approaching the subject with Miss Conisbrough, I used what delicacy I could. I told her that I should never enjoy a moment's pleasure in possessing that of which they were unjustly deprived which I never shall. I reminded her of her promise; she flatly told me she recalled it. Well" (he stood before Randulf, and there were tones of passion in his voice) "I humbled myself before Miss Conisbrough, I entreated her to think again, to use her influence with her mother, to meet me half-way, and help me to repair the injustice. I was refused-with distress it is true but most unequivocally. Nor would she release me until I had promised not to urge the matter on Mrs. Conisbrough, who, I surmise, would be less stern about it. Miss Conisbrough is relentless and strong. She was not content with that. She not only had a horror of my money, but even of me, it appears. She made me promise not to seek them out or visit them. By dint of hard pleading I was allowed to accompany them home, and be formally introduced to her sisters-no more. That is to be the end of it. I tell you, because I know you can understand it. For the rest of the world I care nothing. People may call me grasping and heartless if they choose. They may picture me enjoying my plunder, while Mrs. Conisbrough and her daughters are wearing out their lives in-do you wonder that I cannot bear to think of it?" he added passionately. "Could nothing be done through these drawings?" suggested Aglionby. "Could you not tell Delphine that some one had seen them who admired them exceedingly. "I see what you mean," said Randulf, with a smile. "She has great schemes for working, and selling her pictures, and helping them, and so on. But I have a better plan than that. I must work my father round to it, and then I must get her to see it. She shall work as much as she pleases and have as many lessons as she likes-when she is my wife." Aglionby started again, flushing deeply. Randulf's words set his whole being into a fever. "That is your plan ?" said he in a low voice. "That is my plan, which no one but you knows. However long I have to wait, she shall be my wife." "I wish you good speed in your courtship, but I fear your success won't accomplish my wishes in the matter. "Miss Conisbrough must have some reason for the strange course she has taken," said Randulf. "Do you think we are justified in trying to discover that reason, or are we bound not to inquire into it ?" There was a long pause. darkly: "I have promised." "But I have not." Then Aglionby said Bernard shook his head. "I don't believe, "No, I don't. It is the most extraordinary whatever it may be, that any one but Miss Conisthing I ever heard." "You think so? I am glad you agree with me. Tell me for I vow I am so bewildered by it all that I hardly know whether I am in my senses or out of them-tell me if there was anything strange in my proposal to share my inheritance with them-anything unnatural ?'' "The very reverse, I should say." brough is cognizant of it." "Well, let me use my good offices for you, if ever I have a chance. If ever I know them well enough to be taken into their confidence, I shall use my influence on your side-may I?" "You will earn my everlasting gratitude if you do. And if it turns out that they do want helpthat my cousin Delphine has to work for money, "Or in my going to Miss Conisbrough about you will let me know. Remember," he added it, rather than to her mother?" "No, indeed!" "It never struck me beforehand that I was contemplating doing anything strange or wrong. Yet Miss Conisbrough made me feel myself very wrong. She would have it so, and I own that there is something about her, her nature and character are so truly noble, that I could not but submit. But I submit under protest." "I am glad you have told me," said Randulf. "Now all my doubts about you have vanished." jealously, "it is my right and duty, as their kinsman, to see that they are not distressed." "Yes, I know, and I shall not forget you." Randulf, when his guest had gone, soliloquized silently: "That fellow is heart and soul on my side. He doesn't know himself whither he is drifting. I'd like to take the odds with any one, that he never marries that little dressed-up doll whose likeness he is now carrying about with him.” (To be continued.) LITERARY WORK OF THOMAS CARLYLE. I will speak of very few of Carlyle's works in detail. His histories are rightly considered the most dramatic works of the kind in any language; the only historian I can now think of who at all approaches him in the ability to give this vivid, effulgent glow of life to his scenes is our own Motley. His "Rise of the Dutch Republic" has somewhat of the highly pictorial style which in a great degree characterized Carlyle's "French Revolution." Every touch of Carlyle's is an illuminated point, and we feel that we have been in the very midst of that terrific explosion of hostile forces which resulted in that direful chaos "when all the stars of heaven were gone out." It is not my purpose, however, to do more than merely allude to this mighty work in which the philosophy of the French Revolution is once forever explained. I must barely mention also his posthumous work which has produced a decided sensation, but will, of course, add nothing to his literary fame. He jotted down, as memory suggested them, these various reminiscences of his relatives and friends, never supposing that in that crude, disjointed form they would go to publication. I am grateful to Mr. Froude, nevertheless, for having published them, because it is encouraging to see how tiresomely geniuses can scribble when they once condescend to write for themselves and not for eternity. So we must blame— and thank-Mr. Froude as well as Mr. Carlyle when we read such sentences as these: "Old Esther judged