Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 12.djvu/20

xii London throughout the whole of the next two years. Nor indeed till the autumn of the year following does he seem to have allowed himself any respite from his labours. In August 1855, however, and at intervals in 1856, we find him indulging in occasional holidays; but in the winter of the latter year, he again buried himself among his books at Chelsea and took another long spell of work in the 'sound-proof' room which he had erected at the top of his house. In July 1857 the first chapters of Frederick were at last getting into print, and in the autumn of 1858 he again visited Germany on a tour of inspection of the historic scenes of the Seven Years' War, thus enabling himself to combine the fine dramatic quality of his battle-pieces with a technical and scientific accuracy which has earned for his Frederick the Great a well-merited place among the text-books of German military students. He returned to England in September 1858, and a little later—that is to say, more than seven years after the commencement of the work—its first two volumes were given to the world. Its success was immediate, and considering its subject, remarkable, four thousand copies being sold before the end of the year. The third volume appeared in 1862, the fourth in 1864, and the fifth and sixth, by which the great work was brought to a conclusion, in 1865.

To call in question the merits of this colossal biography would be of course absurd. Even were it not informed—one cannot perhaps say throughout, but in many brilliant passages and pages—by Carlyle's extraordinary genius, it would yet remain a monument of historical industry and acumen, and an achievement on which, though it stood alone, the most ambitious of historians might be well content to rest his fame. We cannot even say that, with due allowance made where allowance is due, it is in any way inferior in execution to its author's lofty standard of literary workmanship. Emerson, as quoted by Mr. Leslie Stephen, pronounced it 'the wittiest book in the world,' and it is certainly rich in the inimitable humour of the mind which gave it birth.