A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE KOW 223 



into froth, " no butter of sweet thought or sweet 

 content at all. Yet Carlyle could say of her, "Not 

 a bad little dame at all. She and I did aye very 

 weel together; and 'tweel, it was not every one 

 that could have done with her," which was doubt- 

 less the exact truth. Froude also speaks from per- 

 sonal knowledge when he says: "His was the soft 

 heart and hers the stern one." 



We are now close on to the cardinal fact of Car- 

 lyle' s life and teachings, namely, the urgency of 

 his quest for heroes and heroic qualities. This 

 is the master key to him; the main stress of his 

 preaching and writing is here. He is the medium 

 and exemplar of the value of personal force and 

 prowess, and he projected this thought into current 

 literature and politics, with the emphasis of gun- 

 powder and torpedoes. He had a vehement and 

 overweening conceit in man. A sort of anthropo- 

 morphic greed and hunger possessed him always, 

 an insatiable craving for strong, picturesque charac- 

 ters, and for contact and conflict with them. This 

 was his ruling passion (and it amounted to a pas- 

 sion) all his days. He fed his soul on heroes and 

 heroic qualities, and all his literary exploits were 

 a search for these things. Where he found them 

 not, where he did not come upon some trace of 

 them in books, in society, in politics, he saw only 

 barrenness and futility. He was an idealist who 

 was inhospitable to ideas; he must have a man, the 

 flavor and stimulus of ample concrete personalities. 

 "In the country, ".he said, writing to his brother 



