Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 10.djvu/20

 fifth chapter of the Third Book, the chapter on 'The English,' is a case in point: nothing truer, more inspiring, or at the same time more human, more genially humorous, has ever been written on the national character than this study of John Bull, in all his strength and weakness, his confusions of the mind and his heroisms of the will.

And to distinguish—as it is more necessary to do with Carlyle than with any other writer—between merits of subject and those of treatment, we should have, in respect of certain great qualities of its author, to give Past and Present a very high place in his works. For unflagging spirit and inexhaustible animation it is surpassed by none of them, and surpasses many: as well it may indeed, seeing that, as Professor Nichol truly observes of it, it is the 'only considerable consecutive book, unless we also except the Life of Sterling, which the author wrote without the accompaniment of wrestlings, agonies, and disgusts.' As a matter of fact this volume of upwards of two hundred and fifty pages was completed 'from title-page to colophon,' during the first seven weeks of 1843, actually one of the 'four years of abstruse toil, obscure speculation, futile wrestling and misery,' which, as he afterwards complained, it had cost him to get together his materials for the Cromwell. In spite of this formidable preoccupation, he was able to dash off Past and Present literally 'at a heat.' But perhaps I should have written 'because' rather than 'in spite,' for it may well have been to the rebound of the bent bow—to the unspeakable relief of being able to exchange distasteful for congenial work—that the pages which follow are indebted for that varying but unceasing play of eloquence, humour, and passion by which they are irradiated from first to last.

H. D. TRAILL.