bind themselves into separate Firmaments: deep, silent rock-foundations are built beneath, and the skyey vault, with its everlasting Luminaries, above; instead of a dark, wasteful Chaos, we have a blooming, fertile, heavenencompassed World.

"I, too, could now say to myself: Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called to-day; for the night cometh wherein no man can work.''

There is another passage in Sartor Resartus which shows Carlyle writing beautiful English, clothing beautiful thought with no sense of the pains of parturition so often observable in his prose :

"Two men I honour, and no third. First the toilworn Craftsman that with earth-made implement laboriously conquers the earth, and makes her man's.

"Venerable to me is the hard hand; crooked, coarse; wherein notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue indefeasibly royal, as of the sceptre of this planet. Venerable too is the rugged face, all weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it is the face of a man living manlike. Oh, but the more venerable for thy rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love thee! Hardlyentreated brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed; thou wert our conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so marred. For in thee too lay a god-created form, but it was not to be unfolded; encrusted must it stand with the thick adhesions and defacements of labour; and thy body, like thy soul, was not to know freedom. Yet toil on, toil on; thou art in thy duty, be out of it who may thou toilest for the altogether indispensable, for

daily bread.

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"A second man I honour, and still more highly: him who is seen toiling for the spiritually indispensable; not daily bread, but the bread of life. Is not he too in his

duty; endeavouring towards inward harmony; revealing this, by act or by word, through all his outward endeavours, be they high or low? Highest of all, when his outward and his inward endeavour are one: when we can name him artist; not earthly craftsman only, but inspired thinker, who with heaven-made implement conquers heaven for us! If the poor and humble toil that we have food, must not the high and glorious toil for him in return, that he have light, have guidance, freedom, immortality? These two, in all their degrees, I honour; all else is chaff and dust, which let the wind blow whither it listeth.

"Unspeakably touching is it, however, when I find both dignities united; and he that must toil outwardly for the lowest of man's wants, is also toiling inwardly for the highest. Sublimer in this world know I nothing than a peasant saint, could such now anywhere be met with. Such a one will take thee back to Nazareth itself; thou wilt see the splendour of heaven spring forth from the humblest depths of earth, like a light shining in great darkness."

The French Revolution is, I think, the work by which Carlyle at present is most known.

As a history it suffers somewhat from being always written with the assumption that the reader already has a general knowledge of the events and characters recorded and portrayed.

Most of us would prefer that the authors of history should assume that their readers are quite ignorant persons.

But as an imaginative commentary on a tremendous event in the history of mankind the book must ever take its place among the masterpieces of literature.

The taking of the Bastille is a terrific piece of narrative; and in a stroke of consummate art Carlyle pauses in the midst of his story of the tremendous conflict with its madness, dust, and fury and paints a sudden vision of the peaceful fields of France :

"O evening sun of July, how, at this hour thy beams fall slant on reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women

spinning in cottages; on ships far out on the silent main; on balls at the orangerie of Versailles, where high-rouged dames of the palace are even now dancing with doublejacketed Hussar officers;-and also on this roaring Hellporch of a Hôtel de Ville.'

For to the Hôtel de Ville has the vast concourse trailed off, escorting Marquis de Launay, the Governor of the Bastille, "through roarings and cursings; through hustlings, clutchings, and at last through strokes till his bleeding trunk lies on the steps there; the head is off through the streets; ghastly, aloft on a pike."

Then when the grim old prison-fortress is ransacked there comes forth to view the most piteous archives the world has known:

"Old secrets come to view; and long-buried despair finds voice. Read this portion of an old letter. If for my consolation Monseigneur would grant me, for the sake of God and the Most Blessed Trinity, that I could have news of my dear wife; were it only her name on a card, to show that she is alive! It were the greatest consolation I could receive; and I should for ever bless the greatness of Monseigneur.'

"Poor prisoner, who namest thyself Queret-Demery, and hast no other history, she is dead, that dear wife of thine, and thou art dead! 'Tis fifty years since thy breaking heart put this question; to be heard now first, and long heard, in the hearts of men.”

Perhaps the most splendid passage in Carlyle's writings upon the French Revolution is to be found, not in his history of that cataclysm, but in his essay on "The Diamond Necklace," where he dwells on the awful end of Marie Antoinette :

"Beautiful Highborn that wert so foully hurled low! For, if thy being came to thee out of old Hapsburg Dynasties, came it not also out of Heaven? Sunt lachrymae rerum, et memtem mortalia tangunt. Oh! is there a

man's heart that thinks without pity of those long months and years of slow-wasting ignominy;-of thy birth softcradled, the winds of Heaven not to visit thy face too roughly, thy foot to light on softness, thy eye on splendour; and then of thy death, or hundred deaths, to which the guillotine and Fouquier-Tinville's judgment was but the merciful end?

"Look there, O man born of woman! The bloom of that fair face is wasted, the hair is grey with care; the brightness of those eyes is quenched, their lids hang drooping, the face is stony pale as of one living in death.

"Mean weeds which her own hand has mended attire the Queen of the World. The death-hurdle, where thou sittest pale, motionless, which only curses environ, has to stop-a people drunk with vengeance will drink it again in full draught, looking at thee there. Far as the eye reaches, a multitudinous sea of maniac heads, the air deaf with their triumph-yell!

"The living-dead must shudder with yet one more pang; her startled blood yet again suffuses with the hue of agony that pale face, which she hides with her hands.

"There is, then, no heart to say, ' God pity thee' ?

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'O think not of these: think of Him Whom thou worshippest, the Crucified-Who also treading the winepress alone, fronted sorrow still deeper, and triumphed over it, and made it holy, and built of it a Sanctuary of Sorrow for thee and all the wretched!

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Thy path of thorns is nigh ended. One long last look at the Tuileries, where thy step was once so lightwhere thy children shall not dwell.

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The head is on the block; the axe rushes-dumb lies the world; that wild-yelling world, and all its madness, is behind thee."

These many passages, and those others already quoted in the former chapter on Dr Johnson, justify our assigning to Carlyle a foremost place among the great masters of English prose.

CHAPTER XLV

SIR WILLIAM NAPIER AND RICHARD SHEIL

How many victories wrested from defeat by incredible valour, how many deeds of incomparable glory on stricken battle-fields, are lost and now can never be brought up out of oblivion because no witness of them possessed the gift of expression and the art of narrative ? No great writer has emerged to chronicle the innumerable combats and interminable endurances of the Great War in which a thousand thousand laid down their young lives in defence of the British Empire, and twice that number were carried wounded from the field.

Perhaps the very conditions of a war with a front of four hundred miles render a comprehensive relation of it incommunicable.

But in the older wars the whole of a great battle could be seen in all its awful grandeur from a rising ground occupied by a commander; and in Sir William Napier's history of the Peninsular War many battles and sieges were so witnessed, and recorded in a fine manly prose, and thus rendered for ever memorable.

The Battle of Albuera, which was a battle almost lost, after a long and terrific combat at the end of the day was turned into a glorious victory by the indomitable valour of the last reserves brought up in a desperate hope of saving the day from a rout.

The enthusiasm and pride of the great soldier flows from Napier's pen as he describes the awful

scene: