supposed to belong to those scientific speculations which are current in our own time. No man of any culture will attempt to disparage science, or question its solid claims to the respect of mankind. The world owes much to a long line of patient and laborious workers in the several departments of nature; but of late there has sprung up a school of thinkers, unlike the discoverers whose names add lustre to history, in this one respect, that they mistake the fancies and conjectures of their own minds for well-authenticated natural facts. Speculation is fast taking the place of experiment, and in lieu of grand discoveries, we are treated to crude and inexact theories, without the least claim to be regarded as scientific, and not unfrequently men find pleasure in flippant atheism. It is cheering to turn from all such cheap heresy to the serious, positive truths enunciated by Carlyle, who, with the searching glance of genius, descends beneath the surface of things, and brings us face to face with life's realities.

He is equally profound and explicit in his ideas of man's nature, duties, and destiny. Scorning to regard him as simply a physical organism, with material properties and molecular energies, he asserts the existence and supremacy of the invisible soul. "To the eye of vulgar logic," he says, "what is man? an omnivorous biped that wears breeches. To the eye of pure reason what is he? a soul, a spirit, a divine apparition. Round this mysterious me there lies under all these woolrags a garment of flesh contextured in the loom of heaven, whereby he is revealed to his like, and dwells with them in union and division; and sees and fashions for himself a universe with azure starry spaces and long thousands of years. Deep-hidden is he under that strange garment; amid sounds and colours and forms; as it were swathed-in and inextricably overshrouded; yet is he sky-woven and worthy of a God. He feels; power has been given to him to know, to believe; nay, does not the spirit of love, free in its celestial primeval brightness, even here, though but for moments, look through?"

In these brief sentences we find nearly all that it deeply concerns man to know of himself. Augustine's speculations and Calvin's logic add nothing thereto except confusion worse confounded. Man's real nature lies not in his flesh garment, but rather in those invisible energies and properties which in the final analysis are the essential characteristics of his being. Nothing about him is so precious or so real as that which to the eye of flesh seems so unreal. Carlyle would have men draw a sharp line between phenomena and their essences; between thought and its creations and conditions. Consequently, his philosophy has found practical expression in the old Latin maxim, "Quod esto videris." He entertains a supreme contempt for every species of simulation, makebelief, pretension, and unreality. A little that is real and simple is worth more to him than much that is unreal and mere assumption; and he, more than any man of his age, has proved the utter hollowness and barrenness of too many popular ideals of life. Next to Robert Burns, he has done the best things towards exalting the general conception of manhood and womanhood, pure and simple. He has separated their intrinsic qualities

from their accidents and surroundings. Nay, he has gone further, and taught how those qualities are won and lost. He traces all progress to honest work and the love of order, and all decay to idleness, selfishness, and disorder. And in his intense hatred of indolence, cupidity, brutemindedness, and lawlessness, is to be found his respect for powerful men, who have at different periods of the world's history crushed out rebellion and chaos. He worships strength, physical and intellectual, and the men who have given proof of their power to rule with a rod of iron receive his commendation. A conviction of the capability of strength and the fitness of the strongest to rule enters into his social and political theories. He hates to see weak men in positions of authority and responsibility; being convinced that the powerful alone have a right to rule, and the weak and unwise must learn to obey, voluntarily if they will, but by force if they won't. Associated with this idea of the dignity of talent and capacity is his sense of the sacredness of duty and of heroworship. Carlyle is no Mephistopheles, chuckling over the agonies wrought by sin and folly, but an Ezekiel, mingling tears and sympathy and calls to repentance with his stern denunciation of wrong-doing. He believes in progress, but in progress through decay; in advancement, by the speedy and total extinction of defunct and incapable forms of philosophy, government, and religion. He is impressed with the fact that we in this age are well nigh choked with shams and quackeries of all sorts, and that it is next to impossible for heroic reality and simple honesty to thrive among us. While there is doubtless much truth in this, one cannot read his gloomy vaticinations without feeling that they are exaggerated, and pitched in a much too despondent key. Things are not quite hopeless yet. He himself, out of his atrabilious moods, is not without hope for the human race, for he freely recognises the fact that man worships ideals and heroes, and wherever this sentiment lives, and to the extent that it lives in the heart of a nation, there is a promise and prophecy of better things. Does not every true man feel that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is above him? "No nobler or more blessed feeling dwells in the heart," says Carlyle. "Nay, is not Christianity itself in some sort a hero-worship. To me it is very cheering to consider that no sceptical logic, or general triviality, insincerity, and aridity of any time and its influence can destroy this noble inborn loyalty and worship that is in man. That man in some sense or other worships heroes; that we all of us reverence, and must ever reverence, really great and good men; this is to me the living rock amid all the destructions of every kind, the one fixed point in modern revolutionary history, otherwise as if bottomless and shoreless."

It is impossible to deny the power of hero-worship as a redeeming agency in human life. There is wondrous potency in a pure and elevated nature, and heroes have ever been the saviours of mankind. But, granted the truth of all this, considerable difficulty presents itself in the choice of heroes and the forms of obedience. There are many types of the hero and not a few methods of worship. And the common charge against Carlyle has much truth at the bottom of it: that he admires force,

appreciates quantity and momentum of being rather than quality. One can understand, for instance, why Luther, Mohammed, Cromwell, and Burns should rank among his heroes; but cannot help feeling a strange repugnance to placing Danton, Mirabeau, and Frederic of Prussia among our ideal gods. If force must be worshipped, then let us reverence the best types of it-force of intellect and courage of heart, and not mere brute strength and animal sagacity.

