In the realm of contemporary English prose he has left no adequate
successor; [Footnote: The nearest being the now foremost prose writers
of our time, Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Froude.] the throne that does not pass
by primogeniture is vacant, and the bleak northern skies seem colder
and grayer since that venerable head was laid to rest by the village
churchyard, far from the smoke and din of the great city on whose streets
his figure was long familiar and his name was at last so honoured.
Carlyle first saw the world tempest-tossed by the events he celebrates in
his earliest History. In its opening pages, we are made to listen to the
feet and chariots of "Dubarrydom" hurrying from the "Armida Palace,"
where Louis XV. and the _ancien regime_ lay dying; later to the ticking
of the clocks in Launay's doomed Bastile; again to the tocsin of the
steeples that roused the singers of the _Marseillaise_ to march from
"their bright Phocaean city" and grapple with the Swiss guard, last
bulwark of the Bourbons. "The Swiss would have won," the historian
characteristically quotes from Napoleon, "if they had had a commander."
Already, over little more than the space of the author's life--for he was
a contemporary of Keats, born seven months before the death of Burns,
Shelley's junior by three, Scott's by twenty-four, Byron's by seven
years--three years after Goethe went to feel the pulse of the
"cannon-fever" at Argonne--already these sounds are across a sea.
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