountains, bounding from their deep bases (ten miles deep, I am told) are not entirely there on thy behalf! Meseems they have other work than floating thee forward:-and the huge Winds that sweep from Ursa Major to the Tropics and Equators, dancing their giant waltz through the kingdoms of Chaos and Immensity, they care little about filling rightly or filling wrongly the small shoulder-of-mutton sails in this cockle skiff

THOMAS CARLYLE.

of thine! Thou art not among articulate speaking friends, my brother; thou art among immeasurable dumb monsters, tumbling, howling wide as the world here. Secret, far off, invisible, invisible to all hearts but thine, there lies a help in them: see how thou wilt get at that. Patiently thou wilt wait till the mad south-wester spend itself, saving thyself by dexterous science of defence the while; valiantly, with swift decision, wilt thou strike in, when the favouring East, the Possible, springs up. Mutiny of men thou wilt sternly repress; weakness, despondency, thou wilt cheerily encourage; thou wilt swallow down complaint. unreason, weariness, weakness of thyself and others;-how much wilt thou swallow down! There shall be a depth of Silence in thee, deeper than this Sea, which is but ten miles deep; a Silence unsoundable; known to God only. Thou shalt be a great Man. Yes, my World-Soldier, thou of the world Marine-Service,-thou wilt have to be greater than this tumultuous unmeasured World here round thee is: thou, in thy strong soul, as with wrestler's arms, shalt embrace it, harness it down; and make it bear thee on-to new Americas, or whither God wills!.

Religion, I said; for, properly speaking, all true Work is Religion; and whatsoever Religion is not Work may go and dwell among the Brahmins, Antinomians, Spinning Dervishes, or where it will; with me it shall have no harbour. Admirable was that of the old Monks, "Laborare est Orare, Work is Worship."

Older than all preached Gospels was this unpreached, inarticulate, but ineradicable, for ever-enduring Gospel: Work, and therein have well-being. Man, Son of Earth and of Heaven, lies there not, in the innermost heart of thee, a Spirit of active Method, a Force for Work ;--and burns like a painfully smouldering fire, giving thee no rest till thou unfold it, till thou write it down in beneficent Facts around thee! What is immethodic, waste, thou shalt make methodic, regulated, arable; obedient and productive to thee. Wheresoever thou findest Disorder, there is thy eternal enemy: attack him swiftly, subdue him; make Order of him, the subject, not of Chaos, but of Intelligence, Divinity, and Thee! The thistle that grows in thy path, dig it out that a blade of useful grass, a drop of nourishing milk, may grow there instead. The waste cotton-shrub, gather its waste white down, spin it, weave it; that in place of idle litter, there may be folded webs, and the naked skin of man be covered.

But above all, where thou findest Ignorance, Stupidity, Brute-mindedness-attack it, I say; smite it wisely, unweariedly, and

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rest not while thou livest and it lives; but smite, smite in the name of God! The Highest God, as I understand it, does audibly so command thee: still audibly, if thou have ears to hear. He, even Ile, with His unspoken voice, fuller than any Sinai thunders, or syllabled speech of Whirlwinds; for the SILENCE of deep Eternities, of Worlds from beyond the morning-stars, does it not speak to thee? The unborn Ages; the old Graves, with their long-mouldering dust, the very tears that wetted it, now all dry-do not these speak to thee what ear hath not heard? The deep Death-kingdoms, the stars in their never-resting courses, all Space and all Time, proclaim it to thee in continual silent admonition. Thou, too, if ever man should, shalt work while it is called To-day. For the Night cometh wherein no man can work.

All true Work is sacred; in all true Work, were it but true hand-labour, there is something of divineness. Labour, wide as the Earth, has its summit in Heaven. Sweat of the brow; and up from that to sweat of the brain, sweat of the heart; which includes all Kepler calculations, Newton meditations, all Sciences, all spoken Epics, all acted Heroisms, Martyrdoms-up to that "Agony of bloody sweat," which all men have called divine! O brother, if this is not "worship," then, I say, the more pity for worship; for this is the noblest thing yet discovered under God's sky! Who art thou that complainest of thy life of toil? Complain not. Look up, my wearied brother; see thy fellow-workmen there, in God's Eternity; surviving there, they alone surviving; sacred Band of the Immortals, celestial Body guard of the Empire of Mankind. Even in the weak Human Memory they survive so long, as saints, as heroes, as gods; they alone surviving; peopling, they alone, the immeasured solitudes of Time! To thee Heaven, though severe, is not unkind; Heaven is kind-as a noble Mother; as that Spartan Mother, saying, while she gave her son his shield, "With it, my son, or upon it!" Thou, too, shalt return home, in honour to thy far-distant Home, in honour; doubt it not-if in the battle thou keep thy shield! Thou, in the Eternities and deepest Deathkingdoms, art not an alien; thou everywhere art a denizen! Complain not; the very Spartans did not complain. Past and Present.

