forces and formulæ; and they were eager to realise it once more as the scene of the endless drama of human action and passion, of struggle, and triumph and defeat.
It was in the hour when this mood was dominant over the younger and more active minds throughout educated England that the man appeared. He came bringing with him all that they asked for, feeling all that they felt, hating everything that they hated (and a good deal more on his own account) and filled full of the same ardent if somewhat vague aspirations with which they too were bursting. His contempt for the accepted philosophy, the conventional theology, the current politics of his time was even more profound than theirs. The gritty Benthamism of his age was more irritating to his palate, the yoke of its cast-iron economics more galling to his shoulders. He was even more impatient of 'laws, forces and formulæ' than they, even more impressed than they with the superiority of action to thought and its immeasurable superiority to words. Had his powers of expression been only a little above the average; had his enthusiasm of the preacher glowed to no extraordinary pitch of ardour, he could not have failed to obtain a hearing. What wonder then, that with the passionate force of conviction which animated his utterances, and the marvellous mastery of language which went to the shaping of them, he should alike have stormed the heart and carried captive the intellect of his age?
This, of course, is not to say that the Preacher of the Thirties had anything like the congregation that 'sat under' him during the two succeeding decades—that the Carlyle of Sartor Resartus had a tithe of the following that attended on the Carlyle of Past and Present, and the Latter Day Pamphlets. No more is meant than that his earliest writings caught the ear of that tribus prærogativa of his countrymen whose suffrage in such cases is to be taken first, and who think to-day what the great body of their fellow-citizens will think to-morrow. Their suffrage however he certainly won—if not unanimously, yet at least, from all of them,
