Produced by Robert Shimmin, Tiffany Vergon, Charles Aldarondo, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team OBITER DICTA By Augustine Birrell 'An _obiter dictum_, in the language of the law, is a gratuitous opinion, an individual impertinence, which, whether it be wise or foolish, right or wrong, bindeth none--not even the lips that utter it.' OLD JUDGE. PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION. _This seems a very little book to introduce to so large a continent. No such enterprise would ever have suggested itself to the home-keeping mind of the Author, who, none the less, when this edition was proposed to him by Messrs. Scribner on terms honorable to them and grateful to him, found the notion of being read in America most fragrant and delightful. London, February 13, 1885._ CONTENTS. CARLYLE ON THE ALLEGED OBSCURITY OF MR. BROWNING'S POETRY TRUTH-HUNTING ACTORS A ROGUE'S MEMOIRS THE VIA MEDIA FALSTAFF CARLYLE The accomplishments of our race have of late become so varied, that it is often no easy task to assign him whom we would judge to his proper station among men; and yet, until this has been done, the guns of our criticism cannot be accurately levelled, and as a consequence the greater part of our fire must remain futile. He, for example, who would essay to take account of Mr. Gladstone, must read much else besides Hansard; he must brush up his Homer, and set himself to acquire some theology. The place of Greece in the providential order of the world, and of laymen in the Church of England, must be considered, together with a host of other subjects of much apparent irrelevance to a statesman's life. So too in the case of his distinguished rival, whose death eclipsed the gaiety of politics and banished epigram from Parliament: keen must be the critical faculty which can nicely discern where the novelist ended and the statesman began in Benjamin Disraeli. Happily, no such difficulty is now before us. Thomas Carlyle was a writer of books, and he was nothing else. Beneath this judgment he would have winced, but have remained silent, for the facts are so.