Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 10.djvu/19

 now do as you wish. But have a care of yourselves. By the true eyes of God, per veros oculos Dei, if you manage badly, I will be upon you!" Samson, therefore, steps forward, kisses the King's feet; but swiftly rises erect again, swiftly turns towards the altar, uplifting with the other Twelve, in clear tenor-note, the Fifty-first Psalm, "Miserere mei Deus,

with firm voice, firm step and head, no change in his countenance whatever. "By God's eyes," said the King, "that one, I think, will govern the Abbey well.

And admirably, as we all know, is his government described in Book. of this volume. We follow the history of the good Abbot's administration—its struggles, reforms, pieties, with the same strange sense of reality and nearness that we feel in reading of his election; and it is all too soon for us that Jocelin's Chronicle comes to an end, 'impenetrable time-curtains rush down,' the 'real phantasmagory of St. Edmundsbury plunges into the bosom of the Twelfth Century again,' and 'Monks, Abbot, Hero-worship, Government, Obedience, Coeur de Lion, and St. Edmund's Shrine vanish like "Mirza's Vision," leaving nothing but a mutilated black ruin amid green botanic expanses, and oxen, sheep, and dilettanti pasturing in their places.'

It is with some unwillingness that we pass from this picturesque and romantic episode to the two concluding books, and find ourselves again at hand-grips with professors of the dismal science, commercial capitalists, laissez-faire theorists, Plugson of Undershot, Sir Jabesh Windbag, and the rest of Carlyle's favourite bogies. They are all fallen silent—all gone dead to-day, and to fight the battle with them over again gives one, curiously enough, a far more 'phantasmagoric' feeling than that with which one joined in the struggles of Abbot Samson. Yet even now it is impossible not to observe with admiration how, again and again, in isolated passages, in whole chapters, the genius of Carlyle triumphs and preserves the vitality of his perishable materials. The