Carlyle on India Paper

 I'd been eyeing it for months as it sat unpurchased on the shelves of my favourite local antiques shop – a single-volume, pocket-sized edition of Carlyle's The French Revolution, printed on India paper and published by Chapman & Hall in 1901. Finally, the other day, I actually bought it, and for the very fair price of £6 (it's in excellent condition for its age). But am I going to read it, after all these years of meaning to? Reader, I am (though perhaps in instalments – there are many, many pages in that India-paper volume). I have begun, and I'm loving it. It's history writing at its most exhlilarating and colourful, the work of a writer bursting with energy and ideas, with a brilliant, fervid style and a very definite philosophy of history. Every page is peppered with exclamation marks and question marks (the latter most often appended to rhetorical questions) and every page drives the narrative along with irresistible force. It could, indeed, hardly be more different from the way history is written today. Even though I cannot pretend to understand Carlyle's every reference and allusion (I don't know enough of the history of the period) I'm hugely enjoying being carried along on the great surging rollers of Carlyle's prose.  
  Here is a representative passage, about the 'decadent' age into which Louis XV was born. It has, I think, a certain contemporary relevance...
'But of those decadent ages in which no Ideal either grows or blossoms? When Belief and Loyalty have passed away, and only the cant and false echo of them remains; and all Solemnity has become Pageantry; and the Creed of persons in authority has become one of two things: an Imbecility or a Macchiavelism? Alas, of these ages World-History can take no notice; they have to become compressed more and more, and finally suppressed in the Annals of Mankind; blotted out as spurious, – which indeed they are. Hapless ages: wherein, if ever in any, it is an unhappiness to be born. To be born, and to learn only, by every tradition and example, that God's Universe is Belial's and a Lie; and the 'Supreme Quack' the hierarch of men! In which mournfullest faith, nevertheless, do we not see whole generations (two, and sometimes even three successively) live, what they call living; and vanish, – without chance or reappearance?'
Phew.