loyalty," the hero an embodiment of the spiritual exuberance and vitality that in Carlyle's idiom went by the name of wonder. The prototype of the hero was the prophet.

Carlyle's admiration for great men—Mohammed, Shakespeare, Cromwell, Frederick the Great—divided him further from those who counted on the weight of institutions, traditions, and social habits to provide continuity and discourage rash social experimentation. Heroism was disruptive, in Carlyle's view. Its value lay precisely in its unsettling effect on habits and routine. It divided men and women more often than it brought them together. Carlyle's conception of the man of action had something in common with republican conceptions, and his objection to a political order founded on self-interest occasionally recalled the republican tradition. In the age of machinery, as he called it in "Signs of the Times," men were mistakenly assumed "to be guided only by their self-interests." Government became a "good balancing of these; and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter." In "Characteristics" as well as in Sartor Resartus, Carlyle spoke of "virtue" with an awareness of the word's resonant overtones, associating it with "Chivalrous Valour," "Nobleness of Mind," and "heroic inspiration" and with a type of bold, impulsive action that sickened and declined when it began to be "philosophised of." ^*

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In a letter describing his arduous method of literary composition, Carlyle repeatedly spoke of the "virtue" it required: "I go into the business with all the intelligence, patience, silence, and other gifts and virtues that I have; find that ten or a hundred times as many could be profitably expended there, and still prove insufficient; and as for plan, I find that every new business requires as it were a new scheme of operations, which amid infinite bungling and plunging unfolds itself as intervals (very scantily after all) as I get along. The great thing is, Not to stop and break down; to know that virtue is very indispensable, that one must not stop because new and ever new drafts upon one's virtue must be honoured!"

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