Neither of Carlyle’s portrait gallery, unparalleled in range, in which from each picture an authentic human face looks out at us; nor of his masterpieces of narration, long since laureled even by the unwilling,--is there space here to speak. In portraiture he used Rembrandt’s methods: seizing on structural and characteristic traits, he displays them in strong, full light, and heightens the effect by surrounding them with shadows. As a biographer he succeeded equally well in telling the story of Schiller and that of John Sterling: the latter a most difficult task, as it must always be to make intelligible to strangers a beautiful character whose charm and force are felt by his friends, but have no proportionate expression in his writings. As an essayist he has left models in many branches: “Mirabeau,” “Johnson,” “Goethe,” “Characteristics,” “Burns,” “History,” stand as foothills before his more massive works. His is creative criticism, never restricted, like the criticism of the schools, to purely literary, academic considerations, but penetrating to the inmost heart of a book or a man, to discover what deepest human significance may there be found. A later generation has, as we have noted, adopted a different treatment in all these fields: bending itself to trace the ancestry and to map out the environment of men of genius; concentrating attention on the chain rather than its links; necessarily belittling the individual to aggrandize the mass. It behooves us, while we recognize the value of this treatment as a new means to truth, not to forget that it is not the only one. By and by--perhaps the time is already at hand--we shall recognize that the other method, which deals with the individual as an ultimate rather than in relation to a series, which is human rather than abstract, cannot be neglected without injury to truth. Either alone is partial; each corrects and enlightens the other.