remarkable force and beauty, with numerous touches of that sly, savage humor peculiar to the author. The tone of the work, however, is one of perfect discontent. The style bristles with Carlyle's usual extravagance about society and government, declaring both to be shams and unveracities, and sneering at all plans for improvement which the ingenuity or benevolence of others has framed. If we understand Carlyle aright, he considers that the constitutional government of England is a humbug; that William the Conqueror and Oliver Cromwell were the best governors that England has ever had; that since Cromwell's time the country has been governed by Sir Jabesh Windbag, strong in no faith but that "paragraphs and plausibilities will bring votes;" and that everybody is a fool or a flunkey except Thomas Carlyle. He hates every form of government which it is possible to establish in this world - democracy among the rest. If his work may be said to have any practical bearing on politics, it is this - that a governor is wanted with force enough to assume arbitrary power, and exercise it according to the dreams of mystics and sentimentalists. His system is a compound of anarchy and despotism. His ideal governor is a man blessed with an incapacity or indisposition to explain himself, who rises up some day and cries "The government of this country is a lie, the people cannot make it a reality, but I can and will." His notion of the wretched condition of society is disheartening enough. Man, he tells us, has lost all the soul out of him. "This is verily the plague-spot-centre of the universal social gangrene, threatening all modern things with frightful death. You touch the focal centre of all our disease, of our frightful nosology of diseases, when you lay your hand on this. There is no religion; there is no God; man has lost his soul, and vainly seeks antiseptic salt. Vainly; in killing kings, in passing Reform Bills, in French Revolutions, Manchester Insurrections, is found no remedy. The foul elephantine leprosy reäppears in new force and desperateness next hour." Sad condition of poor depraved humanity! A whole generation, except one man, without souls, and that one exception without his senses! It is curious to notice the illusions of an understanding so powerful, when governed by a sensibility so tempestuous. It would be unjust, however, to question the depth of many detached thoughts, and truth of some of the speculations, in this volume.

It would be useless to deny that Carlyle's work on Cromwell is one of great merit; that it places many equivocal acts of Cromwell in a truer light than that in which they have formerly been viewed, -that there is an attempt to represent the subject dramatically from the heart of the man - and that the whole representation blazes with that stern, rough, intense, and fiery eloquence, which flames through the other writings of the author; - but still no reader, with a grain of moral sense, or common sense, can fail to see that Carlyle's zeal for Cromwell has completely blinded him to all the bad qualities of his character; and that, in the remarks on the Irish war, at least, he has compromised every principle of morals, and every instinct of humanity, in his eagerness to make out a case for his hero. In his contempt for what he is pleased to call the "rose-colored" sentimentality of those who love peace, and shrink with horror from rapine and murder, he hardly seems aware that, under the influence of a morbid sentimentality of another kind, he himself has come forward to whitewash Oliver Cromwell. We may judge of his love for his subject, by his willingness to sacrifice justice, mercy and truth to it. In his justification of Cromwell's wholesale massacres in Ireland - in echoing the bigoted or crafty religious phrases under which Cromwell himself veiled their enormity - in that perversion of sympathy by which he would try to make us honor, not the heroic men who fought for their cause against hope, but their cold-blooded murderer-and, finally, for attempting to give the sanction of religion to the whole - Carlyle appears as a sort of compound historian, made up of Machiavelli, Sir Harry Vane, Jack Ketch and Mr. Squeers. It would be just as easy to defend the master of "Dotheboys Hall," and make him out a philanthropist, as to give any character of religion or mercy to Cromwell's cruelties in Ireland. Besides, the great Protector needs none of this puffing. His fame, stained as it is with some crimes, is as clear as that of many other great men of action. But the mode pursued by Carlyle would make history and biography more immoral and detestable than the most licentious fictions. It would canonize all guilt which has been accompanied by energy; it would hold up bigotry, tyranny, hypocrisy, murder, as things noble and great; it would make Hampden and Washington give way to Danton and Mirabeau. Besides, it destroys all discrimination in judging character, and daubs vices with the same eulogy it occasionally vouchsafes to virtues. The thing would appear ridiculous in any other mode of representation than that adopted by Carlyle, but he possesses a singular power in corrupting the moral sense through appeals to the senses and the imagination, and in making the reader ashamed of the axioms of morals and religion, by stigmatizing those who abide by them as superficial, incapable, and deficient in insight.

