SPECTATOR'S LIBRARY.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.

narrow,

Past and Present. By Thomas Carlyle Chapman and Hall. The Rambles of the Emperor Ching Tih in Kean Neu ; a Chinese Tale. Trans-

lated by Tkiu Shen, Student of the Auglo-Chiuese College, Malacca. Witti'a Preface by James Legge, D.D. President of the College. In two volumes.

Longman aid Co.

MILITARY ADVENTURES,

Historical Record of the Honourable East India Company's First Madras European Regiment : containing an Account of the Establishment of Independent Com- panies in 1695, their formation into a Regiment in 1748, and its subsequent Ser-

vices to 1842. By a Staff-Officer Smith and Elder.

CARLYLE'S PAST AND PRESENT.

WHEN SOCRATES was asked what he thought of a book he had been reading, he replied, that as what he understood was excellent be inferred that what he did not understand was the same. With- out a strict application of this remark to Past and Present, it may be said of the work, that it contains a good deal which, in Mr. CARLYLE'S peculiar manner, is excellent in a high degree, to- gether with a good deal which is not very intelligible at first sight, and which seems, on a rapid judgment, to partake rather of a mystical verboseness than of thoughts difficult to be understood from their depth and novelty. It is probable also that the difficult book perused by SOCRATES might have its difficulties in its parts, not in its general character and purpose, which is rather the case with Past and Present ; the design of the author not being very distinctly impressed, and his tangible views bearing little proportion to his involution-digressions, or, as he might himself express it, to his Carlylisms. Such, however, as we understand, we will unfold.

The main drift of Mr. CARLYLE appears to be to compare the Past with the Present in order to exhibit the merits of the one and the errors or worse than errors of the other. In his estimation, the merits of the Past appear to consist in a trusting and religious spirit ; in a regard to high moral or mental qualities without respect to wealth or external circumstances — in fact, " hero-worship"; in an admission of other rights than mere parchment or "agree- ment" rights ; and in an untiring zeal, that would labour for great or worthy objects without thought of the money-reward, or of reward at all. The more tangible shapes in which our present evils show themselves, the author deems to be the condition of the poor and the character or consequences of the new Poor-law—the ardour for money, the "mammon-worship," of the middle classes, especially of the master-manufacturers—the idleness and selfishness of the landed interest—the idleness and dilettantism " of the aristocracy —the slothful indifference, the laissez-faire of Parliament and Ministers, the general characteristics of all Premiers being em- bodied in " Sir Jabesh Windbag." But these things are merely symptoms. The root of the evil is the spirit of the age—a sceptical indifference to God and to all that is morally great in human nat- ture—a knowledge got by prying—an admiration of nothing and of nobody but self—a cold contempt for all enthusiasm—and a moiling spirit that rather slaves than works, but will only slave for money or the gratification of a wretched vanity. The author's preparation for the remedy of the evil, (for he seems not without hope that there is stamina in the patient to bear the doctor as well as the disease,) is the abolition of the Corn-laws and a well-planned system of extensive emigration, so as to give a "fair day's wage for a fair day's work." This evil is only to be permanently cured by infusing a new spirit into the nation ; which is to be done, it would appear, by teaching. But here, we opine, the author falls off. In a chapter called " The One Institution," he draws a quaint but capital picture of the soldier—the thing, the realized fact, that under the most do-nothing governments, amid the death of old institutions and the painful birth or embryos of new, is still fresh and complete. From this taking heart of hope, he infers that a "teaching service" can be raised, equipped, and disciplined : but we desiderate the how. We want the soul and the shape of the army, as well as the plan of the campaign.

