Mr. Carlyle somewhere contrasts his age with that of Elizabeth, after this fashion; “For Raleighs and Shakespeares we have Beau Brummell and Sheridan Knowles.”  Only on the surmise that Mr. Carlyle owed poor Knowles some desperate grudge, can such an outburst be accounted for.  Otherwise it is sheer fatuity, or an impotent explosion of literary spite.  For the breadth and brilliancy of the poetic day shed upon it, no period in the history of any nation, not that of Pericles or of Elizabeth, is more resplendent than that which had not yet faded for England when Mr. Carlyle began his career; nor in the field of public action can the most prolific era of Greece or of England hold up, for the admiration of the world and the pride of fellow-countrymen, two agents more deservedly crowned with honor and gratitude than Nelson and Wellington.  Here are two leaders, who, besides exhibiting rare personal prowess and quick-eyed military genius on fields of vast breadth, and in performances of unwonted magnitude and momentousness, were, moreover, by their great, brave deeds, most palpably saving England, saving Europe, from the grasp of an inexorable despot.  Surely these were heroes of a stature to have strained to its utmost the reverence and the love of a genuine hero-worshipper.  On the ten thousand luminous pages of Mr. Carlyle they find no place.  Not only are their doings not celebrated, that they lived is scarce acknowledged.

Even when its objects are the loftiest and the most honored, jealousy is not a noble form of

  “The last infirmity of noble mind.”

Does Mr. Carlyle feel that Nelson and Wellington, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth, stand already so broad and high that they chill him with their shadow, and that therefore he will not, by eulogy, or even notice, add to their altitude?  Is he repeating the littleness of Byron, who was jealous not only of his contemporaries, Napoleon, and Wellington, and Wordsworth, but was jealous of Shakespeare?  That a pen which, with zestful animation, embraces all contemporaneous things, should be studiously silent about almost every one of the dozen men of genius who illustrate his era, is a fact so monstrous, that one is driven to monstrous devices to divulge its motive.  In such a case it is impossible to premise to what clouds of self-delusion an imaginative man will not rise.

Writing of Thomas Carlyle, the last words must not be censorious comments on a weakness; we all owe too much to his strength; he is too large a benefactor.  Despite over-fondness for Frederick and the like, and what may be termed a pathological drift towards political despotism, how many quickening chapters has he not added to the “gospel of freedom”?  Flushed are his volumes with generous pulses, with delicate sympathies.  From many a page what cordialities step forth to console and to fortify us; what divine depths we come upon; what sudden vistas of sunshine through tempest-shaken shadows; what bursts of splendor