Of Many Men

ir illustrious subject in the light of one displeased with most things in the scheme of God's universe : with institutions past and present; with men, contemporaneous or historical (save his scanty list of heroes whom he erected into demigods and called on all the world to fall down and worship) ; with himself, assailed from without by the spectacle of a world nodding toward chaos and from within by rooted discontents, intrenched against all sorceries of exorcism that tore and rent him at their will. Genius is not always bland and companionable, and that of Carlyle was neither, but one of the most stormy and denunciatory which, in our time, has launched its message on the world. '' There is none that doeth good ?no, not one," he reiterates forever, clothing the affirmation in high, piercing phrase never divorced from pedantry, and in the sweep of his denunciation he includes all things? parliaments, revolutions, reforms, systems of philosophy, of religion, of law ; schemes of economy, institutes of government (believing as to the latter, it would seem, only in the handcuff and the knout as efficient instruments), sothat, as Emerson says, finding nowhere under the stars any sign of wholesome growth, he addresses his shrill eloquence to the celebration of the majestic laws of decay. The world is perishing all around him, generation follows generation in the same devil's dance of death, and all their pirouettings, gestures, and grimaces between the old stars and t...