Such in brief are the main elements of Carlyle's teaching. More might be said about him as biographer, historian, essayist, and philanthropist; but let it suffice, that as historian he has reproduced with graphic fidelity stirring incidents and actors in the drama of history, recovering in many instances events and characters buried beneath vast accumulations of ignorance and prejudice; as essayist, he has penned. literary sketches and criticisms which will rank among the best productions of the kind; as philanthropist, he has enunciated schemes for the cure of poverty and the suppression of vice which have been tried again and again, and have signally failed, processes in which "blood and iron" are the active agents. Notwithstanding the defects in his social and political systems, which appear to have been framed on the Prussian model, it is clear that Carlyle perceives with wonderful fidelity some of the striking blemishes of modern civilisation. He is, in a fashion, a John-the-Baptist, having a very definite mission in an age when kid-gloved philanthropy is apt to employ lenitives where the knife and cautery would be more to the purpose. He has hardly left an abuse unscathed; he has traced our social evils to their roots in the past, and put them before us as an inheritance very largely of the spirit of the eighteenth century. All who have read his history of the French Revolution will recollect the fiery prophetic earnestness with which he denounces the imbecility and corruption which produced that terrific outburst. A wall must not diverge too much from the perpendicular or it soon becomes a mere dust heap, and nations must not depart too much from the eternal laws of truth and justice, as between man and man, lest rebellion rectify the wrong, and restore the moral equilibrium. Revolutions are severe trials, but they have their legitimate place and function in history. They appear as judgments and retributions. Such was the French Revolution. The nation had endured injustice, cruelty, and oppression long enough, and eventually the moral force of an outraged people flung off the royal and priestly incubus. Not as a calm and philosophic historian, but with burning words and vivid portraiture, does Carlyle depict the rapid scenes of that awful drama. Mirabeau, Robespierre, Danton, Loménie, live upon the page, act their part, and vanish. Paris, Versailles, France, Europe, rise before the wand of the magician, and the reader breathes hard as he crosses the Boulevards, stands with the surging crowd before the stormy Bastile, or watches the royal fugitives steal out in the quiet night. Here are apocalyptic vials poured by the Chelsea prophet, wrath to the uttermost; shams, political and religious, are overtaken by hideous ruin; and through it all there shines the stern law, written in letters of flame, that to justice kings and people must sooner or later pay homage.

But here I must pause, though a task of love to myself, and just add a few closing words of needed criticism. Carlyle has now been so long before the world that we may anticipate the verdict of posterity on his career and teaching. His work is now done; he has no new ideas to bestow; and no turn of the kaleidoscope will give us anything but some altered grouping in the brilliant colours of his style. His humour is boisterous and obstrusive, and his sportiveness degenerates into cynicism. The power of vivid portraiture begets a love of strongly-marked features of character because they are strong, and for no other reason-the moral comes to be confounded with the æsthetic, a taste for the gigantic is developed, until the glare of the canvas becomes excessive; a suspicion creeps over the mind that undue intensity threatens to mar the artist's work, and that overwrought feeling may be found here, as elsewhere, to weaken rather than to enforce healthy moral conviction.

He

Yet, in the sphere of practical life, Carlyle's influence upon a complacent age has been as remarkable as it has been beneficent. has uprooted many of the false idols of society, broken into fragments the brittle gods of a materialistic age, and has taught men the infinite value of truth, and right, and work.

OF SEEING THINGS WITH ONE'S OWN EYES.

THE more critical among my readers, glancing at the heading of the following remarks, will be inclined to ask:-"Can a person then see with any eyes but his own? Since when has it become possible for people to exchange eyes?" My text, I may observe, is not the only one of the kind in the English language. We talk, for example, of a "man's standing on his own legs;" of "every tub standing on its own bottom," as though some men stood on other people's legs; or, as though a tub could stand on another bottom than its own. However, I am willing to acknowledge that it is easier to conceive of the two latter operations being performed than of our using other folk's eyes to see by. And yet, I venture to say that for one man who stands on other people's legs, there are twenty who see by other people's eyes. So that what ought to be the more difficult, proves to be the more easy task. The pedigree of those who have relied on other eyes than their own reaches up, I fear, very high; very high indeed. It is just possible we might be able to go even as far back as Adam and Eve; perhaps, if we are to believe Mr. Darwin and those who think like him, still further. Nay, it would almost seem as though the beings who really used their own eyes were, and always had been, great exceptions-curiosities of nature.

I suppose we could all of us adduce many examples of persons who see with the eyes of others, or at all events think they see in using other people's eyes. How many sons there are who, in certain matters, see just as their fathers saw? This is, perhaps, more the case in politics and religion than in other matters. Still more common is it for daughters to carry with them to the new homes which they form at marriage, not only their mothers' presents, but their mothers' eyes. They can only see what she saw; as she did, so they must do. And as their husbands also bring the eyes with them that were used by their mothers, the consequence is that, to say the least, they certainly do not see alike. In the course of time, after a good deal of uneasiness has been gone through, they exchange eyes-the wife takes her husband's in some matters, and the husband the wife's in others: but they rarely each use their own. What a common thing this exchange is among people who live in the same neighbourhood and belong to the same rank of life. You will find certain things looked at in the same light; this article or that of dress, or household furniture, or garden, estimated at the same value; the same shop, or school, or chapel, or church, or doctor, or minister, cried up or cried down; and if you happen to be a stranger, or to come from a totally different position in life, or have an inconvenient habit of enquiring into the reason of things, you wonder at the unanimity-one has a right too, to wonder at the unanimity among human beings, for it is a great rarity! And how can we account for it? Why, the fact is, everybody looks at the particular things in question with his neighbour's eye;