The late R. A. Vaughan, a careful observer of the
tendencies of English thought, says: "It may not be flattering to Mr.
Carlyle, but we believe it to be true that by far the larger portion of
the best minds, whose early youth his writings have powerfully
influenced, will look back upon the period of such subjection as the
most miserably morbid period of their life. On awaking from such
delirium to the sane and healthful realities of manful toil, they will
discover the hollowness of that sneering, scowling, wailing,
declamatory, egotistical, and bombastic misanthropy, which, in the eye
of their unripe judgment, wore the air of a philosophy so
profound."[166] The time will also come when Carlyle will be revealed to
all in his true character: as the theologian preaching a pagan creed; as
the philosopher emasculating the German philosophy which he scrupled not
to borrow; as the stylist perverting the pure English of Milton and
Shakspeare into inflated, oracular Richterisms; and as the arch
demagogue who, despising the people at heart, assigned no bounds to his
ambition to gain their hearing and cajole them into the reception of his
unmixed Pantheism.
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