works of middle-life, especially in his _Latter-day Pamphlets_, namely, individualism, raised to the dignity of a principle of morality and of a one only rule for the safety of mankind. Most men have an ideal of their own of the beautiful in both the aesthetic and the ethical order. Many men of thought have formed to themselves an ideal of a happy and prosperous country, of a wise and beneficent government, and so has Mr. Carlyle. An ideal is always a key to the workings of the brain and to the aspirations of the heart. Mr. Carlyle's accords precisely with what we can gather of both in his present as well as most all his other writings. In giving it to the public, he puts his seal upon all his philosophical speculations, and shows his opponents that he is game to the end. It is his "_La garde meurt, mais ne se rend pas_." For the establishment of his Utopia, he sails to the West Indies in company with a "younger son of a duke, of an earl, or of the queen herself." He keeps shy of Jamaica, (and well he may,) and goes to Dominica, an island which is "a sight to kindle a heroic young heart." {92} He gets grandly pathetic, and describes Dominica as "inverted wash-bowl;" its rim for twenty miles up from the sea is fine alluvium, though unwholesome for all except "niggers kept steadily at work;" its upper portion "is salubrious for the Europeans," of whom he puts to dwell 100,000, who are "to keep steadily at their work a million niggers on the lower ranges." He pulls up the cannon which are now going to honeycomb and oxide of iron in the jungle, and plants them firmly on the upper land to guard his niggers and keep off the sacrilegious invader. With tears of mingled joy and regret he cries, "What a kingdom my poor Frederick William, followed by his Frederick, would have made of this inverted wash-bowl; clasped round and lovingly kissed and laved by the _beautifulest_ seas in the world, and beshone by the grandest sun and sky!" This, then, is the end for which Carlyle has lived seventy-two years; this is what he has learned by fifty years' study of history and political economy! Three wise men of Gotham once went to sea in a tub and came to grief therein. Carlyle might imitate their example, and, bidding adieu to the "brutish hobnails" whom he is powerless to regenerate, go out as far as he would: he could never be so much at sea as he was when he penned this remarkable essay. -------- Sayings Of The Fathers Of The Desert. Abbot Alois said: "Unless a man say in his heart, 'Only God and I are in this world,' he will not find rest." Abbot Hyperchius said: "He is really wise who teaches others by his deeds, and not by his words." Abbot Moses said: "When the hand of the Lord slew the first-born of Egypt, there was no house in that land in which there lay not one dead." A brother asked him: "What does this mean?"