The _Life of Friedrich_
could not be a succession of dramatic scenes, like the _French
Revolution_, nor a biography like _Cromwell_, illustrated by the
surrounding events of thirty years. Carlyle found, to his dismay, that he
had involved himself in writing the History of Germany, and in a measure
of Europe, during the eighteenth century, a period perhaps the most
tangled and difficult to deal with of any in the world's annals. He was
like a man who, with intent to dig up a pine, found himself tugging at
the roots of an Igdrasil that twined themselves under a whole Hercynian
forest. His constant cries of positive pain in the progress of the work
are distressing, as his indomitable determination to wrestle with and
prevail over it is inspiring. There is no imaginable image that he does
not press into his service in rattling the chains of his voluntary
servitude. Above all, he groans over the unwieldy mass of his
authorities--"anti-solar systems of chaff."
"I read old German books dull as stupidity itself--nay
superannuated stupidity--gain with labour the dreariest
glimpses of unimportant extinct human beings ... but when I
begin operating: _how_ to reduce that widespread black
desert of Brandenburg sand to a small human garden! ... I have
no capacity of grasping the big chaos that lies around me,
and reducing it to order.
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