It is not by teaching this or that dogma, political, philosophical, or religious, that Mr Carlyle is doing his _work_, and exerting an influence, by no means despicable, on his generation. It is by producing a certain moral tone of thought, of a stern, manly, energetic, self-denying character, that his best influence consists. Accordingly we are accustomed to view his works, even when they especially regard communities of men, and take the name of histories, as, in effect, appeals to the individual heart, and to the moral will of the reader. His mind is not legislative; his mode of thinking is not systematic; a state economy he has not the skill, perhaps not the pretension, to devise. When he treats of nations, and governments, and revolutions of states, he views them all as a wondrous picture, which he, the observer, standing apart, watches and apostrophizes, still revealing _himself_ in his reflections upon them. The picture _to the eye_, he gives with marvellous vividness; and he puts forth, with equal power, that sort of world-wide reflection which a thinking being might be supposed to make on his first visit to our planet; but the space between--those intermediate generalizations which make the pride of the philosophical historian--he neglects, has no taste for. Such a writer as Montesquieu he holds in manifest antipathy. His _History of the French Revolution_, like his _Chartism_, like the work now before us, his _Past and Present_, is still an appeal to the consciousness of each man, and to the high and eternal laws of justice and of charity--lo, ye are brethren!