Carlyle’s “Miscellanies”—­essays published first in the leading Reviews, when he lived in his moorland retreat—­created enthusiasm among young students and genuine thinkers of every creed.  Lord Jeffrey detected the new genius and gave him a lift.  Carlyle’s “French Revolution” took the world by surprise, and established his fame.  His “Oliver Cromwell” modified and perhaps changed the opinions of English and American people respecting the Great Protector.  It was then that his popularity was greatest, and that the eccentric genius of Cheyne Row, so long struggling with poverty, was assured of a competence, and was received in some of the proudest families of the kingdom as a teacher and a sage.  Thus far he was an optimist, taking cheerful views of human life, and encouraging those who had noble aspirations.

But for some unaccountable reason, whether from discontent or dyspepsia or disappointment, or disgust with this world, Carlyle gradually became a pessimist, and attacked all forms of philanthropy, thus alienating those who had been his warmest supporters.  He grew more bitter and morose, until at last he howled almost like a madman, and was steeped in cynicism and gloom.  He put forth the doctrine that might was right, and that thrones belong to the strongest.  He saw no reliance in governments save upon physical force, and expressed the most boundless contempt for all institutions established by the people.  Then he wrote his “Frederic the Great,”—­his most ambitious and elaborate production, received as an authority from its marvellous historical accuracy, but not so generally read as his “French Revolution,” and not, like his “Cromwell,” changing the opinions of mankind.

Soon after this the death of his wife plunged him into renewed gloom, from which he never emerged; and he virtually retired from the world, and was lost sight of by the younger generation, until his “Reminiscences” appeared, injudiciously published at his request by his friend and pupil Froude, in which his scorn and contempt for everybody and everything turned the current of public opinion strongly against him.  This was still further increased when the Letters of his wife appeared.

Carlyle’s bitterest assailants were now agnostics of every shade and degree, especially of the humanitarian school,—­that to which Mill and George Eliot belonged.  It was seen that this reviler of hypocrisy and shams, this disbeliever in miracles and in mechanisms to save society, was after all a believer in God Almighty and in immortality; a stern advocate of justice and duty, appealing to the conscience of mankind; a man who detested Comte the positivist as much as he despised Mill the agnostic, and who exalted the old religion of his fathers, stripped of supernaturalism, as the only hope of the world.  The biography by Froude, while it does not conceal the atrabilious temperament of Carlyle, his bad temper, his intense egotism, his irritability, his overweening pride, his scorn, his