Phantasm-Captains, and the rest of the Sartorian puppet-pantomime.
There was a profound truth in all of these invectives, warnings, and
prophecies. But the prophet's voice at last got so shrieky and
monotonous, that instead of warning and inspiring a second generation,
these terrific maledictions began to pall upon a practical world. An
ardent admirer of the prophet has said that, when he first heard
Carlyle speak face to face, he could hardly resist the impression that
he was listening to an actor personating the Sage of Chelsea, and
mimicking the stock phrases of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_. Certainly
no man of sense can find any serious guidance on any definite social
problem from these "Pamphlets" of his morbid decline. Carlyle at last
sat eating his heart out, like Napoleon on St. Helena. His true
friends will hasten to throw such a decent covering as Japhet and Shem
threw around Noah, over the latest melancholy outbursts about Negroes,
Reformers, Jamaica massacres, and the anticipated conflagration of
Paris by the Germans. It is pitiful indeed to find in "the collected
and revised works," thirty-six volumes, the drivel of his Pro-Slavery
advocacy, and of ill-conditioned snarling at honest men labouring to
reform ancient abuses.

It is perilous for any man, however consummate be his genius, to place
himself on a solitary rock apart from all living men and defiant of all
before him, as the sole source of truth out of his own inner
consciousness. It is fatal to any man, however noble his own spirit,
to look upon this earth as "one fuliginous dust-heap," and the whole
human race as a mere herd of swine rushing violently down a steep place
into the sea. Nor can the guidance of mankind be with safety entrusted
to one who for eighty-six years insisted on remaining by his own
hearth-stone a mere omnivorous reader and omnigenous writer of books.
Carlyle was a true and pure "man of letters," looking at things and