Two
whole generations have passed with the memory of half their storms.
"Another race hath been, and other palms are won." Old policies,
governments, councils, creeds, modes and hopes of life have been
sifted in strange fires. Assaye, Trafalgar, Austerlitz, Jena, Leipzig,
Inkermann, Sadowa,--Waterloo when he was twenty and Sedan when he was
seventy-five,--have been fought and won. Born under the French Directory
and the Presidency of Washington, Carlyle survived two French empires,
two kingdoms, and two republics; elsewhere partitions, abolitions,
revivals and deaths of States innumerable. During his life our sway in
the East doubled its area, two peoples (the German with, the Italian
without, his sympathy) were consolidated on the Continent, while another
across the Atlantic developed to a magnitude that amazes and sometimes
alarms the rest. Aggressions were made and repelled, patriots perorated
and fought, diplomatists finessed with a zeal worthy of the world's most
restless, if not its wisest, age. In the internal affairs of the leading
nations the transformation scenes were often as rapid as those of a
pantomime. The Art and Literature of those eighty-six years--stirred to
new thought and form at their commencement by the so-called Romantic
movement, more recently influenced by the Classic reaction, the
Pre-Raphaelite protest, the Aesthetic _mode,_--followed various, even
contradictory, standards.
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