This account exhibits the essential spirit of The Past and Pre- sent. Its form is more Carlylish still. The work is divided into four books ; the first of which is called the Proem, and consists of six chapters, each with a quaint title, bearing or being made to bear, some relation to the present Condition-of-England question. " Midas," for example, is used to typify our present state of un- exampled riches, where the poor cannot get bread by work, and the rich work so much for riches that they have no enjoyment in life. " Morrison's Pill" ridicules schemes and schemers with one panacea, especially of a material kind; and " Aristocracy of Talent," the cants that are promulgated with respect to political reforms. Book second, called " The Ancient Monk," is a moat remarkable production. Essentially it is an "article "—the notice of a chronicle or diary of a monk of St. Edmondsbury Abbey in the twelfth century, published by the Camden Society. The original chronicle seems bald and monkish enough; relating to the peen- niary affairs and internal economy of the Abbey, with occasionally a curt reference to public events, when they affected the Abbey or its inmates. But from these rude notes, CARLYLE, with local and antiquarian knowledge impregnated by a peculiar genius, has conr jured up a series of pictures, as quaint and striking as the artistic remains of the period on glass and tapestry, and much more life- like. The object is to bring out the better features of that age in contrast to the worser features of ours : and, besides the one- sidedness, the critics, whom Mr. CARLYLE so cordially hates, might detect some flaws in the logic. It is not, however, for its philosophy, but its literature, that this part is so remarkable. In

despite of some lumbering mannerism, it has revived the Past. The old and ailing Abbot in the hands of flatterers—the dilapi- dated state of the Abbey, and the quarrels with the old women of the town and the tenants about the Abbey-dues, are " revived to Fancy's view." We perceive the usurious dealings of the Jews of St. Edmondsbury with the distressed churchmen ; we are present at the incidents connected with electing a new Abbot ; and we follow him through all his reforming struggles, till the " cmtera desunt " of the Chronica Jocelini de Brakelonda closes the curtain.

The two last books differ little in character from the Proem. " The Modern Worker " gives a picture or intended picture and commentary of the present age, and its preceding ages since the " blessed Restoration " of CHARLES the Second. " The Horo- scope," as its name implies, is intended to cast the fate of the future ' • which it does in the insufficient manner we have indicated, though mixing up a good deal of the actual present with the speculative to come.

In addition to faults already alluded to, we may add that the words very considerably outweigh the matter ; much of the book being variations on the same theme, rather than a constant succes- sion of subjects : and this induces weariness in the reader. In a larger sense, the Past and Present is deficient in well-defined plan, and is rather to be regarded as a forcible and impressive de- clamation upon some existing evils, than a complete or perhaps a just exposition of our actual state. At the same time, the writer is evidently bent on endeavouring to grapple with the inmost heart of things rather than their extrinsic forms; nor can the work be read without enlarging the views of the reader, and raising his mind to nobler notions than the indifference, selfishness, and money-making struggles—the Mammonism and Dilletantism of the Present.

We know not that this account will convey to the reader a very distinct idea of the form and character of this remarkable book ; but we can by a few extracts give a notion of its manner in the b Ater parts

ENGLISH PAUPERISM AND THE NEW POOR-LAW.

Of these successful skilful workers, some two millions, it is now counted, sit in workhouses, Poor-law prisons; or have " out-door relief" flung over the wall to them—the workhouse bastile being filled to bursting, and the strong Poor-law broken asunder by a stronger. They sit there, these many months now ; their hope of deliverance as yet small. In workhouses, pleasantly so named, because work cannot be done in them. Twelve hundred thousand workers in England alone ; their cunning right-band lamed, lying idle in their sorrowful bosom ; their hopes, outlooks, share of this fair world, shut in by narrow walls. They sit there, pent up, as in a kind of horrid enchantment ; glad to be imprisoned and enchanted, that they may not perish starved. The Picturesque Tourist, in a sunny autumn day, through this bounteous realm of England, descries the union workhouse on his path. " Passing by the work- house of St. Ives in Huntingdonshire, on a bright day last autumn," says the Picturesque Tourist, "I saw sitting on wooden benches, in front of their Inu- tile and within their ring-wall and its railings, some half-hundred or more of these men. Tall robust figures, young mostly or of middle age ; of honest countenance, many of them thoughtful and even intelligent-looking men. They sat there, near by one another; but in a kind of torpor, especially in a silence, which was very striking. In silence : for, alas, what word was to be said ? An earth all lying round, crying, come and till me, come and reap me : yet here we sit enchanted. In the eyes and brows of these men hung the gloomiest expression, not of anger, but of grief and shame and manifold in- articulate distress and weariness : they returned my glance with a glance that seemed to say, 'Do not look at us. We sit enchanted here, we know not why. The sun shines and the earth calls ; and, by the governing powers and im- potences of this England, we are forbidden to obey. It is impossible, they tell us.' There was something that reminded me of Dante's Hell in the look of all this; and I rode swiftly away." So many hundred thousands sit in workhouses ; and other hundred thousands have not yet got even workhouses ; and in thrifty Scotland itself; in Glasgow or Edinburgh city, in their dark lanes, hidden from all but the eye of God, and of rare benevolence the minister of God, there are scenes of WO and destitution and desolation, such as, one may hope, the sun never saw before in the most barbarous regions where men dwelt.

