prose. Now, much as Carlyle straggled after the faculty of metrical expression, ease in that faculty had evidently been denied him by Nature, and it was in prose or nothing that he was to manifest his superiority. Nay, in his earliest prose-writings for the press one observes something of the same stiffness, hard effort, and want of fluency that characterize almost all his verse-attempts. This, however, must have been in great part accidental; for we have only to go to some of his private letters, dashed off in his twentieth year or thereabout, to see that he had already acquired his marvelous power of picturesque and eloquent expression, and was master of a swift, firm, and musical style. But, for such a literary career as his was to be, mere gift of expression, however fluent and eloquent, was not enough. It was not enough that he should be able to write fluently and eloquently in a general way, by the exercise of mere natural talent, on any subject that turned up. He had to provide himself amply with matter, with systematized knowledge of all sorts, and especially with systematized historical knowledge. Hence the depth and extent of his readings, the range and perseverance of his studies in French, German, Italian, and Spanish, in addition to Latin and English. For writings so full-bodied as those he was to give to the world, it was necessary that he should step into literature as already himself a polyhistor or accomplished universal scholar; and, when he did step conspicuously into literature, it was in fact as already such a polyhistor.—In connection with which it is worth while to note how completely by that time Carlyle had emancipated himself from the common idea of so many of his literary contemporaries that literature ought to consist in writing about literature. To this day what are the chief subjects of the essays and books continually set forth by our professed authors? Why, the lives and writings of previous authors, the personages and phenomena of the past literary history of the world. We have Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, and the other literary dii majorum gentium, over and over again, with descents to as many of the literary dii minorum gentium as may be necessary for variety; and the public is thus deluged with an eternal, ever-flowing literature merely about literature. Now, though Carlyle began in this way too—as witness his essays on Jean Paul Richter, on Goethe and Faust, on Burns, on German Playwrights, etc.—there were premonitions even then, both in his mode of handling these subjects and in the fact that such essays were interspersed with others of a more general and philosophic kind, that he would not dwell long in the element of mere literary history and æsthetic criticism, or be satisfied with adding his own contributions, however excellent, to the perpetual conversation about 'Shakespeare and the musical glasses.' Accordingly, before he had fully established himself, he had taken final leave of the mere literature about literature, and had moved on into a literature appertaining to human society and human action generally, to war and statesmanship, to poverty and
