great work, as he instinctively sees, implies a great force. A man can only leave his mark upon history so far as he is animated, and therefore worthy to be animated, by a great idea. The secret of his nature is to be discovered by a sympathetic imagination acting by a kind of poetical induction. Gathering together all his recorded acts and utterances, the masses of recorded facts, preserved, often in hopeless confusion and misrepresentation, by his contemporaries, you must brood over them till at last you gain a clear vision of the underlying unity of character which manifests itself in these various ways. Then, at last, you may recognise the true hero, and discover unsuspected unity of purpose and strength of conviction, where the hasty judgments passed by contemporaries and those who set them upon isolated fragments of his career, make a bewildering chaos of inconsistency. The process is admirably illustrated in the study of Cromwell, and the result has the merit of being at least a possible, if not a correct, theory of a great man. This, again, is connected with another aspect of Carlyle's teaching—as valuable, though perhaps its value is not even now as generally recognised. For the tendency of his mind is always to substitute what is sometimes called the dynamical for the merely mechanical view of history. It is a necessity for his imagination to penetrate as much to the centre instead of remaining at the circumference; to unveil the actual forces which govern the working of the superficial phenomena, instead of losing himself in the external phenomena themselves. The true condition for understanding history is to gain a clear perception of the genuine beliefs, the wants and passions which actually sway men's souls, instead of working simply at the complicated wheels and pulleys of the political machinery, or accepting the masses of idle verbiage which conceal our true thoughts from ourselves and from each other. An implicit faith in the potency of the machinery, and an equal neglect of the real driving force, was, in his view, the original sin of political theory. The constitution-mongers of the Delolme or Siéyès type, the men who fancied that government (as one of them said) was like 'a dance where everything depended on the disposition of the figures,' and nothing, therefore, on the nature of the dancers, have pretty well passed away. Carlyle saw the same vital fallacies in such nostrums as the ballot or the scheme so enthusiastically advocated by Hare and Mill. 'If of ten men nine are recognisable as fools, which is a common calculation, how in the name of wonder will you get a ballot-box to grind you out a wisdom from the votes of those ten men? Never by any conceivable ballot-box, nor by all the machinery in Bromwicham or out of it, will you attain such a result.' Whether Carlyle was right or wrong in the particular application I do not presume to say. Such a change as