TEUFELSDRÖCKI'S NIGHT VIEW OF THE CITY.

I look down into all that wasp-nest or beehive, and witness their wax-laying and honey-making, and poison-brewing, and choking by sulphur. From the Palace esplanade, where music plays while Serene

lingers in his perfumed saloons, or reposes within damask curtains; Wretchedness cowers into truckle-beds, or shivers hunger

Highness is pleased to eat his victuals, down the low lane, where in her door-sill the aged widow, knitting for a thin livelihood, sits to feel the afternoon sun, I see it all; for, ex-stricken into its lair of straw; in obscure cept the Schlosskirche weather-cock no biped cellars, Rouge-et-Noir languidly emits its stands so high. Couriers arrive bestrapped voice-of-destiny to haggard hungry villains; and bebooted, bearing Joy and Sorrow while Councillors of State sit plotting and bagged-up in pouches of leather: there, playing their high chess-game whereof the top-laden, and with four swift horses, rolls pawns are Men. The Lover whispers his in the country Baron and his household; mistress that the coach is ready; and she, here, on timber-leg, the lamed Soldier hops full of hope and fear, glides down, to fly painfully along, begging alms: a thou- with him over the borders: the Thief, still sand carriages, and wains, and cars, come more silently, sets-to his pick-locks and crowtumbling in with Food, with young Rus- bars, or lurks in wait till the watchmen first ticity, and other Raw Produce, inanimate snore in their boxes. Gay mansions, with or animate, and go tumbling out again with supper-rooms and dancing-rooms, are full Produce manufactured. That living flood, of light and music and high-swelling hearts ; pouring through these streets, of all qualities but, in the condemned cells, the pulse of life and ages, knowest thou whence it is coming, beats tremulous and faint, and bloodshot whither it is going? From Eternity on- eyes look out through the darkness, which wards to Eternity! These are apparitions: is around and within, for the light of a stern what else? Are they not souls rendered last morning. Six men are to be hanged on visible in bodies that took shape and will the morrow: comes no hammering from the lose it, melting into air? Their solid Pave- | Rabenstein!-their gallows must even now ment is a Picture of the Sense; they walk be o' building. Upwards of five-hundredon the bosom of Nothing; blank Time is thousand two-legged animals without feathbehind them and before them. Or fanciest ers lie round us, in horizontal position; their thou, the red and yellow Clothes-screen yon-heads all in nighteaps, and full of the foolder, with spurs on its heels and feathers inishest dreams. Riot cries aloud, and stagits crown, is but of to-day, without a yester-gers and swaggers in his rank dens of day or a to-morrow; and had not rather its shame; and the Mother, with streaming Ancestor alive when Hengst and Horsa over- hair, kneels over her pallid dying infant, ran thy Island? Friend, thou seest here a whose cracked lips only her tears living link, in that Tissue of History, which moisten. All these heaped and huddled inweaves all Being: watch well, or it will together, with nothing but a little carpentry be past thee, and seen no more. "Ach, mein and masonry between them: crammed in, lieber!" said Teufelsdröckh once, at mid-like salted fish in their barrels; or welternight, when we had returned from the coffee-ing, shall I say, like an Egyptian pitcher of house in rather earnest talk, "it is a true sublimity to dwell here. These fringes of lamplight, struggling up through smoke and thousand-fold exhalation, some fathoms into the ancient region of Night, what thinks Bootes of them, as he leads his Huntingdogs over the Zenith in their leash of sidercal fire? That stifled hum of midnight, when Traffic has lain down to rest; and the chariot-wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and there through distant streets, are bearing her to Halls roofed in, and lighted to the due pitch for her; and only Vice and Misery, to prowl or to moan like night-birds, are abroad: that hum, I say, like the stertorous, unquiet slumber of sick life, is heard in Heaven! Oh! under that hideous coverlet of vapours, and putrefactions, and unimaginable gases, what a Fermenting-vat lies simmering and hid! The joyful and the sorrowful are there; men are dying there, men are being born; men are praying, on the other side of a brick partition, men are cursing; and around them all is the vast, void Night. The proud Grandee still

now

tamed vipers, each struggling to get its head
above the others; such work goes on under
that snake-counterpane? But I sit above it
all; I am alone with the Stars!"
Sartor Resartus, Chap. iii.

THE ATTACK UPON THE BASTILLE.

