This was written fifteen years ago, and as Carlyle has of late been unduly depreciated I would add that, while strictly to the present point, it is not put forward as an estimate of Carlyle’s genius. That I seem to have attempted twenty-five years earlier in a private letter (to my friend the late Reverend Angus Mackay) I may here perhaps be allowed to quote. It was in 1883, soon after the publication of Carlyle’s _Reminiscences_: “This is not Carlylese, but it is finer. The popular judgment is hopelessly wrong. We can never understand Carlyle till we get rid of the ‘great prophet’ notion. Carlyle is not (as we were once taught) a ‘great moral teacher,’ but, in the high sense, a great _comedian_. His books are wonderful comedies. He is the Scotch Aristophanes, as Rabelais is the French and Heine the German Aristophanes—of course, with the intense northern imagination, more clumsy, more imperfect, more profound than the Greek. But, at a long distance, there is a close resemblance to Aristophanes with the same mixture of audacity in method and conservatism in spirit. Carlyle’s account of Lamb seems in the true sense Aristophanic. His humour is, too, as broad as he dares (some curious resemblances there, too). In his lyrical outbursts, again, he follows Aristophanes, and again at a distance. Of course he cannot be compared as an artist. He has not, like Rabelais, created a world to play with, but, like Aristophanes generally, he sports with the things that are.” That youthful estimate was alien to popular opinion then because Carlyle was idolised; it is now, no doubt, equally alien for an opposite reason. It is only on extremes that the indolent popular mind can rest. Footnote 63: J. Beddoe, _The Races of Britain_, p. 254. Footnote 64: I once studied, as an example, colour-words in various writers, finding that every poet has his own colour formula. Variations in length of sentence and peculiarities of usage in metre have often been studied. Reference is made to some of these studies by A. Niceforo, “Metodo Statistico e Documenti Litterari,” _Revista d’Italia_, August, 1917. Footnote 65: “The Muses are the daughters of Memory,” Paul Morand tells us that Proust would say; “there is no art without recollection,” and certainly it is supremely true of Proust’s art. It is that element of art which imparts at once both atmosphere and poignant intimacy, external farness with internal nearness. The lyrics of Thomas Hardy owe their intimacy of appeal to the dominance in them of recollection (in _Late Lyrics and Earlier_ one might say it is never absent), and that is why they can scarcely be fully appreciated save by those who are no longer very young. Footnote 66: