A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE KOW 217 



and our Catliolic brethren can hardly relish his ref- 

 erence to the " consolations " the nuns deal out to 

 the sick as "poisoned gingerbread." In "Freder- 

 ick" one comes upon such phrases as "milk-faced," 

 ''bead-roll histories," "heavy pipe-clay natures," a 

 " stiff- jointed, algebraic 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, pro- 

 phetic, 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 imagination, the moral sense. His 

 power of mental abstraction was not great; he could 

 not deal in abstract ideas. When he attempted to 

 state his philosophy, as in the fragment called 

 "Spiritual Optics," which Froude gives, he is far 

 from satisfactory. His mathematical proficiency 

 seemed to avail him but little in the region of pure 

 ideality. His mind is precipitated at once upon 



