it has been truly said, "possessed in perfection the art of embalming thought. The severe taste which surrounds them has operated like the pure air of Egypt in preserving the sculptures and paintings of that country; where travelers tell us that the traces of the chisel are often as sharp, and the colors of the paintings as bright, as if the artists had quitted their work but yesterday."

In works of art, or pure literature, the style is even more important than the thought, for the reason that the style is the artistic part, the only thing in which the writer can show originality. The raw material out of which essays, poems and novels are made, is limited in quantity, and easily exhausted. The number of human passions upon which changes can be rung is very small; and the situations to which their play gives rise may be counted on the fingers. Love returned and love unrequited, jealousy and envy, pride, avarice, generosity and revenge, are the hinges upon which all poems and romances turn, and these passions have been the same ever since Adam. I live, I love,— I am happy, I am wretched, I was once young,- I must die,— are very simple ideas, of which no one can claim a copyright; yet out of these few root-ideas has flowed all the poetry the world knows, and all that it ever will know. In Homer and Virgil, Plautus and Terence, we have an epitome of all the men and women on the planet, and the writer who would add to their number must either repeat them or portray monstrosities. Joubert felt this when he cried: " Oh, how difficult it is to be at once ingenious and sensible!" La Bruyère, long before him, had felt it when he exclaimed: "All is said, and one comes too late, now that there have been men for seven thousand years, and men that have thought." It is common to talk of originality as

the distinguishing mark of genius, when, on the contrary, it is essentially receptive and passive in its nature. Its power lies, not in finding out new material, but in imparting new life to whatever it discovers, new or old; not in creating its own fuel, but in fanning its collected fuel into a flame. All the thought, the stuff or substance, of a new poem or essay, is necessarily commonplace. The thing said. has been said in some form a thousand times before; the writer's merit lies in the way he says it. We talk, indeed, of creative intellects, but only Omnipotence can create; man can only combine. As Praxiteles, when he wrought his statue of Venus, did not produce it by a pure effort of the imagination, but selected the most beautiful parts of the most beautiful figures he could obtain as models, and combined them into a harmonious whole, so, to a great extent, are literary masterpieces produced. Wherein lies the charm of the "golden-mouthed" Jeremy Taylor? Is it in the absolute novelty of his thoughts? — or is it not rather in the fact that, as De Quincey says, old thoughts are surveyed from novel stations and under various angles, and a field absolutely exhausted throws up eternally fresh verdure under the fructifying lava of burning imagery? Even the wizard of Avon can strictly produce nothing new; he can only call in the worn coin of thought, melt it in his own crucible, and issue it with a fresh superscription and an increased value.

What would De Quincey be without his style? Rob him of the dazzling fence of his rhetoric, his word-painting, and rhythm, strip him of his organ-like fugues, his majestic swells and dying falls,-leave to him only the bare, naked ideas of his essays, and he will be De Quincey no longer. It would be like robbing the rose of its color and perfume,

or taking from an autumnal landscape its dreamy, hazy atmosphere and its gorgeous dyes. Take the finest English classic, The Fairy Queen, L'Allegro or Il Penseroso, Midsummer Night's Dream; strip it of music, color, wit, alliteration, the marriage of exquisite thoughts to exquisite language,— all that belongs to form as distinguished from the substance,- and what will the residuum be? All the ideas in these works are as old as creation. They were everywhere in the air, and any other poet had as good a right to use them as Milton, Spenser and Shakspeare. That critical mouser, the Rev. John Mitford, in his notes to Gray's poems, has shown that hardly an image, an epithet, or even a line in them originated with the ostensible author. Gray cribbed from Pope, Pope from Dryden, Dryden from Milton, Milton from the Elizabethan classics, they from the Latin poets, the Latin from the Greek, and so on till we come to the original Prometheus, who stole the fire directly from Heaven. But does this lessen the merit of these authors? Grant that the finest passages in poetry are to a great extent but embellished recollections of other men's productions; does this detract one jot or tittle from the poet's fame? The great thinkers of every age do not differ from the little ones so much in having different thoughts, as in sifting classifying and focalizing the same thoughts, and, above all, in giving them to the world in the pearl of exquisite and adequate expression. Give to two painters the same pigments, and one of them will produce a “Transfiguration," and the other will exhaust his genius upon the sign-board of a country tavern; as out of the same stones may be reared the most beautiful or the most unsightly of edifices, the Parthenon of Athens, or an American Court-House.

What is the secret of the popularity of our leading journals? Is it their prodigious wisdom, their prophetic sagacity, the breadth and accuracy of their knowledge, their depth and range of thought,-in short, their grasp of the themes they discuss? No; the newspaper which each man reads with the most delight is that which has mastered most perfectly the art of putting things; which flatters his selfesteem by giving to his own inchoate ideas artistical development and expression; which, in short, is a mirror inwhich Jones or Brown can see with his own eyes the Socrates he has taken himself to be.

Perhaps no other writer of the day has more powerfully influenced the English-speaking race than Carlyle. Beyond all other living men he has, in certain important respects, shaped and colored the thought of his time. As a historian, he may be almost said to have revolutionized the French Revolution, so different is the picture which other writers have given us from that which blazes upon us under the lurid torchlight of his genius. To those who have read his great prose epic, it will be henceforth impossible to remember the scenes he has described through any other medium. As Helvellyn and Skiddaw are seen now only through the glamour of Wordsworth's genius,—as Jura and Mont Blanc are transfigured, even to the tourist, by the magic of Byron and Coleridge, so to Carlyle's readers Danton and Robespierre, Mirabeau and Tinville, will be forever what he has painted them. No other writer equals the great Scotchman in the Rembrandt-like lights and shadows of his style. While, as Mr. McCarthy says, he is endowed with a marvelous power of depicting stormy scenes and rugged, daring natures, yet "at times, strange, wild, piercing notes of the pathetic are heard through his fierce

bursts of eloquence like the wail of a clarion thrilling beneath the blasts of a storm." His pages abound in pictures of human misery sadder than poet ever drew, more vivid and startling than artist ever painted. In his conflict with shams and quackeries he has dealt yeoman's blows, and made the bankrupt institutions of England ring with their own hollowness. What is the secret of his power? Is it the absolute novelty of his thoughts? In no great writer of equal power shall we find such an absolute dearth of new ideas. The gospel of noble manhood which he so passionately preaches is as old as Solomon. Its cardinal ideas have been echoed and reëchoed through the ages till they have become the stalest of truisms. That brains are the measure of worth; that duty, without reward, is the end of life; that "work is worship"; that a quack is a Falsehood incarnate; that on a lie nothing can be built; that the victim of wrong suffers less than the wrong-doer; that man has a soul which cannot be satisfied with meats or drinks, fine palaces and millions of money, or stars and ribands; this is the one single peal of bells upon which the seer of Chelsea has rung a succession of changes, with hardly a note of variation, for over half a century.

Anything more musty or somniferous than these utterances, so far as their substance is concerned, can hardly be found outside of Blair's sermons. Coming from a common writer, they would induce a sleepiness which neither "poppy, mandragora, nor all the drowsy sirups of the world" could rival in producing. But preached in the strong, rugged words, and with the tremendous emphasis of Carlyle,— enforced by sensational contrasts and epic interrogations,made vivid by personification, apostrophe, hyperbole, and enlivened by pictorial illustration, these old saws, which