28. +Carlyle’s Style.+-- Carlyle was an author by profession, a teacher of and prophet to his countrymen by his mission, and a student of history by the deep interest he took in the life of man. He was always more or less severe in his judgments-- he has been called “The Censor of the Age,”-- because of the high ideal which he set up for his own conduct and the conduct of others. --He shows in his historic writings a splendour of imagery and a power of dramatic grouping second only to Shakespeare’s. In command of words he is second to no modern English writer. His style has been highly praised and also energetically blamed. It is rugged, gnarled, disjointed, full of irregular force-- shot across by sudden lurid lights of imagination-- full of the most striking and indeed astonishing epithets, and inspired by a certain grim Titanic force. His sentences are often clumsily built. He himself said of them: “Perhaps not more than nine-tenths stand straight on their legs; the remainder are in quite angular attitudes; a few even sprawl out helplessly on all sides, quite broken-backed and dismembered.” There is no modern writer who possesses so large a profusion of figurative language. His works are also full of the pithiest and most memorable sayings, such as the following:-- “Genius is an immense capacity for taking pains.” “Do the duty which lies nearest thee! Thy second duty will already have become clearer.” “History is a mighty drama, enacted upon the theatre of time, with suns for lamps, and eternity for a background.” “All true work is sacred. In all true work, were it but true hand-labour, there is something of divineness. Labour, wide as the earth, has its summit in heaven.” “Remember now and always that Life is no idle dream, but a solemn reality based upon Eternity, and encompassed by Eternity. Find out your task: stand to it: the night cometh when no man can work.”