Though he scorned the word-painters and description-mongers, no one was a better landscape painter. It is perhaps idle to dwell upon characteristics which one either feels or cannot be persuaded into feeling. Those to whom he is on the whole repugnant may admit him to be occasionally a master of the picturesque; and sometimes endeavour to put him out of court on the strength of this formula. A mere dealer, many exclaim, in oddities and grotesques, who will sacrifice anything to produce a startling effect, whose portraits are caricatures, whose style is torn to pieces by excessive straining after emphasis, and who systematically banishes all those half-tones which are necessary to faithful portraiture in the search after incessant contrasts of light and shade. Let us first remark in regard to this that Carlyle himself peremptorily and emphatically denied that the distinction here assumed between the poet and the philosopher could be more than superficial. The philosopher only reaches his goal so far as his analysis leads to a synthesis, or as his abstract speculations can be embodied in definite concrete vision. And the poet is a mere idler, with no substantial or permanent value in him, unless he is uttering thoughts equally susceptible of philosophical exposition. 'The hero,' he says, 'can be poet, prophet, king, priest, or what you will, according to the kind of world he finds himself born into. I confess I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men. The poet who could merely sit on a chair and compose stanzas could never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the heroic warrior, unless he himself were an heroic warrior too.' To this doctrine—though with various logical distinctions and qualifications which seem incongruous with Carlyle's vehement dogmatic utterances—I, for one, would willingly subscribe; and I hold further that in strenuously asserting and enforcing it Carlyle was really laying down the fundamental doctrine of all sound criticism, whether of art or literature or life. Any teaching, that is, which attempts to separate the poet from the man as though his excellence were to be measured by a radically different set of tests is, to my mind, either erroneous or trifling and superficial. The point at which one is inclined to part company with this teaching is different. I do not condemn Carlyle for judging the poet as he judges the hero, for the substantial worth of the man whom it reveals to us; but I admit that his ideal man has a certain stamp of Puritanical narrowness. So, for example, there is something characteristic in his judgments not only of Coleridge, but of Lamb or Scott. He judges Lamb as the spoilt child of Cockney circles, as the Baptist in his garment of camel's hair might have judged some favourite courtier cracking jokes for the amusement of Herodias' daughter. And of Scott, though he strives to do justice to the pride