Sve have only to lick into Goethe's stint works to bercure, but, is broportion as ine classical element predominated, they were Home ne form. Gideria srain, is an minde & Faust, which is intensed. German & his wahaphers, athome it at clamicale Compare hi Bade heming wit has CARLYLE'S MISCELLANIES. пете is no style more easy to mimic, to parody, or even seriously to imitate in some of its external peculiarities; but the point of the mimicry consists in the contrast between the commonplace caricaturist and the language which belongs to an original thinker of extraordinary imaginative power. A dancing dog on his hind legs is laughable, because he is assuming an attitude at the same time inconsistent with his own formation and inseparably associated with a being of a higher order to whom it is natural to stand upright. Human mimicry is more refined, more ingenious, and more amusing, and sometimes, in its higher forms, it conveys a criticism and even a compliment to its object; but the success of the attempt still depends on the recognised anomaly of the language or gesture which is copied. The imitator, if he understands his business, tries to show that characteristic pecu. liarities would be absurd if they ceased to belong to the character; and it is certain that Mr. Carlyle's words, in the absence of his thoughts, would be exceptionally and ostentatiously empty. There is some pretext for the common complaint that Mr. Carlyle has created a school of vapid and inflated declamation but the master, whatever may be his own literary defects, is wholly exempt from the distinguishing weakness of his disciples. The plagiarists are one and all remarkable for an utter want of humorous faculty or perception, and it will be found that their dialect or jargon is most prominently brought out in the parts of their compositions which purport to be serious and elevated. Mr. Carlyle, on the contrary, displays his peculiarity or mannerism chiefly in playful and familiar illustrations, as when, personifying the collectors of historical materials under the name of Scott's proverbial antiquarian, he complains that "Dryasdust strikes me like a hapless Nigger gone masterless;" but when he touches a higher note, no style more pure, more idiomatic, or more noble is to be found in English literature. Bacon or Milton might have been proud to own his description of the condition in which the world has been left by the great revolutionary explosion:-"The question of questions now is: What part of that exploded past, the ruins and dust of which still darken all the air, will continually gravitate back to us; be re-shaped, transformed, re-adapted, that so in new figures, under new conditions, it may enrich and nourish us again? What part of it, not being incombustible, has actually gone to flame and gas in this huge world conflagration, and is now gaseous, mounting aloft; and will know no beneficence of gravitation, but mount and roam upon the waste winds for ever, Nature so ordering it, in spite of our industry of Art?" Mr. Emerson-the most gifted?as well as the most servile of Mr. Carlyles imitators-will furnish the best illustration of the difference between the original and the copy. Incapable of humour, totally devoid of the critical faculty, incurably misty and confused in the blurred outlines of his thoughts, the American burn o лээримдпләлов ЭМЧ 047 үгт элприэарт рип әгалә * |