it more polite to leave her old riding-habit to the parish, ah! me!" "I found, when I went to Edinburgh, Glasgow, and other places, that it was not or by no means so perceptibly was. "Self-delusion or half-knowledge could not get existed in his presence." "Of the children I recollect nothing that was not auroral CARLYLE'S works may be divided into histories, critiques, and what, for lack of a better name, I shall call Jeremiads. The first division includes his "Life of Cromwell," "French Revolution," "Life of Schiller," "Life of John Sterling," "History of Norway Kings," and "Life of Frederick the Great," not to mention the "Reminiscences." His critiques embrace an almost exhaustless list of subjects, prominent among which are "Diderot," "Goethe," "Novalis," "Jean Paul Richter," "Mme. de Stäel," "Voltaire," "German Literature," "Burns," and "Hero and Hero-Worship," perhaps the best-known of all his works. Of his Jeremiads, "Past and Present," "Chartism," “Sartor Resartus" (sternly sad at heart despite its grim jesting), and "Latter-Day Pamphlets" may be specially mentioned. I leave out of view his various translations from the French and German, among which one is surprised to find a translation of "Legendre's Geometry." Legendre's Geometry." The translations from the German doubtless had decided influence in forming Carlyle's peculiar style. One notices many Germanisms in his characteristic works, the unique form of the genitive case being an instance in point, he rarely using our plain English possessive. Thus we do not read of "his face" or "her beauty," but "the face of him," "the beauty of her." While speaking of these peculiarities, I may as well mention others which characterize Carlyle's style. He never hesitates at the regular form of the superlative degree, however awkward the result; "imperishablest," "beautifullest," and "indefatigablest," all have a kind of "linked sweetness long drawn out" which charms his ear, if no other. He has "dittoes" ad nauseam, and frequently confronts one with such startling words as vestural, deliration, visualised, complected, etc., not to mention his odd combinations as "to insure one of misap-matutinal." prehension," "snow-and-rose-bloom- maiden," "cunning enough significance," and so on. I know of no other author who has so extensive a vocabulary, except the divine Shakspeare, and I cannot help regretting that one who was so richly furnished with language should occasionally express himself so awkwardly. 1 To my shame, I must confess that my first opinions of Carlyle were far from complimentary. About the first work of his that ever fell into my hands was that on "Chartism," after reading which I thought of its author what some one once said of Coleridge: "Excellent? Yes, very, if you let him start from no premises and come to he was already before the public in the beautiful life of him written by Archdeacon Hare. Carlyle felt that Mr. Hare had unintentionally thrown only a half light on the picture of their friend. He was willing that Sterling should be forgotten, but not willing he should be misremembered, hence this inimitable biography of a noble and beautiful human soul. Can we not see Sterling as, "armed with his little outfit of heroisms and aspirations," he steps into line, ready to do what sovereignty and guidance he can in his day and generation? We plunge with him into the tumultuous vortex of Radicalism; with him we try "all manner of sublimely illuminated places." Later we see "the sun of English priesthood rising over the waste ruins and extinct volcanoes of his Radicalism, with promise of new blessedness and healing on its wings." Sterling as curate, "rushing like a host to victory; playing and pulsing like sunshine or soft lightning; busy at all hours to perform his part in abundant and superabundant measure"-surely there was never a more radiant picture. Alas for the Church, that Sterling soon saw this sun of the Euglish priesthood going down in his sky, a delusion and disappointment. Happy for us could we have retained such an Ithuriel in our ranks, one who had "an eye to discern the divineness of heaven's splendors and lightnings; the insatiable wish to revel in their godlike radiance, and a heart, too, to front the scathing terrors of them, which is the first condition of conquering an abiding place there." He had what Carlyle considers a truly pious soul, one devoutly submissive to the will of the Supreme in all things, "the highest and sole-essential form which religion can assume in man, and without which all religious forms are a mockery and delusion." no conclusion." "Sartor Resartus" and "Chartism" remained sealed books to me until after I had read some of his less obscure works, which did not need to have their explanations explained to my obtuse understanding. Now I rank myself among Carlyle's most ardent admirers, and as it was his Life of John Sterling which first completely won my own heart, it is that which I prefer now to review and that which I most confidently recommend to all those who have not yet the good fortune to feel themselves en rapport with the magnificent genius of our author. It is my ideal biography, and I write it first on the list of those which completely satisfy my heart and place me in such vivid contact with their subjects that it seems as if a new and precious friendship were added to my blessings. The list is short, indeed, including only "John Sterling," Mrs. Gaskell's "Charlotte Brönte," Archdeacon Hare's "Memorials of a Quiet Life," Mrs. Kingsley's Life of her husband, and Fanny Kemble's "Records of a Girlhood." Some one has said that Tennyson's "In Memoriam" and Carlyle's "John Sterling" are the two monuments of the nineteenth-century friendship, and so they are, with this difference: Tennyson's polished and