pose it would add 50,000l. to the whole of the cost of the scheme if they were to rehouse the whole of the people of London involved in their scheme. What is 50,000l. to be borrowed by the Metropolitan Board of Works as a charge upon the rates for sixty years? Why it would come to about 47. 5s. per cent., and if it was 5 per cent. it would not be 2,500l. a year to the ratepayers of London; and for the sake of saving that, will you say that this intense suffering shall be caused to these poor people ?

There is very often an outcry raised against the tyranny of the landowner who, to make a deer forest or to enlarge a park, will turn out the labourer and destroy the shepherd's cot. If this is unjust, how much more flagrant is the injustice when we count the sufferers by hundreds and thousands instead of by units. Because the tyrant is a many-headed monster in the shape of a Board, instead of the one selfseeking landlord, the evil is not less and the consequences are more terrible. If one street housing the working classes in this densely populated town is destroyed without adequate provision being made for those who are displaced, the suffering is great, and vice and crime, the result of overcrowding, will increase. One of the highest duties of legislators is to see to the well-being of the labouring people. On their prosperity depend in a great measure the honour and the prosperity of the whole nation, and there is no more certain way of improving the working classes than by giving them the means of living in healthy and decent dwellings.

MAUDE STANLEY.

CARLYLE'S LECTURES ON THE PERIODS OF EUROPEAN CULTURE.

FROM HOMER TO GOETHE.

'DETESTABLE mixture of prophecy and playactorism '—so in his Reminiscences Carlyle describes his work as a lecturer. Yet we are assured by a keen, if friendly, critic, Harriet Martineau, that 'the merits of his discourses were so great that he might probably have gone on year after year till this time with improving success and perhaps ease, but the struggle was too severe,' i.e. the struggle with nervous excitement and ill-health. In a friendly notice of the first lecture ever delivered (May 1, 1837 1) by Carlyle before a London audience, the Times observes: The lecturer, who seems new to the mere technicalities of public speaking, exhibited proofs before he had done of many of its higher and nobler attributes, gathering self-possession as he proceeded.'

In the following year a course of twelve lectures was delivered 'On the History of Literature, or the successive Periods of European Culture,' from Homer to Goethe. As far as I can ascertain, except from short sketches of the two lectures of each week in the Examiner from May 6, 1838, onwards, it is now impossible to obtain an account of this series of discourses. The writer in the Examiner (perhaps Leigh Hunt) in noticing the first two lectures (on Greek literature) writes: He again extemporises, he does not read. We doubted on hearing the Monday's lecture whether he would ever attain in this way to the fluency as well as depth for which he ranks among celebrated talkers in private; but Friday's discourse relieved us. He "strode away" like Ulysses himself, and had only to regret, in common with his audience, the limits to which the one hour confined him.' George Ticknor was present at the ninth lecture of this course, and he noted in his diary (June 1, 1838): 'He is a rather small, spare, ugly Scotchman, with a strong accent, which I should think he takes

The 1st of May was illustrious On the evening of that day Browning's Strafford was produced by Macready at Covent Garden Theatre. Dr. Chalmers was at this time also lecturing in London, and extensive reports of his lectures are given in the Times and the Morning Chronicle.

no pains to mitigate. . . . To-day he spoke-as I think he commonly does-without notes, and therefore as nearly extempore as a man can who prepares himself carefully, as was plain he had done. He was impressive, I think, though such lecturing could not well be very popular; and in some parts, if he were not poetical, he was picturesque.' Ticknor estimates the audience at about one hundred.

A manuscript of over two hundred and fifty pages is in my hands, which I take to be a transcript from a report of these lectures by some skilful writer of shorthand. It gives very fully, and I think faithfully, eleven lectures; one, the ninth, is wanting. In the following pages, I may say, nothing, or very little, is my own. I have transcribed several of the most striking passages of the lectures, and given a view of the whole, preserving continuity by abstracts of those portions which I do not transcribe. In these abstracts I have as far as possible used the words of the manuscript. In a few instances I have found it convenient to bring together paragraphs on the same subject from different lectures. Some passages which say what Carlyle has said elsewhere I give for the sake of the manner, more direct than that of the printed page; sometimes becoming even colloquial. The reader will do well to imagine these passages delivered with that Northern accent which Carlyle's refined Bostonian hearer thought he took no pains to mitigate.'

At the outset Carlyle disclaims any intention to construct a scientific theory of the history of culture; some plan is necessary in order to approach the subject and become familiar with it, but any proposed theory must be viewed as one of mere convenience.

There is only one theory which has been most triumphant-that of the planets. On no other subject has any theory succeeded so far yet. Even that is not perfect; the astronomer knows one or two planets, we may say, but he does not know what they are, where they are going, or whether the solar system is not itself drawn into a larger system of the kind. In short, with every theory the man who knows something about it, knows mainly this-that there is much uncertainty in it, great darkness about it, extending down to an infinite deep; in a word, that he does not know what it is. Let him take a stone, for example, the pebble that is under his feet; he knows that it is a stone broken out of rocks old as the creation, but what that pebble is he knows not; he knows nothing at all about that. This system of making a theory about everything is what we may call an encharted state of mind. That man should be misled, that he should be deprived of knowing the truth that the world is a reality and not a huge confused hypothesis, that he should be deprived of this by the very faculties given him to understand it, I can call by no other name than Enchantment.

Yet when we look into the scheme of these lectures we perceive a presiding thought, which certainly had more than a provisional value for Carlyle. The history of culture is viewed as a succession of faiths, interrupted by periods of scepticism. The faith of Greece and Rome is succeeded by the Christian faith, with an interval of Pagan scepticism, of which Seneca may be taken as a representative.

