1
10
3
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/aa9034fb802a67f4f71e5c5df082a6ae.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=SiMJdZTg65Cg-sBpsfhKY7NcrkANs562F-yIHUBSY7-u0camaTm06ZUKcWurYsDXyJzqKLtbeXl85NMeTfVtItjbPap0KX1XTccbDPjj3e1gbDjOHilSKg8NNuNs7UqCKUWMCbxmhzCyQWaCjQH85eGOSqZnxDNvOGTztpK4M-42DAUp9W96YrpvPq%7EafU-tcL28oA87KMg4Gfb3Gu2EhLsMP7EuIowTBbGi9oijprW0lyV8RC07ovFtX8w78ww%7EW%7E4nI2SGGSv64Xhhhe8dfpyShm%7EDatee5EGxj0D4JYp9Mqhfy9BGQrPmZt664Z8j%7EeOEAKYLn8fPwo-ptDSkSg__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
f10602be0024af9d0f5626730070fd08
PDF Text
Text
THOMAS CARLYLE:
DELIVERED BEFORE THE
SOUTH PLACE RELIGIOUS SOCIETY,
FEBRUARY 13th, 1881,
BY
MONCURE D. CONWAY, M.A.
LONDON :
SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY.
Price 2d.
�LONDON
FREDEEICK G. HICKSON AND CO.
257, HIGH HOLBOEN, W.C.
�o
ANTHEM.
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,.
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve ;
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind : We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
HYMN.
Though wandering in a strange land,
Though on the waste no altar stand,
Take comfort thou art not alone
While Faith hath marked thee for her own.
Would’st thou a temple ? Look above,
The heavens stretch over all in love :
A book ? For thine evangile scan
The wondrous history of man.
The holy band of saints renowned
Embrace thee, brother-like, around ;
Their sufferings and their triumphs rise
In hymns immortal to the skies.
And though no organ-peal be heard,
In harmony the winds are stirred;
And there the morning stars upraise
Their ancient songs of deathless praise.
After Carlyle.
�4
READINGS.
FROM “ ECCLESIASTICUS.”
Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat
us.
God hath wrought great glory by them through his great
power from the beginning.
Such as did hear rule in their kingdoms, men renowned for
their power, giving counsel by their understanding, and
declaring prophecies :
Leaders of the people by their counsels, and by their
knowledge of learning meet for the people, wise and eloquent
in their instructions :
Such as found out musical tunes, and recited verses in
writing :
Rich men furnished with ability, living peaceably in their
habitations :
All these were honoured in their generations and were the
glory of their times.
There be of them, that have left a name behind them, that
their praises might be reported.
And some there be, which have no memorial. . .
But these were merciful men, whose righteousness hath not
been forgotten.
With their seed shall continually remain a good inhen'tance. . . .
Their seed shall remain for ever, and their glory shall not
be blotted out.
Their bodies are buried in peace ; but their name liveth for
evermore.
The people will tell of their wisdom, and the congregation
will show forth their praise.
�FROM THE WORKS OF THOMAS CARLYLE.
I.
How, when. I look back, it was a strange isolation I then
lived in. The men and women around me, even speaking
with me were but figures; I had practically forgotten that
they were alive, that they were not automatic. In the midst
■of their crowded streets and assemblages, I walked solitary ;
and (except as it was my own heart, not another’s, that I
kept devouring) savage also, as is the tiger in his jungle.
Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, have
fancied myself tempted and tormented of a Devil; for a Hell,
as I imagine, without Life, though only diabolic Life, were
more frightful: but in our age of Down-pulling and Disbelief,
the very Devil has been pulled down. You cannot so
much as believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all
void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility;
it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling
■on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. Oh,
the vast gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death ! Why
was the Living banished thither, companionless, conscious ?
Why, if there is no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your
■God ? . . .
From suicide a certain aftershine of Christianity withheld
me. . . .
So had it lasted, as in bitter protracted Death-agony,
through long years. The heart within me, unvisited by any
heavenly dewdrop, was smouldering in sulphurous, slow
consuming fire. Almost since earliest memory I had shed no
tear; or once only when I, murmuring half-audibly, recited
Faust’s Death song, that wild Selig der den er im Siegesglanze findet (Happy whom he finds in Battle’s splendour),
and thought that of this last friend even I was not forsaken,
�6
that Destiny itself could not doom me not to die. Havingno hope, neither had I any definite fear, were it of Man or of
Devil; nay, I often felt as if it might be solacing could the
Arch-Devil himself, though in Tartarian terrors, rise to me
that I might tell him a little of mind. And yet, strangely
enough, I lived in a continual indefinite, pining fear;
tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what:
it seemed as if all things in the Heavens above and the Earth
beneath would hurt me ; as if the Heavens and the Earth
were but boundless jaws of a devouring monster, wherein I,
palpitating, waited to be devoured.
Full of such humour, and perhaps the miserablest man in
the whole French Capital or Suburbs, was I, one sultry Dogday, after much perambulation, toiling along the dirty little
• Rue Sainte-Thomas de TEnfer, among civic rubbish enough,
in a close atmosphere, and over pavements hot as Nebuchad
nezzar’s Furnace, whereby ^doubtless my spirits were little
cheered ; when all at once there rose a Thought in me, and I
asked myself, 1 What art thou afraid of ? Wherefore, like a
coward, dost thou for ever pip and whimper, and go cowering
and trembling ? Despicable biped ! what is the sum-total of'
the worst that lies before thee ? Death ? Well, Death ; and
say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil or Man
may, will, or can do against thee ! Hast thou not a heart;
can’st thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of
Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy
feet, while it consumes thee ! Let it come, then ; I will meet
it and defy it! ’ And as I so thought, there rushed like a
stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear
away from me for ever. I was strong, of unknown strength,,
a spirit, almost a god. Ever from that time the temper of my
misery was changed ; not fear or whining Sorrow was it, but
Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance.
�Thus had. the JSverlasting JVo pealed, authoritatively through
•all the recesses of my Being, of my Me ; and then was it that
my whole Me stood up, in native God-created majesty, and
with emphasis recorded its protest. Such a Protest, the most
important transaction in Life, may that same Indignation
and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly
called. The Everlasting No, had said, “ Behold, thou art
fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil’s) ; ”
to which my whole Me now made answer, “ I am not thine,
but free, and for ever hate thee ! ”
It is from this hour that I incline to date my spiritual NewBirth, or Baphometic fire-baptism perhaps I directly there
upon began to be a Man.
II.
Sterling returned to England ; took orders,—‘ ordained
deacon at Chichester on Trinity Sunday, in 1834 ’ (he never
technically became priest.) ....
The bereaved young lady has taken the vail, then ! Even
so. “ Life is growing all so dark and brutal; must be re
deemed into human, if it will continue life. Some pious
heroism, to give a human colour to life again, on any terms, —
even on impossible ones !
To such length can transcendental moonshine, cast by some
morbidly radiating Coleridge into the chaos of a fermenting
life, act magically there and produce divulsions and convul
sions and diseased developments. So dark and abstruse,
■without lamp or authentic finger-post, is the course of pious
■genius towards the Eternal Kingdoms grown. No fixed
highway more; the old spiritual highways and recognized
paths to the Eternal, now all torn up and flung in heaps, sub
merged in unutterable boiling mud-oceans of Hypocrisy and
Unbelievability, of brutal living Atheism and damnable dead
�8
putrescent Cant : surely a tragic pilgrimage for all mortals;
Darkness, and. the mere shadow of Death, enveloping all
things from pole to pole ; and in the raging gulf-currents,
offering us will-o’-wisps for loadstars,—intimating that there
are no stars, nor ever were, except certain Old-Jew ones which
have now gone out. Once more, a tragic pilgrimage for all
mortals ; and for the young pious soul, winged with genius,
and passionately seeking land, and passionately abhorrent of
floating carrion withal, more tragical than for any !—A pil
grimage we must all undertake nevertheless, and make the
best of with our respective means. Some arrive ; a glorious
few : many must be lost,—go down upon the floating wreck
which they took for land. Nay, courage ! These also, so far
as there was any heroism in them, have bequeathed their life
as a contribution to us, have valiantly laid their bodies in the
chasm for us ; of these also there is no ray of heroism lost,—
and, on the whole, what else of them could or should be‘ saved ’ at any time ? Courage, and ever Forward !
Concerning this attempt of Sterling’s to find sanctuary in
the old. Church, and desperately grasp the hem of her garment
in such manner, there will at present be many opinions : and
mine must be recorded here in flat reproval of it, in mere
pitying condemnation of it, as a rash, false, unwise and
unpermitted step. Nay, among the evil lessons of his Time
to poor Sterling I cannot but account this the worst; properly
indeed, as we may say, the apotheosis, the solemn apology
and consecration, of all the evil lessons that were in it to
him. Alas, if we did remember the divine and awful
nature of God’s Truth, and had not so forgotten it as poor
doomed creatures never did before—should we, durst we in
our most audacious moments, think of wedding it to the
world’s Untruth, which is also, like all untruths, the Devil’s ?'
Only in the world’s last lethargy can such things be done,.
�and accounted safe and pious ! Fools ! “ Do you think the
Living God is a buzzard idol,” sternly asks Milton, that you
dare address Him in this manner ?—Such darkness, thick
sluggish clouds of cowardice and oblivious baseness, have
accumulated on us; thickening as if towards the eternal
sleep ! It is not now known, what never needed proof or
statement before, that Religion is not a doubt; that it is a
certainty,—-or else a mockery and horror. That none or all
of the many things we are in doubt about, and need to have
demonstrated and rendered probable, can by any alchemy be
made a “ Religion ” for us; but are and must continue a
baleful, quiet or unquiet, Hypocrisy for us ; and bring—
salvation, do we fancy ? I think, it is another thing they
will bring ; and are, on all hands, visibly bringing, this good
while I . . . No man of Sterling’s veracity, had he clearly
consulted his own heart, or had his own heart been capable
of clearly responding, and not been dazzled and bewildered
by transient fantasies and theosophic moonshine, could have
undertaken this function. His heart would have answered :
11 No, thou canst not. What is incredible to thee, thou shalt
not, at thy soul’s peril, attempt to believe ! Elsewhither for a
refuge, or die here. Go to Perdition if thou must,—but not
with a lie in thy mouth-; by the Eternal Maker, no ! ”
III.
There is a perenninal nobleness, and even sacredness in
Work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high
calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and
earnestly works ; in Idleness alone there is perpetual despair.
Work, never so Mammonish, mean, is in communication with
Nature ; the real desire to get Work done will itself lead one
more and more to truth, to Nature’s appointments and regu
lations, which are truth.
�20
Consider how, even in the meanest sorts of Labour, thewhole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony,
the instant he sets himself to work. Doubt, Desire, Sorrow.
Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these like hell-dogs,
lie beleaguering the soul of the poor day worker, as of every
man ; but he bends himself with free valour against his task,
and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off
into their caves.
Blessed is he who has found his work ; let him ask no other
blessedness. He has a work, a Life-purpose ; he has found it
and will follow it. Labour is Life ; from the innocent heart
of the Worker rises his god-given Force, the sacred celestial
Life-essence breathed into him by Almighty God ; from his
inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness—to all knowledge,
‘ self-knowledge ’ and much else, so soon as Work fitly begins.
And again, hast thou valued Patience, Courage, Persever
ance, Openness to light; readiness to own thyself mistaken,
to do better next time ? All these, all virtues, in wrestling
with the dim brute powers of Fact, in ordering of thy fellows
in such wrestle, there and elsewhere not at all, thou wilt
continually learn.
Work is of a religious nature :—work is of a brave nature ;
which it is the aim of all religion to be. All work of man is
as the swimmer’s : a waste ocean threatens to devour him ; if
he front it not bravely, it will keep its word. By incessant
wise defiances of it, lusty rebuke and buffet of it, behold how
loyally it supports him, bears him as its conqueror along.
‘ Religion,’ I said, for properly speaking all true Work is
Religion ; and whatsoever religion is not work may go and
dwell among the Brahmins, Antinomians, Spinning Dervishes,
and where it will; with me it shall have no harbour. Admi
rable was that of the old monks, ‘ Larborare est orare, Work
is Worship.’
�11
Older than all preached Gospels was this unpreached, inar
ticulate, but ineradicable, forever enduring Gospel : Work,
and therein have well being. Man, Son of Earth and of Heaven,
lies there not, in the innermost heart of thee, a spirit of
active Method, a Force for work:—and burns like a painfullysmouldering fire, giving thee no rest till thou unfold it, till
thou write it down in benificent Facts around thee ! What is
immethodic, waste, thou shall make methodic, regulated,
arable ; obedient and productive to thee. Wheresover thou
findest Disorder, there is thy eternal enemy ; attack him
swiftly, subdue him, make Order of him, the subject not of
Chaos, but of Intelligence, Divinity and Thee ! But above
all, where thou findest Ignorance, Stupidity, Brute-mindedness, attack it, I say, smite it wisely, unweariedly, and rest
not while thou livest, and it lives, but smite, smite, in the
name of God! . . .
“ As to the Wages of work, there might innumerable things
be said. . . . Nay, at bottom, dost thou need any reward ?
“ My brother, the brave man has to give his life away.
Give it, I advise thee ; thou dost not expect to sell thy Life
in an adequate manner ? What price, for example, would
content thee ? The just price of thy Life to thee—why, God’s
entire Creation to thyself, the whole Universe of Space, the
whole Eternity of Time, and what they hold : that is the
price which would content thee : that, and if thou wilt be
candid, nothing short of that! It is thy all; and for it thou
would’st have all. Thou art an unreasonable mortal;—or
rather thou art a poor infinite mortal, who, in thy narrow clay
prison here, seemest so unreasonable ! Thou wilt never sell
thy Life, or any part of thy Life, in a satisfactory manner.
Give it, like a royal heart ; let the price be Nothing ; thou
hast then in a certain sense got all for it ! ”
�12
HYMN.
So here hath been dawning
Another blue day :
Think, wilt thou let it
Slip useless away ?
Out of eternity
This new day is born ;
Into eternity
At night will return.
Behold it aforetime
No eye ever did ;
So soon it for ever
From all eyes is hid.
Here hath been dawning
Another blue day :
Think, wilt thou let it
Slip useless away ?
Carlyle.
�13
ANTHEM.
The future hides in it
Gladness and sorrow;
We press still thorow,
Nought that abides in it
Daunting us,—Onward.
And solemn before us,
Veiled the dark Portal ;
Goal of all mortal :—
Stars silent rest o’er us,
Graves under us silent.
While earnest thou gazest.
Comes boding of terror,
Comes phantasm and error ;
Perplexes the bravest
With doubt and misgiving.
But heard are the Voices,
Heard are the sages,
The Worlds, and the Ages :
“ Choose well; your choice is
Brief, and yet endless.
“ Here eyes do regard you
In Eternity’s stillness ;
Here is all fulness,
Ye brave to reward you.
Work, and despair not 1 ”
Goethe, th. by Carlyle.
��THOMAS CARLYLE.