This is in a more touching tone than CARLYLE has yet displayed, unless our memory fails. The next two passages also appear to us to have more satiric humour.

AN ADMIRER OF THE ARISTOCRACY OF TALENT.

For example, you Bobus Biggins, sausage-maker on the great scale, who are raising such a clamour for this aristocracy of talent, what is it that you do, in that big heart of yours, chiefly in very fact pay deference to ? Is it to talent, intrinsic manly worth of any kind, you unfortunate Bobus ? The manliest man that you saw going in a ragged coat, did you ever reverence him ; did you so much as know that he was a manly man at all, till his coat grew better ? Talent ! I understand you to be able to worship the fame of talent, the power, cash, celebrity, or other success of talent; but the talent itself is a thing you never saw with eyes. Nay what is it in yourself that you are proudest of, that you take most pleasure iu surveying meditatively in thoughtful moments ? Speak now, is it the bare Bobus. stript of his very name and shirt, and turned loose upon society, that you admire and thank Heaven for; or Bobus with his cash- accounts and larders dropping fatness, with his respectabilities, warm garnitures, and pony-chaise, admirable in some measure to certain of the flunkey species ? Your own degree of worth and talent, is it of infinite value to you ; or only of finite—measurable by the degree of currency, and conquest of praise or pud- ding, it has brought you to ? Bobus, you are in a vicious circle, rounder than one of your own sausages ; and will never vote for or promote any talent, ex- cept what talent or sham-talent has already got itself voted for.

EXETER HALL FOLKS AND THEIR PROTOGKS.

0 Anti-Slavery Convention, loud-sounding, long-eared Exeter Hall !—But in thee too is a kind of instinct towards justice, and I will complain of nothing. Only, black Quashee over the seas being once sufficiently attended to, wilt thou not perhaps open thy dull sodden eyes to the "sixty thousand valets in London itself who are yearly dismissed to the streets, to be what they can when the season ends "; or to the hunger-stricken, pallid, yellow-coloured "free labourers " in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Buckinghamshire, and all other shires ! These yellow-coloured, for the present, absorb all my sympathies : if I bad a twenty millions, with model-farms and Niger expeditions, it is to these that I would give it. Quasbee has already victuals, clothing ; Quasbee is not dying of such despair as the yellow coloured pale man's. Quashes, it oast be owned, is hitherto a kind of blockhead. The Haiti Duke of Marmalade, educated now for almost half a century, seems to have next to no sense in him. Why, in one of those Lancashire weavers, dying of hunger, there is more thought and heart, a greater arithmetical amount of misery and desperation, than in whole gangs of Quasbees. It must be owned, thy eyes are of the sodden sort ; and with thy emancipations, and thy twenty- millionings, and long-eared clamourings, thou, like Robespierre with his paste- board Etre Supreme, threatened to become a bore to us, Avec ton Etre Su- preme to commences m'embeter !

HOME TRUTHS.