gilded and artistic piece of work is a sepulchre so exact, glittering, and obtrusive, that one inevitably turns from it doubting the sincerity of the mourner who could so publish the bitterness of his grief to the world. A woe which can never forget the metre and the rhyme may be very graceful, but it is not apt to be very deep. Elegant as it all is, Tennyson's elaborate wailings for Arthur Hallam can never stir the depths of sympathy as did the one heartfelt cry of that Hebrew poet who, before the great tragedy of his life, forgets his poetry, and cries in anguished and touching prose, "Oh, Absalom! my son, my son would God I had Later still, we watch Sterling as a husband, a died for thee!" The same sad sincerity of grief father, a son, and friend. We read his beautiful and earnestness of love glorify the little book that letters; we sit opposite him as he writes his Carlyle has written about his friend; it is no favorite poetry whenever his constant and increaspainted and gilded monument like that of Tenny-ing illness allows him a painless hour. We hear son, but is hewed with reverent hands out of the him in argument, dashing into our midst like a very granite of friendship. Carlyle did not approve of biographies. "It is best and happiest," he says, "to return silently with one's small, sorely-foiled bit of work to the Supreme Silences, who alone can judge of him and it." Feeling thus, he would have left "John Sterling" in happy obscurity had it not been that troop of Cossacks, and scattering weak forces right and left. We could almost adore the transcendently hopeful creature as he looks over his unmanageable, dislocated, and devastated world, and yet sees it glistening in fairest sunshine. Nothing more tender was ever written than these beautiful words describing Sterling a short while before his death: "" 'Sterling's face still; the same that we had long known, but painted now as on the azure of eternity, serene, victorious, divinely sad; the dust and extraneous disfigurements imprinted on it by the world now washed away forever." Not the least attractive feature of this book is the fact that it presents Carlyle himself in an altogether more lovable form than anything else that has ever been written about him. It is gratifying to see our gloomy iconoclast thoroughly enjoying an entirely human friendship. Their differences of opinion were many; but in their intercourse, with Sterling's revivifying influence to encourage him, I have no doubt that Carlyle blossomed out into more tenderness and hopefulness than he ever showed to any other creature. Even he could not help turning his sunny side toward this radiant young son of the morning. What the friendship was to Sterling himself is best told in his brief letter of farewell to Carlyle, written a few weeks before his death: "MY DEAR CARLYLE: For the first time in many months it seems possible to send you a few words, merely, however, for Remembrance and Farewell. On higher subjects there is nothing to say. I tread the common road into the great darkness without any thought of fear and with very much of hope. Certainty, indeed, I have none. With regard to you and me I cannot begin to write; having nothing for it but to keep shut the lid of those secrets with all the iron weights that are in my power. Toward me it is still more true than toward England, that no man has been and done like you. Heaven bless you! If I can lend a hand when there, that shall not be wanting." Of the second division of Carlyle's works, his criticisms, I have little or nothing new to say, criticising a critic being a work of supererogation for which I have neither the ability nor inclination. He brought to this department of his work what few critics have to bring,-a clear, penetrating glance into the beauty or deformity of every life and mind. He sees straight down into the heart, and if, in its darkest corners, unknown to ourselves or others, there is one unworthy motive lurking, he hunts it to its gloomy hiding-place and drags it cowering to the light. Of all his critiques that I have read, perhaps the two on Burns and Voltaire pleased me most. What can I say of the tender touch of that hand which sketched for us Robert Burns as no other hand could have done? The sympathy which thrills through every word, even the words of censure; the ready genius which has transfigured that poor life-picture, spreading even athwart its dark clouds the bright arch of the rainbowthese are things that I have no power to describe. The criticism on Voltaire is essentially a masterpiece. Never before had this man had simple justice done him. His cohorts of admirers had written lives without number, many of which might better have been called the apotheosis of Voltaire; his defamers, looking at him always with the chancel-rail between them, have been more than ready to make a warning auto-da-fe of him and his writings, and to paint him almost as the archfiend himself. Not so Carlyle. He looks at Voltaire as a man, and as a brother-man he does him justice, a justice in whose fierce, white light we see Voltaire, a shrunken figure, indeed, but still not less than human. He shows that it was quite impossible such a thorough child of that age could be in any true sense a great or deep thinker, for what was the age itself but one of superficial polish, mockery, selfishness, and skepticism? He frankly reminds us, though, that we yet owe to Voltaire one debt of gratitude, for it was he who dealt the death-blow to superstition, which "now lies cowering in its lair; its last agonies may endure for centuries, perhaps, but it carries the iron in its soul and cannot vex the earth any more.' These, and all his other criticisms, show Carlyle to be a discriminating, sympathetic, and thoroughly just judge. A man with such