helm for submitting to such reasonable checks of his hobby. His courage was doubtless of average degree, if it may not be cited in proof of his heroism. It was a valour tempered freely by prudential considerations, as his veracity was a veracity qualified by his thrift, as his justice was the justice of a Royal Rhadamanthus with a paramount preference for tall Grenadiers.

Friedrich Wilhelm, as we said, was by no means a monster without a fitful perception of justice and right, but still less was he a pattern of monarchical excellence. With many average and mixed and a few odd and odious qualities, he was evidently, for his age, an endurable king. As a king he left some results behind him, however attained, which were of inestimable value to those who came after him. He created a Prussian army, and he organized Prussian Finance; he may fairly be said to have found means for his successor Fritz to make Prussia, once for all, one of the great Powers. This was a splendid achievement, entailing some political consequences which we do not yet sufficiently estimate, but of which it is probable we shall test the value before very long. If the Hohenzollerns come to definite terms with the Veracities, if they cast in their lot thoroughly with liberty of thought and action, it is presumable that great opportunities await them. No royal race of Europe is likely to have greater, and they owe this prospect as much to Friedrich Wilhelm as to any of their Kurfürsts, or to the Great Frederick himself. Nevertheless, had Friedrich Wilhelm achieved this potentiality by "soft and spontaneous methods, or had he gone about his work in a less truculent manner, we suspect he would never have lingered in the atelier, or come out into the hero shop of Thomas Carlyle. Mr. Carlyle has a positive mania for the fortiter in re, for bloody noses, rattan strokes and blows from the shoulder. He approves of rigour and rough usage in the abstract, and he is also so hopelessly given to paradox, that he is never

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satisfied unless he is challenging our convictions, reversing our judgments, and giving us the lie direct. Nothing short, as we view it, of moral perversity could have induced him to dress up this figure of Friedrich Wilhelm, and to insist on our seeing beauties in its ugliness. We look, and we find a fanatic for pipeclay in a worthy placarded as "a wild son of nature." We are told to regard an illiterate "rough" as a silent poet and dumb man of genius. A domestic Herod, with a tendency to fuddle himself, is represented as “full of sensitiveness" and latent sobriety. The greatest crimp in history is depicted with the tenderest conscience, and veracity and justice are the chief attributes of a manstealer! The artist who converted the Saracen's head into Sir Roger de Coverley had no option allowed him, but Mr. Carlyle was under no compulsion but that of his own mania, to paint up a rugged and boorish tyrant into a pattern monarch for these latter generations.

We imagine that we can discern the source of this tendency, which is shared, as we complain, in some degree by others. Mr. Carlyle has no faith in his age or his contemporaries; he is blind to the modern conditions of progress, and he turns from its complicated agencies in despair. His creed is the old superseded faith in individual efforts and the superiority of units; he is insensible to the grandeur of social forces, and the increasing ease with which they work; he even questions the value of their results, because they are wrought by a machinery which he has never learnt to appreciate. As the true poet sings, "the individual withers and the world is more and more;" but Mr. Carlyle, instead of accepting this tendency as the inevitable law or condition of progress, is irritated and querulous, or confused and alarmed, and rushes out in his shirt sleeves to call for a hero. For present occasions and "Latterday" wants he sees with disgust there is none on the beat. At the same time he is looking for some fatal catastrophe which ought to befal us, but which never

happens, and for some "coming man" to avert it, but who never arrives, and for whom he remains moodily waiting in the cold. In history only he finds consolation. There he meets with or fancies heroes ad libitum. His skill in characterization, his eloquence, his research, his powers as a humorist come into play, and procure him a vivid and consistent image, sometimes exactly resembling the original, sometimes, as here, more nearly resembling his ideal of what the original should have been. No one understands better the manipulation of his materials, or the media by which he obtains his effects. His Veracities, Silences, and Sphere-harmonies on the one side, and on the other his Upholsteries, Groceries, and the like enable him to heighten the effect of his picture, till his hero comes up to the exhibition standard. But the motive with which he has proceeded to work, his opposition to his century and aversion to its tendencies, or perhaps the consciousness that his taste for heroes is regarded as somewhat out of fashion in these days, inspires him with a spirit of perversity to the end. He persists in thrusting his hero in our faces offensively, with a dogmatism and even an arrogance of assertion, which respect for our age, our contemporaries and ourselves makes it our positive duty to repel. Let him pull if he likes the "patient nose" of Leibnitz, but remember that the noses of the living are more sensitive. When, in order to set off his hero to advantage, he libels the men and institutions of his own country; when he maintains that "every parliament is a big dangerous fireship," and that it "spouts itself away in vocables and eloquent wind;" that "newspaper editing is the California of the spiritually vagabond," and that the English trust in such agencies is singular," in the sense of unreasonable, we decline to accept his hero on any such terms, for we have too much respect for ourselves and our contemporaries. We prefer rather to think that the present is a great epoch-greater in motives,

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achievements, and promise than any former one; and we retort, it is singular that one of its greatest men should be in it, but not exactly of it; should estimate the work of other men in other ages so extravagantly high, and his own age and his own craft with such manifest injustice.

ABSOLUTISM IN EXTREMIS.

The Collapse of Imperialism.-The Hundred Days.—Napoleon did not create the Centralisation of France.-M. de Tocqueville's Inquiries, and their bearings. Original Uniformity of Institutions.-The French Aristocracy slipped out of their Place in the System.-The Subdivision of Land, and Administrative Centralisation, preceded 1789.-France governed by Thirty Intendants.-Government had become Guardianship.-Adulation of the Intendants.-Judicial and Executive Functions confounded.-All Frenchmen alike, with some frivolous Distinctions.--Preparatives of the Revolution. Its chief Cause, however, the tendency to Equality.-Does this necessarily entail Despotism, according to Fatalist View of De Tocqueville? -Causes which produced Despotism in France, but which do not apply to England. Even in France it is now making concessions to Freedom.

THE career of the first Napoleon is perhaps the best excuse for the worship of heroes to be found in modern history. No one man seemingly ever did so much, and in so short a time, to set himself above his fellows, and cause us to attribute the events he participated in to the force of his individual genius and will. He was unquestionably the greatest man of the whole modern age, and yet we are beginning to observe his dependence on antecedent circumstances, and the inexorable limits even to his temporary supremacy. The later researches of the French historians have tended to dispel our illusions as to the power of Napoleon when seemingly most absolute. It is not long since that M. Thiers, in a premature preface to his as yet incomplete "History of the Consulate and the Empire," laid particular stress on this important consideration, which the correspondence of Napoleon with his brother Joseph has indeed now made patent to every one-that Absolutism tends to its own exhaustion and ruin from the