blockheadisms

Updated: May 4, 2025

In slang phrase, he always 'piles it on. Does a bookseller misdirect a parcel, he exclaims, 'My malison on all Blockheadisms and Torpid Infidelities of which this world is full. Still, all allowances made, it is a thousand pities; and one's thoughts turn away from this stormy old man and take refuge in the quiet haven of the Oratory at Birmingham, with his great Protagonist, who, throughout an equally long life spent in painful controversy, and wielding weapons as terrible as Carlyle's own, has rarely forgotten to be urbane, and whose every sentence is a 'thing of beauty. It must, then, be owned that too many of Carlyle's literary achievements 'lack a gracious somewhat. By force of his genius he 'smites the rock and spreads the water; but then, like Moses, 'he desecrates, belike, the deed in doing.

Augustine Birrell - Obiter Dicta