on the same subject but desisted out of respect for Carlyle's superior genius. Mill's interest indeed was too great. It led him 1835 to

Carlyle's monument on the embankment at the bottom of Cheyne Row

borrow the manuscript of the first volume, which he left on his library table, where it was found by a maid, who burned it as waste paper. In the face of this disaster, which seemed to cancel the work of years,

Carlyle's chief concern was to spare Mill's feelings. He set courageously to work, like Scott, to repair his ruined fortune, and in 1837 the entire book was finished and published.

The "French Revolution" has been criticised because it is not accurate as history. One might as well criticise the Parthenon because it is not a pile of bricks. The reader who wants facts, statistics, chronology, and nothing else may well seek elsewhere. But the reader who wants a great story painted with a brush of flame must go to Carlyle. His "French Revolution" is a book with two morals: (1) Rulers who are intent upon their pleasures instead of their duties sow the wind and reap the whirlwind; (2) Anarchy is the father of despotism. The story, as Carlyle tells it, is a matchless prose epic, eloquent, humorous, pathetic, picturesque, powerful, and just. A faint idea of its brilliancy may perhaps be gathered from a few brief

extracts:

"His majesty (Louis XV) has religious faith; believes, at least, in a devil.”—The Bastille. Book I. Chapter 1.

"Boston harbor is black with unexpected tea. Behold a Pennsylvania congress gather; and, ere long, on Bunker Hill, democracy announcing, in rifle volleys death-winged, under her star banner, to the tune of Yankee-doodle-doo, that she is born, and, whirlwind like, will envelop the whole world."-Ibid. I. 2.

"D'Artois has breeches of a fabulous kind. Four tall lackeys hold him up in the air that he may fall into the garment without vestige of wrinkle; from which rigorous incasement the same four, in the same way, and with more effort, have to deliver him at night."-Ibid. II. 1. 'The clatter-teeth (claque dents)' snarls singular old Mirabeau, discerning in such admired forensic eloquence nothing but two clattering jawbones, and a head vacant, sonorous, of the drum species."— Ibid. IV. 4.

La Guillotine! With my machine, messieurs, I whisk off your head (vous fais sauter la tête) in a twinkling, and you have no pain '— whereat they all laugh. Unfortunate doctor! For two-and-twenty years he, unguillotined, shall hear nothing but guillotine, see nothing but guillotine; then dying, shall through long centuries wander, as it

were, a disconsolate ghost, on the wrong side of Styx and Lethe, his name like to outlive Cæsar's."-Ibid. IV. 4.

"Note lastly that globular younger Mirabeau; it is Vicomte Mirabeau; named oftener Mirabeau Tonneau (Barrel Mirabeau), on account of his rotundity and the quantities of strong liquor he contains." Ibid. IV. 4.

"The jailer has no room; whereupon, other place of security not suggesting itself, it is written on les pendit' (they hanged them)."— Ibid. V. 5.

The curé of Sainte-Etienne du Mont marches unpacific at the head of his militant parish.”—Ibid. V. 6.

"A patriot in liquor insisted on sitting to smoke on the edge of one of the powder-barrels; there smoked he, independent of the world -till the Abbé 'purchased his pipe for three francs' and pitched it far."-Ibid. V. 7.

"Vanished is the Bastille, what we call vanished; the body, or sandstones, of it hanging in benign metamorphosis, for centuries to come, over the Seine waters as Pont Louis Seize (Bridge of Louis XVI); the soul of it living, perhaps, still longer in the memories of men."-Ibid. V. 9.

"Welcome the beggarliest truth, so it be one, in exchange for the royalest sham."-Ibid. VI. 1.

"Sanscullotism (without-breeches-dom) will burn much, but what is incombustible it will not burn."-Ibid. VI. 1.

"What a glow of patriotism burns in many a heart, penetrating inwards to the very purse! "-Ibid. VII. 1.

"To the blind all things are sudden."-Ibid. VII. 8.

"What was one roasted warhorse among so many?"-Ibid. VII. 8.

"In any corner of the civilized world, a tub can be inverted, and an articulate-speaking biped mount thereon."-The Constitution. I. 4.

