For we may surely accept without hesitation one application of the doctrine, which is of the first importance with Carlyle, and which he has taught so incessantly and impressively, that to him more than to any other man may be attributed the general recognition of its truth. The success of any system of thought—the permanent influence, that is, of any great man or of any great institution—must be due to the truth which it contained, or to its real value to mankind. This doctrine has become so much of a commonplace, and harmonises so fully with all modern historical methods, that we are apt to overlook the service done by Carlyle in its explicit assertion and rigorous application to facts. When he was delivering his lectures upon hero-worship, intelligent people were still in the attitude of mind represented, for example, by Gibbon's famous explanation of the success of Christianity, as due, amongst other things, to the zeal of the early believers, as if the zeal required no explanation; when, on the other side, it was thought proper to explain Mahometanism, not by the admixture of genuine truth which it contained, but as a simple imposture. Carlyle still speaks like a man advancing a disputed theory when he urges in this latter case that to explain the power of Mahomet's sword, you must explain the force which wielded the sword; and that the ingenious hypothesis of a downright cheat will by no means serve the turn. This doctrine is now generally accepted, unless by a few clever people who still cherish the wire-pulling heresy which makes history a puppet-show manipulated by ingenious scoundrels, instead of a vast co-operation of organic forces. Carlyle, however, has done more than any writer to make such barren and degrading explanations impossible for all serious thinkers. His 'Cromwell' has at least exploded once for all the simple-minded 'hypocrisy' theory, as the essay upon Johnson destroyed the ingenious doctrine that a man could write a good book simply because he was a fool. Whether his portraits are accurate or not, they are at least set before us as conceivable and consistent human beings. The prosaic historian and biographer takes the average verdict of commonplace observers: if he is a partisan, he is content with the contemporary caricatures of the party to which he belongs; if he wishes to be impartial, he strikes a rough average between opposite errors; and if he wishes to be dazzling, he calmly combines incompatible judgments. Macaulay's works, with all their merits, are a perfect gallery of such portraits—rhetorically excellent, but hopelessly flimsy in substance: of angelic Whigs and fiendish Tories, and of strange monsters like his Bacon and his Boswell, made by quietly heaping together meanness and wisdom, sense and folly, and inviting you to accept a string of paradoxes as a sober statement of fact. The truly imaginative writer has to go deeper than this. He begins where the rhetorician ends. A