"Mr. Carlyle delivered the first of a course of lectures on German Literature, at Willis's Rooms, on Tuesday, to a very crowded and yet a select audience of both sexes. Mr. Carlyle may be deficient in the mere mechanism of oratory; but this minor defect is far more than counterbalanced by his perfect mastery of his subject, the originality of his manner, the perspicuity of his language, his simple but genuine eloquence, and his vigorous grasp of a large and difficult question. No person of taste or judgment could hear him without feeling that the lecturer is a man of genius, deeply imbued with his great argument." "This course of lectures," says a writer already quoted, "was well attended by the fashionables of the West End; and though they saw in his manner something exceedingly awkward, they could not fail to discern in his matter the impress of a mind of great originality and superior gifts."[A] [Footnote A: JAMES GRANT: "Portraits of Public Characters." (Lond. 1841.) Vol. ii., p. 152.] The following year he delivered a second course on the 'History of Literature, or the Successive Periods of European Culture,' at the Literary Institution in Edwards-street, Portman-square. 'The Revolutions of Modern Europe' was the title given to the third course, delivered twelve months later. The fourth and last series, of six lectures, is the best remembered, 'Heroes and Hero-worship.' This course alone was published, and it became more immediately popular than any of the works which had preceded it. Concerning these lectures, Leigh Hunt remarked that it seemed "as if some Puritan had come to life again, liberalized by German philosophy and his own intense reflections and experience." Another critic, a Scotch writer, could see nothing but wild impracticability in them, and exclaimed, "Can any living man point to a single practical passage in any of these lectures? If not, what is the real value of Mr. Carlyle's teachings? What is Mr. Carlyle himself but a phantasm!"