Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 67, No. 416, June 1850Various
General
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 67, No. 416, June 1850
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
We have been sorely tempted to mark with italics certain portions of
the above extract, but on second thoughts we shall leave it intact.
After applying ourselves most diligently to the text, with the view
of eliciting its meaning, we have arrived at the conclusion, that
it is either downright nonsense, or something a great deal worse.
Observe what he says. It is to be prayed for by all men that Shams
may cease--more especially Sham Kings. But certain solid Englishmen
are not prepared for this. They have been "used to decent forms long
since fallen empty of meaning, to plausible modes, solemnities grown
ceremonial,--what you in your iconoclast humour call shams." They
thought no harm of them. "Kings reigned, what they were pleased to
call reigning; lawyers pleaded, bishops preached, and honourable
members perorated," &c. And those who differ in their estimate of
these things from Mr Carlyle are "almost below the level of lowest
humanity, and down towards the state of apehood and oxhood:"--and
their belief is a "scandalous blasphemy." So then, the Monarchy
is a sham, and so are the laws, the Church, and the Constitution!
They are all lies, and in deliberate long-established lying there
can be no help or salvation for the subject! This may not be Mr
Carlyle's meaning, and we are very willing to suppose so; but he
has no title to be angry, were we to accept his words according to
their evident sense. If men, through conceit or affectation, will
write in this absurd and reckless fashion, they must be prepared
to stand the consequences. The first impression on the mind of
every one who peruses the above passage must be, that the author is
opposed to the form of government which is unalterably established
in these kingdoms. If this be so, we should like to know in what
respect such doctrines differ from the pestilential revolutionary
trash which has inundated France and Germany? What kind of overturn
does Mr Carlyle contemplate, for overturn there must be, and that
of the most extensive kind, if his views are ever destined to be
realised? Is it not, perhaps, as melancholy a spectacle as may be,
to find a man of some genius, and considerable learning, attempting
to unsettle the minds of the young and enthusiastic, upon points
distinctly identified with all that is great and glorious in our past
history; and insinuating doctrines which are all the more dangerous
on account of the oblique and uncertain language in which they are
conveyed? Fear God and honour the King, are precepts not acknowledged
by Mr Carlyle as the rudiment and foundation of his faith. He does
not recognise them as inseparably linked together. He would set up
instead some wretched phantom of his own imagination, framed out of
the materials which he fondly supposes to be the attributes of the
heroic character, and he would exalt that above all other authority,
human and divine. He is, if we do not entirely misconstrue the tenor
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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