the universe itself into a mere heap of separable atoms, seemed to him hopelessly barren, and uninteresting to the higher mind. Mill's talk and books—which specially represented this mode of thought for him—were 'sawdustish;' for what is sawdust but the dead product of a living growth deprived of its organising principle and reduced to mere dry indigestible powder? To the poetic as to the religious nature of Carlyle, such a process was to make the whole world weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. Carlyle, therefore, must be judged as a poet, and not as a dealer in philosophic systems; as a seer or a prophet, not as a theorist or a man of calculations. And, therefore, if I were attempting any criticism of his literary merits, I should dwell upon his surpassing power in his peculiar province. Admitting that every line he wrote has the stamp of his idiosyncrasies, and consequently requires a certain congeniality of temperament in the reader, I should try to describe the strange spell which it exercises over the initiated. If you really hate the grotesque, the gloomy, the exaggerated, you are of course disqualified from enjoying Carlyle. You must take leave of what ordinarily passes even for common-sense, of all academical canons of taste, and of any weak regard for symmetry or simplicity before you enter the charmed circle. But if you can get rid of your prejudices for the nonce, you will certainly be rewarded by seeing visions such as are evoked by no other magician. The common-sense reappears in the new shape of strange vivid flashes of humour and insight casting undisputed gleams of light into many dark places; and dashing off graphic portraits with a single touch. And if you miss the serene atmosphere of calmer forms of art, it is something to feel at times as no one but Carlyle can make you feel, that each instant is the 'conflux of two eternities;' that our little lives, in his favourite Shakespearean phrase, are 'rounded with a sleep;' that history is like the short space lighted up by a flickering taper in the midst of infinite glooms and mysteries, and its greatest events brief scenes in a vast drama of conflicting forces, where the actors are passing in rapid succession—rising from and vanishing into the all-embracing darkness. And if there is something oppressive to the imagination when we stay long in this singular region, over which the same inspiration seems to be brooding which created the old Northern mythology with its grim gigantesque, semi-humorous figures, we are rewarded by the vividness of the pictures standing out against the surrounding emptiness; some little groups of human figures, who lived and moved like us in the long-past days; or of vignettes of scenery, like the Alpine sunrise in the 'Sartor Resartus,' or the sight of sleeping Haddington from the high moorland in the 'Reminiscences,' as bright and vivid for us as our own memories, and revealing unsuspected sensibilities in the writer.