The Christian faith, earnestly held to men's hearts during a great epoch, is transforming itself into a new thing, not yet capable of definition, proper to our nineteenth century; of this new thing the Goethe of Wilhelm Meister and the West-östlicher Divan is the herald. But its advent was preceded by that melancholy interval of Christian scepticism, the eighteenth century, which is represented by Voltaire and the sentimental Goethe of Werther, which reached its terrible consummation in the French Revolution; and against which stood out in forlorn heroism Samuel Johnson. Carlyle's general view is a broad one, which disregards all but fundamental differences in human beliefs. The Paganism of Greece is not severed from that of Rome; Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, is essentially of one and the same epoch.

There is a sentence which I find in Goethe full of meaning in this regard. It must be noted, he says, that belief and unbelief are two opposite principles in human nature. The theme of all human history, so far as we are able to perceive it, is the contest between these two principles. All periods, he goes on to say, in which belief predominates, in which it is the main element, the inspiring principle of action, are distinguished by great, soul-stirring, fertile events, and worthy of perpetual remembrance: and, on the other hand, when unbelief gets the upper hand, that age is unfertile, unproductive, and intrinsically mean; in which there is no pabulum for the spirit of man, and no one can get nourishment for himself. This passage is one of the most pregnant utterances ever delivered, and we shall do well to keep it in mind in these disquisitions.

In attempting to follow the stream of mind from the period at which the first great spirits of our Western World wrote and flourished down to these times,' we start from Greece. When we ask who were the first inhabitants of Greece, we can derive no clear account from any source. 'We have no good history of Greece. This is not at all remarkable. Greek transactions never had anything alive [for us?]; no result for us; they were dead entirely. The only points which serve to guide us are a few ruined towns, a few masses of stone, and some broken statuary.' Three epochs, however, in Greek history can be traced: the first, that of the siege of Troy-the first confederate act of the Hellenes in their capacity of a European people; the second, that of the Persian invasion; the third, the flower-time of Greece, the period of Alexander the Great, when Greece' exploded itself on Asia.'

Europe was henceforth to develop herself on an independent footing, and it has been so ordered that Greece was to begin that. As to their peculiar physiognomy among nations, they were in one respect an extremely interesting people, but in another unamiable and weak entirely. It has been somewhere remarked by persons learned in the speculation on what is called the doctrine of races, that the Pelasgi were of Celtic descent. However this may be, it is certain that there is a remarkable similarity in character of the French to these Greeks. Their first feature was what we may call the central feature of all others, exhausting (?)2 vehemence, not

2 MS. 'existing.'

exactly strength, for there was no permanent coherence in it as in strength, but a sort of fiery impetuosity; a vehemence never anywhere so remarkable as among the Greeks, except among the French, and there are instances of this, both in its good and bad point of view. As to the bad, there is the instance mentioned by Thucydides of the sedition in Corcyra, which really does read like a chapter out of the French Revolution, in which the actors seem to be quite regardless of any moment but that which was at hand.

The story of the massacre is briefly told, which recalls to Carlyle, as it did to Niebuhr, the events of September 1792.

But connected with all this savageness there was an extraordinary delicacy of taste and genius in them. They had a prompt dexterity in seizing the true relations of objects, a beautiful and quick sense in perceiving the places in which the things lay, all round the world, which they had to work with, and this, without being entirely admirable, was in their own internal province highly useful. So the French, with their undeniable barrenness of genius, have yet in a remarkable manner the facility of expressing themselves with precision and elegance, to so singular a degree that no ideas or inventions can possibly become popularised till they are presented to the world by means of the French language. . . . But in poetry, philosophy, and all things the Greek genius displays itself with as curious a felicity as the French does in frivolous exercises. Singing or music was the central principle of the Greeks, not a subordinate one. And they were right. What is not musical is rough and hard and cannot be harmonised. Harmony is the essence of Art and Science. The mind moulds to itself the clay, and makes it what it will.

This spirit of harmony is seen even in the earliest Pelasgic architecture, and more admirably in Greek poetry, Greek temples, Greek statuary. A beautiful example may be found in the story of how Phidias achieved his masterpiece at Elis.

When he projected his Jupiter of Elis, his ideas were so confused and bewildered as to give him great unrest, and he wandered about perplexed that the shape he wished would not disclose itself. But one night, after struggling in pain with his thoughts as usual, and meditating on his design, in a dream he saw a group of Grecian maidens approach, with pails of water on their heads, who began a song in praise of Jupiter. At that moment the Sun of Poetry stared upon him, and set free the image which he sought for, and it crystallised, as it were, out of his mind into marble, and became as symmetry itself. This Spirit of Harmony operated directly in him, informing all parts of his mind, thence transferring itself into statuary, seen with the eye, and filling the heart of all people.

Having discussed the origin of Polytheism, Carlyle speaks of divination.

It is really, in my opinion, a blasphemy against human nature to attribute the whole of the system [of polytheism] to quackery and falsehood. Divination, for instance, was the great nucleus round which polytheism formed itself-the constituted core of the whole matter. All people, private men as well as states, used to consult the oracle of Dodona or Delphi (which eventually became the most celebrated of all) on all the concerns of life. Modern travellers have discovered in those places pipes and other secret contrivances from which they have concluded that these oracles were constituted on a principle of falsehood and delusion. Cicero, too, said that he was certain two Augurs could not meet without laughing; and he was likely to know, for he had once been an Augur himself. But I confess that