A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE ROW. 237 



theory." Equally original and felicitous is the " al- 

 buminous simplicity " which he ascribes to the Welfs. 

 Newspaper men have never forgiven him for calling 

 them the " gazetteer owls of Minerva ; " and our 

 Catholic brethren can hardly relish his reference to 

 the " consolations " the nuns deal out to the sick as 

 " poisoned gingerbread." In " Frederick," one comes 

 upon such phrases as " milk-faced," " bead-roll histo- 

 ries," " heavy pipe-clay natures," a " stiff-jointed, al- 

 gebraic kind of piety," etc. 



Those who persist in trying Carlyle as a philoso- 

 pher and man of ideas, miss his purport. He had no 

 philosophy, and laid claim to none, except what he 

 got from the German metaphysicians, views which 

 crop out here and there in " Sartor." He was a 

 preacher of righteousness to his generation, and a 

 rebuker of its shams and irreverences, and as such 

 he cut deep, cut to the bone, and to the marrow of 

 the bone. That piercing, agonized, prophetic, yet 

 withal melodious and winsome voice, how it rises 

 through and above the multitudinous hum and clatter 

 of contemporary voices in England, and alone falls 

 upon the ear as from out the primal depths of moral 

 conviction and power.! He is the last man in the 

 world to be reduced to a system or tried by logical 

 tests. You might as well try to bind the sea with 

 chains. His appeal is to the intuitions the imagina- 

 tion, the moral sense. His power of mental abstrac- 

 tion was not great; he could not deal in abstract 

 ideas. When he attempted to state his philosophy, 



