THOMAS CARLYLE.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3011, 18 February 1881, Page 3

THOMAS CARLYLE.

" Civis," in the Otago Witness, has the following : — Opinions differ as to the literary place and merit of Thomas Carlyle, who this week has gone over to the majority. There are few subjects, indeed, literary or other, on which opinions do not differ. I met an educated gentleman some short time ago •who informed me confidentially that Shakespeare was immensely overrated. Admiration for Shakespeare was the fashion of the hour, and would pass away. There really was nothing in Shakespeare. Greorge 111., I believe (not that his opinion on subjects is worth much), was of the same way of thinking. Carlyle, more than most men of his generation, being a poietes, a maker, or in other words, an innovotor, has naturally stirred tip detraction. There are those who question his claim to any permanent place of honor in English literature ; there are those who deny that he wrote in English at all. Let them rare. Prom faroff and barbarous New Zealand I offer my poor wild-flower tc lay in homage on the grave of Thomas Carlyle, greatest writer of English in my time. lam not forgetful of Tennyson, Scott. Thackeray, Dickens, Byron, Wordsworth. Carlyle was greater than any of them. His prose-poem, " flameepic" "French Kevolution" —though some minnikin compendiumists who undertake to tell the etory of English literature do not even give it mention—has not its fellow among boob written with the pen. I admit all Carlyle's extravagances of thought and expression. Nay, I glory in them. They are splendid sins. No other writer was ever able to sin 90 splendidly, and, to my defective literary morality, that is an ample justification. Five years older than the century, Carlyle bad outlasted his powers, and has long been little more than a mere nominis umbra. In Chelsea, the brilliant historian end essayist was known as " the gentleman who lives next to Miss Cobbe." The " disease called thinking" had long been over with him, and there is little to forget in his final falling asleep, except that the small critics will take occasion again to damn him with faint praise.