After dinner Babbage,
in his grimmest manner, thanked Carlyle for his very interesting
lecture on silence.
Carlyle sneered at almost every one: one day in my house he
called Grote's 'History' "a fetid quagmire, with nothing
spiritual about it." I always thought, until his 'Reminiscences'
appeared, that his sneers were partly jokes, but this now seems
rather doubtful. His expression was that of a depressed, almost
despondent yet benevolent man; and it is notorious how heartily
he laughed. I believe that his benevolence was real, though
stained by not a little jealousy. No one can doubt about his
extraordinary power of drawing pictures of things and men--far
more vivid, as it appears to me, than any drawn by Macaulay.
Whether his pictures of men were true ones is another question.
He has been all-powerful in impressing some grand moral truths on
the minds of men. On the other hand, his views about slavery
were revolting. In his eyes might was right. His mind seemed to
me a very narrow one; even if all branches of science, which he
despised, are excluded. It is astonishing to me that Kingsley
should have spoken of him as a man well fitted to advance
science. He laughed to scorn the idea that a mathematician, such
as Whewell, could judge, as I maintained he could, of Goethe's
views on light. He thought it a most ridiculous thing that any
one should care whether a glacier moved a little quicker or a
little slower, or moved at all.
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