The English Revolution of 1640 began in a defence of legal privileges, and ended in a military despotism. It commenced in withstanding attacks on civil and religious rights, and ended in the dominion of a sect. The point, therefore, where the lover of freedom should cease to sympathize with it is plain. It is useless for the republican to say that every revolution of the kind must necessarily take a similar course, for that is not an argument for Cromwell's usurpation, but an argument against the expediency of opposing a king's assaults on the rights and privileges of the people. The truth is that the English Revolution was at first a popular movement, having a clear majority of the property, intelligence, and numbers, of the nation on its side. The king, in breaking the fundamental laws of the kingdom, made war on the community, and was to be resisted just as much as though he had been king of France or Spain, and had invaded the country. It is easy to trace the progress of this resistance, until, by the action of religious bigotry and other inflaming passions, the powers of the opposition became concentrated in the hands of a body of military fanatics, commanded by an imperious soldier, and representing a small minority even of the Puritans. The king, weak and vacillating, made an attempt to establish arbitrary power, was resisted, and after years of civil war, ended his days on the scaffold. Cromwell, without any of those palliations which charity might urge in extenuation of the king on the ground of the prejudices of his station, took advantage of the weakness of the country, after it had been torn by civil war, usurped supreme power, and became the most arbitrary monarch England had seen since William the Conqueror. No one doubts his genius, and it seems strange that any one should doubt his despotic character. This, however, is growing into fashion, even among sturdy democrats and republicans.

The truth is, that Cromwell's natural character, even on the

hypothesis of his sincerity, was arbitrary, and the very opposite of the character of a champion of freedom. It seems to us supremely ridiculous to talk of such a man as being capable of having his conduct determined by a parliament or a council. He pretended to look to God, not to human laws or fallible men, for the direction of his actions. In the name of the Deity he charged at the head of his Ironsides. In the name of the Deity he massacred the Irish garrisons. In the name of the Deity he sent dragoons to overturn parliaments. He believed neither in the sovereignty of the people nor the sovereignty of the laws; and it made little difference whether his opponent was Charles I. or Sir Harry Vane, provided he were an opponent. In regard to the inmost essence of tyranny, that of exalting the individual will over everything else, and of meeting opposition and obstacles by pure force, Charles I. was a weakling in comparison with Cromwell. Now, if, in respect to human governments, democracy and republicanism consist in allowing any great and strong man to assume the supreme power, on his simple assertion that he has a commission from Heaven so to do, - if constitutional liberty is a government of will instead of a government of laws, - then the partisans of Cromwell are justified in their eulogies. It appears to us that the only ground on which the Protector's tyranny can be considered more endurable than the king's, consists in the fact that from its nature it could not be permanent, and could not establish itself into the dignity of a precedent. It was a power depending neither on the assent of the people, nor on laws and institutions, but simply on the character of one man. As far as it went, it did no good in any way to the cause of freedom; for to Cromwell's government, and to the fanaticism which preceded it, we owe the reäction of Charles the Second's reign, when licentiousness in manners, and servility in politics, succeeded in making virtue and freedom synonymous with hypocrisy and cant.

In regard to Cromwell's massacres in Ireland, he simply acted as Cortés did in Mexico, and Pizarro in Peru, and deserves no more charity. If he performed his barbarities from policy, as Carlyle intimates, he must be considered a disciple of Machiavelli and the Devil; if he performed them from religious bigotry, he may rank with St. Dominic and Charles the Ninth. We are sick of hearing brutality and wickedness, either in Puritan or Catholic, extenuated on the ground of bigotry. The bigotry which prompts inhuman deeds is not an excuse for sin, but the greatest of spiritual sins. It indicates a condition of mind in which the individual deifies his malignant passions.

The style of the book on Cromwell is occasionally a trial even to the lovers of Carlyle's picturesque and shaggy diction, and few men can pronounce some of the sentences aloud without running the risk of being throttled. To follow the course of his thought through the sudden turns and down the abrupt declivities of his style, exposes one at times to the danger of having his eyes put out of joint. Carlyle is said to have copied his style from Jean Paul; but we should think he had copied it rather from Swiss scenery. Of all English styles, it reminds us most of the terrible alexandrines of old George Chapman's Homer, whose words we are sometimes compelled to dodge, as though they were missiles hurled at us by the gigantic combatants they so graphically describe. Carlyle, indeed, sometimes speaks as Ajax spoke, who, when enraged, according to Chapman, "throated his threats." His style is a faithful symbol of his powerful but perverse nature, in all the inconsistency of its formal contempt of formulas and canting hatred of cant.

NOVELS OF THE SEASON.*

THERE was a time when the appearance of a clever novel would justify its separate examination in a review, and a nice discussion of the claims of its Mr. Herbert or Lady Jane to be enrolled among men and women. But in this age of ready writers, romances must be reviewed in battalions, or allowed to pass unchallenged. Every week beholds a new irruption of emigrants into the sunny land of fiction, sadly disturbing the old balance of power, and introducing a fearful confusion of names and habits. Within a few years, all the proprieties of the domain have been violated by the intrusion of hordes of ruffians, pickpockets, and vagabonds. Sir Charles Grandison finds himself face to face with Jack Shep

* Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Hawkstone Bachelor of the Albany, Harold, Grantley Manor, Vanity Fair.