Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 26.djvu/17



the five volumes of Miscellaneous Essays of which the first is here presented the Centenary Edition of Carlyle's Works will be complete. And with this collection of his occasional writings it will be worthily closed. The Miscellaneous Essays—like most of an author's productions which lie scattered over a considerable tract of time—are of unequal merit and interest: but at their best, and where they belong to their writer's 'best period,' they are, many of them, among the finest of his efforts. Some of them were evidently thrown off at a heat, and at a time when Carlyle's mind was specially exercised on some burning question of the day. And, in this case, their length, that of an ordinary Review article, not being sufficient to exhaust the initial impetus which set them going, we read them from end to end with unabated and unflagging pleasure. Opening one of the volumes of the 1872 Edition, quite at random, I have lighted upon the famous paper contributed by him to the Foreign Quarterly Review on that singular figure in South American history, Dr. Francia, the one-while Dictator of Paraguay. Its date is of 1843, and it belongs therefore to the time when Carlyle was at that precise stage in his intellectual and artistic career at which such a subject most powerfully appealed to him, and at which he was able, after his own peculiar fashion, to do it the fullest justice. Both his mind and his style were thoroughly ripe for it. As for his style, it was now at almost the full height of its irregular and erratic power; while, for his mind, it was in a state of rapidly deepening discontent with and distrust of democratic tendencies, and of daily growing belief in the necessity of the Hero as Dictator. Him, or a