Our critical time has not forborne to criticize itself, and perhaps the writer who impressed himself most strongly upon his generation was the one who railed most desperately against the "spirit of the age." Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was occupied between 1822 and 1830 chiefly in imparting to the British public a knowledge of German literature. He published, among other things, a _Life of Schiller_, a translation of Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_, and two volumes of translations from the German romancers--Tieck, Hoffmann, Richter, and Fouque--and contributed to the _Edinburgh_ and _Foreign Review_ articles on Goethe, Werner, Novalis, Richter, German playwrights, the _Nibelungen Lied_, etc. His own diction became more and more tinctured with Germanisms. There was something Gothic in his taste, which was attracted by the lawless, the grotesque, and the whimsical in the writings of Jean Paul Richter. His favorite among English humorists was Sterne, who has a share of these same qualities. He spoke disparagingly of "the sensuous literature of the Greeks," and preferred the Norse to the Hellenic mythology. Even in his admirable critical essays on Burns, on Richter, on Scott, Diderot, and Voltaire, which are free from his later mannerism--written in English, and not in Carlylese--his sense of spirit is always more lively than his sense of form. He finally became so impatient of art as to maintain--half-seriously--the paradox that Shakspere would have done better to write in prose. In three of these early essays--on the _Signs of the Times_, 1829; on _History_, 1830, and on _Characteristics_, 1831--are to be found the germs of all his later writings. The first of these was an arraignment of the mechanical spirit of the age. In every province of thought he discovered too great a reliance upon systems, institutions, machinery, instead of upon men. Thus, in religion, we have Bible societies, "machines for converting the heathen." "In defect of Raphaels and Angelos and Mozarts, we have royal academies of painting, sculpture, music." In like manner, he complains, government is a machine. "Its duties and faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable." Against the "police theory," as distinguished from the "paternal" theory, of government, Carlyle protested with ever shriller iteration. In _Chartism_, 1839, _Past and Present_, 1843, and _Latter-day Pamphlets,_ 1850, he denounced this _laissez faire_ idea. The business of government, he repeated, is to govern; but this view makes it its business to refrain from governing. He fought most fiercely against the conclusions of political economy, "the dismal science" which, he said, affirmed that men were guided exclusively by their stomachs. He protested, too, against the Utilitarians, followers of Bentham and Mill, with their "greatest happiness principle," which reduced virtue to a profit-and-loss account. Carlyle took issue with