But quite apart from Carlyle's worth as a moral teacher or as a controversialist, his place in literature is very high. His short biography of Schiller was an epoch-making book, because of the influence it has exercised upon the study of German literature: but it bears little evidence of the genius of its author, and, in consequence of the abundance of Schiller correspondence subsequently brought to light, it has been superseded by the biographies of Palleskie and Duntzer. Carlyle's "Life of John Sterling" is, however, a work of great power, a kind of prose "Lycidas," which, like that great elegy, has rescued from oblivion a man in whom the world would soon have ceased to be interested. Carlyle, again, was an essayist of striking individuality. Few literary sketches are more picturesque than his "Count Cagliostro" and "The Diamond Necklace," and the essays on Johnson and Burns are models of generous human insight. With literary insight, however, Carlyle was not too well endowed, at least, when purely imaginative literature was concerned, and he once expressed the opinion that Shakspere had better have written in prose. "It is part of my creed," he wrote to Emerson, "that the only poetry is history could we tell it right." His method of telling it gives him a place by himself among historians, a place so singular that it is impossible to classify him. "Carlyle's 'French Revolution,'" said John Stuart Mill, "is one of those productions of genius which is above all rule, and is a law to itself." The deathbed of Louis XV., the taking of the Bastille, and the execution of Danton, are never-to-be-forgotten descriptions, and the poetical passage which follows the relation of the bloody horrors of 1789 cannot be too often quoted:--"O evening sun of July, how, at this hour, thy beams fall slant on reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in cottages; on ships far out in the silent main; on Balls at the Orangerie of Versailles, where high-rouged Dames of the Palace are even now dancing with double-jacketed Hussar-Officers;--and also on this roaring Hell-porch of a Hôtel-de-Ville!" The scientific history of the French Revolution has yet to be written; and even to appreciate Carlyle's prose epic adequately we should know something of Mignet, Thiers, Morse Stephens, and von Sybel, but neither the accumulation of fresh facts, nor a philosophical deduction from such facts, can impair the value of Carlyle's work. That, in spite of all his fire and passion, Carlyle could delineate character with most judicial fairness, may be demonstrated by turning to Mr John Morley's essays on Robespierre and the other revolutionists, and observing how his calm and unprejudiced intellect has pronounced judgments in every way endorsing Carlyle's.