Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 26.djvu/19

Rh episodical pieces in the French Revolution. The 'Burns' is famous, and the 'Boswell' the most complete reply to Macaulay's brilliant but shallow characterisation of Johnson's biographer. Failures, like the unfortunate essay on Sir Walter Scott, are so rare as to make that aberration virtually unique.

In this collection, however, containing as it does a good deal of Carlyle's best and maturest work, it has been thought well to include a certain number of those early writings of his which for various reasons have never yet been allowed to find a place in any previous edition, otherwise professedly complete. For this step no apology seems to me to be needed. This is no case of impiously dragging to light, regardless of the known or presumed wishes of their deceased author, works which he thought unworthy of him and would, if living, have desired to suppress. Even to our reprints from the Edinburgh Encyclopœdia no such reproach as this would apply. True it is that they are only what Carlyle himself would have described as 'honest journeywork'; but that he was not ashamed of honest journeywork appears quite plainly in the passage quoted, in my Introduction to the volume of German Romance, from the author's preface to the earlier reprint. No doubt his contributions to the Encyclopœdia were journeywork of a more commonplace and mechanical kind. They belong, indeed, distinctly to the 'hack' category; and are just such tasks as the needy scribes of the days of Johnson and Goldsmith had in mind when they talked about 'writing for the booksellers.' They were written, as most such articles were and still are, under the severest restrictions as to space; so that the writer's want of elbow-room inevitably reduces them to little more than a curt and bald catalogue of the material facts relating to his subject. If they possess the virtue of accuracy, it is all that is expected of them: indeed, it is the only expectation they could possibly satisfy. Still it would be too much to say even of these that they nowhere give promise, however faint and doubtful, of the future Carlyle. A sentence of unusual