236 A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE ROW. 



phantasmal rumors, no ray of direct daylight visiting 

 the poor Sovereign Woman ; who is lazy, not ma- 

 lignant, if she could avoid it ; mainly a mass of esu- 

 rient oil, with alkali on the back of alkali poured- 

 in, 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 vocab- 

 ulary ! 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 Frederick and Voltaire ; they were " mere ephem- 

 era; contemporary eaters, scramblers for provender, 

 talkers of acceptable hearsay ; and related merely to 

 the butteries and wiggeries of their time, and not re- 

 lated 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 ravening, 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 



