Perhaps no author, ancient or modern, has so completely embodied in his writings, the spirit of the world, the Welt-Geist, as the Germans say, as Thomas Carlyle. This writer may have done some service to society in exposing many cants, in demolishing numerous shams, and in calling attention to the eternal verities, of which few men are more ignorant; but he has deified force, and consecrated the worship of might in the place of right. Indeed, for him, right is cant, and there is no right but might. He spurns humility, submission, obedience, and recognizes God only in human ability. His hero-worship is the worship of the strong and the successful. Ability, however directed or wherever displayed, is his divinity. His heroes are Woden and Thor, Cromwell, Frederick the Great, Mirabeau, Danton, Napoleon Bonaparte. The men who go straight to their object, whether good or bad, and use the means necessary to gain it, whether right or wrong, are for him the divine men, and the only thing he censures is weakness, whether caused by indecision or scruples of conscience. His hero is an elemental force, who acts as the lightning that rives the oak, or the winds that fill the sails and drive the ship to its port. Old-fashioned morality, which requires a man to seek just ends by just means, is with him a cant, a sham, an unreality, and the true hero makes away with it, and is his own end, his own law, his own means. He is not governed, he governs, and is the real being, the real God; all else belong to the unveracities, are mere simulacra, whose end is to vanish in thin air, to disappear in the inane. The man who recognizes a power above him, a right independent of him, and in submission to the divine law, and from love of truth and justice, weds himself to what is commanded, espouses the right and adheres to it through good report and evil report, takes up the cause of the oppressed, the wronged and outraged, the poor, the friendless, and the down-trodden, and works for it, gives his soul to it, and sacrifices his time, his labor, and his very life to advance it, when he has no man with him, and all the world unheeds, jeers, or thwarts him, is unheroic, and has no moral grandeur in him, has no virtue--unless he succeeds. He is a hero only when he carries the world with him, bends the multitude to his purpose, and comes out triumphant. The unsuccessful are always wrong; lost causes are always bad causes; and the unfortunate are unveracious, and deserve their fate. The good man struggling with fate, and holding fast to his integrity in the midst of the sorest trials and temptations, and overborne in all things save his unconquerable devotion to duty, is no hero, and deserves no honor, though even the ancients thought such a man worthy of the admiration of gods and men. {5} Carlyle forgets that there is an hereafter, and that what to our dim vision may seem to be failure here may there be seen to have been the most eminent success. The Christians conquered the