216 FRESH FIELDS 



at this rate for ten years past, till, by pouring and 

 by stirring, they get her to the state of soap and 

 froth." 



Carlyle had a narrow escape from being the most 

 formidable blackguard the world had ever seen; 

 was, indeed, in certain moods, a kind of divine 

 blackguard, — a purged and pious Rabelais, who 

 could bespatter the devil with more telling epithets 

 than any other man who ever lived. What a 

 tongue, what a vocabulary! He fairly oxidizes, 

 burns up, the object of his opprobrium, in the 

 stream of caustic epithets he turns upon it. He 

 had a low opinion of the contemporaries of Freder- 

 ick and Voltaire: they were "mere ephemera; con- 

 temporary eaters, scramblers for provender, talkers 

 of acceptable hearsay; and related merely to the 

 butteries and wiggeries of their time, and not 

 related to the Perennialities at all, as these two 

 were." He did not have to go very far from home 

 for some of the lineaments of Voltaire's portrait: 

 "He had, if no big gloomy devil in him among the 

 bright angels that were there, a multitude of raven- 

 ing, tumultuary imps, or little devils, very ill- 

 chained^ and was lodged, he and his restless little 

 devils, in a skin far too thin for him and them ! " 



Of Frederick's cynicism he says there was "al- 

 ways a kind of vinegar cleanness in it, except in 

 theory." Equally original and felicitous is the 

 " albuminous simplicity " which he ascribes to the 

 Welfs. Newspaper men have never forgiven him 

 for calling them the "gazetteer owls of Minerva;" 



