" Individualism was still a mark
of the early years of the century. The spirit of "L'Etat c'est moi"
survived in Mirabeau's "never name to me that _bete_ of a word
'impossible';" in the first Napoleon's threat to the Austrian ambassador,
"I will break your empire like this vase"; in Nelson turning his blind
eye to the signal of retreat at Copenhagen, and Wellington fencing Torres
Vedras against the world: it lingered in Nicholas the Czar, and has found
perhaps its latest political representative in Prince Bismarck.
This is the spirit to which Carlyle has always given his undivided
sympathy. He has held out hands to Knox, Francia, Friedrich, to the men
who have made manners, not to the manners which have made men, to
the rulers of people, not to their representatives: and the not
inconsiderable following he has obtained is the most conspicuous tribute
to a power resolute to pull against the stream. How strong its currents
may be illustrated by a few lines from our leading literary journal, the
_Athenaeum,_ of the Saturday after his death :--
"The future historian of the century will have to record the marvellous
fact that while in the reign of Queen Victoria there was initiated,
formulated, and methodised an entirely new cosmogony, its most powerful
and highly-gifted man of letters was preaching a polity and a philosophy
of history that would have better harmonised with the time of Queen
Semiramis.
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