Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 02.djvu/17

Rh labour of their wearisome overhauling represented often as not, perhaps, by a single illuminating line.

What, moreover, is a still stronger proof of exhaustive research, it is not only upon these touches of the dramatic and the picturesque that Carlyle's unescapable artistic eye has seized, but in cases where the total effect of a long and uninspired memoire pour servir is, on the whole, informing, though no single passage of it be worthy of literal citation, we here too find evidence not to be mistaken that Carlyle has been carefully over the ground. If the fashion of a later time had prevailed in the Thirties, and historians had been in the habit of prefacing the text of their works with a marshalled list of all the authorities whom they had consulted, the introductory pages of this volume would have not only exhibited a long string of names (scores of them now concealed in the footnotes under the modest reference 'Hist. Parl.'), but would have shown incidentally how nothing was too heavy, or too light, for Carlyle's consultation, no cranny of his subject too minute, no corner too remote, for his indefatigable investigations.

Industry of this description and degree is, of course, no unfamiliar virtue in these days. Every student who publishes a 'monograph' on some infinitesimal fraction of his narrowly circumscribed 'period,' possesses it nowadays, in more or less ample measure. Exhaustive treatment is indeed his only excuse for the excessive limitation of its scope; to 'scamp' the work in so small a canvas would indeed be unpardonable. But the trouble with the contemporary student is that, though he leaves no single document of all Dryasdust's voluminous collection untouched, he is a little too apt to use them in the spirit of Dryasdust himself. No one since Carlyle—as no one assuredly, save Gibbon, before him—has in equal measure combined industry in the study of authorities, accuracy in their citation, and fairness in their use, with anything approaching to Carlyle's artistic faculty and literary power. For the requirement of the third of the above-mentioned qualities will as effectually exclude one of the two famous historians, his contemporaries, as