"Your tickets of entry are needful; needfuller your blunderbusses!"-Ibid. VI. 6.

"There are depths in man that go to the length of lowest Hell, as there are heights that reach highest Heaven;-for are not both

Heaven and Hell made out of him, made by him, everlasting Miracle and Mystery as he is? "-The Guillotine. I. 4.

"That fair kind head (Princess de Lamballe's) is cleft with the axe; the neck is severed. That fair body is cut in fragments. She was beautiful, she was good, she had known no happiness. Young hearts, generation after generation, will think with themselves: O worthy of worship, thou king-descended, god-descended, and poor sister-woman! why was not I there; and some Sword Balmung or Thor's Hammer in my hand? Her head is fixed on a pike; paraded that Marie Antoinette may see. One, in the Temple with the Royal Prisoners at the moment, said, 'Look out.' Another eagerly whispered,' Do not look!'"-Ibid. I. 4.

"Man has transcendentalism in him; standing, as he does, poor creature, every way in the confluence of Infinitudes '; a mystery to himself and others; in the centre of two Eternities, of three Immensities, in the intersection of primeval Light with the everlasting Dark."-Ibid. I. 6.

"There is not truth enough in him to make a real lie of.”—Ibid. I. 6.

"Lesource exclaiming: ' I die on the day when the People have lost their reason; you will die when they recover it.'"-Ibid. II. 3.

Tigresse Nationale: meddle not with a whisker of her! Swiftrending is her stroke; look what a paw she spreads;-pity has not entered into her heart."-Ibid. V. 3.

Terrible as the French revolution was, Carlyle points out, at the end of his book, that less than 4000 persons perished during the Reign of Terror, which is about the two-hundredth part of the number killed 1756-1763 in the Seven Years' War, which was waged to settle a personal quarrel between Frederick the Great of Prussia on the one hand, and Maria Theresa of Austria, Catherine of Russia, and Madame de Pompadour of France on the other.

Warmly as the book was welcomed, for some years it produced little cash except for $2000 which Emerson sent from America. To keep the pot boiling, Carlyle wrote more reviews and delivered four series of lectures. Their subjects were "German Literature," "The History of European Literature," ," "Revolutions," and "Heroes and

Hero Worship." They netted him nearly a thousand pounds, but he went to the platform in the mood of a man going to be hanged. The last series, published 1841, continues to be widely read. His heroes are Odin as divinity; Mohammed as prophet; Dante and Shakespeare as poets; Luther and Knox as priests; Johnson, Rousseau, and Burns as men of letters; Cromwell and Napoleon as kings. The lesson of the series is based on Carlyle's growing distrust of the common people, belief that might is right, and reliance on leadership. In 1842 the death of Mrs. Carlyle's mother gave her a fixed income, and this, together with the growing popularity of his own writings, ended his financial troubles. The next year his interest in the poor resulted in the publication of "Past and Present," in which he advocated sympathy and paternal government. At the same time he was busy with "Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches," which, issued in 1845, soon went through three editions. In this work, by means of Oliver's own words, Carlyle showed that he was not a man of falsehood but a man of truth, thus reversing the judgment of him which had prevailed up to that time in the popular mind. In 1850 Carlyle showed still more emphatically his growing discontent with modern society and government by the publication of eight "Latter Day Pamphlets." These in large part are savage attacks on sham, democracy, and the existing order of things. They led some to believe that his philosophy could be summed up in the phrase, "Whatever is, is wrong," while others declared that, by disturbing the smug self-satisfaction of the age, the blasts of his displeasure blew health.

He was so discouraged by the criticism which the book produced that he decided to cease railing against the age and go back to history. In his search for a suitable subject he thought of Ireland, Simon de Montfort, the Norsemen, the Cid, John Knox, and Napoleon. His choice finally fixed, however, on Friedrich II of Prussia, surnamed the Great, as being the best example in not too remote history of the efficiency of autocracy. Born 1712, and King of Prussia 1740-1786, by his military genius and administrative ability, Frederick raised Prussia to the rank of a powerful state. As a general he belongs in the same class with Alexander, Hannibal, Cæsar, Gustavus Adolphus, and