" [Footnote:
Carlyle, _Miscellanies_, iii. 292, 293.]
Never has the task of the literary historian been more accurately
defined than in this passage; and never do we feel so bitterly the
gulf between the ideal and the actual performance, at which more than
one man of talent has since tried his hand, as when we read it. It
strikes perhaps the first note of Carlyle's lifelong war against
"Dryasdust". But it contains at least two other points on which it is
well for us to pause.
The first is the inseparable bond which Carlyle saw to exist between
the poetry of a nation and its history; the connection which inevitably
follows from the fact that both one and the other are the expression
of its character. This is a vein of thought that was first struck by
Vico and by Montesquieu; but it was left for the German philosophers,
in particular Fichte and Hegel, to see its full significance; and
Carlyle was the earliest writer in this country to make it his own.
It is manifest that the connection between the literature and the
history of a nation may be taken from either side.
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