"The new Lord Rector is, however, as conservative in his choice of the implements of study as he is in the determination of its objects. The languages and the history of the great nations of antiquity he puts foremost, like any other pedagogue. The Greeks and the Romans are, he tells the Edinburgh students, 'a pair of nations shining in the records left by themselves as a kind of pillar to light up life in the darkness of the past ages;' and he adds that it would be well worth their while to get an understanding of what these people were, and what they did. It is here, however, that an old error of Mr. Carlyle's crops up among his well-remembered truths. He quotes from Machiavelli--evidently agreeing himself with the sentiment, though he refrained from asking the assent of his audience to it--the statement that the history of Rome showed that a democracy could not permanently exist without the occasional intervention of a Dictator. It is possible that if Machiavelli had had the experience of the centuries which have elapsed since his day, he would have seen fit to alter his conclusion, and it is to be regretted that the admiration which Mr. Carlyle feels for the great men of history will not allow him to believe in the possibility of a political society where each might find his proper sphere and duty without disturbing the order and natural succession of the commonwealth. His judgment on this point is like that of a man who had only known the steam-engine before the invention of governor balls, and was ready to declare that its mechanism would be shattered if a boy were not always at hand to regulate the pressure of the steam. * * * * * "We may turn, however, from this difference to another of Mr. Carlyle's doctrines, which mark at once his independence of thought and his respect for experience, where he declares the necessity for recognising the hereditary principle in government, if there is to be 'any fixity in things.' In the same way we find him almost lamenting the fact that Oxford, once apparently so fast-anchored as to be immovable, has begun to twist and toss on the eddy of new ideas.