a consuming spirit of earnestness is not apt to slur over any part of his work, or be satisfied with anything short of his very best efforts. Indeed, next to the varied and profound genius of this author, it is his great earnestness which most impresses the candid reader. I am aware, of course, that Mr. Henry James, in a recent "Atlantic Monthly," has informed the world that Carlyle was simply a great comedian, caring nothing for sincerity, truth, and work, except as convenient subjects to write and rant about. Mr. James complacently announces himself as one of Carlyle's intimate friends,— strange, by the way, how many intimate friends have come to light since the poor man's death,as one who thoroughly understood and respected him. And this base caricature is the outcome of his devotion! It is a veritable Brutus-stab, it seems to me, for certainly, if Carlyle were not in earnest, he was the most contemptible of men. A huge sham, spending a life-time in the effort to upset and explode all other shams, and conscious all the time of his own duplicity, is a monster not even deserving Mr. James's admiration. Carlyle was desperately in earnest; his sincerity and his gloom are alike unquestionably all-pervading in the remaining department of his work which we are now to consider. By this class of his writings he is usually judged, and it is this which has given him his individual and peculiar position in literature. I am convinced, though, that his most honorable and lasting laurels have been won on other fields, and rather regret that, after considering him as a critic and an historian, my work is still incomplete. There is yet another path in which we must follow him. About fifty years ago this modern Jeremiah first lifted up his voice in wailing for the sins of his people, a voice heartpiercing in its pathos, appalling in its hopelessness. It awoke dismal echoes in many a thoughtful heart: like an elegy of tears, it arrested, for the moment, at least, the astonished and indignant notice even of that large class of people who may aptly be termed the ephemera of life. Their place in the world is like that of the evanescent foam above the great, busy, restless heart of the ocean. day they toss and froth and sparkle perhaps, tomorrow they are not, and there is no added moan in the great waves of society to show where they have gone down. Like the surging of the billows beneath this foam was the influence of that mighty mind which now, at last, knows what "the doubt ful prospects of this painted dust" may be. From the first, Carlyle felt himself the one real man looking with clear, sad eyes upon the real problems of life, which the rest of us phantoms, as he calls us, peep at through the holes in our masks, or touch but with phantom lances. A desolate isolation, indeed, to be the one philosopher in this mammoth masquerade. Ah! well; he had never been one of the ephemera. Perhaps if he had, he would have known that even among them there is a little more eager questioning of Fate, a little more bitter disappointment at its sphinx-like silence, than he ever imputed to them. It is something to be a giant among pigmies, certainly, but to be a Giant Despair is an appalling and mournful destiny. An intolerable gloom, a hopeless, overwhelming sadness of heart, enthralled this man, who was never king over himself. He had passed far beyond the To heights for which we common mortals sigh, the heights bathed forever in the fair sunlight of peace, freshened forever by the glad breezes of heaven. He was one of the few in this generation who have reached the very peaks of intellectual life, the bare peaks which invade the misty cloudland itself. The sunbeams seek humbler eminences; the rainbow itself spreads its bright arch beneath those lofty summits, which are cloud-capped, storm-swept, lightning-blasted. Upon such a towering peak stood Carlyle, looking down toward us pigmies patiently toiling far beneath him; looking down with withering contempt and pity upon us, because we knew no better than to be happy and glad in our sunlight and bow of promise. We look up to him; inevitably we must look up. His elevation is too great for us to dare to sympathize; but strange to say, pigmies though we are, we do dare to pity the giant who has climbed so far above us that he has even passed the heights of repose and hope. A Goliath, indeed, he may be, but never more a child of light, which is a happier though humbler title. These are the feelings with which one lays down "Past and Present" or "LatterDay Pamphlets." Carlyle has been aptly termed the iconoclast of the nineteenth century. It is interesting to watch him, hitting straight out from the shoulder every time, and ruthlessly knocking images right and left. It does seem that he is either hopelessly behind what we are pleased to call the spirit of our age, or else about a thousand years ahead of it. It is amusing to see how many of our pet theories are ground to atoms by his vigorous blows. When once he has found what he considers a truth, he rushes impetuously forward with it, never pausing to see whether the crowd be huzzaing at his back or not. Usually the crowd is doing exactly the reverse, but it does not disconcert him. It is certainly not advisable that I should do more than merely mention a few of his peculiar views, all of which one may readily find elaborately presented in the works I have named. Carlyle altogether disapproves of the non-interference theory of government, believes in the oneman power, and particularly admired the Czar of Russia as a consistent exponent of that idea. He objects to the freedom of the press, and declares the first step toward reforming Parliament should be to turn out the ubiquitous reporters. He was a staunch advocate of slavery, and I have an idea |