To me, and I feel assured to all who have of late years closely watched the social features of the labourer's life, it has been clear that any movement like the present, come when it would, would in all probability find its leaders where I see it has already found one able leader. There is but one scene of purely class intercourse the labourers enjoy, but one accustomed place of meeting where as a class they meet separate from all others, and that is in the smaller village 'chapels' and 'meeting-houses.' I believe the greatest portion of the success of the 'temperance' cause among the labourers has been obtained through the action of these congregations, and those who administer at them. The one hope I have of the present agitation being kept within legal bounds, of its seeking to carry out its ends in a calm, peaceful, however bold and determined spirit, proceeds from my belief that there will be a powerful religious tone given to it by its real leaders being of the labouring class. The ministers in the chapels and in the cottage where religious meetings are held are chiefly Wesleyan Methodists, very many of whom are themselves day labourers, sweating in common with the members of their flocks. They are earnest men of deep religious conviction; they possess a large amount of Bible-gleaned knowledge; their conversation, and that of most of their members, is strongly coloured with scriptural phraseology.

Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne was a remarkable specimen of the class 'Squarson,' probably unique in his true liberality and practical wisdom. He knew of what he spoke, and testified of what he had seen. The districts with which he was best acquainted were those which would be most likely to suffer in case of Disestablishment, as they are among those in which the supremacy of priest and parson have been most undisputed. Yet here is one of the most eminent of the clergy of the region, and a scion of one of its great houses, who comes forward to tell the world that the most beneficent influence in these villages is the Dissenting preacher. The religion of the villages might be imperilled if he were withdrawn; but that will not be the case so long as Christian faith lives and works by love. It is to that, and not to the existence of a State Church, which has done its utmost to check and thwart the action of the most Christian force that has been at work because it has not been under the control of the clergy, that we may trust for the religious future of the English peasantry.

With all their zeal, their devotion to their great work, their anxiety to adapt themselves to the altered conditions of the time, as shown in all these discussions at the Congress, the clergy are hampered at almost every point, partly by their connexion with the State, but not the less, in the case of a large section of them, by the dominance of what for lack of a better term we may call mediævalism. They address the people under serious disadvantage, because they are representatives of an institution which (however they may strive to hide it from themselves) is the object of much popular

odium; and the abundance of their good work as ministers of Christ does not remove the prejudice against them as the officials of a State Church. On the other hand, the arrogant pretentions of one party among them, as the only true ministers of the Catholic Church, place them out of harmony with some of the best tendencies of modern Christian life, and endanger a bigoted and intolerant temper, which goes far to neutralize their influence. We have an amusing example in the case of a writer in 'The Church Quarterly Review,' who has been employing a good deal of perverted ingenuity to prove, by a childish display of the most elementary facts in our Church history, that Congregationalists have no right to call themselves 'Nonconformists,' since they are the descendants of the 'sectaries.' Supposing he be right in his contention, what then? He has been told again and again that we are not ashamed of our descent from the 'sectaries,' and that we have never suggested that we stand precisely on the lines of the old Nonconformity. But still he returns to the charge as though he could effect some important end by the repetition of an attack which might be irritating if it were not so purely ludicrous. We might, if we felt it necessary, challenge many of his statements, but this were to give the controversy an importance which it does not deserve. The force of our argument is precisely the same, whatever be thought of our ecclesiastical descent. No doubt we have in many points gone far in advance of our fathers; it is in perfect accord with all our principles that we should have done so. Like them we are the children of liberty and progress, not of tradition, and our reliance is not upon authority of any kind. In the conflicts of the future the advantage of that freedom will become increasingly apparent. J. GUINNESS ROGERS.

ART. IX. Thomas Carlyle.

A History of his Life in London. By JAMES ANTHONY
FROUDE, M.A. Longmans and Co.

Or all possible ways of putting before us the life of a great man, Mr. Froude has, it seems to us, chosen the very worst. Both at the outset of his own literary career, and now when it is probably nearing its completion, he has written biography, the middle portion of that brilliant period being devoted to history, which again, in his hands, is largely biographical. His first essay, a life of Saint Bettelin, consisted of only a few pages, and was simple panegyric, the facts, when they failed, supplemented by an imagination always vivid, and always ready at call. 'And this is all,' Mr. Froude wrote in 1844, 'that is known, and more than all-yet nothing to what the angels know-of the life of a servant of God, who sinned and repented, and did penance and washed out his sins, and became a saint, and reigns with Christ in heaven.' This is of course, not the way to construct a biography of any man, yet the reader will always supply much that is left out. His own knowledge of human nature will guide him to the fact that the servant of God became a saint by degrees only, and was never in his life wholly purged of earthly stain, he will take for granted much of incompletenesses, defects of will, and taints of blood, and making these critical deductions will frame a portrait to himself far more like the real man than any photograph, had such been possible, which should show every wrinkle of the original face, and every scar with which temptation or sin had deformed the soul.