Thomas Carlyle was buried, on Thursday last, in the
village of Ecclefechan, long ago raised from obscurity
by being his birthplace, now consecrated by holding
his dust. The public eye had turned rather to that
spot near Edinburgh, where, amid the mouldering
walls of Haddington Cathedral, among her kindred,
lies the wife who so long shared the toils and
furthered the aims of his life. How strong were the
ties that bound him to that spot is shown in the
tribute on her tomb. It may, in a sense, be unim
portant where one is buried; yet when a man rests
from his labours, his works do follow him. If he
have lived for a high aim, his life is a testimony;
and, be it great or small, that testimony should be
faithful to the facts, and its influence continue in the
direction of the life. There was a genuine instinct
beneath the desire of the patriarchs to be gathered
to their people. Of Jacob it is written—“ These are
�16
the twelve tribes of Israel: and this is it that their
father spake unto them, and blessed them: every
one according to his blessing he blessed them. And
he charged them, and said unto them, I am to be
gathered unto my people : bury me with my fathers
in the cave that is in the field of Ephron the Hittite.
In the grave that is in the field of Macpelah, which
is before Mamre, in the land of Canaan, which
Abraham bought with the field of Ephron the Hittite,
fbr a possession of a burying-place. (There they
buried Abraham and Sarah his wife; there they
buried Isaac and his wife ; and there I buried Leah.)
The purchase of the field and of the cave that is
therein was from the children of Heth. And when
Jacob had made an end of commanding his sons, he
gathered up his feet into the bed and yielded up the
ghost.” The patriarch died in an Egyptian palace :
his son had become Prime Minister of Pharaoh: his
body might have rested in a pyramid. But whatever
lesson or lustre his name possessed must be reflected
on the humble people of whom he had come. If
Egypt wished to honour him it must go, as it did,
with its “ chariots and horsemen,” to the lonely field
in a distant land.
Not in accordance with the spirit of Carlyle’s life,
or his last charge to those around him, could he be
laid in any proud pyramid; not in Westminster
Abbey; not in Haddington Cathedral ; not even in
�17
such Arimathean sepulchre as the Scotch kirk would
have given him. Carlyle is gathered to his people,
not to their creed, but to their heart; to those who,
amid whatever ignorance, did their best for him, and
succeeded in nourishing in him the moral strength
which exerted a unique influence on the world.
Thomas Carlyle was a glorified peasant. Some
little time ago one of his aristocratic friends set
about showing that he was descended from a great
family which lived in a castle; but the sage smiled
at the attempt which for the rest came to nothing.
He was, indeed, the last of the family so lowly born.
From the first that sturdy and sensible stonemason,
his father, and his wise wife, steadily climbed towards
that height which their son reached, and their
descendants sustain. Nevertheless, they were at his
birth very poor. Within a hundred yards of the
spot where he now rests stands the small house of
which his parents occupied but two rooms. The
room in which this great man was born is humble
enough, lit by one little window. It is now occupied
by the village sexton who dug his grave.
And as he was thus born among the poor, so amid
peasants chiefly he was laid to rest. There was
sufficient manifestation of feeling throughout the
country to have made the funeral one of vast dimen
sions ; to avoid all appearance of an ostentation
always odious to him the place and day of the burial
�18
were kept private. Few even in Ecclefechan knew
them. Many were off installing a new minister in a
neighbouring village church. A red-coated fox hunt
was going on in fields near by. Only when the bell
began tolling did the inhabitants know of the hour.
With, exception of a few intimate friends who had
gone from London, and his relatives now far removed
in position from the circumstances amid which the
author was born, they who gathered around the
grave of Carlyle were mainly peasants. The public
school children gathered around the gates and on the
walls; the workpeople, chiefly youths, clung to the
iron railing of the enclosure. There was a profound
interest pictured on every face. An intense feeling
hushed the lowly groups who, amid the snow, with
heads uncovered, looked upon the wreath of flowers,
read the name and date, and perhaps realised that
here was one who with opportunities no better than
their own had won a high place in the heart and
honour of the world. Nay, with fewer advantages
than theirs, as they might be reminded by the bell
tolling from a School Board tower. There was no
such school in the days of Carlyle’s childhood.
And there they read the great man’s tribute to
his parents on their tomb—the words “gratefully
reverent of such a father and such a mother ”—and
learned that a man may depart from the creed of his
people, may leave behind their condition and their
�Wys, yet preserve the true heart of his early life, its
simplicity and humility. That grave will speak more
eloquently than the Kirk pulpit which could pronounce
HO benediction over it. An old peasant along the
road was heard to say to another, “ What a pity yon
man was an infidel! ” The two shook their heads
over their greatest countryman. Alas, how little
they knew of fidelity who could think of that life as
infidelity ! But their children will learn more from
that profound silence amid which the thinker was
laid to rest. They will know that the greatest man
that ever grew up there was one who had no part nor
lot in the dogmas taught them. No dogmatic tree
ever produced such fruits !
The lowly conditions of Carlyle’s early life,—the
pedestal that raises him in honour,—did also, as I
think, influence his teachings. He knew too much
of the poor, their ignorance and superstition, to
believe that their suffrage should be trusted in
government. At the same time he knew too much
of the nobility, gentry and parsons round about to
believe that their suffrage was much better. So he
came to his passionate worship of heroes, and
pursued his life-long dream of a time when they
Would take the place of nobles without nobility, and
of kings whose crowns were baubles. The milen
nial prophecy which the lad heard at Kirk—Christ
on the throne, Satan chained in the pit—became to
�20
the man a vision of the latter day, when the wisest
man should be king, and the worst man bound
down. But this thinker, who so resisted democracy,
has shown his faith m the fundamental worth of
the common people by the enthusiasm with which
he paid homage to the heroes sprung from them. He
wrote the life of Schiller, whose mother was a
baker s daughter ; he admired Richter, whose father
was a poor under-schoolmaster, and his mother a
weaver’s daughter; Paul Heyne in that “poor Chemnitz
hovel, with its unresting loom and cheerless hearth,
its squalor and devotion, its affection and repining;
and the fire of natural genius struggling into flame
amid such incumbrances, in an atmosphere so damp
and close.” Luther, the worker in iron; Dr. Johnson,
whom he calls “ the born king, likewise a born
slave ;” Robert Burns, in whom he saw “ the noblest
and ablest man in all the British lands,” holding the*
plough with hand worthy to sway the sceptre; these
were his heroes,—these his kings.
Their high
authority lay not in lineage, but in that divine right
of genius which had raised a lowly Nazareue to be
lord over kings. Very few of his worshipful heroes
were men of what is called high birth. Such was
this anti-democrat’s tribute to the masses. He
sometimes idealised men emerged from them; and
seemed hardly to do justice to the happier conditions
of life. Many men have utilised early advantages
�for great service to the common people,—John Knox,
for instance, and Cromwell, Voltaire, Washington.
Nevertheless, there is no nobler sight than the
steady victory of intellect, character, energy over
the obstacles which paralyse so many, and no epic
Carlyle wrote is grander than the epic that he lived.
Between that small room where Carlyle first saw
the light, and that smaller grave which hides bim
from the light, it is hardly a hundred steps: yet
what a Life-pilgrimage lies between those terms !
what stretches of noble years, of immense labours,
of invincible days rising from weary nights, mark
the fourscore years and five that led from the stone
mason’s threshold to a hero’s tomb 1
What could his parents give him ? An ever
present sense of an invisible world, of which this life
is the threshold,—a world of transcendant joys
marking the crown which the universe prepares for
virtue, with an underside of unspeakable pains which
mark the eternal brand fixed on evil-doing. Of this
world they could teach him little, only that it was a
place of brief probation by suffering and self-denial.
For the rest they can only send him to a poor little
school hard by. It, and Ecclefechan influences
generally, are travestied in the experiences of Herr
Teufelsdrockh in his native “Entepfuhl.” “ Of the
insignificant portion of my education which depended
on schools,” he says, “there need almost no notice
�22
be taken. I learned what others learn; and kept it
stored by in a corner of my head, seeing as yet no
manner of use in it. My schoolmaster, a downbent,
brokenhearted, underfoot martyr, as others of that
guild are, did little for me, except discover that he
could do little.” This poor schoolmaster pronounced
his pupil fit for one of the learned professions. That
meant the ministry. So the father must toil more,
and the mother save more, that Thomas may go to
the University and become a preacher.
But, meanwhile, there is another university than
that at Edinboro’, and little Thomas is already
studying in it more deeply than pedagogue or parent
suspects. That university is the universe itself, and
little by little he finds that Ecclefechan is a centre
of it. The little burn runs before the door ; as he
wades in it the brook whispers of its course as it
passes on to the river, on to the sea, out into the
universe. The swallows come from afar—from
Africa and other regions—to nestle in the eaves of
the house. The stage coach, as it comes and departs,
becomes mystical to the lad when he learns that it
connects the village with distant cities, and is weaving
human habitations together like a shuttle. The
village road leads to the end of the world.
But he is yet a little boy when he thus begins to
learn the alphabet and primer of nature and of this
world. With the invisible universe he is supposed
�to be familiar: the most ignorant Ecclefechan
peasant has explored God, Heaven and Hell; and
the cleverest lad among them is yet too young at
fourteen to make the discovery that such familiarity
with the invisible world is only another name for
total ignorance of that and this too. So the boy
takes his first step towards the pulpit: he is sent at
fourteen to the university. But there every step he
takes is away from the pulpit; unconsciously for a
long time, but with painful consciousness in the end.
To him, as to so many, that tragical experience had
to come of parting from the faith of father and
mother, and with it smiting the hearts he most
loved. It was the darkest day of that man’s life
when the hour came, so proudly anticipated by his
parents, when, with the high reputation he had
already gained, he should enter upon that ministerial
work which to them represented all that was glorious
on earth; and when, as that hour came, he confessed
to himself that he had no belief in what he was
expected to preach ; that he could never, with any
honesty of mind, enter the pulpit. This, then, was
the blighting end of all the hopes that had glorified
that little village home! This, then, was the only
payment he could make to his dear ones for the toils,
sacrifices, stintings his education had cost them!
And with what prospect to himself? What work
and what fate was there for a young heretic in
�24
Scotland seventy years ago ? He had no means ; he
certainly conld not depend on others. He tries
school teaching, bnt that is not his vocation, so is
not an honest one. He studies law, but finds that
even less to be his true work. He longs for action ;
but there is no post he can occupy, no work that
summons him, save only to be a writer of books.
But even for that he is hardly prepared. His ideal
of a book is very high. Only “ once in the two
centuries or often er there is a man gifted ” to write
a real book, he somewhere says. The true book is
ever the Word made flesh to dwell among us and
reflect a divine glory on rhe world. Carlyle’s youth
had passed and left the strong man still struggling
with cares and doubts—the great mind filled with
those “blank misgivings of a creature moving about
in worlds unrealised.”
The eagle poises long ere it swoops down, like
swift lightning, on its prize. This eye sun-kindled
is also sun-dazzled as its search first turns earthward
to find that which shall nourish the mighty heart
winged for daring flight. From that painful suspense
and long pause, when,—supporting himself by writing
cyclopaedic articles, mathematical treatises, and the
like,—Carlyle was more really eating his heart and
awaiting the opportunity of his genius,—there came
a sorrowful poem. It is one of the two or three
rhymed pieces he ever wrote, though the poetic
�25
faculty was supreme in him, transfering all his
work; the prophet’s burden on him was too painful
for his genius to rise into song. It is the ‘ Tragedy of
the Night-Moth,’ As the lonely scholar, daring great
things, reads Goethe’s mystic page, a bright-winged
moth flits in from the darkness: the tiny fire-worship
per circles around the candle, then darts into the
flame, and—puff!—the moth is dead!
“ Poor moth ! near weeping I lament thee,
Thy glossy form, thy instant woe ;
’Twas zeal for things too high that sent thee
From cheery earth to shades below.
“ Short speck of boundless space was needed
For home, for kingdom, world to thee !
Where passed unheeding as unheeded,
Thy slender life from sorrow free.
“ But syren hopes from out thy dwelling,
Enticed thee, bade thee earth explore,—
Thy frame, so late with rapture swelling,
Is swept from earth for evermore !
“ Poor moth ! thy fate my own resembles :
Me, too, a restless asking mind,
Hath sent on far and weary rambles
To seek the good I ne’er shall find.
“ Like thee, with common lot contented,
With humble joys and vulgar fate,
I might have lived and ne’er lamented,
Moth of a larger size, a longer date !
�26
“ But Nature’s majesty unveiling.
What seemed her wildest, grandest charms,
Eternal Truth and Beauty hailing,
Like thee I rushed into her arms.
“ What gained we, little moth ? thy ashes,
Thy one brief parting pang may show :
And withering thoughts for soul that dashes
From deep to deep, are but a death more slow.”
Hither, then, that village road which leads to the
end of the world had brought this pilgrim. When
he started out that world-end seemed to be ministry
in the Scotch Church. He toiled to that height and
found it a mere hillock,—many summits rising beyond
that. Other seeming mountains also turned to hills
beneath his ascending steps, until at last he came to
the highest, the ruggedest of all,—the soaring
summit of his own ideal.
But as he was climbing that stony mountain path,
with feet lacerated at every step, lo, a new light
shines around, a warm glow beneath which the path
is fringed with flowers. Woman’s love has come to
his side, taken his hand, looked deeply into his eye :
thenceforward no more is he to journey alone, or un
sustained, until that dark day, forty years later,
when she who had irradiated his home expired, and
he wrote on her grave that the light of his life was
gone out.
Bright and beautiful was that presence which was
�21
with the scholar when, amid as bleak and lonely a
region as eye can rest on, he undertook his life-task.
Along the fifteen miles of country road leading to that
solitude called Craigenputtock, their first home, one
passes a few spots which recall the influences under
which the Scottish child is brought up. One may pass
from the monument of Burns, at Dumfries, showing
the muse touching the youth on the shoulder as he
holds the plough; a few miles further, one may
pause at the grave of “ Old Mortality,” who passed
his time deciphering mossy inscriptions on tombs;
and near by may read the inscription which Walter
Scott wrote on the tomb he raised over Helen Walker,
whom he immortalised under the name of Jeannie
Deans—the girl who would not tell an untruth to
save her sister’s life, but did journey on foot to Lon
don, and saved her at last. The inscription says—
“ Respect the grave of poverty when combined with
love of truth and dear affection.” And that admoni
tion the pilgrim may well bear with him to the far
home amid the moors, where the same unswerving
veracity, combined with dear affection, took root and
sent their rich fruitage through the world of litera
ture.
For a long time there was poverty. His ideal was
too high for the world to care for it just then; yet
as he said, “ Experience charges dreadfully high
wages, but she teaches as none other.” He gathered
�28
richest invisible harvests from those dreary moors.
There was plain living and high thinking, and gradu
ally health came back.
Here, at Craigenputtock, Carlyle wrote “ Sartor
Eesartus.” He had written the “Life of Schiller,’’
but in “ Sartor Eesartus” he wrote his own spiritual
biography. It seemed at first a thankless task.
Publishers refused it. It lay silent for seven years,
and when it appeared by instalments in a magazine
the subscribers grumbled at it; but it found in
America one able to read in it the history of his own
spirit—the prophecy of a new life coming on all
souls. Ealph Waldo Emerson, who first collected
those papers, journeyed across the ocean that he
might grasp the hand and converse with the heart of
his intellectual brother. The last thing I ever heard
Carlyle say was, “ Give my love to Emerson. I still
think of his visit to me at Craigenputtock as the
most beautiful thing in my experience there.”
