are more significant than that Moslem one, of Moses and the Dwellers by the Dead Sea. A tribe of men dwelt on the shores of that same Asphaltic Lake; and having forgotten, as we are all too prone to do, the inner facts of Nature, and taken up with the falsities and semblances of it, were fallen into sad conditions,-verging indeed toward a certain far deeper Lake. Whereupon it pleased kind Heaven to send them the Prophet Moses, with an instructive word of warning, out of which might have sprung 'remedial measures' not a few. But no: the men of the Dead Sea discovered, as the valet-species always does in heroes or prophets, no comeliness in Moses; listened with real tedium to Moses, with light grinning, or with splenetic sniffs and sneers, affecting even to yawn; and signified in short, that they found him a humbug and even a bore. Such was the candid theory these men of the Asphalt Lake formed to themselves of Moses, That probably he was a humbug, that certainly he was a bore.

"Moses withdrew; but Nature and her rigorous veracities did not withdraw. The men of the Dead Sea, when we next went to visit them, were all 'changed into Apes'; sitting on the trees there, grinning now in the most unaffected manner; gibber

ing and chattering very genuine nonsense; finding the whole Universe now a most indisputable Humbug. The Universe has become a Humbug to these Apes who thought it one. There they sit and chatter, to this hour: only, I believe, every Sabbath there returns to them a bewildered half-consciousness, half-reminiscence; and they sit, with their wizened smoke-dried visages, and such an air of supreme tragicality as Apes may; looking out through those blinking smoke-bleared eyes of theirs, into the wonderfulest universal smoky Twilight and undecipherable disordered Dusk of Things; wholly an Uncertainty, Unintelligibility, they and it; and for commentary thereon, here and there an unmusical chatter or mew:-truest, tragicalest Humbug conceivable by the mind of man or ape! They made no use of their souls; and so have lost them. Their worship on the Sabbath now is to roost there, with unmusical screeches, and half remember that they had souls.

"Didst thou never, O Traveller, fall in with parties of this tribe? Meseems they are grown somewhat numerous in our day."

To print examples of Carlyle's manner of writing is no doubt easier than to explain how he came to

write as he did. Yet certain extracts of his workmanship are plainly to be accounted for. The oral characteristics of his style, its exaggeration and its humor, are in part an inheritance and imitation of his father's talk in Annandale. Richter and other German romanticists encouraged him, no doubt, in a restless wilfulness, a dislike of the beaten paths. But his choice of words and sentence-structure, like his whole method of composition, was really necessitated by his physical organization. He exhibited, in an extraordinary degree, a combination of what are known as the "visual," the "audile" and the "motor" types of imagination. If his sensitiveness to visual impressions resembles that of Dickens, as we have said, in his nervous response to stimuli of sound he is like Walt Whitman, and in his motor type of imaginative energy he is another Tolstoi. Artists of this motor type think with their whole body. Their nerve centers compel them, whether they will or no, to a perpetual dynamic activity. They can not help creating a "Private Theater under their own Hat" and turning actors in it. They write in terms of bodily sensation.

An illustration may make this clearer. One of my pupils once marked four hundred and thirty-two

passages in Carlyle's French Revolution as being "striking." When he was asked to analyse these passages and to discover, if possible, the reason for the impression they had made upon him, he found that nineteen per cent. of them-nearly one passage in every five-contained images of fire. Sixteen per cent. had images founded upon discordant noises, sixteen per cent., also, contained color terms, fifteen per cent. presented images of storm, wind and other violent physical changes in Nature, eleven per cent. had terms of confusion and chaos, and nearly eight per cent. were marked by metaphors drawn from the animal world. It may be added that thirtyfive per cent. of the four hundred and thirty-two passages contained the "triad" construction-a three-fold grouping of words, clauses or sentences, familiar in the Bible and in many classical writers.

Of course it should be remembered that this particular pupil, in marking passages which appealed to him, betrayed, no doubt, something of his own type of physical organization and his own imaginative response to verbal imagery. It should also be borne in mind that Carlyle produced, especially in his letters and early essays, hundreds of pages which were not composed in the heightened "Car

lylese" manner, and which are not easily to be distinguished, save by experts in English style, from other good writing of the Victorian period. Yet it remains true that he will continue to be judged as a writer by the passages which bear most intimately the mark of his temperament. At once a realist and a mystic, he was forced by the laws of his nature to see things in a certain way, and having perceived this vision, he had no rest in his soul or body until he had told what he had seen.