Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 12.djvu/23

Rh troversy, of which he had had enough. Napoleon was at heart too much of a gamin for his taste. Looking over Prussia in more recent times, he concluded 'that the Prussian monarchy had been the centre of modern stability, and that it had been made so by its actual creator Frederick II. called the Great.' And thus it was that he found himself at last, spade in hand, before that Titanic midden, that 'Pelion laid on Ossa of Prussian Dryasdust,' which in the result it took him fourteen mortal years to dig through.

Merely to have played the 'Golden Dustman' to this huge pile of biographical refuse; merely to have 'screened' and sifted it with such resolute and untiring labour; to have extricated, stored, arranged, labelled and catalogued its buried treasures, and to have carted away the mass of superincumbent rubbish, to be 'shot' once for all in its proper limbo of oblivion — this alone would have been a great and valuable work. But seeing that to this Carlyle has added the construction of a magnificently imposing, if imperfectly proportioned, museum, for the safe custody and perpetual preservation of the recovered treasures, it might seem ungracious to grudge the long years that were consumed on the accomplishment of the work. Regret only awakens when we turn away from what we have gained—no doubt a quite indefensible proceeding—to consider what we have lost; to reflect on the matchless excellence and perfect adequacy of so many of Carlyle's shorter pieces; and mentally to enumerate all those memorable events in the world's history which have waited in vain to hear their story told as he alone could tell it, all those its epic figures who might be living for us now with the full and vivid life of a Mirabeau or a Cromwell, had not he who of all men was best fitted to play their vates sacer been 'otherwise engaged.' H. D. TRAILL.