Carlyle was a great man to America before he was
known to his own country. He had even felt at one
time as if his destiny might lead to a residence in
America. He said to Edward Irving, “ I have the
ends of my thoughts to bring together, which no one
can do in this thoughtless scene. I have my views
of life to reform, and the whole plan of my conduct
to remodel; and withal I have my health to recover.
And then once more I shall venture my bark upon
�29
the waters of this wide realm, and if she cannot
weather it, I shall steer west and try the waters of
another world.”
So he said when he was 25 years of age. But he
presently recognised the meaning of what Goethe
said to a youth who talked of going to the New
World,—-“Your America is here, or nowhere.”
London summoned him from his lonely hills. He
fixed his home here, and for more than a generation
lived and taught in a way that left London no need
to envy Athens with her Socrates. Socrates never
more resolutely exposed the shams of Athens. They
gave him poison. They began giving Carlyle critical
poison; but he outlived it and his critics; and
finally the throne offered him its Grand Cross of
Bath. He had not worked for such wages, however,
and Majesty’s gift was declined with thanks. It is
a pity he did not at least visit America, as he had
intended. He would have understood better the
depth and significance of that long struggle, culmi
nating in civil war, by which the Republic emanci
pated itself by setting free those enslaved within its
borders. During that struggle his voice was heard
on the wrong side ; but some years ago a lady whose
son had fallen in that war, sent him the Harvard
Memorial: he read the book containing the record of
those young men who saved and liberated their
country, carefully; and when that lady came to see
�30
him personally, he took her hand and said, even with
tears, “ I was mistaken.”
Carlyle’s name, through this mistake, could be
quoted by the slaveholder, but never justly. The
man was never really on that side. The servitude in
which he believed was entirely ideal. To him the
ideal Society would be one in which the ignorance
should be directed by knowledge, unwisdom controlled
by wisdom, and the indolent find their truer happi
ness in obedience to the order of true and good
leaders. There was something of sweet old Scotch
simplicity in this dream of the patriarchal life he
had read of in the Bible, but it never existed in any
modern community. In his eagerness to believe that
such a Utopia of perfect subordination between the
higher and lower might be realised, he lent a too
ready ear to the fanciful pictures which southerners
personally drew for him of their pastoral life. I have
often heard him talk of that southern Arcadia,
which I, who was born there, knew to be a chaos.
But no man was more opposed to injustice and
■oppression where he recognised them ; and no man
would more have overwhelmed the actual vices and
brutalities of negro slavery, had he lived amid them,
than he who detested the last French empire, and
whose latest protest was against placing a memorial
of its fallen heir in Westminster Abbey.
Carlyle has been called a Worshipper of Force,—
�31
of physical force. That is a superficial judgment.
It was moral force that he reverenced in Cromwell,
and in other heroes. He sometimes found that he
had misjudged his man, and confessed it. He was
severe on Sir Robert Peel when that Minister was
-most powerful, but when he saw in him the courage
to redress a wrong he revoked his sentences. He
idealised Frederick the Great,—-the freethinking
king, the friend of Voltaire,—but as his biography
of that monarch proceeded he discovered that he was
no hero in a moral sense, and at the close of the
labours which gave the world that great historical
work, he said to Varnhagen von Euse,—“I have had
no satisfaction in it at all, only labour and sorrow.
What had I to do with your Frederick ? ” Carlyle
respected physical force as the means of moral force.
As he bowed reverently before the hard hand of the
labourer who was changing a bit of chaos, a clod intofruit,-—saw in it a sceptre nobler than that of sham
kings,—so did he see in an army fighting for a right
cause a great implement bringing order out of dis
order. But he never respected mere brute force.
The purest force worked in silence. He who poured,
scorn upon Louis Napoleon when he was the strongest
ruler in Europe, was prompt to defend Mazzini when
a powerless exile in England.
I have heard an anecdote that, in a circle where
the Duke of Wellington was severely criticised, some
�32
one ended all censures by saying—“ Wellington was
so great a man that I have forgotten his faults.” The
same may be trulier said of Carlyle. Whatever
faults he may have had will be speedily forgotten in
the memory of his great services and grand life. It
was natural that he should be misjudged, because of
his unique character, and the powerful individuality
which held him aloof from all parties and all move
ments. Popular movements no sooner make roads
than they begin to wear ruts, and then settle down into
the ruts hopelessly. The popular notion, for example,
of what a Republic is, has become as much a formula
as the monarchial form of government. But that
kind of political conventionalism may prove as ham
pering as any older system. When Carlyle had
theoretically melted all the chains of the Past in the
fires of his just heart and brain, the popular leaders
expected him to pour their molten strength into this
or that democratic mould. They who hailed his
iconoclasm were bitterly disappointed at his rejection
of their new schemes. But the thinker believed that
the universe had a scheme of its own—a scheme far
vaster than any shaped by chartist or democrat;
and he preserved a true freedom when he bade men
work at what was before them, trust that each
further day would bring the light and strength for
that day, and the fairer order eventually appear.
Of the like character was his religious position and
�influence. He was one of the most religious men
that ever lived. His life was a long self-sacrifice, a
never-failing charity, an unceasing worship. There
fore, it could not be contained in any creed. 11 To
what religion do I belong ? ” wrote Schiller; “ To
none thou could’st name. And wherefore to none ?
Because of my religion.” It was only the fervour of
Carlyle’s religion which led him to turn from the
Scotch Church with a breaking heart: it was that
which ignored each hallowed dome which shut out
the vault of heaven, and the higher vault of reason,
beneath which, to his last day, he knelt with wonder
and aspiration. He could not see in the Church
Articles thirty-nine pillars supporting the universe,
and each sect was to him only some umbrella which
its devotees mistook for the sky. Fifty-six years
ago Carlyle reminded the world that while super
stition might degrade the world freethought could
never harm religion. He then paid his homage to
the man whose memory was a red-spectre to Chris
tendom,—even to Voltaire; and, chiefly, as he said,
because Voltaire “gave the death-stab to modern
superstition.” “ That, with superstition, Religion is
also passing away, seems,” he continued, “ a still
more ungrounded fear. Religion cannot pass away.
The burning of a little straw may hide the stars of
the sky ; but the stars are there, and will re-appear.
. . . . Old Ludovicus Vives has a story of a
�34
down that killed his ass because it had drunk up
the moon, and he thought the world could ill spare
that luminary. Let us not imitate him ; let us not
slay a faithful servant who has carried us far. He
has not drunk the moon ; but only the reflection of
the moon in his own poor water-pail.”
The doctrines which Carlyle learned at his mother’s
knee, though outgrown, survive in slight expressions
of his later years; just as the dialect of Dumfries
shire has a scholarly survival in that style which so
puzzled his critics. An afterglow of Calvinism is in
his necessitarian philosophy, and he uses the meta
phors of Gehenna to burn up the incredible cant
about Hell. In the same way his far-reaching
humanity is sometimes expressed in phrases that
belong to a past age of conservatism. M. Taine, in
his “ History of English Literature,” says that in
reading Carlyle’s volumes “ we discover, at last, that
we are in the presence of a most extraordinary
animal, relic of a lost family, a sort of mastodon
fallen on a world not made for him; ” and we
“ dissect him with minute curiosity, telling ourselves
that we shall probably never find another like him.”
There is some truth in this, too. There are some
men whose greatness is largely in their adequacy
to shove the world on beyond even themselves.
'Wordsworth was such a man: he renewed in man
that love and feeling for nature which gave a poetic
�35
soul to science ; and science went on with that
impulse, leaving the poet still with his ritual in
Grasmere Church. Another Wordsworth, or any
great man of kindred genius, can hardly he produced
again. Another Carlyle has been rendered as improbable'
by the momentum with which thought speeds on
the rpad where his own spur started it. That, how
ever, is true only of what is most casual in the man,
most on the surface. The heart of Carlyle still beats
in all the best aspirations of our time. It will be a
longer time than we shall live to see ere mankind
approaches the banner of this leader, much less
passes it. If any one will read attentively his essay
entitled “ Characteristics,” written fifty-six years
ago, he will find there a spiritual prophecy which
every thinker risen since has confirmed either by
failure or fulfilment, and which still remains a
prophecy, nay, a pillar of fire for all faithful men and
women to follow. That great essay, which, flashing
across the sea, kindled a new beacon in New Eng
land, gathering about it a fraternity of the free, was
but half understood then, is not fully comprehended
now. It is the first statement of the Religion of
Humanity. When Byron and many another were
filling the air with wailings, or curses, this inspired
peasant announced the faith that would move on
unhasting, unresting as the stars undisturbed in
in their eternal calm by the rise or fall of empires,.
�36
or of temples, or of deities made by man in his own
image.
“The doom of the Old,” he declared, “has long
been pronounced and irrevocable; the Old has passed
away ; but, alas ! the New appears not in its stead ;
the Time is still in pangs of travail with the New.
Man has walked by the light of conflagrations, and
amid the sound of falling cities; and now there is
darkness and long watching till it be morning. . . .
Deep and sad as is our feeling that we stand in bodeful
Night; equally deep, indestructible is our assurance
that the Morning also will not fail. Nay, already, as
we look round, streaks of a dayspring are in the east;
it is dawning ; when the time shall be fulfilled it
will be day. The progress of man towards higher
and nobler Developments of whatever is highest and
noblest in him, lies not only prophesied to Faith, but
now written to the eye of Observation, so that he
who runs may read.”
“Everywhere the eternal fact begins again to be
recognised, that there is godlike in human affairs.
In all dialects, though but half articulately, this
high Gospel begins to be preached; 'Man is still
Man.’ ” “ He that has an eye and a heart can even
now say : why should I falter ? Light has come into
the world; to such as love Light, so as Light must
be loved, with a boundless all-doing, all-enduring
love. For the rest let that vain struggle to read
�the mystery of the Infinite cease to harass us . . .
4 Whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy
might ’ . . Behind us, behind each one of us lie six
thousand years of human effort, human conquest;
before us is the boundless Time, with its uncreated
and unconquered Continents and Eldorados, which
we, even we, have to conquer and create : and from
the bosom of Eternity shine for us celestial guiding
stars.
My inheritance, how wide and fair !
Time is my fair seedfield, of Time I’m heir.”
More than fifty years of brave life, of unswerving
fidelity, of unfaltering pursuit of truth, on the part of
him who so wrote, followed that first sign of a religion
for time, for this world,—a religion turned from
metaphysics about the Infinite to seek and save man
from the evils that afflict and degrade him. And we
may say of him who awakened the generation of
which we are spiritual offspring, that he is indeed the
heir of Time. What he sowed in that unbounded
seedfield, Time will not suffer to perish. That high
influence,—raised by death above all that transiently
enveloped it,—that Spirit which as it came from
deeps of experience shall call to every Deep,—will
remain to do its work for evermore.
Farewell, great and faithful father ! We, thy
children, born of the light that lived in thine eyes,
�38
offspring of the fire in thy heart which burnt all
fetters, bid thee farewell, now that thy hands are
folded on thy breast. But we know thou wilt remain
still with uswe shall see thy strong hand at work
wherever shams and falsities are falling; and when
the night is upon us we will remember thy long watch
and look for the morning-star ; and when the dawn
comes it will reveal thy face, no more in pain, trans
figured in the triumph of thy truth; and thy name
enshrined in every heart that shall live to reap in joy
the harvest thou in tears didst sow 1
���
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Thomas Carlyle: a memorial discourse delivered before the South Place Religious Society, February 13th 1881
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway, Moncure Daniel, 1832-1907
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 38 p. ; 15 cm.
Notes: Printed by F.G. Hickson & Co., London. Includes following texts: reading from Ecclesiasticus, works of Thomas Carlyle, and two hymns. Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 2.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
[South Place Chapel]
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[1881]
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
G3350
Subject
The topic of the resource
Sermons
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (Thomas Carlyle: a memorial discourse delivered before the South Place Religious Society, February 13th 1881), identified by </span><span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Morris Tracts
Thomas Carlyle
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/18e81ff0fd05b1e0d850b8a788627859.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=UmZ1yiPLiH0wRKrxkaLgYdcBu8xojIhBIt08Odp43tXVWuohCXLUYv8L4BRrHVGARp1W3YnOUpQx-qIljwwQ1BqWgAJx3rLuLWmdUQLlPCFzr3Fgt7YTjFvrIeQEDJQzvHiSybjqqQuhTjgdj4XDqqVSebTKoC1PvlWcQ8eMi57g1whrgumFPPoPk3WxZSgnpU-54BKbPTav-wNO5TsYKic3HtI3zE9I0W1DaTFiA6Mt00mPBcxzHbLf6lGPWYR%7EXmy-LXnKVxpJPC8jwQmdZ40xPgs0feL3JdEfFE49YX4Av8wSDOy8CODC0rWuOW1qLt5VAdS%7E113ilGi%7EUe8rBA__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
e59a9920a197225257761f9ec8db96f6
PDF Text
Text
INAUGURAL ADDRESS
AT EDINBURGH, APRIL 2nd, 1866 ;
BY
THOMAS CARLYLE,
ON BEING INSTALLED AS RECTOR OF THE
UNIVERSITY THERE.
[AUTHORIZED REPORT]
EDINBURGH: EDMONSTON AND DOUGLAS.
LONDON : CHAPMAN AND HALL.
.1 8 6 6.
�ADDRESS.
Gentlemen,—I have accepted the office you have elected
me to, and it is now my duty to return thanks for the
great honour done me. Your enthusiasm towards me, I
must admit, is in itself very beautiful, however undeserved
it may be in regard to the object of it. It is a feeling hon
ourable to all men, and one well known to myself when I
was of an age like yours, nor is it yet quite gone. I
can only hope that, with you too, it may endure to the
end,—this noble desire to honour those whom you think
worthy of honour; and that you will come to be more
and more select and discriminate in the choice of the
object of it:—for I can well understand that you will
modify your opinions of me and of many things else,
as you go on. {Laughter and cheers?) It is now fifty-six
years, gone last November, since I first entered your City,
a boy of not quite fourteen; to ‘attend the classes’ here,
and gain knowledge of all kinds, I could little guess
what, my poor mind full of wonder and awe-struck ex
pectation ; and now, after a long course, this is what we
have come to. (Cheers?) There is something touching
�6
INAUGURAL ADDRESS.
and tragic, and yet at the same time beautiful, to see, as
it were, the third generation of my dear old native land,
rising up and saying, “ Well, you are not altogether an
unworthy labourer in the vineyard; you have' toiled through
a great variety of fortunes, and have had many judges:
this is our judgment of you I” As the old proverb says,
‘ He that builds by the wayside has many masters.’ We
must expect a variety of judges; but the voice of young
Scotland, through you, is really of some value to me; and
I return you many thanks for it,—though I cannot go
into describing my emotions to you, and perhaps they
will be much more perfectly conceivable if expressed in
silence. (Cheers.)
When this office was first proposed to me, some of you
know I was not very ambitious to accept it, but had my
doubts rather. I was taught to believe that there were
certain more or less important duties which would lie
in my power. This, I confess, was my chief motive in
going into it, and overcoming the objections I felt to
such things: if I could do anything to serve my dear
old Alma Mater and you, why should not I ? (Loud
cheers.) Well, but on practically looking into the matter
when the office actually came into my hands, I find it
grows more and more uncertain and abstruse to me whether
there is much real duty that I can do at all. I live four
hundred miles away from you, in an entirely different
scene of things; and my weak health, with the burden
of the many years now accumulating on me, and my total
unacquaintance with such subjects as concern your affairs
here,—all this fills me with apprehension that there is
�EXTEMPORE.
