he adds that it would be well worth their while to get an understanding of what these people were, and what they did.  It is here, however, that an old error of Mr. Carlyle’s crops up among his well-remembered truths.  He quotes from Machiavelli—­evidently agreeing himself with the sentiment, though he refrained from asking the assent of his audience to it—­the statement that the history of Rome showed that a democracy could not permanently exist without the occasional intervention of a Dictator.  It is possible that if Machiavelli had had the experience of the centuries which have elapsed since his day, he would have seen fit to alter his conclusion, and it is to be regretted that the admiration which Mr. Carlyle feels for the great men of history will not allow him to believe in the possibility of a political society where each might find his proper sphere and duty without disturbing the order and natural succession of the commonwealth.  His judgment on this point is like that of a man who had only known the steam-engine before the invention of governor balls, and was ready to declare that its mechanism would be shattered if a boy were not always at hand to regulate the pressure of the steam.

* * * * *

“We may turn, however, from this difference to another of Mr. Carlyle’s doctrines, which mark at once his independence of thought and his respect for experience, where he declares the necessity for recognising the hereditary principle in government, if there is to be ‘any fixity in things.’  In the same way we find him almost lamenting the fact that Oxford, once apparently so fast-anchored as to be immovable, has begun to twist and toss on the eddy of new ideas.

“It is impossible to glance at Mr. Carlyle’s Easter Monday discourse without recalling the oration which his predecessor pronounced on resigning office last autumn. * * * Mr. Carlyle is as simple and practical as his predecessor was dazzling and rhetorical.  An ounce of mother wit, quotes the new Lord Rector, is worth a pound of clergy, and while he admires Demosthenes, he prefers the eloquence of Phocion.  A little later he repeats his old doctrine on the virtue of silence, laments the fact that ’the finest nations in the world—­the English and the American—­are going all away into wind and tongue,’ and protests that a man is not to be esteemed wise because he has poured out speech copiously.  Mr. Carlyle has so often inculcated these sentiments in his books that there can be no suspicion of an arriere pensee in their utterance now, but the contrast between him and his predecessor is at the least instructive.  Each does, however, in some measure, supply what is deficient in the other.  No one would claim for the Chancellor of the Exchequer the intensity of power of his successor, but in his abundant energy, his wide sympathy with popular movement, and his real, if vague and indiscriminating, faith in the activity and progress of modern life, he conveys lessons of trust in the present, and hopefulness in the future, which would be ill-exchanged for the patient and somewhat sad stoicism of Mr. Carlyle.”