It would be idle to deny that Carlyle did exalt the German nation and German policies to the English-speaking world, but we shall have to qualify this exaltation if we accept Dr. Johnson's principle that an author's works need editing a generation or so after their composition. This dictum is based on the obvious necessity of recognizing that the force of what a man says is conditioned by the current opinion of his time and by his attitude towards it, and it also recognizes the truth of one of Carlyle's own observations: "It is man's nature to change his dialect from century to century; he cannot help it though he would." The dialect of the nineteenth century was not that of the twentieth, and Carlyle's use of it was affected by several things that still further obscure his meaning for us. He opposed strongly what he regarded as many popular fallacies of his time, and in opposing them he overemphasized things that seemed to him to discredit or to disprove them. To the undisciplined British populace, impatient of all control and clamoring for the removal of all restrictions on individual liberty, he extolled the docile German people; but it was not their absolute so much as their comparative virtue that he was praising, and he would have recognized that, under other circumstances, their submissiveness could prove a vice, as, indeed, it has. Another fact, pointed out by Colonel T. W. Higginson, a man whose extreme humanitarianism was calculated to make him unsympathetic towards the eulogist of Dr. Francia, is that Carlyle was a humorist and a man to whom the humorous attitude was second nature. It will be necessary, therefore, to discount his praise of the German people and of German institutions, for two reasons; the first, because it was heightened to serve as a corrective to the tendency towards license in his countrymen; and the second, because, as a humorist, and also because of his ardent temperament, he invariably indulged in over-statement.