ship and cant. All nobleness, in word and act, has become extinct; and in its place there is nothing but laissez-faire; greatest amount of happiness; catch as catch can; and sauve qui peut. This strain of arrogant, contemptuous denunciation, runs through all our author's works, in some cases breaking out into a perfect frenzy.

We do not regard our age as at all perfect, but we do deem this strain of wholesale invective as nothing more or less than committing false witness against our neighbour. It is preposterous, and, we had almost said, slanderous, for any poor, fallible mortal to sit in judgment on the sincerity and rectitude of several hundred millions of his fellow-men, whom he has never seen, and condemn them en masse. Whatever defects may exist in the Church and the world, we challenge any man to, exhibit an age in the world's history, when there were fewer defects to blame, and more facts for which to be grateful to God, than the age in which we live. The laudator temporis acti is an ancient character; but one whose querulous question, Wherefore "the former days were better than these?" receives only the cutting reply, "Thou inquirest not wisely concerning this."

With all our profound respect for Mr. Carlyle, we cannot, in reading the cynical flings he makes at his contemporaries, avoid being irresistibly reminded of the lugubrious exclamation of honest Jack Falstaff: "There live not three good men unhanged in England, and one of them is fat and grows old. A bad world, I say.”

To those who are ignorant of the course of thought in many portions of the Christian world, within the last twenty-five years, it may excite some surprise, that, after the developments we have made, we are prepared to render the judgment which we are about to record. But those who know the history of religious opinion and philosophical speculation during that time, will not wonder when we say, that, although we condemn some of Carlyle's opinions, as false and dangerous, yet we hope that he still holds the essential truths of Christianity in his head, and rests upon them in his heart; and that, although his faith is mingled with vague and dreamy speculations, drawn from Pantheism, Heathenism, Mohammedanism, and German Rationalism, yet at heart he reposes on a Divine Saviour, a Sanctifying Spirit, and a revealed Word. He is the connecting link between the old-fashioned faith and the new-fashioned skepticism; or, to alter the figure, whilst the foundation of his belief rests on the Rock of Ages, the summit of it is lost in the cloudy region of German metaphysics.

When we come to consider his claims in a literary point of view, our decision is somewhat forestalled by the verdict of public opinion. It is too late to attempt to assign him a position among the FOURTH SERIES, VOL. 1.—16

lights of the age; for he has already taken his position, and holds it by a right of tenure which will not be successfully disputed. He is universally recognized as one of the fixed stars in the galaxy of English literature. His position has been assumed under the combined action of a strong English mind, and the powerful impulse of German thinking. The resultant of these forces has been an orbit somewhat eccentric and cometary, but brilliant and vast. He never can become a popular writer; but, within a small circle, he must always be a powerful one. This power does not arise from any force of logic in his writings, for he rarely reasons, but from the sudden, self-luminous flashings of truth that he emits. He ejects the truth in some oracular utterance, which if you understand and receive, it is well; but if not, he is utterly indifferent; the loss lies with yourself, and not with him. Like the Sybil to Tarquin, there is but one offer of the oracles; their refusal is their total loss,-he flings them into the fire. Genius he has not so much as talent. He loves a great man more than he loves a great truth, and hence the biographical cast of his writings. He is not properly an original thinker, in the sense in which we apply that term to Foster, or Coleridge; although he is an original writer. There are few important thoughts in his works that may not be found elsewhere; whilst there are many expressions of thought that are entirely peculiar to himself. But we do not regard his merit as, on this account, the less conspicuous. The cunning workman, who fashions the massive ingots into forms of beauty and of use, is surely not less to be valued than the miner, who delves out the ore from the bowels of the earth. The work of Mr. Carlyle may be expressed in a single word; he is the interpreter of the idealistic philosophy of Germany to the English mind; moulded and petrified, as it has been, in the intellectual forms of Bacon, Locke, Paley, and Bentham.

When we come to the question of style, we feel not unlike the judges of Ho-Ti, in Elia's "Dissertation on Roast Pig," who had tasted "the crackling;" though we hope to avoid the malfeasance of these erudite men of the robe. We feel the fascination and power of this style, and hang over its fitful coruscations with delight, but still must pronounce upon it a sentence of the severest condemnation. We are not purists, nor disposed to condemn a man who has not the stately dulness of Addison, or the polished inanity of Blair; and we believe the attempt to fix a Procrustean bed of style, that some seem disposed to make, is as foolish as it will be vain. But it is for this very reason, in part, that we object to Mr. Carlyle's attempt to sew this German patch-work on his English style. That it is natural to him, in a certain sense, we believe, just as it is natural to

some men to stutter; but that any man, were it even Charles Lamb, whose wit it so often heightened, has a right to establish stuttering as an authorized style of speech, we utterly deny. That this style is not unavoidable, is proved by the pure, idiomatic English in which some of his earlier essays are written, portions of which are among the finest specimens of strong, clear Saxon, that the language affords. The style is evidently cultivated for its own sake, and is more strongly marked in every successive work.

