UNDER THE MICROSCOPE
This preference for the province of reflex poets and echoing philosophers came to a climax of expression in the transcendant remark that Mr. Lowell had in one critical essay so taken Mr. Carlyle to pieces, that it would seem impossible ever to put him together again. Under the stroke of that recollected sentence, the staggered spirit of a sane man who desires to retain his sanity can but pause and reflect on what Mr. Ruskin, if I rightly remember, has somewhere said, that ever since Mr. Carlyle began to write you can tell by the reflex action of his genius the nobler from the ignobler of his contemporaries; as ever having won the most of reverence and praise from the most honourable among these, and (what is perhaps as sure a warrant of sovereign worth) from the most despicable among them the most of abhorrence and abuse.
A notable example of this latter sort was not long since (in his "Fors Clavigera") selected and chastised by Mr. Ruskin himself with a few strokes of such a lash as might thenceforward, one would think, have secured silence at least, if neither penitence nor shame, on the part of
lished by an eminent and eloquent writer—that I could but remember his name and grace my page with it I—who after some just remarks on Byron's absurd and famous description of a waterfall, proceeds to observe that Milton was the only poet who ever made real poetry out of a cataract—"and that was in his eye."
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