The _French Revolution_, however, is far more distinctly a work of art than _Cromwell_, and far more accessible to the great public than _Sartor_. Indeed the _French Revolution_ is usually, and very properly, spoken of and thought of, as a prose poem, if prose poem there can be. It has the essential character of an epic, short of rhythm and versification. Its "argument" and its "books"; its contrasts and "episodes"; its grouping of characters and _denoument_--are as carefully elaborated as the _Gerusalemme_ of Tasso, or the _Aeneid_ of Virgil. And it produces on the mind the effect of a poem with an epic or dramatic plot. It is only a reader thoroughly at home in the history of the time, who can resist the poet's spell when, at the end of Part III., Book VII., he is told that the Revolution is "ended," and the curtain falls. As a matter of real history, this is an arbitrary invention. For the street fight on the day named in the Revolutionary Calendar--13 _Vendemiaire, An 4_ (5th October 1795), is merely a casual point in a long movement, at which the poet finds it artistic to stop. But the French Revolution does not stop there, nor did the "Whiff of Grapeshot" end it in any but an arbitrary sense. When the poet tells us that, upon Napoleon's defeating the sections around the Convention, "the hour had come and the Man," and that the thing called the French Revolution was thereby "blown into space," nothing more silly, mendacious, and "phantasmic" was ever stated by sober historian. The Convention was itself the living embodiment and product of the Revolution, and Bonaparte's smart feat in protecting it, increased its authority and confidence. If Carlyle's _French Revolution_ be trusted as real history, it lands us in as futile a _non sequitur_ as ever historian committed.