"They have their Temples, whereof the chief, as the Jewish Temple did, stands in their metropolis; and is named _Almack's_, a word of uncertain etymology. They worship principally by night; and have their Highpriests and Highpriestesses, who, however, do not continue for life. The rites, by some supposed to be of the Menadic sort, or perhaps with an Elusinian or Cabiric character, are held strictly secret. Nor are Sacred Books wanting to the Sect; these they call _Fashionable Novels_: however, the Canon is not completed, and some are canonical, and others not...."[339] Their chief articles of faith are: "1. Coats should have nothing of the triangle about them; at the same time, wrinkles behind should be carefully avoided. "2. The collar is a very important point: it should be low behind, and slightly rolled. "3. No licence of fashion can allow a man of delicate taste to adopt the posterial luxuriance of a Hottentot. "4. There is safety in a swallow-tail. "5. The good sense of a gentleman is nowhere more finely developed than in his rings. "6. It is permitted to mankind, under certain restrictions, to wear white waistcoats. "7. The trousers must be exceedingly tight across the hips. "All which Propositions I, for the present, content myself with modestly but peremptorily and irrevocably denying."[340] This premised, he draws conclusions: "I might call them two boundless and indeed unexampled Electric Machines (turned by the 'Machinery of Society'), with batteries of opposite quality; Drudgism the Negative, Dandyism the Positive: one attracts hourly towards it and appropriates all the Positive Electricity of the nation (namely, the Money thereof); the other is equally busy with the Negative (that is to say the Hunger), which is equally potent. Hitherto you see only partial, transient sparkles and sputters: but wait a little, till the entire nation is in an electric state; till your whole vital Electricity, no longer healthfully Neutral, is cut into two isolated portions of Positive and Negative (of Money and of Hunger); and stands there bottled-up in two World-Batteries! The stirring of a child's finger brings the two together; and then--What then? The Earth is but shivered into impalpable smoke by that Doom's thunder-peal: the Sun misses one of his Planets in Space, and thenceforth there are no eclipses of the Moon. Or better still, I might liken----"[341] He stops suddenly, and leaves you to your conjectures. This bitter pleasantry is that of an enraged or despairing man, who designedly, and simply by reason of the violence of his passion, would restrain it and force himself to laugh; but whom a sudden shudder at the end reveals just as he is. In one place Carlyle says that there is, at the bottom of the English character, underneath all its habits of calculation and coolness, an inextinguishable furnace: