glares through a loop-hole with straitened intentness of vision.  A particular sort of errors and falsities you can track with the scent of a blood-hound, and with a speed and bottom not surpassed, if equalled; but the Destinies have put the nose of your genius to the ground, and sent it off for good and all upon a particular trail.  You sound, indeed, before your encounter, such a thrilling war-note as turns the cripple’s crutch to an imaginary lance; you open on your quarry with such a cry as kindles a huntsman’s heart beneath the bosoms of nursing mothers.  No living writer possesses the like fascination.  Yet, in truth, we should all have tired of your narrow stringency long ago, did there not run in the veins of your genius so rich and ruddy a human blood.  The profoundness of your interest in man, and the masterly way in which you grasp character, give to your thought an inner quality of centrality and wholeness, despite the dogmatic partiality of its shaping at your hands.  And so your enticement continues, intensely partial though it be.

Continues,—­but with growing protest, and growing ground for it.  For, to speak the truth, by your kind permission, without reserve, you are beginning to suffer from yourself.  You are threatening to perish of too much Thomas Carlyle, I venture to caution you against that tremendous individual.  He is subduing your genius to his own special humors; he is alloying your mental activity, to a fearful degree, with dogmatic prepossession; he is making you an intellectual routinier, causing thereby an infiltration of that impurity of which all routine at last dies.  For years we that love you most have seen that you were ceasing more and more to hold open, fresh relations with truth,—­that you were straitening and hardening into the linear, rigid eagerness of the mere propagandist.  You have, if I may so speak, been turning all your front-head into back-head, giving to your cerebral powers the characters of preappointed, automatic action, which are proper to the cerebellum.  It cannot be denied that you have thus acquired a remarkable, machine-like simplicity, force, and constancy of mental action,—­your brain-wheels spinning away with such a steam-engine whirr as one cannot but admire; but, on the other hand, as was inevitable, you have become astonishingly insensitive to all truths, save those with which you are established in organic connection; nor could the products of Manchester mills be bargained for beforehand with more certainty than the results of your intellectual activity.  You can be silent,—­I venture to assert so much; but if you speak at all, we know perfectly well what description of fabric must come from your loom.

It does not, therefore, surprise us, does not clash with our sense of your native greatness, that for our particular Iliad you prove a very nutshell Homer indeed.  For I must not disguise it from you that this is exactly the case.  It was Homerus in nuce first; and the pitiful purport of the epic results less from any smallness in the action celebrated than from that important law, not, perhaps, wholly new to your own observation, which forbids a pint-measure to contain more than a pint, though you dip it full from the ocean itself.