All morning, since nine, there has been a cry everywhere, "To the Bastille !" Repeated "deputations of citizens" have been here, passionate for arms; whom De Launay has got dismissed by soft speeches through port-holes. Towards noon Elector Thuriot de la Rosière gains admittance; finds De Launay indisposed for surrender: nay, disposed for blowing up the place rather. Thuriot mounts with him to the battlements: heaps of paving stones, old iron, and missiles lie piled: cannon all duly levelled; in every embrasure a cannon-only drawn back a little! But outwards, behold, O Thuriot, how the multitude flows on, welling through every street; tocsin furiously pealing; all drums beating the géné

THOMAS ARNOLD.

rale: the suburb Sainte-Antoine rolling hitherward wholly as one man! Such vision (spectral, yet real) thou, O Thuriot! as from thy Mount of Vision, beholdest in this moment: prophetic of other phantasmagories, and loud-gibbering spectral realities which thou yet beholdest not, but shalt. "Que voulez-vous?" said De Launay, turning pale at the sight, with an air of reproach, almost of menace. "Monsieur," said Thuriot, rising into the moral sublime, "what mean you? Consider if I could not precipitate both of us from this height," say only a hundred feet, exclusive of the walled ditch! Whereupon De Launay fell silent.

Wo to thee, De Launay, in such an hour, if thou canst not, taking some one firm decision, rule circumstances! Soft speeches will not serve; hard grape-shot is questionable; but hovering between the two is unquestionable. Ever wilder swells the tide of men; their infinite hum waxing ever louder into imprecations, perhaps into crackle of stray musketry, which latter, on walls nine feet thick, cannot do execution. The outer drawbridge has been lowered for Thuriot; new deputation of citizens (it is the third and noisiest of all) penetrates that way into the outer court: soft speeches producing no clearance of these, De Launay gives fire; pulls up his drawbridge. A slight sputter;

which has kindled the too combustible

chaos; made it a roaring fire chaos! Bursts forth insurrection, at sight of its own blood (for there were deaths by that sputter of fire), into endless rolling explosion of musketry, distraction, execration; and overhead from the fortress, let one great gun, with its grapeshot go booming, to show what we could do. The Bastille is besieged!

On, then, all Frenchmen that have hearts in their bodies! Roar with all your throats of cartilage and metal, ye sons of liberty: stir spasmodically whatsoever of utmost faculty is in you, soul, body, or spirit; for it is the hour! Smite thou Louis Tournay, cartwright of the Marais, old soldier of the Regiment Dauphine; smite at that outer drawbridge chain, though the fiery hail whistles round thee! Never, over nave or felloe did thy axe strike such a stroke. Down with it, man; down with it to Orcus: let the whole accursed edifice sink thither, and tyranny be swallowed up for ever! Mounted, some say, on the roof of the guardroom, some on bayonets stuck into joints of the wall, Louis Tournay smites, brave Aubin Bonnemère (also an old soldier) seconding him the chain yields, breaks; the huge drawbridge slams down, thundering (avec fracas). Glorious! and yet, alas! it is still but the outworks. The eight grim towers with their Invalides' musketry, their paving

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stones and cannon-mouths, still soar aloft intact; ditch yawning impassable, stonefaced; the inner drawbridge with its back towards us: the Bastille is still to take! The French Revolution: A History.

ON THE CHOICE OF BOOKS.

I can truly say the labour you have gone into (which appears to be faithfully done. wherever I can judge of it), fills me with astonishment; and is indeed of an amount almost frightful to think of. There seems innumerable reading beings, and tell them much that they wish to know: to me the one fault was, that, like the Apostle Peter's sheet of Beasts, it [the Critical Dictionary and unclean," and thereby became of such of English Literature] took in "the clean unmanageable bulk, to say no more. Readers of daily increasing magnitude, and already are not yet aware of the fact, but a fact it is first grand necessity in reading is to be vigiof terrible importance to readers, that their lantly conscientiously select; and to know everywhere that Books, like human souls, are actually divided into what we may call sheep and goats," the latter put inexorably on the left hand of the Judge; and whither we know; and much to be avoided, tending, every goat of them, at all moments and if possible, ignored, by all sane creatures!

to be no doubt the Book will be welcome to

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Carlyle to S. Austin Allibone, Aberdour, Fife (for Chelsea, London), 18th July, 1859.

THOMAS ARNOLD, D.D., born at Cowes, Isle of Wight, 1795, entered Corpus Christi College, Oxford, 1811, and took a First Class in Classics, 1814; in 1815 was elected Fellow of Oriel College, where he gained the Chancellor's Prizes for the two University Essays, Latin and English, for 1815 and 1817, received private pupils at Laleham, 1819-1828, Head Master of Rugby School from 1827, and Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford from 1841 until his sudden death, June 12, 1842. The History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides, in Greek, the text according to Bekker, with some Alterations, with English Notes, chiefly Historical and Geographical, Oxford, 1830-32-35, 3 vols. 8vo; History of Rome, Lond., 1838-40-42, 3 vols. demy 8vo; History of the Later Roman Commonwealth, Lond., 2 vols. demy 8vo; Introductory Lectures on Modern History, Lond., 1842, 8vo; Sermons, 6 vols. 8vo, and 1 vol. fp. 8vo; Miscellaneous Works, Lond., 8vo.

"His sermons are remarkable as being, by their simple and natural language, one of the first prac

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