obstinate, he exerted himself to obtain it by force, and was slain, as well as a great many other knights and squires. God forgive them their sins!"
Surely that line about the unreasonable Frieslanders is worthy of Carlyle,—of Carlyle whose grim and pregnant humor lurks beneath sentences that, to the unwary, seem as innocent as the sheathed dagger before the blade is sprung. He it was who hated with a just and lively abhorrence all constitutional histories, and all philosophy of history, as likewise "empty invoice lists of Pitched Battles and Changes of Ministry,"—as dead, he declared, as last year's almanacs, "to which species of composition they bear, in several points of view, no inconsiderable affinity." He it was, moreover, who welded together history and literature, and gave us their perfect and harmonious union in the story of the "Diamond Necklace." The past was enough for Carlyle, when he worked amid her faded parchments, and made them glow with renewed color and fire. That splendid pageant of events, that resistless torrent of life, that long roll-call of honored names which we term
