Mr Thomas Carlyle has, of late years, devoted a good deal of his leisure time to the denunciation of shams. The term, in his mouth, has a most extended significance indeed--he uses it with Catholic application. Loyalty, sovereignty, nobility, the church, the constitution, kings, nobles, priests, the House of Commons, ministers, Courts of Justice, laws, and lawgivers, are all alike, in the eyes of Mr Carlyle, shams. Nor does he consider the system as of purely modern growth. England, he thinks, has been shamming Isaac for several hundred years. Before the Commonwealth it was overridden by the frightful Incubus of Flunkeyism; since then, it has been suffering under Horsehair and Redtapism, two awful monsters that present themselves to Mr Carlyle's diseased imagination, chained at the entrances of Westminster Hall and Downing Street. Cromwell, perhaps, was not a sham, for in the burly regicide brewer Mr Carlyle discerns certain grand inarticulate strivings, which elevate him to the heroic rank. The gentlemen of the present age, however, are all either shams or shamming. The honourable Felix Parvulus, and the right honourable Felicissimus Zero, mounted respectively upon "desperate Sleswick thunder-horses"--M'Crowdy the political economist--Bobus--Flimnap, Sec. Foreign Department--the Right Honourable Minimus, and various other allegorical personages, intended, we presume, to typify carnal realities, are condemned as Solemn Shams, Supreme Quacks, Phantasm Captains, the Elixir of the Infatuated, and Able-Editor's Nobles. It is natural to suppose that an individual who habitually deals in such wholesale denunciation, and whose avowed wish is to regenerate and reform society upon some entirely novel principle, must be a man of immense practical ability. The exposer of shams and quackeries should be, in his own person, very far indeed above suspicion of resembling those whom he describes, or tries to describe, in language more or less intelligible. If otherwise, he stands in imminent danger of being treated by the rest of the world as an impertinent and egregious impostor. Now, Mr Thomas Carlyle is anything but a man of practical ability. Setting aside his style for the present, let us see whether he has ever, in the course of his life, thrown out a single hint which could be useful to his own generation, or profitable to those who may come after. If he could originate any such hint, he does not possess the power of embodying it in distinct language. He has written a history of the French Revolution, a pamphlet on Chartism, a work on Heroes and Hero-worship, and a sort of political treatise entitled _Past and Present_. Can any living man point to a single practical passage in any of these volumes? If not, what is the real value of Mr Carlyle's writings? What is Mr Carlyle himself but a Phantasm of the species which he is pleased to denounce?