Various

“ If this service is severe enough to shake their philosophy during the sleety showers of February, and the withering blasts of March; the first break of sunshine, and the first streak of blue sky, makes their impatience amount to agony. The rest of the season only renders their suffering more inveterate; until at last the discharge of cannon from the Park, and the sound of trumpets at the doors of the House of Lords, a gracious speech from the throne, and a still more gracious smile from the sitter on it, let them loose from their task, and they are free, facetious, and foxhunters once more. ”

“ Thy whole munificence, thy whole magnanimity, thy whole generosity, to the living lights of thy sullen region of toil, trimming, and tribulation, of the dulness of dukes and the mountainous fortunes of pinmakers—is exactly £1200 a-year! and this to be divided among the whole generation of the witty and the wise, of the sons and daughters of the muse,—the whole "school of the prophets," the lustres of the poetry and the science of England! £1200 a-year for the only men of their generation who will be remembered for five minutes by the generation to come. ”

“ But nothing can be more childish than to suppose, that Pitt would have given his praise to tawdry metaphor, that Burke would have done honour to feeble truisms, that Fox should have been unable to distinguish between logic and looseness of reasoning, or that the whole assembly, who had been in the habit of hearing those pre-eminent orators, should have been tricked by theatric dexterity or charlatan rhetoric into homage. The oration must have been a most magnificent performance, and we have only to deplore the loss of a great work of genius. ”

“ The hapless generation that now reads these words ought to hold its peace when it has read them, and sink into unutterable reflections, not unmixed with tears, and some substitute for 'sackcloth and ashes,' if it liked. In its poor canting, sniffling, flimsy vocabulary, there is no word that can make any response to them. This man has a living God-inspired soul in him, not an enchanted artificial 'substitute for salt,' as our fashion is. They that have human eyes can look at him; they that have only owl-eyes need not. ”

“ Veteran men: men of might and men of war, their faces are as the faces of lions, and their feet are swift as the roes upon the mountains; not beautiful to honourable gentlemen at this moment!
"'You call yourselves a Parliament,' continues my Lord General, in clear blaze of conflagration. 'You are no Parliament! Some of you are drunkards,' and his eye flashes on poor Mr Chalmer, an official man of some value, addicted to the bottle; 'some of you are'—and he glares into Henry Martin and the poor Sir Peter, who rose to order, lewd livers both—'living in open contempt of God's, commandments. ”

“ The grand problems are, how to level the mountain, and to drain the sea: or, if we must leave the Alps to be still the throne of the thunder, and suffer even the Zuyder-zee to roll its sullen waves over its incorrigible shallows; yet to tunnel the mountain and pass the sea with a rapidity, which makes us regardless of the interposition of obstacles that once stopped the march of armies, and made the impregnable fortresses of kingdoms. But the still severer trials of human intelligence are, how to clothe, feed, educate, and discipline the millions which every passing year pours into the world. ”

“ England, the defender of all, was the sufferer for all. Every principle of her financial prosperity, every material of her military prowess, every branch of her constitutional system, every capacity of her political existence, her Church, her State, and her Legislature, were successively compelled into the most perilous yet most powerful display; and the close of the most furious hostility which Europe had ever seen, only exhibited in a loftier point of view the victorious strength which principle confers upon a people. ”

“ It must be acknowledged, however, that the Whig maxim, though a watchword of faction, was no blunder of fact. A commercial treaty with the French in that day, or in any other day before or since, was a dream. To bring the Frenchman to any rational agreement on the subject of trade, or to keep him steady to any agreement whatever, has been a problem, which no British statesman has been able to solve. No commercial treaty, even with all the genius of Pitt, has ever produced to England the value of the paper on which it is written. ”

“ Thus every man one knowledge lacks;
Our error is—we read the score
Of each man as he walks before,
And bear our tickets at our backs.
Gratian.—True, indeed—as old fables mostly are. There is in them the depth of wisdom acquired by experience.
Curate.—I fear experience alone won't do much. It seems thrown away upon most people. They continue follies to the end. I suppose Cicero thought himself a poet; though it may be doubted if he wrote the line as Juvenal gives it,
"O fortunatam natam me consule Romam." ”

“ Even Cromwell himself would have Barbadoesed him.
"This last of our heroisms!" God grant it is the last! It is only out of another religious war that another such heroism can arise. If church and dissent should take up arms, and, instead of controversies carried on in pamphlets, upon tradition and white surplices, should blow out each other's brains with gunpowder, then Mr Carlyle would see his "heroic ones" revive upon the earth.
"The Christian doctrines which then dwelt alive in every heart, have now in a manner died out of all hearts." Only the cant of them dwells alive with us. ”

“ Wherever blows are rife, Hibernia's sons appear; in big fights or little wars the shamrock gleams in the van. No matter the cloth, so long as the quarrel be there. In Austrian white, or Spanish yellow, or Prussian blue,—even in the blood-coloured breeks of Gallia's legions, but especially, and preferred above all, in the "old red rag" of the British grenadier, have Irishmen displayed their valour. ”