7
really nothing worth the least consideration that I can do
on that score. You may depend on it, however, that if
any such duty does arise in any form, I will use my most
faithful endeavour to do in it whatever is right and proper,
according to the best of my judgment. (Cheers.)
Meanwhile, the duty I at present have,—which might
be very pleasant, but which is not quite so, for reasons you
may fancy,—is to address some words to you, if possible
not quite useless, nor incongruous to the occasion, and on
subjects more or less cognate to the pursuits you are
engaged in. Accordingly, I mean to offer you some loose
observations, loose in point of order, but the truest I have,
in such form as they may present themselves; certain
of the thoughts that are in me about the business you
are here engaged in, what kind of race it is that you
young gentlemen have started on, and what sort of arena
you are likely to find in this world. I ought, I believe,
according to custom, to have written all that down on
paper, and had it read out. That would have been much
handier for me at the present moment—(A laugh);—
but, on attempting the thing, I found I was not used
to write speeches, and that I didn’t get on very well.
So I flung that aside; and could only resolve to trust, in
all superficial respects, to the suggestion of the moment, as
you now see. You will therefore have to accept what is
readiest; what comes direct from the heart; and you must
just take that in compensation for any good order or
arrangement there might have been in it. I will endea
vour to say nothing that is not true, so far as I can
manage; and that is pretty much all I can engage for.
(A laugh.)
�8
INAUGURAL ADDRESS.
Advices, I believe, to young men, as to all men, are
very seldom much valued. There is a great deal of ad
vising, and very little faithful performing ; and talk that
does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed
altogether. I would not, therefore, go much into advising;
but there is one advice I must give you. In fact, it is the
summary of all advices, and doubtless you have heard it a
thousand times; but I must nevertheless let you hear it
the thousand-and-first time, for it is most intensely true,
whether you will believe it at present or not:—namely,
That above all things the interest of your whole life depends
on your being diligent, now while it is called to-day, in this
place where you have come to get education ! Diligent:
that includes in it all virtues that a student can have: I
mean it to include all those qualities of conduct that lead
on to the acquirement of real instruction and improve
ment in such a place. If you will believe me, you who
are young, yours is the golden season of life. As you have
heard it called, so it verily is, the seed-time of life; in
which, if you do not sow, or if you sow tares instead of
wheat, you cannot expect to reap well afterwards, and you
will arrive at little. And in the course of years, when you
come to look back, if you have not done what you have
heard from your advisers,—and among many counsellors
there is wisdom,—you will bitterly repent when it is too
late. The habits of study acquired at Universities are of
the highest importance in after-life. At the season when
you are young in years, the whole mind is, as it were,
fluid, and is capable of forming itself into any shape
that the owner of the mind pleases to allow it, or con
�HONESTY OF MIND.
9
strain it, to form itself into. The mind is then in a
plastic or fluid state ; but it hardens gradually, to the
consistency of rock or of iron, and you cannot alter the
habits of an old man: he, as he has begun, so he will
proceed and go on to the last.
By diligence I mean among other things, and very
chiefly too,—honesty, in all your inquiries, and in all you
are about. Pursue your studies in the way your conscience
can name honest. More and more endeavour to do that.
Keep, I should say for one thing, an accurate separation
between what you have really come to know in your minds
and what is still unknown. Leave all that latter on the
hypothetical side of the barrier, as things afterwards to be
acquired, if acquired at all; and be careful not to admit a
thing as known when you do not yet know it. Count a thing
known only when it is imprinted clearly on your mind, and
has become transparent to you, so that you may survey it
on all sides with intelligence. There is such a thing as a
man endeavouring to persuade himself, and endeavouring
to persuade others, that he knows things, when he does
not know more than the outside skin of them; and yet
he goes flourishing about with’ them. (Hear, hear, and
a laugh?) There is also a process called cramming, in some
Universities (A laugh),—that is, getting up such points of
things as the examiner is likely to put questions about.
Avoid all that, as entirely unworthy of an honourable
mind. Be modest, and humble, and assiduous in your
attention to what your teachers tell you, who are pro
foundly interested in trying to bring you forward in the
right way, so far as they have been able to understand it.
�10
e
INAUGURAL ADDRESS.
Try all things they set before you, in order, if possible, to
understand them, and to follow and adopt them in propor
tion to their fitness for you. Gradually see what kind of
work you individually can do; it is the first of all pro
blems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to
do in this universe. In short, morality as regards study
is, as in all other things, the primary consideration, and
overrules all others. A dishonest man cannot do anything
real; he never will study with real fruit; and perhaps it
would be greatly better if he were tied up from trying
it. He does nothing but darken counsel by the words
he utters. That is a very old doctrine, but a very true
one; and you will find it confirmed by all the thinking
men that have ever lived in this long series of generations
of which we are the latest.
I daresay you know, very many of you, that it is now
some seven hundred years since Universities were first set
up in this world of ours. Abelard and other thinkers had
arisen with doctrines in them which people wished to hear
of, and students flocked towards them from all parts of the
world. There was no getting the thing recorded in books,
as you now may. You had to hear the man speaking to
you vocally, or else you could not learn at all what it
was that he wanted to say. And so they gathered to
gether, these speaking ones,—the various people who had
anything to teach;—and formed themselves gradually,
under the patronage of kings and other potentates who
were anxious about the culture of their populations, and
nobly studious of their best benefit; and became a body
�UNIVERSITIES.
11
corporate, with high privileges, high dignities, and really
high aims, under the title of a University.
Possibly too you may have heard it said that the course
of centuries has changed all this ; and that ‘ the true Uni
versity of our days is a Collection of Books.’ And beyond
doubt, all this is greatly altered by the invention of Print
ing, which took place about midway between us and the
origin of Universities. Men have not now to go in person
to where a Professor is actually speaking; because in
most cases you can* get his doctrine out of him through a
book; and can then read it, and read it again and again,
and study it. That is an immense change, that one fact
of Printed Books. And I am not sure that I know of any
University in which the whole of that fact has yet been
completely taken in, and the studies moulded in complete
conformity with it. Nevertheless, Universities have, and
will continue to have, an indispensable value in society;
—I think, a very high, and it might be, almost the highest
value. They began, as is well known, with their grand
aim directed on Theology,—their eye turned earnestly on
Heaven. And perhaps, in a sense, it may be still said, the
very highest interests of man are virtually intrusted to them.
In regard to theology, as you are aware, it has been, and
especially was then, the study of the deepest heads that
have come into the world,—what is the nature of this stupen
dous universe, and what are our relations to it, and to all
things knowable by man, or known only to the great Author
of man and it. Theology was once the name for all this;
all this is still alive for man, however dead the name
may grow! In fact, the members of the Church keeping
�12
INAUGURAL ADDRESS.
theology in a lively condition—(Laughter)—for the benefit
of the whole population, theology was the great object of
the Universities. I consider it is the same intrinsically
now, though very much forgotten, from many causes, and
not so successful—(A laugh)—as might be wished, by any
manner of means I
It remains, however, practically a most important truth,
what I alluded to above, that the main use of Universities
in the present age is that, after you have done with all
your classes, the next thing is a collection of books, a
great i library of good books, which you proceed to study
and to read. What the Universities can mainly do for
you,—what I have found the University did for me, is, That
it taught me to read, in various languages, in various
sciences ; so that I could go into the books which treated of
these things, and gradually penetrate into any department
I wanted to make myself master of, as I found it suit me.
Well, gentlemen, whatever you may think of these
historical points, the clearest and most imperative duty
lies on every one of you to be assiduous in your reading.
Learn to be good readers,—which is, perhaps, a more
difficult thing than you imagine. Learn to be di scrim in ative in your reading; to read faithfully, and with your best
attention, all kinds of things which you have a real in
terest in, a real not an imaginary, and which you find to be
really fit for what you are engaged in. Of course, at the
present time, in a great deal of the reading incumbent on
you, you must be guided by the books recommended
by your Professors for assistance towards the effect of their
�READING.
13
prelections. And then, when you leave the University, and
go into studies of your own, you will find it very important
that you have chosen a field, some province specially suited
to you, in which you can study and work. The most unhappy
of all men is the man who cannot tell what he is going to
do, who has got no work cut out for him in the world,
and does not go into it. For work is the grand cure of
all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind,—
honest work, which you intend getting done.
If, in any vacant vague time, you are in a strait as to
choice of reading,-^-a very good indication for you, perhaps
the best you could get, is towards some book you have
a great curiosity about. You are then in the readiest
and best of all possible conditions to improve by that
book. It is analogous to what doctors tell us about the
physical health and appetites of the patient. You must
learn, however, to distinguish between false appetite and
true. There is such a thing as a false appetite, which will
lead a man into vagaries with regard to diet; will tempt
him to eat spicy things, which he should not eat at all,
nor would, but that the things are toothsome, and that
he is under a momentary baseness of mind. A man ought
to examine and find out what he really and truly has an
appetite for, what suits his constitution and condition;
and that, doctors tell him, is in general the very thing he
ought to have. And so with books.
As applicable to all of you, I will say that it is highly
expedient to go into history; to inquire into what has
passed before you on this Earth, and in the Family of Man.
�14
INAUGURAL ADDRESS.
The history of the Romans and Greeks will first of all
concern you; and you will find that the classical know
ledge you have got will he extremely applicable to eluci
date that. There you have two of the most remarkable
races of men in the world set before you, calculated to
open innumerable reflections and considerations; a mighty
advantage, if you can achieve it;—to say nothing of what
their two languages will yield you, which your Professors
can better explain; model languages, which are universally
admitted to be the most perfect forms of speech we have
yet found to exist among men. And you will find, if you
read well, a pair of extremely remarkable nations, shining
in the records left by themselves, as a kind of beacon, or
solitary mass of illumination, to light up some noble
forms of human life for us, in the otherwise utter darkness
of the past ages; and it will be well worth your while if
you can get into the understanding of what these people
were, and what they did. You will find a great deal of
hearsay, of empty rumour and tradition, which does not
touch on the matter; but perhaps some of you will get
to see the old Roman and the old Greek face to face; you
will know in some measure how they contrived to exist,
and to perform their feats in the world.
I believe, also, you will find one important thing not
much noted, That there was a very great deal of deep reli
gion in both nations. This is pointed out by the wiser kind
of historians, and particularly by Ferguson, who is particu
larly well worth reading on Roman history,—and who, I
believe, was an alumnus of our own University. His book
is a very creditable work. He points out the profoundly
�ROMANS AND GREEKS.
15
religious nature of the Roman people, notwithstanding their
ruggedly positive, defiant, and fierce ways. They believed
that Jupiter Optimus Maximus was lord of the universe, and
that he had appointed the Romans to become the chief of
nations, provided they followed his commands,—to brave
all danger, all difficulty, and stand up with an invin
cible front, and be ready to do and die; and also to have
the same sacred regard to truth of promise, to thorough
veracity, thorough integrity, and all the virtues that ac
company that noblest quality of man, valour,—to which
latter the Romans gave the name of ‘ virtue’ proper (yirtus,
manhood), as the crown and summary of all that is en
nobling for a man. In the literary ages of Rome, this re
ligious feeling had very much decayed away; but it still
retained its place among the lower classes of the Roman
people. Of the deeply religious nature of the Greeks,
along with their beautiful and sunny effulgences of art,
you have striking proof, if you look for it. In the tragedies
of Sophocles, there is a most deep-toned recognition of
the eternal justice of Heaven, and the unfailing punish
ment of crime against the laws of God. I believe you
will find in all histories of nations, that this has been at
the origin and foundation of them all; and that no nation
which did not contemplate this wonderful universe with
an awestricken and reverential belief that there was a great
unknown, omnipotent, and all-wise and all-just Being,
superintending all men in it, and all interests in it,—no
nation ever came to very much, nor did any man either,
who forgot that. If a man did forget that, he forgot the
most important part of his mission in this world.
�16
INAUGURAL ADDRESS.
Our own history of England, which you will naturally
take a great deal of pains to make yourselves acquainted
with, you will find beyond all others worthy of your study.
For indeed I believe that the British nation,—including
in that the Scottish nation,—produced a finer set of men
than any you will find it possible to get anywhere else in
the world. (Applause?) I don’t know, in any history
of Greece or Rome, where you will get so fine a man as
Oliver Cromwell, for example. (Applause?) And we, too,
have had men worthy of memory, in our little corner of
the Island here, as well as others; and our history has had
its heroic features all along; and did become great at last
in being connected with world-history:—for if you examine
well, you will find that John Knox was the author, as it
were, of Oliver Cromwell; that the Puritan revolution
never would have taken place in England at all, had it
not been for that Scotchman. (Applause.) That is an
authentic fact, and is not prompted by national vanity
on my part, but will stand examining. (Laughter and
applause^)
In fact, if you look at the struggle that was then going
on in England, as I have had to do in my time, you will
see that people were overawed by the immense impedi
ments lying in the way. A small minority of God-fearing
men in that country were flying away, with any ship they
could get, to New England, rather than take the lion by
the beard. They durst not confront the powers with their
most just complaints, and demands to be delivered from
idolatry. They wanted to make the nation altogether con
formable to the Hebrew Bible, which they, and all men,
�ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH HISTORY.
17
understood to be the exact transcript of the Will of God ;
—and could there be, for man, a more legitimate aim ?
Nevertheless, it would have been impossible in their
circumstances, and not to be attempted at all, had not
Knox succeeded in it here, some fifty years before, by
the firmness and nobleness of his mind. For he also is of
the select of the earth to me,—John Knox. (Applause?)
What he has suffered from the ungrateful generations that
have followed him should really make us humble ourselves
to the dust, to think that the most excellent man our country
has produced, to whom we owe everything that distin
guishes us among the nations, should have been so sneered
at, misknown, and abused. (Applause?) Knox was heard by
Scotland; the people heard him, believed him to the marrow
of their bones : they took up his doctrine, and they defied
principalities and powers to move them from it. “We
must have it,” they said; “ we will and must!” It was in
this state of things that the Puritan struggle arose in
England; and you know well how the Scottish earls and
nobility, with their tenantry, marched away to Dunse Hill
in 1639, and sat down there: just at the crisis of that
struggle, when it was either to be suppressed or brought
into greater vitality, they encamped on Dunse Hill,—thirty
thousand armed men, drawn out for that occasion, each
regiment round its landlord, its earl, or whatever he might
be called, and zealous all of them ‘ For Christ’s Crown and
Covenant.’ That was the signal for all England’s rising up
into unappeasable determination to have the Gospel there
also ; and you know it went on, and came to be a contest
whether the Parliament or the King should rule; whether it
B
�18
INAUGURAL ADDRESS.
should he old formalities and use and wont, or something
that had been of new conceived in the Souls of men, namely,
a divine determination to walk according to the laws of
God here, as the sum of all prosperity; which, of these
should have the mastery: and after a long, long agony of
struggle, it was decided—the way we know.
