ing to the knees of wealth and power for protection against the democracy, and praying for the maintenance of a Christian Church to guard a freethinker's spoons. After a eulogy on the superior manners of the nobility, suggestive of recent intercourse with them, he proceeds to develop a plan for ostensibly accepting democracy and secretly preparing to smite it with the sword. The plan may be confidently pronounced to be his own, but the spirit embodied in it may be that of the company which he has been keeping." The phrase "social parasite" is not used in this passage, but the imputation conveyed in the words we have italicised, taken with the context, is not the less plain. Mr. Carlyle, it is intimated, eulogizes the nobility in return for their dinners, and even carries his servility so far as to make himself the tool of their political intrigues. Any other interpretation of the passage would have to be based on the supposition that the writer had little notion of the force of words, and was especially unacquainted with the language of ironical insinuation—which might be a natural inference with regard to a North American Reviewer, but in this instance at least would be an erroneous one. The writer is in truth a master of language, and an especial proficient in the art of insinuation. The article is signed with his name, and the signature we regret to say, is "Goldwin Smith." That he has signed his name and given that of Mr. Carlyle will perhaps be considered by Mr. Smith a sufficient reason why the ugly term "coward," which he has flung at Mr. Disraeli, should not be retorted upon himself; and although we must confess that, of the two methods in which he and the author of Lothair have committed the same offence, that of his adversary seems to us the more manly, yet we are far from thinking that cowardice can be considered as a characteristic of either. To Mr. Smith's attack on Mr. Carlyle we should, indeed, rather incline to apply the term "audacity," considering the relative age and position of the parties, the respect entertained for Mr. Carlyle by many persons not entirely devoid of intelligence or honesty, and, above all, the fact that, in a public lecture delivered some six years ago in America, Mr. Smith had acknowledged his own intellectual obligations to "the philosopher of the celestial immensities and infinities," whose French Revolution, he said on that occasion, "had seemed to him a new revelation." Perhaps he only said this for the sake of an alliterative antithesis (he is, as we have remarked, a master of words), and it is at all events very clear that he now draws inspiration from other sources—one wonders sometimes from what sources. Yet neither fact affords any good reason why he should bespatter with mud the fountain he has deserted. And what was the pretext? A plot was hatching against democracy! Mr. Carlyle was in a state of terrestrial panic! We need hardly say now that the plot was hatching nowhere but in Mr. Smith's brain, which, for powers of artificial incubation, is equal to an Egyptian oven; while the ridicule of panic sounds amusingly enough from one who not very long ago, apropos of a speech in Congress, rang an alarum that set two continents shaking—with laughter. We have left unnoticed his designation of Mr. Carlyle as a "freethinker." It is a vulgar and stale device of people who have set up a religion of their own—what Mr. Smith, for example, is fond of styling "a reasonable religion"—to scatter charges of heterodoxy by way of diverting attention from their own mysterious rites. Such a calling of names is below the style of Mr. Goldwin Smith, unless when he has become very much inflamed by having some of his rough missiles returned at his own head. We admit, finally, the force of certain excuses which may be alleged for his attack on Mr. Carlyle—namely, that it was almost certain never to be brought to the notice of its object; that had it reached him, instead of driving him wild with rage, it would at the most have called forth a grim smile; and lastly, that the world knows Mr. Carlyle, and needed no indignant outburst from him to see
