have been rather enhanced than otherwise had his hero broken the head of a poet or essayist.  This is a clear case of a disciplinarian suffering from temporary derangement.  I really cannot quite stomach such heroic and sweeping work.  Carlyle, who was a Scotch peasant by birth, raised himself until he was deservedly regarded as the greatest man of his day, and he did this by means of literature; yet he coolly sets an ignorant, cruel, crowned drill-serjeant high above the men of the literary calling.  It is a little too much!  Suppose that Carlyle had been flogged back to the plough-tail by some potentate when he first went to the University; should we not have heard a good deal of noise about the business sooner or later?  Again, we find Mr. Froude writing somewhat placidly when he tells us about the men who were cut to pieces slowly in order that their agony might be prolonged.  The description of the dismemberment of Ballard and the rest, as given in the “Curiosities of Literature,” is too gratuitously horrible to be read a second time; but Mr. Froude is convinced that the whole affair was no more than a smart and salutary lesson given to some obtrusive Papists, and he commends the measures adopted by Elizabeth’s ministers to secure proper discipline.  Similarly the wholesale massacre of the people in the English northern counties is not at all condemned by the judicious Mr. Freeman.  The Conqueror left a desert where goodly homesteads and farms had flourished; but we are not any the less to regard him as a great statesman.  I grow angry for a time with these bold writers, but I always end by smiling, for there is something very feminine about such shrill expressions of admiration for force.  I like to figure to myself the troubles which would have ensued had Carlyle lived under the sway of his precious Friedrich.  It was all very well to sit in a comfortable house in pleasant Chelsea, and enlarge upon the beauties of drill and discipline; but, had the sage been cast into one of the noisome old German prisons, and kept there till he was dying, merely because the kingly disciplinarian objected to a phrase in a pamphlet, we should have heard a very curious tune from our great humourist.  A man who groaned if his bed was ill-made or his bacon ill-fried would not quite have seen the beauty of being disciplined in a foul cellar among swarming vermin.

The methods of certain other rulers may no doubt appear very fine to our robust scribblers, but I must always enter my own slight protest.  Ivan the Terrible was a really thorough-paced martinet who preserved discipline by marvellously powerful methods.  He did not mind killing a few thousands of men at a time; and he was answerable for several pyramids of skulls which remained long after his manly spirit had passed away.  He occasionally had prisoners flayed alive or impaled merely by way of instituting a change; and I think that some graphic British historian should at once give us a good life of this remarkable and