I should say also of that Protectorate of Oliver Crom
well’s, notwithstanding the censures it has encountered,
and the denial of everybody that it could continue in the
world, and so on, it appears to me to have been, on the
whole, the most salutary thing in the modern history of
England. If Oliver Cromwell had continued it out, I
don’t know what it would have come to. It would have
got corrupted probably in other hands, and could not have
gone on; but it was pure and true, to the last fibre, in
his mind; there was perfect truth in it while he ruled
over it. Machiavelli has remarked, in speaking of the
Romans, that Democracy cannot long exist anywhere in
the world; that as a' mode of government, of national
management or administration, it involves an impossibility,
and after a little while must end in wreck. And he goes
on proving that, in his own way. I do not ask you all to
follow him in that conviction—(hear),—but it is to him
a clear truth; he considers it a solecism and impossibility
that the universal mass of men should ever govern them
selves. He has to admit of the Romans, that they con
tinued a long time; but believes, it was purely in virtue
of this item in their constitution, namely, of their all
having the conviction in their minds that it was solemnly
�THE PROTECTOR.
19
necessary, at times, to appoint a Dictator; a man who had
the power of life and death over everything, who degraded
men out of their places, ordered them to execution, and
did whatever seemed to him good in the name of God above
him. He was commanded to take care that the republic
suffer no detriment. And Machiavelli calculates that this
was the thing which purified the social system, from time
to time, and enabled it to continue as it did. Probable
enough, if you consider it. And an extremely proper
function surely, this of a Dictator, if the republic was
composed of little other than bad and tumultuous men,
triumphing in general over the better, and all going the
bad road, in fact. Well, Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate,
or Dictatorate if you will let me name it so, lasted for
about ten years, and you will find that nothing which was
contrary to the laws of heaven was allowed to live by
Oliver. (Applaus'e.)
For example, it was found by his Parliament of Notables,
what they call the ‘Barebones Parliament,’—the most
zealous of all Parliaments probably (laughter),—that the
Court of Chancery in England was in a state which was
really capable of no apology; no man could get up and
say that that was a right court. There were, I think,
fifteen thousand, or fifteen hundred (Laughter),—I really
don’t remember which, but we will call it by the last num
ber, to be safe (Renewed laughter);—-there were fifteen
hundred cases lying in it undecided; and one of them,
I remember, for a large amount of money, was eightythree years old, and it was going on still; wigs were
wagging over it, and lawyers were taking their fees, and
�20
INAUGURAL ADDRESS.
there was no end of it. Upon view of all which, the
Barebones people, after deliberation about it, thought it
was expedient, and commanded by the Author of Man and
Fountain of Justice, and in the name of what was true and
right, to abolish said court. Really, I don’t know who could
have dissented from that opinion. At the same time, it was
thought by those who were wiser in their generation, and
had more experience of the world, that this was a very dan
gerous thing, and wouldn’t suit at all. The lawyers began to
make an immense noise about it. (Laughter?) All the public,
the great mass of solid and well-disposed people who had got
no deep insight into such matters, were very adverse to it:
and the Speaker of the Parliament, old Sir Francis Rous,—
who translated the Psalms for us, those that we sing here
every Sunday in the Church yet; a very good man, and a
wise and learned, Provost of Eton College afterwards,—
he got a great number of the Parliament to go to Oliver
the Dictator, and lay down their functions altogether, and
declare officially, with their signature, on Monday morning,
that the Parliament was dissolved. The act of abolition
had been passed on Saturday night; and on Monday
morning, Rous came and said, “We cannot carry on the
affair any longer, and we remit it into the hands of your
Highness.” Oliver in that way became Protector a second
time. I give you this as an instance that Oliver was
faithfully doing a Dictator’s function, and of his prudence
in it, as well.
Oliver felt that the Parliament, now
dismissed, had been perfectly right with regard to Chan
cery, and that there was no doubt of the propriety of
abolishing Chancery, or else reforming it in some kind
�sources of history.
21
of way.. He considered the matter, and this is what he
did. He assembled sixty of the wisest lawyers to be found
in England. Happily, there were men great in the law;
men who valued the laws of England as much as anybody
ever did; and who knew withal that there was something
still more sacred than any of these. (A laugh,^ Oliver
said to them, “ Go and examine this thing, and in the name
of God inform me what is necessary to be done with it.
You will see how we may clean out the foul things in that Chancery Court, which render it poison to everybody.”
Well, they sat down accordingly, and in the course of six
weeks,(there was no public speaking then, no reporting
of speeches, and no babble of any kind, there was just
the business in hand,)—they got sixty propositions fixed
in their minds as the summary of the things that re
quired to be done. And upon these sixty propositions,
Chancery was reconstituted and remodelled; and so it got
a new lease of life, and has lasted to our time. It had
become a nuisance, and could not have continued much
longer. That is an instance of the manner of things that
were done when a Dictatorship prevailed in the country,
and that was how the Dictator did them. I reckon, all
England, Parliamentary England, got a new lease of life
from that Dictatorship of Oliver’s; and, on the whole, that
the good fruits of it will never die while England exists as
a nation.
In general, I hardly think that out of common history
books you will ever get into the real history of this
country, or ascertain anything which can specially illu
�■
INAUGURAL ADDRESS.
minate it for you, and which it would most of all behove
you to know. You may read very ingenious and very
clever books, by men whom it would be the height of in
solence in me to do other than express my respect for.
But their position is essentially sceptical. God and the
Godlike, as our fathers would have said, has fallen asleep for
them; and plays no part in their histories. A most sad and
fatal condition of matters; who shall say how fatal to us all'
A man unhappily in that condition will make but a tem
porary explanation of anything:—in short, you will not be
able, I believe, by aid of these men, to understand how this
Island came to be what it is. You will not find it re
corded in books. You will find recorded in books a
jumble of tumults, disastrous ineptitudes,, and all that
kind of thing. But to get what you want, you will have
to look into side sources, and inquire in all directions.
I remember getting Collins’s Peerage to read,—a very poor
performance as a work of genius, but an excellent book
for diligence and fidelity. I was writing on Oliver Crom
well at the time. (Applause?) I could get no biographical
dictionary available; and I thought the Peerage Book,
since most of my men were peers or sons of peers, would
help me, at least would tell me whether people were old
or young, where they lived, and the like particulars, better
than absolute nescience and darkness. And accordingly
I found amply all I had expected in poor Collins, and got
a great deal of help out of him. He was a diligent dull
London bookseller, of about a hundred years ago, who
compiled out of all kinds of parchments, charter-chests,
archives, books that were authentic, and gathered far and
�COLLINS’S PEERAGE.
23
wide wherever he could get it the information wanted.
He was a very meritorious man.
I not only found the solution of everything I had ex
pected there, but I began gradually to perceive this im
mense fact, which I really advise every one of you who
read history to look out for, if you have not already found
it. It was that the Kings of England, all the way from
the Norman Conquest down to the times of Charles I.,
had actually, in a good degree, so far as they knew, been
in the habit of appointing as Peers those who deserved
to be appointed. In general, I perceived, those Peers of
theirs were all royal men of a sort, with minds full of justice,
valour, and humanity, and all kinds of qualities that men
ought to have who rule over others. And then their genea
logy, the kind of sons and descendants they had, this also
was remarkable:—for there is a great deal more in genea
logy than is generally believed at present. I never heard
tell of any clever man that came of entirely stupid people.
(Laughter^) If you look around, among the families of your
acquaintance, you will see such cases in all directions;—
I know that my own experience is steadily that way; I
can trace the father, and the son, and the grandson, and
the family stamp is quite distinctly legible upon each of
them. So that it goes for a great deal, the hereditary prin
ciple,—in Government as in other things; and it must be
recognised so soon as there is any fixity in things. You
will remark, too, in your Collins, that, if at any time the
genealogy of a peerage goes awry, if the man that actu
ally holds the peerage is a fool,—in those earnest practical
times, the man soon gets into mischief, gets into treason
�24
INAUGURAL ADDRESS.
probably,—soon gets himself and his peerage extinguished
altogether, in short. (Laughter?)
From those old documents of Collins, you learn and
ascertain that a peer conducts himself in a pious, highminded, grave, dignified, and manly kind of way, in his
course through life, and when he takes leave of life:—his
last will is often a remarkable piece, which one lingers
over. And then you perceive that there was kindness in
him as well as rigour, pity for the poor; that he has fine
hospitalities, generosities,—in fine, that he is throughout
much of a noble, good and valiant man. And that in general
the King, with a beautiful approximation to accuracy, had
nominated this kind of man; saying, “ Come you to me,
sir. Come out of the common level of the people, where
you are liable to be trampled upon, jostled about, and can
do in a manner nothing with your fine gift; come here and
take a district of country, and make it into your own image
more or less; be a king under me, and understand that
that is your function.” I say this is the most divine
thing that a human being can do to other human beings,
and no kind of thing whatever has so much of the
character of God Almighty’s Divine Government as that
thing, which, we see, went on all over England for about
six hundred years. That is the grand soul of England’s
history. (Cheers?) It is historically true that, down to
the time of James, or even Charles I., it was not under
stood that any man was made a Peer without having
merit in him to constitute him a proper subject for a
peerage. In Charles i.’s time, it grew to be known or
said that, if a man was born a gentleman, and cared to
�BOOKS.
25
lay out £10,000 judiciously up and down among courtiers,
lie could be made a Peer. Under Charles H. it went on
still faster, and has been going on w7ith ever-increasing
velocity, until we see the perfectly breakneck pace at
which they are going now (A laugh?), so that now a
peerage is a paltry kind of thing to what it was in those
old times. I could go into a great many more details
about things of that sort, but I must turn to another
branch of the subject.
First, however, one remark more about your reading.
I do not know whether it has been sufficiently brought
home to you that there are two kinds of books. When a
man is reading on any kind of subject, in most depart
ments of books,—in all books, if you take it in a wide
sense,—he will find that there is a division into good
books and bad books. Everywhere a good kind of book
and a bad kind of book. I am not to assume that you
are unacquainted, or ill acquainted with this plain fact;
but I may remind you that it is becoming a very im
portant Consideration in our day. And we have to cast
aside altogether the idea people have, that, if they are.
reading any book, that if an ignorant man is reading any
book, he is doing rather better than nothing at all. I must
entirely call that in question; I even venture to deny it.
(Laughter and cheers?) It would be much safer and better
for many a reader, that he had no concern with books at
all. There is a number, a frightfully increasing number,
of books that are decidedly, to the readers of them, not
useful. (?H?ear?) But an ingenuous reader will learn, also,
that a certain number of books were written by a su
�26
INAUGURAL ADDRESS.
premely noble kind of people,—not a very great number
of books, but still a number fit to occupy all your reading
industry, do adhere more or less to that side of things.
In short, as I have written it down somewhere else, I
conceive that books are like men’s souls; divided into
sheep and goats. (Laughter and cheers.) Some few are
going up, and carrying us up, heavenward; calculated,
I mean, to be of priceless advantage in teaching,—in
forwarding the teaching of all generations. Others, a
frightful multitude, are going down, down; doing ever
the more and the wider and the wilder mischief. Keep
a strict eye on that latter class of books, my young
friends!—
And for the rest, in regard to all your studies and read
ings here, and to whatever you may learn, you are to
remember that the object is not particular knowledges,—
not that of getting higher and higher in technical perfec
tions, and all that sort of thing. There is a higher aim
lying at the rear of all that, especially among those who
are intended for literary or speaking pursuits, or the sacred
profession. You are ever to bear in mind that there lies
behind that the acquisition of what may be called wisdom;
—namely, sound appreciation and just decision as to all
the objects that come round you, and the habit of behaving
with justice, candour, clear insight, and loyal adherence to
fact. Great is wisdom; infinite is the value of wisdom.
It cannot be exaggerated ; it is the highest achievement
of man: ‘ Blessed is he that getteth understanding.’ And
that, I believe, on occasion, may be missed very easily;
never more easily than now, I sometimes think. If that
�ENDOWMENTS.
27
is a failure, all is failure!—However, I will not touch
further upon that matter.
But I should have said, in regard to hook-reading, if it
he so very important, how very useful would an excellent
library be in every University! I hope, that will not be
neglected by the gentlemen who have charge of you; and,
indeed, I am happy to hea.r that your library is very much
improved since the time I knew it, and I hope it will go
on improving more and more. Nay, I have sometimes
thought, why should not there be a library in every county
town, for benefit of those that could read well, and might
if permitted? True, you require money to accomplish
that;—and withal, what perhaps is still less attainable at
present, you require judgment in the selectors of books;
real insight into what is for the advantage of human souls,
the exclusion of all kinds of clap-trap books which merely
excite the astonishment of foolish people (Laughter), and
the choice of wise books, as much as possible of good books.
Let us hope the future will be kind to us in this respect.
In this University, as I learn from many sides, there
is considerable stir about endowments; an assiduous and
praiseworthy industry for getting new funds collected to
encourage the ingenuous youth of Universities, especially of
this our chief University. (Hear, hear?) Well, I entirely
participate in everybody’s approval of the movement. It
is very desirable. It should be responded to, and one
surely expects it will. At least, if it is not, it will be
shameful to the country of Scotland, which never was so
rich in money as at the present moment, and never stood
�28
INAUGURAL ADDRESS.
so much iu need of getting noble Universities, and insti
tutions to counteract many influences that are springing
up alongside of money. It should not be slack in coming
forward in the way of endowments (A laugh) ; at any rate,
to the extent of rivalling our rude old barbarous ancestors,
as we have been pleased to call them. Such munificence as
theirs is beyond all praise; and to them, I am sorry to say,
we are not yet by any manner of means equal, or ap
proaching equality. (Laughter?) There is an abundance
and over-abundance of money. Sometimes I cannot help
thinking that probably never has there been, at any other
time, in Scotland, the hundredth part of the money that
now is, or even the thousandth part. For wherever I go
there is that same gold-nuggeting (A laugh?),—-that ‘ unex;
ampled prosperity,’ and men counting their balances by
the million sterling. Money was never so abundant, and
nothing that is good to be done with it. (Hear, hear, and
a laugh?) No man knows,—or very few men know,—what
benefit to get out of his money. In fact, it too often is
secretly a curse to him. Much better for him never to
have had any. But I do not expect that generally to
be believed. (Laughter?) Nevertheless, I should think it
would be a beneficent relief to many a rich man who has an
honest purpose struggling in him, to bequeath some house
of refuge, so to speak, for the gifted poor man who may'
hereafter be born into the world, to enable him to get on
his way a little. To do, in fact, as those old Norman
kings whom I have been describing; to raise some noble
poor man out of the dirt and mud where he is getting
trampled on unworthily, by the unworthy, into some kind
�A DEEPER WANT.
29
of position where he might acquire the power to do a little
good in his generation! I hope that as much as possible
will be achieved in this direction; and that efforts will
not be relaxed till the thing is in a satisfactory state. In
regard to the classical department, above all, it surely is
to be desired by us that it were properly supported,—that
we could allow the fit people to have their scholarships and
subventions, and devote more leisure to the cultivation of
particular departments. We might have more of this from
Scotch Universities than we have; and I hope we shall.
I am bound, however, to say that it does not appear as if,
of late times, endowment were the real soul of the matter.
The English, for example, are the richest people in the
world for endowments in their Universities; and it is
an evident fact that, since the time of Bentley, you
cannot name anybody that has gained a European name
in scholarship, or constituted a point of revolution in the
pursuits of men in that way. The man who does so is
a man worthy of being remembered; and he is poor,
and not an Englishman.
