Carlyle's ESSAYS mark an epoch, _i.e._ the beginning of a new era, in the history of British criticism. The able and vigorous writers who contributed to the early numbers of the _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly Reviews_ successfully applied their taste and judgment to such works as fell within their sphere, and could be fairly tested by their canons; but they passed an alien act on everything that lay beyond the range of their insular view. In dealing with the efforts of a nation whose literature, the most recent in Europe save that of Russia, had only begun to command recognition, their rules were at fault and their failures ridiculous. If the old formulas have been theoretically dismissed, and a conscientious critic now endeavours to place himself in the position of his author, the change is largely due to the influence of Carlyle's _Miscellanies._ Previous to their appearance, the literature of Germany, to which half of these papers are devoted, had been (with the exception of Sir Walter Scott's translation of _Goetz von Berlichingen,_ De Quincey's travesties, and Taylor's renderings from Lessing) a sealed book to English readers, save those who were willing to breathe in an atmosphere of Coleridgean mist. Carlyle first made it generally known in England, because he was the first fully to apprehend its meaning. The _Life of Schiller,_ which the author himself depreciated, remains one of the best of comparatively short biographies, it abounds in admirable passages (conspicuously the contrast between the elder and the younger of the Dioscuri at Weimar) and has the advantage to some readers of being written in classical English prose. To the essays relating to Germany, which we may accept as the _disjecta membra_ of the author's unpublished History, there is little to add. In these volumes we have the best English account of the Nibelungen Lied--the most graphic, and in the main most just analyses of the genius of Heyne, Rchter, Novalis, Schiller, and, above all, of Goethe, who is recorded to have said, "Carlyle is almost more at home in our literature than ourselves." With the Germans he is on his chosen ground; but the range of his sympathies is most apparent in the portrait gallery of eighteenth-century Frenchmen that forms, as it were, a proscenium to his first great History. Among other papers in the same collection the most prominent are the _Signs of the Times_ and _Characteristics,_ in which he first distinctly broaches some of his peculiar views on political philosophy and life. The scope and some of the limitations of Carlyle's critical power are exhibited in his second Series of Lectures, delivered in 1838, when (_aet_. 43) he had reached the maturity of his powers. The first three of these lectures, treating of Ancient History and Literature, bring into strong relief the speaker's inadequate view of Greek thought and civilisation:--