Then he has chosen a proper time and manner for saying his good things; has spoken to almost every great interest as it rose. Nor has he let the good opportunities pass unheeded, or failed to make them for himself. He has taken discretion along as his constant attendant and ally; has shown how the gentlest temper ever deals the surest blows. His method is that of the sun against his rival for the cloak, and so he is free from any madness of those, who, forgetting the strength of the solar ray, go blustering against men’s prejudices, as if the wearers would run at once against these winds of opposition into their arms for shelter. What higher praise can we bestow on any one than to say of him, that he harbors another’s prejudices with a hospitality so cordial as to give him, for the time, the sympathy next best to, if, indeed, it be not edification in, charity itself? For what disturbs and distracts mankind more than the uncivil manners that cleave man from man? Yet for his amendment letters, love, Christianity, were all given! How different is he in temper and manners from Carlyle, with whom he is popularly associated! but who, for the most part, is the polemic, the sophist, the scorner: whose books, opened anywhere, show him berating the wrong he sees, but seeing, shows never the means of removing. Ever the same melancholy advocacy of work to be done under the dread master; force of stroke, the right to rule and be ruled, ever the dismal burden. Doomsday books are all save his earliest—Rhadamanthus sitting and the arbiter. He rides his Leviathan as fiercely as did his countryman, Hobbes, and can be as truculent and abusive; the British Taurus, and a mad one. Were he not thus possessed and fearfully in earnest, we should take him for the harlequin he seems, nor see the sorrowing sadness playing off its load in this grotesque mirth, this scornful irony of his; he painting in spite of himself his portraits in the warmth of admiration, the fire of wrath, and giving mythology for history; all the while distorting the facts into grimace in his grim moods. Yet, what breadth of perspective, strength of outline! the realism how appalling, the egotism how enormous,—all history showing in the background of the one figure, Carlyle. Burns, Goethe, Richter, Mirabeau, Luther, Cromwell, Frederick,—all dashed from his flashing pen, heads of himself, alike in their unlikeness, prodigiously individual, willful, some of them monstrous; all Englishmen with their egregious prejudices and pride; no patience, no repose in any. He still brandishes his truncheon through his pages with an adroitness that renders it unsafe for any, save the few that wield weapons of celestial temper, to do battle against this Abaddon. Silenced he will not be; talking terribly against all talking but his own; agreeing, disagreeing, all the same; he, the Jove, permitting none, none to mount Olympus, till the god deigns silence and invites.