One man that actually did
constitute a revolution was the son of a poor weaver in
Saxony; who edited his Tibullus, in Dresden, in a poor
comrade’s garret, with the floor for his bed, and two folios
for pillow; and who, while editing his Tibullus, had to
gather peasecod shells on the streets and boil them for his
dinner. That was his endowment. (Laughter?) But he
was recognised soon to have done a great thing. His
name was Heyne. (Cheers?) I can remember, it was
quite a revolution in my mind when I got hold of that
�30
INAUGURAL address.
man’s edition of Virgil. I found that, for the first time,
I understood Virgil; that Heyne had introduced me, for
the first time, into an insight of Roman life and ways of
thought; had pointed out the circumstances in which
these works were written, and given me their interpreta
tion. And the process has gone on in all manner of
developments, and has spread out into other countries.
On the whole, there is one reason why endowments are
not given now as they were in old days, when men founded
abbeys, colleges, and all kinds of things of that description,
with such success as we know. All that has now changed;
a vast decay of zeal in that direction. And truly the reason
may in part be, that people have become doubtful whether
colleges are now the real sources of what I called wisdom;
whether they are anything more, anything much more, than
a cultivating of man in the specific arts. In fact, there has
been in the world a suspicion of that kind for a long time.
(A laugh.') There goes a proverb of old date, ‘ An ounce
of mother-wit is worth a pound of clergy.’ {Laughter^)
There is a suspicion that a man is perhaps not nearly so
wise as he looks, or because he has poured out speech
so copiously. {Laughter.) When ‘the seven free arts ’
which the old Universities were based on, came to be
modified a little, in order to be convenient for the wants of
modern society,—though perhaps some of them are obsolete
enough even yet for some of us,—there arose a feeling that
mere vocality, mere culture of speech, if that is what comes
out of a man, is not the synonym of wisdom by any
means ! That a man may be a ‘ great speaker,’ as eloquent
as you like, and but little real substance in him,—espe
�FINE SPEECH.
31
cially, if that is what was required and aimed at by the
man himself, and by the community that set him upon
becoming a learned man. Maid-servants, I hear people
complaining, are getting instructed in the ‘ologies,’ and
are apparently becoming more and more ignorant of brew
ing, boiling, and baking (Laughter); and above all, are
not taught what is necessary to be known, from the highest
of us to the lowest,—faithful obedience, modesty, humility,
and correct moral conduct.
Oh, it is a dismal chapter all that if one went into it,—
what has been done by rushing after fine speech! I have
written down some very fierce things about that, perhaps
considerably more emphatic than I could now wish them to
be; but they were and are deeply my conviction. (Hear,
hear?) There is very great necessity indeed of getting a
little more silent than we are. It seems to me as if the
finest nations of the world,—the English and the Ameri
can, in chief,—were going all off into wind and tongue.
(Applause and laughter?) But it will appear sufficiently
tragical by-and-by, long after I am away out of it. There
is a time to speak, and a time to be silent. Silence withal
is the eternal duty of a man. He won’t get to any real
understanding of what is complex, and what is more than
aught else pertinent to his interests, without keeping
silence too. ‘Watch the tongue,’ is a very old precept,
and a most true one.
I don’t want to discourage any of you from your
Demosthenes, and your studies of the niceties of language,
and all that. Believe me, I value that as much as any
�32
INAUGURAL ADDRESS.
one of you. I consider it a very graceful thing, and a
most proper, for every human creature to know what the
implement which he uses in communicating his thoughts
is, and how to make the very utmost of it. I want you
to study Demosthenes, and to know all his excellences.
At the same time, I must say that speech, in the case
even of Demosthenes, does not seem, on the whole, to
have turned to almost any good account. He advised
next to nothing that proved practicable; much of the re
verse. Why tell me that a man is a fine speaker, if it is
not the truth that he is speaking ? Phocion, who mostly
did not speak at all, was a great deal nearer hitting the
mark than Demosthenes. (Laughter?) He used to tell
the Athenians, “You can’t fight Philip. Better if you
don’t provoke him, as Demosthenes is always urging
to you to do. You have not the slightest chance with
Philip. He is a man who holds his tongue ; he has
great disciplined armies; a full treasury; can bribe any
body you like in your cities here; he is going on steadily
with an unvarying aim towards his object; while you, with
your idle clamourings, with your Cleon the Tanner spout
ing to you what you take for Wisdom— ! Philip will in
fallibly beat any set of men such as you, going on raging
from shore to shore with all that rampant nonsense.”
Demosthenes said to him once, “ Phocion, you will drive
the Athenians mad some day, and they will kill you.”
“ Yes,” Phocion answered, “ me, when they go mad; and
as soon as they get sane again, you I ” (Laughter and
applause?) It is also told of him how he went once to
Messene, on some deputation which the Athenians wanted
�FINE SPEECH.
33
him to head, on some kind of matter of an intricate and
contentious nature: Phocion went accordingly; and had,
as usual, a clear story to have told for himself and his
case. He was a man of few words, but all of them true
and to the point. And so he had gone on telling his
story for a while, wheii there arose some interruption.
One man, interrupting with something, he tried to answer;
then another, the like ; till finally, too many went in, and
all began arguing and bawling in endless debate. Where
upon Phocion struck down his staff; drew back altogether,
and would speak no other word to any man. It appears
to me there is a kind of eloquence in that rap of Phocion’s
staff which is equal to anything Demosthenes ever said:
“ Take your own way, then; I go out of it altogether.”
(Applause?)
Such considerations, and manifold more connected with
them,—innumerable considerations, resulting from obser
vation of the world at this epoch,—have led various
people to doubt of the salutary effect of vocal education
altogether. I do not mean to say it should be entirely
excluded; but I look to something that will take hold of
the matter much more closely, and not allow it to slip out
of our fingers, and remain worse than it was. For, if a
‘good speaker,’ never so eloquent, does not see into the
fact, and is not speaking the truth of that, but the untruth
and the mistake of that,—is there a more horrid kind of
object in creation ? (Loud cheers?) Of such speech I hear
all manner of people say, “ How excellent!” Well, really
it is not the speech, but the thing spoken, that I am
anxious about! I really care very little how the man
I
�34
INAUGURAL ADDRESS.
said it, provided I understand him, and it be true. Ex
cellent speaker ? But what if he is telling me things that
are contrary to the fact; what if he has formed a wrong
judgment about the fact,—if he has in his mind (like
Phocion’s friend, Cleon the Tanner) no power to form a
right judgment in regard to the matter? An excellent
speaker of that kind is, as it were, saying, “ Ho, every
one that wants to be persuaded of the thing that is not
true; here is the man for you!” (Great laughter and
applause?) I recommend you to be very chary of that
kind of excellent speech. (?Renewed laughter?)
Well, all that sad stuff being the too well-known product
of our method of vocal education,—the teacher merely
operating on the tongue of the pupil, and teaching him to
wag it in a particular way (Laughter),—it has made various
thinking men entertain a distrust of this not very salu
tary way of procedure; and they have longed for some less
theoretic, and more practical and concrete way of working
out the problem of education;-—in effect, for an educa
tion not vocal at all, but mute except where speaking was
strictly needful. There would be room for a great deal of
description about this, if I went into it; but I must con
tent myself with saying that the most remarkable piece
of writing on it is in a book of Goethe’s,—the whole of
which you may be recommended to take up, and try if you
can study it with understanding. It is one of his last
books; written when he was an old man above seventy
years of age: I think, one of the most beautiful he ever
wrote; full of meek wisdom, of intellect and piety; which
�THE EDUCATION OF THE FUTURE.
35
is found to be strangely illuminative, and very touching,
by those who have eyes to discern and hearts to feel it.
This about education is one of the pieces in Wilhelm,
Meister’s Travels; or rather, in a fitful way, it forms
the whole gist of the book. I first read it many years
agoand, of course, I had to read into the very heart of
it while I was translating it (Applause); and it has ever
since dwelt in my mind as perhaps the most remark
able bit of writing which I have known to be executed in
these late centuries. I have often said that there are some
ten pageS of that, which, if ambition had been my only rule,
I would rather have written, been able to write, than have
written all the books that have appeared since I came into
the world. (Cheers?) Beep, deep is the meaning of what
is said there. Those pages turn on the Christian religion,
and the religious phenomena of the modern and the
ancient world: altogether sketched out in the most aerial,
graceful, delicately wise kind of way, so as to keep him
self out of the common controversies of the street and
of the forum, yet to indicate what was the result of things
he had been long meditating upon.
Among others, he introduces in an airy, sketchy kind
of way, with here and there a touch,—the sum-total of
which grows into a beautiful picture,—a scheme of entirely
mute education, at least with no more speech than is ab
solutely necessary for what the pupils have to do. Three
of the wisest men discoverable in the world have been
got together, to consider, to manage and supervise, the
function which transcends all others in importance; that
of building up the young generation so as to keep it
�36
INAUGURAL ADDRESS.
free from that perilous stuff that has been weighing
us down, and clogging every step;—which function, in
deed, is the only thing we can hope to go on with, 'c we
would leave the world a little better, and not the worse,
of our having been in it, for those who are to follow.
The Chief, who is the Eldest of the 'three, says to Wil
helm : “ Healthy well-formed children bring into the
world with them many precious gifts; and very frequently
these are best of all developed by Nature herself, with
but slight assistance, where assistance is seen to be wise
and profitable, and with forbearance very often on the
part of the overseer of the process. But there is one
thing which no child brings into the world with him,
and without which all other things are of no use.”
Wilhelm, who is there beside him, asks, “And what is
that?” “All want it,” says the Eldest; “perhaps you
yourself.” Wilhelm says, “Well, but tell me what it is?”
“ It is,” answers the other, “ Reverence (EhrfurcM); Re
verence! Honour done to those who are greater and
better than ourselves; honour distinct from fear. Ehrfurcht; the soul of all religion that has ever been among
men, or ever will be.”
And then he goes into details about the religions of the
modern and the ancient world. He practically distinguishes
the kinds of religion that are, or have been, in the world ;
and says that for men there are three reverences. The
boys are all trained to go through certain gesticulations;
to lay their hands on their breast and look up to heaven,
in sign of the first reverence; other forms for the other
two: so they give their three reverences. The first and
�THE EDUCATION OF THE FUTURE.
37
simplest is that of reverence for what is above us. It is
the soul of all the Pagan religions; there is nothing better
in th# antique man than that. Then there is reverence
for what is around us,—reverence for our equals, to which
he attributes an immense power in the culture of man.
The third is reverence for what is beneath us; to learn to
recognise in pain, in sorrow and contradiction, even in thoee
things, odious to flesh and blood, what divine meanings
are in them; to learn that there lies in these also, and
more than in any of the preceding, a priceless blessing.
And he defines that as being the soul of the Christian
religion,—the highest of all religions; ‘ a height,’ as Goethe
says (and that is very true, even to the letter, as I con
sider), ‘ a height to which mankind was fated and enabled
to attain; and from which, having once attained it, they
can never retrograde.’ Man cannot quite lose that (Goethe
thinks), or permanently descend below it again; but
always, even in the most degraded, sunken, and unbe
lieving times, he calculates there will be found some few
souls who will recognise what this highest of the religions
meant; and that, the world having once received it, there
is no fear of its ever wholly disappearing.
The Eldest then goes on to explain by what methods
they seek to educate and train their boys; in the trades,
in the arts, in the sciences, in whatever pursuit the boy is
found best fitted for. Beyond all, they are anxious to dis
cover the boy’s aptitudes; and they try him and watch him
continually, in many wise ways, till by degrees they can
discover this. Wilhelm had left his own boy there, per
haps expecting they would make him a Master of Arts,
X
�38
INAUGURAL ADDRESS.
or something of the kind; and on coming back for him,
he sees a thunder-cloud of dust rushing over the plain,
of which he can make nothing. It turns out to be a
tempest of wild horses, managed by young lads who had
a turn for horsemanship, for hunting, and being grooms.
His own son is among them || and 'he finds that the
breaking of colts has been the thing he was most suited
for. (Laughter?)
The highest outcome, and most precious of all the fruits
that are to spring from this ideal mode of educating, is
what Goethe calls Art:—of which I could at present give
no definition that would make it clear to you, unless it
were clearer already than is likely. (A laugh?) Goethe
calls it music, painting, poetry: but it is in quite a higher
sense than the common one ; and a sense in which, I am
afraid, most of our painters, poets, and music men, would
not pass muster. (A laugh?) He considers this as the
highest pitch to which human culture can go; infinitely
valuable and ennobling; and he watches with great in
dustry how it is to be brought about, in the men who have
a turn for it. Very wise and beautiful his notion of the
matter is. It gives one an idea that something far better
and higher, something as high as ever, and indubitably
true too, is still possible for man in this world.—And that
is all I can say to you of Goethe’s fine theorem of mute
education.
I confess it seems to me there is in it a shadow of what will
one day be; will and must, unless the world is to come to a
conclusion that is altogether frightful: some kind of scheme
of education analogous to that; presided over by the
�THE EDUCATION OF THE FUTURE.
39
wisest and most sacred men that can be got in the world,
and watching from a distance: a training in practicality
at every turn; no speech in it except speech that is to be
followed by action, for that ought to be the rule as nearly
as possible among men. Not very often or much, rarely
rather, should a man speak at all, unless it is for the sake
of something that is to be done; this spoken, let him go
and do his part in it, and say no more about it.
I will only add that it is possible,—all this fine theorem
of Goethe’s, or something similar ! Consider what we have
already ; and what ‘ difficulties ’ we have overcome. I
should say there is nothing in the world you can conceive
so difficult, prima facie, as that of getting a set of men
gathered together as soldiers. Rough, rude, ignorant, dis
obedient people; you gather them together, promise them
a shilling a day; rank them up, give them very severe
and sharp drill; and by bullying and drilling and com
pelling (the word drilling, if you go to the original,
means ‘beating,’ ‘steadily tormenting’ to the due pitch),
they do learn what it is necessary to learn; and there is
your man in red coat, a trained soldier; piece of an ani
mated machine incomparably the most potent in this
world; a wonder of wonders to look qt. He will go
where bidden; obeys one man, will walk into the can
non’s mouth for him; does punctually whatever is com
manded by his general officer. And, I believe, all
manner of things of this kind could be accomplished,
if there were the same attention bestowed. Very many
things could be regimented, organized into this mute
system;—and perhaps in some of the mechanical, com
�40
INAUGURAL ADDRESS.
mercial, and manufacturing departments, some faint in
cipiences may be attempted before very long. For the
saving of human labour, and the avoidance of human
misery, the effects would be incalculable, were it set about
and begun even in part.
Alas, it is painful to think how very far away it all is,
any real fulfilment of such things! For I need not hide
from you, young gentlemen,—and it is one of the last
things I am going to tell you,—that you have got into a
very troublous epoch of the world; and I don’t think you
will find your path in it to be smoother than ours has been,
though you have many advantages which we had not.
You have careers open to you, by public examinations and
so on, which is a thing much to be approved of, and which
we hope to see perfected more and more. All that was
entirely unknown in my time, and you have many things
to recognise as advantages. But you will find the ways
of the world, I think, more anarchical than ever. Look
where one will, revolution has come upon us. We have
got into the age of revolutions. All kinds of things are
coming to be subjected to fire, as it were: hotter and hotter
blows the element round everything. Curious to see how,
in Oxford and other places that used to seem as lying at
anchor in the stream of time, regardless of all changes,
they are getting into the highest humour of mutation, and
all sorts of new ideas are afloat. It is evident that what
ever is not inconsumable, made of asbestos, will have to
be burnt, in this world. Nothing other will stand the
heat it is getting exposed to.
