ible,
that merely which is received as such by the popular acquiescence. It
must needs be a truth which the spirit, cleared and strengthened by
manifold knowledge and experience, and above all by steadfast endeavour,
can rest in and say: This I mean; not because it is told me, were my
informants all the schools of Rabbins or a hierarchy of angels; but
because I have looked into it, tried it, found it healthful and
sufficient, and thus know that it will stand the stress of life. We may
be right or wrong in our estimate of Mr. Carlyle, but we cannot be
mistaken in supposing that on this kind of anvil have all truly great
men been fashioned, and of metal thus honest and enduring.

Further it must be said that, true as is his devotion to the truth, so
flaming and cordial is his hatred of the false, in whatever shapes and
names delusions may show themselves. Affectations, quackeries, tricks,
frauds, swindlings, commercial or literary, baseless speculations, loud
ear-catching rhetoric, melodramatic sentiment, moral drawlings and
hyperboles, religious cant, clever political shifts, and conscious or
half-conscious fallacies, all in his view, come under the same hangman's
rubric,--proceed from the same offal heart. However plausible, popular,
and successful, however dignified by golden and purple names, they are
lies against ourselves, against whatever in us is not altogether
reprobate and infernal. His great argument, theme of his song, spirit of
his language, lies in this, that there is a work for man worth doing,
which is to be done with the whole of his heart, not the half or any
other fraction. Therefore, if any reserve be made, any corner kept for
something unconnected with this true work and sincere purpose, the whole
is thereby vitiated and accurst. So far as his arm reaches he is undoing
whatever in nature is holy: ruining whatever is the real creation of the
great worker of all. This truth of purpose is to the soul what life is
to the body of man; that which unites and organises the mass, keeping
all the parts in due proportion and concord, and restraining them from
sudden corruption into worthless dust....

Anyone who should take up the writings themselves with no other
preconception than that which we have attempted to give him, would
doubtless be startled at the strangeness of the style which prevails
more or less throughout them. They are not careless, headstrong,
passionate, confused; but they bear a constant loo