Litchfield enquirer., 1881-02-24
Carlyle.


 money by them than any writer of equal abil' ity in our generation. Nevertheless he ha. pluckily conquered and worthily holds very high place in public estimation. So long as earnestness. honesty, and> wonderful insight
 into the heart of things, are prized by the English-speaking population of this earth, Carlyle will be greatly reverenced by multi tudes of readers who are not to be deterred by a very crabbed style from a fair consideration of the matter he offers them.
 Carlyle's essays have never been as popular as those of Macaulay. Yet we defy any one to read Carlyle's and Macaulay's criticisms of Croker's edition of Boswells Johnson without recognizing the vastly superior power of the former. Macaulay is at his savagest-slashing like the en-editor- power slashing machine he often was. With no apparent effort indeed, with but few blows as of Thor's hammer !; Carlyle cracks of the Croker shell; and, calm ly taking up the kernel of the work, consid- -ers the Sam. Johnson phenomenon with rev ersnt appreciation such as 4Macaulay is plainly incapable of. What has ever. been written either, about Burns and Scott, that is half 50 just, half so great. as Carlyle's essays upon those most noted countrymen of his?a r. Reading Carlyle's historical works we are reminded of the French marshars criticism of the charge of the Six Hundred at Balaklava. They are magnificent, but they are not His tory. Unless one knows the history of the French Revolution, Carlyle's wonderful pic ture of that .'chaos come again," is mere muddle of indistinguishable colors. But. to to one who already knows something of it, no other delineation seems ct all comparable Carlyle's. Frederick and his Cromwell are splendid in parts-perhaps throughout they tire the reader. As you open volume at random, the first page impresses you inn mensely, the second shoots clean over your head, and at the third you close the book. Yet it will pay you to open it again, and progress slowly from beginning to end, happy if YOU are not 90 dazzled by the magnificent rhetOri- cal display as to retain no just perception of the subject. 7s. r a+s
 As to the Hero Worship which with Car lyle constitutes the sum and substance of po- litical science, we are no mere doubter. but a downright disbeliever. Unquestionably there are emergencies when one's country can only be saved from destruction by some Cesar, Ma poleon, Cromwell or Grant. Even then the emergency is less apt to create the hero than the hero the emergency. We doubt whether anything much worse could have happened to Rome than Cesar to France than Napoleon: to England than Cromwell. Even conceding absolute power to the hero of some emergen- cy,- the CarlYlean doctrlne is barren of perma- nent political, results, because he can assure his hero no worthy successor. If America, for instance, were to consider Grant worthy of his Third and Fourth and succeeding Terms, how are we to provide his successor? Are our children to render obedience to Col. Fred. Grant, as England rendered obedience to Rich- ard Cromwell, and France toher Napoleon the Little? The. miracle of genius which never comes but with the greatest of emergencies, and seldom then. is certainly no sure reliance. The everyday government of everyday times cannot reasonably hope to bit on any such phenomenon; and yet, on precisely that for lorn chance, rests the whole theory of govern ment according to Carlyle 2. ......
 We do not dislike Carlyle because he disliked America, and her government of the people, by the people, for the people; but we firmly believe that the institutions which have given us Washington and Lincoln have given us infinitely preferable rulers to the Cromwells and the Fredericks whose ab- solutism seems so admirable to the great Scotchman. so. ..sf rcv -nai