Another memorial bust to Carlyle was unveiled in the central
branch of the Chelsea Free Library on Wednesday. It was a bust taken from the studio of Sir E. Boehm. A Chelsea free library is certainly a very appropriate place for a bust of Carlyle, who was an omnivorous reader, and might have made great use of such a library at Chelsea, when he first went to live there, if it had then existed. But these occasions for gossiping about Carlyle are multiplied too much. It is very likely that lie has written in his "French Revolution" the most remarkable and characteristic book of his century ; but he has done almost as much to compress the thought of his century into the deep but narrow grooves to which his own thought was habitually confined, as to deepen and intensify it, The hero-worship lavished on him is becoming a little extravagant, not to say idolatrous. He impressed on us some great truths and some not inconsiderable falsehoods. There is a time to keep silence and a time to speak. Surely the time to keep silence about Carlyle,—for an interval at least,—has fully arrived.
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