Surely these were heroes of a stature to have strained to its utmost
the reverence and the love of a genuine hero-worshipper. On the ten
thousand luminous pages of Mr. Carlyle they find no place. Not only
are their doings not celebrated, that they lived is scarce
acknowledged.
Even when its objects are the loftiest and the most honored, jealousy
is not a noble form of
"The last infirmity of noble mind."
Does Mr. Carlyle feel that Nelson and Wellington, Coleridge, Shelley,
Keats, and Wordsworth, stand already so broad and high that they chill
him with their shadow, and that therefore he will not, by eulogy, or
even notice, add to their altitude? Is he repeating the littleness of
Byron, who was jealous not only of his contemporaries, Napoleon, and
Wellington, and Wordsworth, but was jealous of Shakespeare? That a pen
which, with zestful animation, embraces all contemporaneous things,
should be studiously silent about almost every one of the dozen men of
genius who illustrate his era, is a fact so monstrous, that one is
driven to monstrous devices to divulge its motive. In such a case it
is impossible to premise to what clouds of self-delusion an
imaginative man will not rise.
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