And in saying that, I am but saying in other words that
�AN AGE OF REVOLUTIONS.
41
we are in an epoch of anarchy. Anarchy plus a constable!
(Laughter?) There is nobody that picks one’s pocket
without some policeman being ready to take him up.
(?Renewed laughter?) But in every other point, man is
becoming more and more the son, not of Cosmos, but
of Chaos. He is a disobedient, discontented, reckless,
and altogether waste kind of object (the commonplace
man is, in these epochs); and the wiser kind of man,
—the select few, of whom I hope you will be part,—has
more and more to see to this, to look vigilantly forward ;
and will require to move with double, wisdom. Will
find, in short, that the crooked things he has got to pull
straight in his own life all round him, wherever he may
go, are manifold, and will task all his strength, however
great it be.
But why should I complain of that either ? For that is
the thing a man is born to, in all epochs. He is born to
expend every particle of strength that God Almighty has
given him, in doing the work he finds he is fit for; to
stand up to it to the last breath of life, and do his best.
We are called upon to do that; and the reward we all get,
—which we are perfectly sure of if we have merited it,—is
that we have got the work done, or at least that we have
tried to do the work. For that is a great blessing in itself;
and I should say, there is not very much more reward than
that going in this world. If the man gets meat and
clothes, what matters it whether he buy those neces
saries with seven thousand a year, or with seven million,
could that be, or with seventy pounds a year? He can
get meat and clothes for that; and he will find intrinsi
�42
INAUGURAL ADDRESS.
cally, if he is a wise man, wonderfully little real differ
ence. (Laughter?)
On the whole, avoid what is called ambition; that is
not a fine principle to go upon,—and it has in it all de
grees of vulgarity, if that is a consideration. ‘ Seekest
thou great things, seek them notI warmly second that
advice of the wisest of men. Don’t be ambitious; don’t
too much need success; be loyal and modest. Cut down
the proud towering thoughts that get into you, or see that
they be pure as well as high. There is a nobler ambition
than the gaining of all California would be, or the getting
of all the suffrages that are on the Planet just now. (Loud
and prolonged cheers?)
Finally, gentlemen, I have one advice to give you, which
is practically of very great importance, though a very
humble one. In the midst of your zeal and ardour,—
for such, I foresee, will rise high enough, in spite of all the
counsels to moderate it that I can give you,—remember
the care of health. I have no doubt you have among you
young souls ardently bent to consider life cheap, for the
purpose of getting forward in what they are aiming at of
high; but you are to consider throughout, much more than
is done at present, and what it would have been a very
great thing for me if I had been able to consider, that
health is a thing to be attended to continually; that you
are to regard that as the very highest of all temporal things
for you. (Applause?) There is no kind of achievement you
could make in the world that is equal to perfect health.
What to it are nuggets and millions ? The French financier
�HEALTH.
43
said, “ Why, is there no sleep to be sold !” Sleep was not
in the market at any quotation. {Laughter and applause?)
It is a curious thing, which I remarked long ago, and have
often turned in my head, that the old word for ‘holy’
in the Teutonic languages, heilig, also means ‘healthy.’
Thus Heilbronn means indifferently ‘holy-well,’ or ‘health
well.’ We have, in the Scotch too, ‘ hale,’ and its deriva
tives; and, I suppose, our English word ‘whole’ (with a
‘w’), all of one piece, without any hole in it, is the same
word. I find that you could not get any better defini
tion of what ‘holy’ really is than ‘healthy.’ Completely
healthy; mens sana in corpore sano. {Applause.) A
man all lucid, and in equilibrium. His intellect a clear
mirror geometrically plane, brilliantly sensitive to all
objects and impressions made on it, and imaging all
things in their correct proportions; not twisted up into
convex or concave, and distorting everything, so that he
cannot see the truth of the matter-without endless groping
and manipulation: healthy, clear, and free, and discerning
truly all round him. We never can attain that at all. In
fact, the operations we have got into are destructive of it.
You cannot, if you are going to do any decisive intellectual
operation that will last a long while; if, for instance, you
are going to write a book,—you cannot manage it (at
least, I never could) without getting decidedly made ill
by it: and really one nevertheless must; if it is your
business, you are obliged to follow out what you are at,
and to do it, if even at the expense of health. Only
remember, at all times, to get back as fast as possible out
of it into health; and regard that as the real equilibrium
�44
INAUGURAL ADDRESS.
and centre of things. You should always look at the
heilig, which means 1 holy’ as well as ‘healtny.’l I
And that old etymology,—what a lesson it is against
certain gloomy, austere, ascetic people, who have gone
about as if this world were all a dismal prison-house. It
has indeed got all the ugly things in it which I have been
alluding to ; but there is an eternal sky over it; and the
blessed sunshine, the green of prophetic spring, and rich
harvests coming,—all this is in it, too. Piety does not
mean that a man should make a sour face about things,
and refuse to enjoy wisely what his Maker has given.
Neither do you find it to have been so with the best sort,
—with old Knox, in particular. No; if you look into
Knox you will find a beautiful Scotch humour in him, as
well as the grimmest and sternest truth when necessary,
and a great deal of laughter. We find really some of
the sunniest glimpses of things come out of Knox that I
have seen in any man; for instance, in his History of
the Reformation,—which is a book I hope every one of
you will read (Applause), a glorious old book.
On the whole, I would bid you stand up to your work,
whatever it may be, and not be afraid of it; not in sor
rows or contradictions to yield, but to push on towards the
goal. And don’t suppose that people are hostile to you or
have you at ill-will, in the world. In general, you will rarely
find anybody designedly doing you ill. You may feel often
as if the whole world were obstructing you, setting itself
against you: but you will find that to mean only, that
the world is travelling in a different way from you, and,
rushing on in its own path, heedlessly treads on you.
�A LAST WORD.
45
That is mostly all: to you no specific ill-will;—only each
has an extremely good-will to himself, which he has a right
to have, and is rushing on towards his object. Keep out
of literature, I should say also, as a general rule (Laughter),
—though that is by-the-by. If you find many people
who are hard and indifferent to you, in a world which you
consider to be inhospitable and cruel, as often indeed
happens to a tender-hearted, striving young creature, you
will also find there are noble hearts who will look kindly
on you; and their help will be precious to you beyond
price. You will get good and evil as you go on, and
have the success that has been appointed you.
I will wind up with a small bit of verse which is from
Goethe also, and has often gone through my mind. To me,
it has something of a modern psalm in it, in some mea
sure. It is deep as the foundations, deep and high, and it
is true and clear :—no clearer man, or nobler and grander
intellect has lived in the world, I believe, since Shakspeare left it. This is what the poet sings;—a kind of
road-melody or marching-music of mankind :
‘ The Future hides in it
Gladness and sorrow;
We press still thorow,
Nought that abides in it
Daunting us,—onward.
And solemn before us,
Veiled, the dark Portal;
Goal of all mortal:—
Stars silent rest o’er us,
Graves under us silent.
�46
INAUGURAL ADDRESS.
While earnest thou gazest,
Comes boding of terror,
Comes phantasm and error;
Perplexes the bravest
With doubt and misgiving.
But heard are the Voices,
Heard are the Sages,
The Worlds and the Ages
“ Choose well, your choice is
Brief, and yet endless.
Here eyes do regard you,
In Eternity’s stillness;
Here is all fulness,
Ye brave, to reward you ;
Work, and despair not.” ’
Work, and despair not: Wir heissen euch hoffcn, We bid
you be of hope!’—let that be my last word. Gentlemen,
I thank you for your great patience in hearing me ;
and, with many most kind wishes, say Adieu for this
time.
EDINBURGH I THOMAS CONSTABLE,
PRINTER TO THE QUEEN, AND TO THE UNIVERSITY.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Inaugural address at Edinburgh, April 2nd, 1866; by Thomas Carlyle, at being installed as Rector of the university there
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Carlyle, Thomas [1795-1881.]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: Edinburgh; London
Collation: 46 p. ; 20 cm.
Notes: 'Authorised Report' [title page]. Later published under the title 'On the Choice of Books'. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Edmonston and Douglas; Chapman and Hall
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1866
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
G5189
Subject
The topic of the resource
Education
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Inaugural address at Edinburgh, April 2nd, 1866; by Thomas Carlyle, at being installed as Rector of the university there), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Addresses
Education
Reading
Speeches
Thomas Carlyle
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/d7fefba610c054c4389aa7e5f120fee9.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=GKe2Pbx-dU1QcsK%7Eui5lbEBUVTGr8TEeMVk4Om5E3d7PXrz594kTtqU7UVhn7ui4OUgeh3u7ZPvrioqI-lVfUr9dvAVqE7Pfm%7E6YTSmYHzhWFKXASu1AZYA4OBavkMK0dXC9WGolJhik50r9Vpixy1Uq8DWYlJUMjWJVCBJE00mnL80C8V6%7Ex2Mfy93QPl%7EpIDz7KWA3gbNO-CRHYhfMkx64e9bC7PLKvhuU%7EDLY5OZif9ma6JnoH%7EJuK6LvWmlk5737mBtdzs0-7bc9BUZqf-2pUmCE5ZyszXGtFV9Didy-LOQNv8-hwCzkPZ06X2XI4fYZMasDcnyPB75NYhPAMw__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
6baa1df24a700317b1c955a34fe0cca3
PDF Text
Text
A Visit to the Grave
OF
THOMAS CARLYLE.
BY
SALADIN.
London :
W. STEWART & Co., 41, FARRINGDON STREET, E.C.
�ERECTED TO THE
MEMORY OF JANNET CARLYLE,
SPOUSE OF JAMES CARLYLE, MAS
ON, IN ECCLEFECHAN, WHO DIED
THE IIth SEPtr, 1792, IN THE 25th
YEAR OF HER AGE.
ALSO JANNET CARLYLE, DAUGHTER TO
JAMES CARLYLE AND MARGARET AIKEN,
DIED
SHE AT ECCLEFECHAN JANR 27™, l8oi,
AGED 17 MONTHS, ALSO MARGRET
THEIR DAUGHTER, SHE DIED JUNE 2 2nd, 1830,
AGED 27 YEARS. AND THE ABOVE
JAMES CARLYLE, BORN AT BROWN KNOWE
IN AUGT 1758, DIED AT SCOTSBRIG ON THE
2 3d JANry 1832, AND NOW ALSO RESTS HERE
AND HERE NOW RESTS THE ABOVE
MARGARET AITKEN, HIS SECOND
WIFE, BORN AT WHITESTANE, KIRKMAHOE, IN SEPTM 1771; DIED AT SCOTSBRIG,
ON CHRISTMAS DAY 1853.
SHE BROUGHT
HIM NINE CHILDREN WHEREOF FOUR
SONS AND THREE DAUGHTERS SURVIVED
GRATEFULLY REVERENT OF SUCH
A FATHER AND SUCH A MOTHER.
�6 SIX©
LA0'
[Reprinted from The Secular Review.]
A VISIT TO THE GRAVE
OF
THOMAS CARLYLE.
Barefooted lads and lasses, when I was some seventeen
years of age, came skelping over the red heather and
yellow broom of the moors from Carlyle’s Craigenputtock
to my school at Glenesslin, Dunscore. I well knew
Mr. Cumming, the seven-feet-high child of Anak, who
was then Carlyle’s tenant farmer, and who showed me
some of Carlyle’s “ business ” letters to himself, and
which, for the incipient soul which was then in my body
of length without breadth, I could not decipher. “ I
should flog the smallest boy in my school for perpetrating
a handwriting like that!” exclaimed I, with the full flavour
of pedagogic strut. As far as I am aware, Carlyle never
visited the Dunscore district without calling upon my
venerable and highly-gifted friend, Thomas Aird; and
dear old Aird of “The Devil’s Dream” made up his
mind that I, his raw and vehement young protege, should
take tea with Carlyle in the little upper room at Mountain
Hall, near Dumfries, where the grand and quiet old poet
had often told me tales of his earlier years to cheer me
through the toil and blighted hope of mine. What tales
he could tell, too, of his early associates in literature; of
John Wilson, with his radiant genius and majestic man
hood ; of De Quincey, with his dreamings over the
borderland of the world; of the lovable “Delta” of
“ Casa Wappy,” and of Blackwood and of Lord Jeffrey ;
and of that marvellous shepherd of Ettrick, who fashioned
the glamourie of “ Kilmeny ” out of the dim mists of
his native hills.
�2
A VISIT TO THE GRAVE OF THOMAS CARLYLE.
Carlyle took tea exactly like any other uncouth mortal.
I was young and blate and timid. By the grace of a
Titan I, a big schoolboy, with his legs too long for his
breeches, was stuck between a Titan and a Deity, and I
shrank into nothingness under the fierce light that beat
upon me. I was told that the butter was from the Barnkin
(which was ever Aird’s guarantee of that article’s excel
lence), and I was recommended to try it with the soda
scone. Thus appealed to, I felt that it devolved upon
me to immortalise myself. Now was the chance for me
to come out of my shell and show Carlyle that Aird was
correct in his predilection for me, and that I was no
common country hobbledehoy. I would astonish Carlyle
—and I daresay I did. I began a sentence, which I
intended to be a long, eloquent, and elegant one. I
would demonstrate that I could orally marshal more than
monosyllables. I would prove that I was a scholar, and
could weild the sesquipedalian thunders. But, O shade
of Tully, in my blateness and trepidation a word of
tremendous length got inextricably and inappropriately
jammed into the sentence, and all the wits I had left got
jammed i.i along with it. I lost my meaning altogether.
I abandoned the old sentence, and began a new one, less
ambitious and perfectly commonplace and trite; but,
before I had got half way through with it, I had forgotten
what I had intended to say. I stuttered and blushed, let
my knife fall upon the floor with a bang, the perspiration
broke upon my brow, and I subsided into silence and
despair. I dared not look up to observe the facial effect
my discomfiture had produced; but I doubt not that, if
Carlyle deigned to think of me at all, he set me down as
a complete idiot, or the nearest to it that could wrell be
conceived.
Much has come and gone since then. Now I am
bolder and my sentences are less ambitious. A raw youth,
I broke down in the orgies of my hero-worship before
the furrowed cheeks and the rugged brow of one of the
most exceptional men that ever ate bread prepared from
the cereals of our planet. In the morning of August 29th,
1884, I repeated wierdly : “Brief, brawling day, with its
noisy phantoms, its poor paper crowns, tinsel gilt, is gone,
and divine, everlasting night, with her star-diadems, with
�A VISIT TO THE GRAVE OF THOMAS CARLYLE.
3
her silences, and her veracities, is come,”* and I deter
mined, since I was only some fifteen miles from Ecclefechan, that I should go and see my old master’s restingplace, and cull a few blades of grass from the clay of
death which now fills up the wrinkles indented with the
graving tool of a weary life. I reached Ecclefechan.
