Carlyle did not love humanity when we read the lines in which he expresses reverence for the "toilworn Craftsman that, with earth-made Implement, laboriously conquers the Earth and makes her man's?" "Venerable to me," he continues, "is the hard Hand; crooked, coarse; wherein notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal, as of the Sceptre of this Planet. Venerable, too, is the rugged face, all weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it is the face of a Man living manlike. O, but the more venerable for thy rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love thee! Hardly entreated Brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed; thou wert our Conscript on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so marred." It is impossible to exaggerate the effect upon the younger minds of his age of Carlyle's stirring words, inciting to worthy and ever worthier effort:--"Do the duty which lies nearest to thee, which thou knowest to be a duty. In all situations out of the pit of Tophet, wherein a living man has stood, there is actually a prize of quite infinite value placed within his reach, namely a duty for him to do; this highest of Gospels forms the basis and worth of all other gospels whatever." "Brother," he says elsewhere, "thou hast possibility in thee for much, the possibility of writing on the eternal skies the record of a heroic life. Is not every man, God be thanked, a potential hero? The measure of a nation's greatness, of its worth under the sky to God and to man, is not the quantity of bullion it has realised, but the quantity of heroisms it has achieved, of noble pieties and valiant wisdoms that were in it, that still are in it."