Produced by Robert Shimmin Tiffany Vergon Charles AldarondoCharles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading TeamOBITER DICTA   An _obiter dictum_ in the language of the law is    a gratuitous opinion an individual impertinence which    whether it be wise or foolish right or wrong bindeth    nonenot even the lips that utter itOLD JUDGE_PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITIONThis seems a very little book to introduce to so large a continent Nosuch enterprise would ever have suggested itself to the homekeepingmind of the Author who none the less when this edition was proposedto him by Messrs Scribner on terms honorable to them and grateful tohim found the notion of being read in America most fragrant anddelightfulLondon February 13 1885_CONTENTS                                   CARLYLEON THE ALLEGED OBSCURITY OF MR BROWNINGS POETRYTRUTHHUNTINGACTORSA ROGUES MEMOIRSTHE VIA MEDIAFALSTAFFCARLYLEThe accomplishments of our race have of late become so varied that itis often no easy task to assign him whom we would judge to his properstation among men and yet until this has been done the guns of ourcriticism cannot be accurately levelled and as a consequence thegreater part of our fire must remain futile He for example whowould essay to take account of Mr Gladstone must read much elsebesides Hansard he must brush up his Homer and set himself toacquire some theology The place of Greece in the providential orderof the world and of laymen in the Church of England must beconsidered together with a host of other subjects of much apparentirrelevance to a statesmans life So too in the case of hisdistinguished rival whose death eclipsed the gaiety of politics andbanished epigram from Parliament keen must be the critical facultywhich can nicely discern where the novelist ended and the statesmanbegan in Benjamin DisraeliHappily no such difficulty is now before us Thomas Carlyle was awriter of books and he was nothing else Beneath this judgment hewould have winced but have remained silent for the facts are soLittle men sometimes though not perhaps so often as is taken forgranted complain of their destiny and think they have been hardlytreated in that they have been allowed to remain so undeniably smallbut great men with hardly an exception nauseate their greatness fornot being of the particular sort they most fancy The poet Gray waspassionately fond so his biographers tell us of military historybut he took no Quebec General Wolfe took Quebec and whilst he wastaking it recorded the fact that he would sooner have written GraysElegy and so Carlylewho panted for action who hated eloquencewhose heroes were Cromwell and Wellington Arkwright and the ruggedBrindley who beheld with pride and no ignoble envy the bridge atAuldgarth his masonfather had helped to build half a century beforeand then exclaimed A noble craft that of a mason a good buildingwill last longer than most booksthan one book in a million whodespised men of letters and abhorred the reading public whosegospel was Silence and Actionspent his life in talking and writingand his legacy to the world is thirtyfour volumes octavoThere is a familiar melancholy in this but the critic has no need togrow sentimental We must have men of thought as well as men ofaction poets as much as generals authors no less than artizanslibraries at least as much as militia and therefore we may accept andproceed critically to examine Carlyles thirtyfour volumes remainingsomewhat indifferent to the fact that had he had the fashioning of hisown destiny we should have had at his hands blows instead of booksTaking him then as he wasa man of lettersperhaps the best typeof such since Dr Johnson died in Fleet Street what are we to say ofhis thirtyfour volumesIn them are to be found criticism biography history politicspoetry and religion I mention this variety because of a foolishnotion at one time often found suitably lodged in heads otherwiseempty that Carlyle was a passionate old man dominated by two orthree extravagant ideas to which he was for ever giving utterance inlanguage of equal extravagance The thirtyfour volumes octavo renderthis opinion untenable by those who can read Carlyle cannot be killedby an epigram nor can the many influences that moulded him bereferred to any single source The rich banquet his genius has spreadfor us is of many courses The fire and fury of the LatterDayPamphlets may be disregarded by the peaceful soul and the preferencegiven to the Past of Past and Present which with its intense andsympathetic mediaevalism might have been written by a Tractarian TheLife of Sterling is the favourite book of many who would sooner pickoakum than read Frederick the Great all through whilst the merestudent of _belles lettres_ may attach importance to the essayson Johnson Burns and Scott on Voltaire and Diderot on Goethe andNovalis and yet remain blankly indifferent to Sartor Resartus andThe French RevolutionBut true as this is it is none the less true that excepting possiblythe Life of Schiller Carlyle wrote nothing not clearly recognisableas his All his books are his very ownbone of his bone and flesh ofhis flesh They are not stolen goods nor elegant exhibitions ofrecently and hastily acquired waresThis being so it may be as well if before proceeding any further Iattempt with a scrupulous regard to brevity to state what I take tobe the invariable indications of Mr Carlyles literary handiworkthetokens of his presenceThomas Carlyle his markFirst of all it may be stated without a shadow of a doubt that heis one of those who would sooner be wrong with Plato than right withAristotle in one word he is a mystic What he says of Novalis maywith equal truth be said of himself He belongs to that class ofpersons who do not recognise the syllogistic method as the chief organfor investigating truth or feel themselves bound at all times to stopshort where its light fails them Many of his