Heroes and

HEROES AND HERO—WORSHIP. In 1837 Carlyle had produced as an introduction to universal history might seem to overweight it; but the survey covers roughly the whole ac tivity of man upon the planet. Carlyle was an historian dowered with a unique style, a pene trating and constructive imagination, and a sense of the picturesque vouchsafed to few. No previous book presented such a series of arrest ing, original generalizations on history, or such lust appreciations of so many diverse careers and personalities. Mahomet, Dante, Shakes peare, Luther, Knox, Johnson, Rousseau, Burns, Cromwell and Napoleon are characterized in unforgettable terms as well as the movements they represented, or conducted. Carlyle's power

of appreciation was catholic. For the first time in English, he showed that Mahomet was something more than a sensualist and an im postor. For the first time, he pictured the real Oliver Cromwell. Following up this first pronouncement, with his monumental history of the great Puritan leader, he absolutely reversed English opinion and made possible the statue of the regicide in the Palace Yard at West minster. Lord Acton says Carlyle invented Oliver Cromwell. On all these representative men, Carlyle had true and weighty things to say which had never been said before.

The book made its influence felt at once on current thinking. In 1849, an acute foreign observer wrote: "The rehabilitation of the hero is to-day of all Carlyle's ideas the most widely spread, and the one which has made head most rapidly. . . . This idea is the basis of Emerson's philosophy, and has inspired all his essays on confidence in oneself, and the power of the individual." Ruskin's determina tion to do something and be something has been attributed to his reading of