The Continental people, it would seem, are " exporting our machinery, be- ginning to spin cotton and manufacture for themselves, to cut as out of this market and then out of that." Sad news indeed; but irremediable ;—by no means the saddest news. The saddest news is, that we should find our national existence, as I sometimes hear it said, depend on selling manufactured cotton at a farthing an ell cheaper than any other people. A most narrow stand for a great nation to base itself on. A stand which, with all the Corn-law abro- gations conceivable, I do not think will be capable of enduring. • • * Yes, were the Corn-laws ended tomorrow, there is nothing yet ended; there is only room made for all manner of things beginning. The Corn-laws gone, and trade made free, it is as good as certain this paralysis of industry sill pass away. We shall have another period of commercial enterprise, of victory and prosperity; during which, it is likely, much money will again be made, and all the people may, by the extant methods, still for a space of years be kept alive and physically fed. The strangling band of famine will be loosened from our necks: we shall have room again to breathe; time to bethink ourselves to repent and consider. A precious and thrice-precious space of years, wherein to struggle as for life in reforming our foul ways ; in alleviating, instructing, regulating our people; seeking, as for life, that something like spiritual food be imparted them, some real governance and guidance be provided them. It will be a price- less time. For our new period or paroxysm of commercial prosperity will and can, on the old methods of " competition, and Devil take the hindmost," prove but a paroxysm ; a new paroxysm,—likely enough, if we do not use it better, to be our last. In this, of itself, is no salvation. If our trade in twenty years, "flourishing " as never trade flourished, could double itself; yet then also, by the old Laissez-faire method, our population is doubled : we shall then be as we are, only twice as many of us, twice and ten times as unmanageable.

THE ONE UNIVERSAL COMPLETE THING.

Who can despair of governments, that passes a soldiers' guardhouse, or meets a red-coated man on the streets. That a body of men could be got together to kill other men when you bade them—this, a priori, does it not seem one of the impossiblest things ? Yet look, behold it : in the stolidest of do-nothing governments that impossibility is a thing done. See it there, with buff belts, red coats on its back; walking sentry at guardhouses, brushing white breeches in barracks ; an indisputable, palpable fact. Out of grey antiquity, amid all finance-difficulties, scaccarium-tallies, ship-monies, coat-and-conduct monies, and vicissitudes of chance and time, there, down to the present blessed hour, it is.

Often, in these painfully decadent and painfully nascent times, with their distresses, inarticulate gaspiugs and "impossibilities "; meeting a tall Life Guardsman in his snow-white trousers, or seeing those two statuesque Life Guardsmen in their frowning bearskins, pipe-clayed buckskins, on their coal- black, sleek-fiery quadrupeds, riding sentry at the Horse Guards,—it strikes one with a kind of mournful interest, how, in such universal down-rushing and wrecked impotence of almost all old institutions, this oldest fighting institution is still so young. Fresh-complexioned, firm-limbed, six feet by the standard, this fighting-man has verily been got up, and can fight. While so much has not yet got into being, while so much has gone gradually out of it, and become an empty semblance or clothes-suit ; and highest king's-cloaks, mere chimeras parading under them so long, are getting unsightly to the earnest eye, unsightly, almost offensive, like a costlier kind of scarecrow's blanket,— here still is a reality. The man in horse-hair wig advances, promising that he will get me' justice": be takes me into Chancery Law Courts, into decades, half-centuries of hubbub, of distracted jargon ; and does get me—disappointment, almost desperation ; and one refuge—that of dismissing him and his "justice" altogether out of my head. For I have work to do; I cannot spend my decades in mere arguing with other men about the exact wages of my work ; I will work cheerfully with no wages, sooner than with a ten-years' gangrene of Chancery lawsuit in my heart. He of the horse-hair wig is a sort of failure ; no substance, but a fond imagination of the mind. He of the shovel-hat, again, who comes forward professing that he will save my soul-0 ye Eternities, of him in this place be absolute silence ! But he of the red-coat, I say, is a success, and no failure. He will veritably, if he get orders, draw out a long sword and kill me. No mistake there. He is a fact, and not a shadow. Alive in this year forty-three, able and willing to do his work. In dim old centuries, with William Rufus, William of Ipres, or far earlier, he began ; and has come down safe so far. Catapult has given place to cannon, pike has given place to musket, iron mail- shirt to coat of red cloth, saltpetre rope-match to percussion-cap; equipments, circumstances have all changed, and again changed : but the human battle- engine, in the inside of any or of each of these, ready still to do battle, stands there, six feet in standard size. There are Pay-offices, Woolwich Arsenals, there is a Horse Guards, War-Office, Captain-General; persuasive sergeants, with tap of drum, recruit in market-towns and villages ; and on the whole, I say, here is your actual drilled fighting-man ; here are your actual ninety thousand of such, ready to go into any quarter of the world and fight.

Strange, interesting, and yet most mournful to reflect on.