“ We have been always told that the great thing is to secure a great importation; that such a thing must necessarily lead to a corresponding increase of exportation;—that all apprehension about the imports being paid in gold, and not in manufactures, are chimerical;—that the sooner the inferior lands in the British islands go out of cultivation the better;—that ample food for the inhabitants will be obtained from foreign states; and that the agriculturists thrown out of employment by the change will be rapidly absorbed, and more profitably employed in sustaining our extended manufactures. ”

“ No man surely knew better than he, that at the conclusion of the civil war the army had become paramount. He could sometimes speak of this army with the natural pride of a soldier, with the full consciousness of the power it possessed, and had conferred on him; and yet, at other times, he would talk of this terrible force in the puling strain, in more than the drawl and drivel of the conventicle. As Lord High Protector, addressing his first parliament, he says:—"I had the approbation of the officers of the army, in the three nations of England, Scotland, and Ireland. ”

“ If there is one spectacle more odious than another of all which history presents to us, whether it take place amongst Mahometan or Christian, Catholic or Protestant, it is this:—to see men practising all the terrible brutalities of war, treading down their enemies, doing all that rage and the worst passions prompt, and doing all amidst exclamations of piety, devout acknowledgments of submission to Divine will, and professions of gratitude to God. ”

“ The plain answer is, that they are starving; that their employment as well as subsistence is gone; that they have neither the means of transport, nor any money to buy grain when they reach the neighbourhood of the bursting warehouses. But then they will be absorbed in the great manufacturing districts, where their labour will be more profitable to themselves and others, than in their native wilds! Yes, there is a process of absorption goes on, on the occurrence of such a crisis; but it is not the absorption of labour by capital, but of capital by pauperism. ”

“ His first measure, that of sending a summons in his own name, to persons of his own choice, and thus, without any popular election whatever, assembling what is called the Little Parliament, or Barebones Parliament, shows a singular audacity, and proves how little trammelled he was himself by traditionary or constitutional maxims. He who would not allow the Long Parliament to recruit its numbers, and thus escape the perils of a free election of an altogether new assembly, extricates himself from the same embarrassment by electing the whole Parliament himself. ”

“ The world is checkered here not less than in the noisy and elegant capital; and man's peculiarities, man's excellencies, and man's defects, follow him even into the heart of these wild mountains, showing themselves in these smaller groups, not less strongly than amid the crowded streets of Paris! How should it be otherwise? Does not every one come hither to unbend, to throw off the stiff mask of metropolitan society for the moment, and to become themselves natural while they invoke the aid of nature's healthy influence? ”

“ No country in the wildest portion of the earth has exhibited a more lamentable picture of insubordination, dissension, and public misery. The peasantry gradually sinking into the most abject poverty; the gentry living on loans; the laws set at defiance; the demand for rents answered by assassination; a fierce faction existing in the bowels of the land, as if for the express purpose of inflaming every passion of an ignorant people into frenzy, and deepening every visitation of nature into national ruin. At this moment, England is paying for the daily food of two millions of people ”

“ This being a fixed law of nature, evidently intended to check the growth of old states, and promote the extension of mankind in the uncultivated parts of the earth, it is in vain to contend against it. So violently does free-trade displace industry on both sides, where it is fully established, that it is scarcely possible to conceive that two nations should at the same time run into the same glaring mistake; and thence the common complaint that no benefit is gained, but an infinite loss sustained, by its establishment in any one country, and that reciprocity is on one side only. ”

“ He felt that he could administer the government better than any of the men around him: we will give him credit, too, for the full intention to administer it conscientiously, and for the good of the nation; but for those enlarged views of the more enlightened patriot, who is solicitous to provide not alone for the present necessities, but for the future long life of a people—he had them not. ”

“ The Commonwealth is proclaimed by sound of trumpet. The king and the lords are cashiered and dismissed. A house of representatives and a council of state form the constitution of England. Cromwell is one of the council. But for the present the war in Ireland carries him away from the scene of politics.
On this Irish campaign, Mr Carlyle breaks out, as may be supposed, in a strain of exultation. He always warms at blood and battle. His piety, or his poetry—not admirable whichever it may be—glows here to a red heat. ”

“ You are far more anxious, my dear Eusebius, to know somewhat of the progress or the result of the Curate's misfortune, than to read his or my translations from Catullus. I have a great mind to punish that love of mischief in you, by burying the whole affair in profound secresy. It is fortunate for him that you are not here, or you would surely indulge your propensity, and with malicious invention put the whole parish, with the Curate, into inextricable confusion. It is bad enough as it is. ”

“ Why! the happiest portion of my life is that which I have passed in the land of dreams: one third of my existence has been spent there—and I have friends, and well-known faces, and peaceful valleys, and bright streams, and strains of ethereal music, which are still and ever vivid in my waking mind, but at night call me to themselves, and wrap me in a state of enjoyment which certainly this poor weak body of mind never could be capable of experiencing. ”

“ The distress that prevails, therefore, is not owing to any deficiency of food for man or animals in the United Kingdom, for as much has come in, of foreign produce, as has disappeared of domestic. It is entirely to be ascribed to the supplanting, in the national subsistence, of a large part of home produce by an equally large part of foreign produce. And in the social, commercial, and national effects which we see around us, we may discern, as in a mirror, not merely the probable but certain effects of such a substitution if perpetuated to future times. ”