It appears that this dislike, and the ignorance consequent upon it, applied to the works of Carlyle. Now, we may have much or little faith in Carlyle as a philosopher or as a historian. Half-lights and half-truths may be the utmost which, in these departments, his works will be found to yield. But the total want of sympathy is the more noteworthy, because the resemblances, though partial, are both numerous and substantial between these two remarkable men and powerful writers, as well in their strength as in their weakness. Both are honest; and both, notwithstanding honesty, are partisans. Each is vastly, though diversely, powerful in expression; and each is more powerful in expression than in thought. Both are, though variously, poets using the vehicle of prose. Both have the power of portraitures, extraordinary for vividness and strength. For comprehensive disquisition, for balanced and impartial judgments, the world will probably resort to neither; and if Carlyle gains on the comparison in his strong sense of the inward and the ideal, he loses in the absolute and violent character of his one-sidedness. Without doubt, Carlyle's licentious though striking peculiarities of style have been of a nature allowably to repel, so far as they go, one who was so rigid as Macaulay in his literary orthodoxy, and who so highly appreciated, and with such expenditure of labor, all that relates to the exterior or body of a book. Still, if there be resemblances so strong, the want of appreciation, which has possibly been reciprocal, seems to be partly of that nature which Aristotle would have explained by his favorite proverb, [Greek: keramens keramei].[D] The discrepancy is like the discrepancy [Pg 6368] of colors that are too near. Carlyle is at least a great fact in the literature of his time, and has contributed largely,—in some respects too largely,—toward forming its characteristic habits of thought. But on these very grounds he should not have been excluded from the horizon of a mind like Macaulay's, with all its large and varied and most active interests....