Yet the fanciful story of St. Bettelin was a better method of biography than that which Mr. Froude has now adopted after the lapse of forty years. He has laid his 'subject,' as it were, on a dissecting table, and, scalpel in hand, has pointed out every fibre of a proud, passionate, sensitive heart, and shown how and why it quivered. He has traced the morbid anatomy of a body never healthy at the best of times, tortured by insomnia, racked with dyspepsia, and has shown how each hour of waking, each pang of pain, upset the balance and distracted the working of one of the master minds of our age. He has bade us mark each wrinkle on the brow, forgetful of the facts that physical death itself should teach, whose first work it is after it has hushed the breath and stilled the unquiet heart, to smooth away the traces of life's fever and fret, and reveal the man as he was in himself, apart from the accidents, often the sordid and degrading accidents, of his career. And in so doing we consider him utterly wrong, ungenerous to his friend and master, rashly regardless of dear memories and reputations, often too mindtul of his own private piques and grudges, and unfaithful to the highest interests of literature, of which he is at this moment in England one of the foremost representatives.

To speak of this last point, the size of the book is a gigantic blunder. Carlyle's life is written in nine volumes, two of his own Reminiscences, three of Mrs. Carlyle's Letters, four of the Life, properly so called. The truism that 'if the Proportion of Literary Biographies.

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author had taken more pains he would have written a better book,' is specially applicable here. To shift, discriminate, and reject, to avoid repetitions and correct the press carefully, to consult the relatives who were nearest and dearest to the dead man, would have taken time, and the Reminiscences were flung upon the world with a haste and a carelessness, with a disregard of feelings which should have been respected, only to be characterized by the one epithet, indecent. Pruned and given as extracts, and Mrs. Carlyle's letters treated in the same manner, vain repetitions avoided, and with less of the editor's own opinions, the whole work might have made two or, at most, three volumes, and have taken rank among the really good biographies of our time. As it is, we have a formless mass; and to construct a 'picture of the man, even according to Mr. Froude's idea of him, we have to go backwards and forwards from volume to volume, and round and round till we are dizzy with our exertions, till years and views of character at different periods are all blended in one whirling maze.

So far as the mere length of the work is concerned, we may be told that it is not very much longer than Boswell's 'Life of Johnson,' or Lockhart's 'Life of Scott;' but the circumstances are different. Johnson was not only the acknowledged superior of all literary men then living, but he was a central and public ifigure, to write of whom was to describe all the society of letters and journalism, so that the loss of a single chapter of Boswell would leave an appreciable gap in the history of the time. Again, Scott's Life gave to an England which knew it not a picture of the Scottish, Edinburgh, and Border society, besides that of all the coming and going at Abbotsford of the celebrated men and women of that day who congregated round the 'great' Sir Walter-the epithet is Carlyle's own. But the prophet of Chelsea lived as was meet, much alone, and the record of his life is the record of little more than himself and his immediate family; there is a want of proportion, of the sense of the fitness of things, in devoting such space to him, even if it were well done, which it is not. One of the best literary biographies of our days is surely Lewes' 'Life of Goethe,' in two by no means bulky volumes; and such is the skill of the narrator, that all the life is there, the canvas is filled, and adequately filled, the man is presented to us as he was and as he lived. There may be another view of him to be taken by another biographer, just as Watts's and Whistler's portraits of Carlyle differ considerably, but neither made the other impossible, nor was either in itself blurred and indistinct. But Mr. Froude has NO. CLXI.

made another Life difficult, if not impossible. As literary executor he has all the materials, he has given what he chose, he has suppressed what he chose and the suppressions are many. We presume that the papers are inaccessible henceforth-if they are not destroyed-even to the relatives of Mr. Carlyle, so that there is great danger that these confused volumes may remain the only record of Carlyle, or that a future biography can be but Froude boiled down, with the spiteful passages omitted. That would be a gain, yet we venture to express a hope that Mrs. Aitken Carlyle may even now put out some sketch, however slight, of her uncle before it is too late, to correct what Mr. Froude has written, contrary, in a great measure, to her expressed wishes and judgment.

On the personal question Mr. Froude has given his own 'Apologia' at the outset of these final volumes, in a passage written with great care, and deserving every consideration. The whole is too long to quote, but a portion may be given without fear of garbling, since we refer the reader to the whole, and give it as a fragment.

His faults, which in his late remorse he exaggerated, as men of noblest natures are most apt to do, his impatience, irritability, his singular melancholy, which made him at times distressing as a companion, were the effects of temperament first, and of a peculiarly sensitive organization; and secondly of absorption in his work and of his determination to do that work as well as it could possibly be done. Such faults as these were but the vapours which hang about a mountain, inseparable from the nature of the man. They have to be told, because without them his character cannot be understood, and because they affected others as well as himself. But they do not blemish the essential greatness of his character, and when he is fully known he will not be loved or admired the less because he had infirmities like the rest of us. Carlyle's was not the imperious grandeur which has risen superior to weakness and reigns cold and impassive in distant majesty. The fire in his soul burnt red to the end, and sparks flew from it which fell hot on those around him, not always pleasant, not always hitting the right spot or the right person; but it was pure fire notwithstanding, fire of genuine and noble passion, of genuine love for all that was good, and genuine indignation at what was mean or base or contemptible. His life was not a happy one, and there were features in it for which, as he looked back, he bitterly reproached himself. But there are many, perhaps the majority of us, who sin deeper every day of their lives in these very points in which Carlyle sinned, and without Carlyle's excuses, who do not know that they have anything to repent of. The more completely it is understood, the more his character will be seen to answer to his intellectual teaching. The one is the counterpart of the other. There was no falsehood and there was no concealment in him. The same true nature showed itself in his life and in his words. He acted as he spoke from his heart; and those who have admired his writings will equally admire himself when they see him in his actual likeness.