On poetry and poets Mr. Carlyle has written many of his best pages, pages penetrating, discriminative, because so sympathetic, and executed with the scholar's care and the critic's culture. His early papers on Goethe and Burns, published more than forty years ago, made something like an epoch in English criticism. Seizing the value and significance of genuine poetry, he exclaims in "Past and Present,"--"Genius, Poet! do we know what these words mean? An inspired soul once more vouchsafed us, direct from Nature's own great fire-heart, to see the truth, and speak it and do it." On the same page he thus taunts his countrymen: "We English find a poet, as brave a man as has been made for a hundred years or so anywhere under the sun; and do we kindle bonfires, thank the gods? Not at all. We, taking due counsel of it, set the man to gauge ale-barrels in the Burgh of Dumfries, and pique ourselves on our 'patronage of genius.'" "George the Third is Defender of something we call 'the Faith' in those years. George the Third is head charioteer of the destinies of England, to guide them through the gulf of French Revolutions, American Independences; and Robert Burns is gauger of ale in Dumfries." Poor George the Third! One needs not be a craniologist to know that the eyes which looked out from beneath that retreating pyramidal forehead could see but part even of the commonest men and things before them. How could they see a Robert Burns? To be sure, had Dundas, or whoever got Burns the place of gauger, given him one of the many sinecures of two or three hundred pounds a year that were wasted on idle scions of titled families, an aureole of glory would now shine through the darkness that environs the memory of George III. So much for George Guelf. Now for Thomas Carlyle.