There is a key to the plain iron gate of the sepulchre;
but, as regards the cottage where the key is kept, there
was no one within and the door was locked. A substan
tial and ungainly wall of whin-stone and lime rose, some
nine or ten feet high, between me and the Ecclefechan
city of the dead. But, standing within a few feet of
where Carlyle lay, was I to be turned aside by a wall of
stone—aye, or a wall of fire ? It wras Carlyle who had
first prompted me to be heroic enough to become a Free
thinker and repudiate the moral suicide of attempting to
force upon the credence that which is repulsive to the
reason. I buttoned my coat, glanced critically at my
boot-soles, and, repeating between my set teeth, “ What
is incredible to thee thou shalt not, at thy soul’s peril,
attempt to believe! Elsewhither for a refuge, or die
here. Go to perdition if thou might; but not with a
lie in thy mouth ; by the Eternal Maker, no ;”t rushed
at the jagged, hard, and ungainly wall, scrambled up it
like a cat, and leapt from its top like a deer.
A plain, spear-headed iron railing, set on a coping of
stone, the spear-points reaching as high as your chin,
encloses three headstones standing in line, to the left old
James Carlyle, the stone-mason ; to the right Thomas
Carlyle, the baby; in the centre Thomas Carlyle, the
God-knows-what, lying waiting for God-knows-what.
“Yes, thy future fate, indeed? Thy future fate, while
thou makest it the chief question, seems to me extremely
questionable.’’^ “ Or, alas, perhaps at bottom is there
no Great Day, no sure look-out of any life to come, but
only this poor life; and what of taxes, felicities, Nell
Gwynes, and entertainments we can manage to muster
here ?Ӥ Outside the rail, in a drizzling shower, I
copied the inscriptions upon the three several grave
stones, for the benefit of him who may not care to visit
* “ Past and Present.”
+ “ Life of Sterling.”
I “ Past and Present.”
§ Ibidem.
�4
A VISIT TO THE GRAVE OK THOMAS CARLYLE.
Ecclefechan at all, and also for the benefit of him who
may visit Ecclefechan, but who may not see his way to
leaping over a ten-feet wall at the risk of breaking his
neck.*
The Thomas Carlyle on tombstone No. 3 was the son of
James Carlyle, brother of Thomas the Great. This brother
James still vegetates in Ecclefechan, but was invisible.
He was described to me as “wee and eccentric,” and was,
till lately, farmer in the Scotsbrig, of tombstone celebrity.
I called at his house ; but, although he did not pretend
to be absent, he was more difficult of access than even
his brother’s grave, and I had to return to London with
out even a glimpse at Carlyle the undistinguished. I,
however, saw his son, nephew of him whom Gilfillan
dubbed “ the cursing Polyphemus of Chelsea.” He is a
rough, broad-set, bucolic-looking person, with a wrinkled,
bull-dog sort of face, but full of ingenuousness and
sonsy integrity. In a quiet and stolid, but unostenta
tiously polite, manner he took me upstairs and pointed
out to me several mementoes of his illustrious uncle.
Among these was a framed oil painting of a person of
about forty-five years of age, not a ladies’ man by any
means, but the possessor of a grim, hard face of heather
and granite, under which the volcanic fires of genius
might slumber, and which I had no difficulty in predicat
ing to be the face of Thomas Carlyle. It is noteworthy
that, from this oil painting, no impression whatever has
yet been taken, as the nephew laconically assured
me. In the room there is also a framed oil painting,
purporting to be the counterfeit presentment of Jane
Welsh Carlyle. But the thing has a face as long as your
arm, and has, altogether, such features and expression as
I cannot charge God Almighty with having bestowed
upon any being I have yet seen. If the father of
Teufelsdrockh had really a wife like that, the key is
furnished to the secret of his bearishness, dyspepsia, and
misanthropy.
I next went to the house in which Thomas the
Uncanny was born. It has a wide cart-arch running
right through it to some unspeakable stables or lumber
* F®r an exact transcript see cover.
�A VISIT TO THE GRAVE OF THOMAS CARLYLE.
5
houses behind. In a little room upstairs, on December
4th, 1795, a baby came howling and wailing, as we have
all done, out of Mystery into Mystery ; and this baby,
instead of an ordinary clod-hopper, turned out to be
Thomas Carlyle. Scotland, although she has specially
the knack of turning cuckoos—or, rather, eagles—out
of sparrows’ nests, had done nothing so tremendous in
this line since the immortal twenty-fifth of January, 1759>
when she parturited in an “auld clay biggin” near
Alloway Kirk the infant that developed into that porten
tous jumble of dirt and deity known as Robert Burns.
In the little room there is a chair, brought from Chelsea,
and which is interesting as being reputed to have often
sustained the somatic foundations of the author of
“ Sartor Resartus.” There is also, in a corner, a bracket,
on which are arranged copies of the whole of the
author’s works—his own present to the room. 1. he
house, although a poor and plain, is a strong and sub
stantial one, and was built with the undistinguished
hands of a father whose son built up with distinguished
hands, not a little whin-stone house in a little obscure
village, but a fabric whose august and rugged masonry
forms a fane in which millions worship, and in which
succeeding millions will continue to worship when the
present celebrants are wiped off the slate with the sponge
of Death. The natal room is shown off by a smart and
pretty young dressmaker, who exposes for sale some
Carlyle nicnacks, one of which I brought away with me
in the shape of a wooden pin-tray, with a photograph of
Ecclefechan in the bottom thereof.
But, as to Ecclefechan itself, it is not worth going the
length of your leg to see. Its principal feature is the
red and rustic U. P. church, which overlooks Ecclefechan’s sole attraction—its graveyard. I saw at least
four public-houses, two or three of which had the cheek
to dub themselves inns. All seemed dead as the grave
yard, except these “ inns,” and one old man wheeling a
barrow, and one frail old woman carrying a back-load of
sticks. Where did the money come from to purchase
the “liquid Madness sold at tenpence a quartern, all
the products of which are, and must be, like its origin,
mad, miserable, ruinous, and that only”?* And yet,
�6
A VISIT TO THE GRAVE OF THOMAS CARLYLE.
let the “ inns ” flourish ; their “ black, unluminous, un
heeded Inferno and Prisonhouse of souls in pain ”f of
fiery whisky must surely be better than the waters of
the Ecclefechan burn as it “wimples through the
clachan.” Even for Carlyle’s sake, I did not taste the
liquid of this burn that runs down the main—in fact,
the only—street of the village, and quite close to the
door of the tenement in which Ecclefechan’s only man
was born. The day was showery ; watery clouds scudded
athwart the autumn sky, and the tide of the unclassical
burn had the appearance of dirty milk. This appear
ance was considerably enhanced t’ne wrong way by the
presence in the bed of the stream—which is now, how
ever, partly covered over—of old boots, old sardine tins,
scraps of old newspapers, the heads of herrings, the
parings of potatoes, yellow cabbage leaves, and the
mortal remains of unburied cats. I should think Eccle
fechan should be a tolerably ready place to die in, never
to speak of the privilege of being buried beside a man
who has left an indelible mark upon his century. Off
trudges the dirty burn to join Mein Water, which, in its
turn, falls into the River Annan, and the miasma of
dead cabbages and the malodour of the corpses of cats
are lost in the tossing tides and saline winds of the
Solway. Ecclefechan has a woollen factory (I took it for
a gaol, or a madhouse), which, when business is brisk,
employs forty hands ; but it now employs only four
teen. Alas for the local Plugstone of Undershot!
Ichabod is over every door. The glory has departed.
There is no vitality in the woollen factory, in the dotard
with the wheelbarrow, or in the beldame with the bundle
of sticks. The village’s only heirloom is decay; its only
source of life—a grave 1 I looked beyond the wheel
barrow, the public-house, and the bundle of sticks, into
the depths of the silent and mysterious sky, and
murmured : “ The Past is a dim, indubitable fact; the
b uture, too, is one, only dimmer—nay, properly, it is the
same fact in new dress and development. For the
Present holds in it both the whole Past and the whole
Future : as the Life-Tree, Igdrasil, wide-waving,
* “Chartism.”
+ Ibidem.
�A VISIT TO THE GRAVE OF THOMAS CARLYLE.
7
many-toned, has its roots down deep in the Death-King
doms, among the oldest dead dust of men, and with its
boughs reaches away beyond the stars, and in all times
and places is one and the same Life-tree.”*
By the way, speaking of Scotsbrig, I had a chat with
a hale and hearty old peasant, who had long been plough
man at that farm. He knew all the ins and outs of the
Carlyles well, and had frequently, when a youth, “put
the graith on the pony for baith Tammas and his brither
John, the doctor. The doctor was a raal gentleman. I
never pat on a saddle for him but he geid me half-acroon ; but Tammas was a meeserable screw. I never
got as muckle as a bawbee frae him.” So much for
this aged yokel’s estimate of him of the Eternities and
Immensities 1
It will be observed that, on his monolith, James Carlyle
is described mas-on. The ancient ploughman of Scots
brig assured me that the gravestone was the handiwork
of the mason who sleeps below. I am sorry for this, as
there is something on the obverse side of the stone which
offends me. At the top there is an angel with wonder
fully chubby cheeks, and the rest of the space is carved
and scrolled over with two heraldic beasts and two
heraldic shields, showing that the modern stonemason
prided himself upon being connected with some strutting
sept of ancient cut-throats. The two heraldic beasts
have each an open mouth, from which proceeds what has
evidently been intended to represent a tongue with
terrible forks ; but which, as they stand, would more
readily suggest that each beast had swallowed a hen, all
but one foot and leg, which still protruded from the open
jaws, with all the toes spread. There are, furthermore,
in sundry places on the stone, as many loose feathers
carved here and there as would make a decent-sized
pillow; but whether they had belonged to the angel, or
the hen, or both, I could not determine. With its
feathers and feet and detached nooks and corners and
humbugs, the whole thing looks like a Kindergarten
puzzle: “Given the pieces, put together the hen.” So
much for a peasant’s heraldry.
Proem to “ Past and Present.’'
�s
A VISIT TO THE GRAVE OF THOMAS CARLYLE.
Howbeit, in the village stonemason all this might be
overlooked and forgiven ; but the very two heraldic brutes
that figure on the back of the tombstone of the father
appear on the face of that of the son—he of the mongrel
English and German kettle-drum with stick and calf’sskin thunder. Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the
streets of Askelon. One more cynical than I might
pronounce the soi-disant scarifier of shams himself a
sham, and sneer that, if Carlyle’s burial in Westminster
would have savoured of vain-glory, his interment in Eccle
fechan is redolent of burlesque.
But if there be here, over thy tomb, Thomas Carlyle,
room for cynicism, still that cynicism is not for me. I
leave to burn, as the only funeral tapers over thy grave,
the few heads of red clover I found blooming there
among the sweet and ungrimed green grass over which
trod the feet of thy childhood. I am fain to forget thy
poor little make-believes of heraldry. Thou, and not
the red-handed cattle-reiver of the bygone centuries, art
the founder of the house of Carlyle. Thine are the
gules, d’argent, and d’or that should make every dead
man of thy lineage, proud of thee, stand up in his grave,
and utter a sepulchral hurrah. So much for thy lineage
of the Past; and, as for thy lineage of the Future, did
no “ two-legged animals without feathers ”* proceed from
thy loins ? Yet, thou hast ten thousand sons, no dwarfs
and drowes either, but men with blood of fire and thews
of steel—Atlases carrying the world on their shoulders.
Over thy bed, with its clay sheets so cool, with its cover
let of green grass and white daisies, I lean, O my father,
and ask thee for thy blessing. I am thy youngest and
most unworthy son; but I have the honour to be con
sanguine with thee in Scottish peasant blood, in sour
peat bogs, in porridge and penury. Your boyish arm,
like mine, bore a shield that was battered shapeless in
the battle for bread; and your right hand, like mine,
bore a blade whose gladiatorial flashes of flame had ren
dered more terrible, but had not illumed, the invulner
able panoply of Ontology and Mystery.
�HUMILITATE.
HERE RESTS THOMAS CARLYLE, WHO WAS BORN
AT ECCLEFECHAN, 4™ DECEMBER, 4795, AND DIED AT
24 CHEYNE ROW, CHELSEA, LONDON, ON SATURDAY
5th FEBRUARY, l88l.
HERE ALSO RESTS JOHN AITKEN CARLYLE, M.D. LL.D.
WHO WAS BORN AT ECCLEFECHAN 7™ JULY l8oi
AND DIED AT THE HILL, DUMFRIES ON MONDAY
15 SEPTEMBER 1879
IN
MEMORY
OF
THOMAS CARLYLE
SON OF JAMES CARLYLE AND ISABELLA CALVERT
IN SCOTSBRIG WHO DIED 27 DEC. 1841
AGED 3 YEARS AND ONE MONTH.
ALSO THE ABOVE ISABELLA CALVERT, WHO
DIED AT SCOTSBRIG Ist JUNE 1859,
AGED 46 YEARS.
�Price 2s., post free,
LAYS OF ROMANCE & CHIVALRY.
By W. STEWART ROSS (“Saladin”).
“ Some of these effusions are ot a very remarkable character, and indicate
that Mr. Ross has a genuine vein of poetic inspiration.”—Daily Telegraph.
“ Mr. Stewart Ross shows great power of dramatic expression.............. The
work will be welcomed by all who can appreciate poetic energy applied to the
interesting and thrilling incidents of the earlier and more romantic periods of
history.”—Aberdeen Journal.
“ Many of the poems are characterised by a spirit and ringing martial vigour
that stirs the blood.”—Daily Chronicle.
“ A book of romantic, historic verse, aglow in every page with the energy of
a true and high poetic genius.”—Glasgow Weekly Mail.
“ The author gives amjffe proof of his varied talents, and his no small share
of the minstrel's magic power.”—Aberdeen Free Press.
“ There is much that is excellent in the work....... Mr. Ross is apparently a
scholar, and might make a success in some other walk in literature.”—Liver
pool Daily Post.
“ Mr. Ross is a poet of undoubted power.”—Hull Miscellany.
“ The poems are characterised now by vigour, now by grace, and now by
pathos,”-—Nottingham Guardian.
“ Mr. Stewart Ross is not only a poet, he is a scholar and a thinker.”—
South London Press.
“The poems contain many fine thoughts, expressed in powerful language.”—
Newcastle Weekly Chronicle.
“ The book is well worthy the perusal of all readers of taste, and we trust
Mr. Stewart Ross will favour this department of literature with further efforts
of his genius.”—Liverpool Mercury.
London : W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C.
Now Ready, bound strongly in cloth, gilt lettered, price is, 8d.
post free,
AN EXAMINATION & POPULAR EXPOSITION
OF THE
HYLO-IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY.
BY WILLIAM BELL McTAGGABT.
(Late Captain 14th Hussars.)
This volume should be read by all interested in the problems of
philosophy ; for the highest advances of modern thought are here
laid bare to their inmost recess, and in a style and diction that he
who runs may read.
London: W. Stewart & Co., 4r, Farringdon Street, E.C.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
A visit to the grave of Thomas Carlyle
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ross, William Stewart [1844-1906]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 8 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Includes references to Carlyle's works. Reprinted from The Secular Review. Stamp inside front cover: Bishopsgate Institute Reference Library, 09 MAR 1998. Medallion of Carlyle on front cover. Publisher's advertisements on back cover. Date of publication from British Library. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
W. Stewart & Co.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[1884]
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
N601
Subject
The topic of the resource
Thomas Carlyle
Free thought
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (A visit to the grave of Thomas Carlyle), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Free Thought
NSS
Thomas Carlyle