teresting trait in Mr. Brownell's ideal man of letters is what I have called the spiritual refinement of his democracy. This conception may be studied profitably in the two complementary essays on Emerson and Carlyle. Carlyle was a great artist malgre lui, but by his paucity of ideas, his violence of temper, his prejudices, his eccentricity of style, his indifference to all the shades of truth—constituting virtually an indifference to truth, and by his reactionary rage against reason, science, and democracy—by all these traits Carlyle represents pretty nearly the antithesis of Mr. Brownell's ideal modern man of letters. Carlyle detested that return of the eighteenth century to reason and nature and that genuine intellectual radicalism which in England, France, and America laid the foundations of our political and social philosophy and liberated the most enlightened spirit of contemporary letters:
Its humanitarianism meant nothing to him. Its reat discovery of the dignity of man, he flouted its substitution of the heart for the soul, its rationalization of the affections, its ideals of freedom of spirit and faculty, of equality of rights and duties, of fraternity of interest and feelings to the end of mutual advantage and coöperative advance, he saw only a chaotic scramble after the ignis fatuus of happiness.
Of hero-worship at the expense of respect for institutions, which all the "strong men" and their advocates, from Frederick and Carlyle to Roosevelt and his biographers, tend to foster and inculcate,