We object to it, because no man has a right thus to adulterate his country's language, any more than his country's coin. The same reasons that require the observance of uniform principles in the one case exist in the other. Were this license granted to every writer, the language, in a few years, would become a chaos of unintelligible barbarisms, and the writings of one generation be in a dead language to the next. Such are the laws of the republic of letters; and we know of no decree, "ne quid respublica detrimenti capiat," that has been, or ought to be, enacted in this particular case.

We object to it again, because of the narrow sphere of influence to which it reduces his power. There are thousands of minds, whom his earnest spirit ought to reach and move, but cannot, owing to the quaint, obscure, and unintelligible form in which his burning thoughts are placed. The man who has the clear and glowing light that he possesses, has no right to put it into a lantern of stained and darkened glass; where one half of those who ought to enjoy its guiding rays, are misled by the fantastic figures of the medium of transmission; and the other half do not perceive them at all. There is no pure and truthful man of our age, whose writings have been more perverted to evil by skepticism and worldliness, than his; for the very reason that there are no writings more capable of misconception and misconstruction, owing to their abrupt and oracular style. We say, then, not only as a question of literature, but also of morals, "To him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.'

We object, also, because the German mode of thought and expression is totally foreign to all our habits of mind, and neither can nor ought to be fastened upon them. There is a style of thinking, speaking, and acting, that is peculiar to each nation—the outgrowth of its history and institutions, and inalienably its own. The pigtail, shaven crown, solemn genuflexions, and tactual salutations of noses, foreheads, and hands, practised by the Celestials, may be very interesting and imposing to the sons of the Flowery Land; but they would have a very farcical effect, if transferred to the streets of NewYork, or the salons of Paris. So there are many things, that are

1

charming simplicity and exquisite wit to a German mind, that to an English taste are the sheerest drivelling and twattle. A single instance of this, among many others, must suffice to illustrate the objection. A witness in Lord Thurtell's trial, being asked what he meant by a man's being respectable, answered, that he kept a gig. This might do very well as an after-dinner joke; but Mr. Carlyle seizes it, and, in the form of gigmanity, gigness, gig-respectability, etc., drives this unfortunate gig through all his writings. There is not a work he has written, but in which, at some unexpected corner, you are met by this ubiquitous gig. This wearing of an epithet, or an illustration, to the very bones, is a puerility unworthy a mind so fertile as our author's, and yet it is one of the most marked characteristics of his style.

Our final judgment on his influence may be gathered from what we have already said. That he is one of the most earnest, reverent, and pure-hearted men of our times; one of the most finished scholars, especially in modern literature; one of the most powerful and effective writers in the circle where he acts, is beyond all question. That he has done philosophy a service, by translating its formulas into the acts of common life; and religion a service, by his manly avowal of religious emotion, and his scathing rebukes of irreligion and worldliness, is also gratefully acknowledged. But that he has serious error mingled with precious truth; and that he often states the truth, so that to many minds it has all the effect of error; is equally unquestionable. And that the fantastical and outre garb in which he often chooses to array his thoughts, has led many to mistake a hero for a harlequin, and the profoundest wisdom for the wildest nonsense, must also be mournfully admitted. But, balancing all these conflicting claims, and looking not only at his present, but his future influence, there are few prominent characters of our day, on whom as men, as writers, or as thinkers, we dwell with a fonder delight; and few, for whose life and writings, with all their cross-lights of half truth and error, we feel more grateful to God, than for those of Thomas Carlyle.

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ART. V.-SPIRITUAL HEROES.

Spiritual Heroes; or, Sketches of the Puritans, their Character and Times. By JOHN STOUGHTON. New-York: M. W. DODD. 1848.

MR. DODD has done the Church, more especially the younger disciples, a good service by his very neat republication of this volume. It is a series of sketches of character and incident in the annals of the Puritans, painted by a faithful hand, and with life-like interest. The materials have been taken, in part, from standard historical authorities, and partly from rare and curious tracts, from unpublished documents, and local tradition; and the whole relates to a period in the history of the Church, to which justice has not been done by the pen of the historian. The Puritans! traduced, vilified, persecuted, many of them martyred; and, after death, their names stigmatized by writers who credited the vilest calumny, and apparently gloried in spreading it upon the historic page. The Puritans! slowly even yet emerging from the clouds in which their characters were enveloped; we are thankful for this instalment, and hail it as another assurance that the debt of justice will yet be fully paid. For though, as Cowper indignantly has it,

yet,

"Their ashes flew,

No marble tells us whither; with their names
No bard embalms and sanctifies his song;

And history, so warm on other themes,

Is cold on this;"

"Their dust and ruins that remain

Are precious in our eyes;

Those ruins shall be built again,

And all that dust shall rise.”

The first place among his "Spiritual Heroes" is given by our author to what he calls "the Islington Congregation.' "" This was composed of some two hundred persons, mostly in humble circumstances; apprentices, small tradesmen, mechanics with their wives and daughters-despised among men, but God's true nobility. They were wont to worship in secret places; and Foxe relates some remarkable instances of their hair-breadth escapes from the hands of their persecutors. In the midst of their worship, on May-day, A. D. 1558, in an open field near Islington, they were broken in upon by a body of armed men, by whom they were taken before a justice, and twentytwo of them-the leaders of the little band-were sent to Newgate. Two of them died there; and of the remaining twenty, thirteen were