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Updated: June 22, 2025
"Carlyle," says Mr. Froude, "did not regard Mr. Gladstone merely as an orator who, knowing nothing as it ought to be known, had flung his force into specious sentiments, but as the representative of the numerous cants of the age ... differing from others in that the cant seemed true to him.
It's from the foot of that the new gallery, the lower level, starts. It slopes off just under the old lead so 330 feet, there's a fault, and it cants up 12 feet so then on down again at a bit sharper dip, nearly 600 feet; then another fault and a drop, and about 50 feet more. "It's down there at the end we think most of the men have been caught, but some may have been near the shaft.
But once more, this is no place for even a summary, much less for a discussion, of the much discussed Carlylian "Gospel of Work"; of its apostle's less vague, but also less disputable, condemnations of shams and cants; or of the innumerable applications and uses to which he put these doctrines.
At all events, Byron never set to work to consecrate his own sin into a religion and proclaim the worship of uncleanness as the last and highest ethical development of "pure" humanity. No Byron may be brutal; but he never cants. If at moments he finds himself in hell, he never turns round to the world and melodiously informs them that it is heaven, if they could but see it in its true light.
Many entries in his journal tell of his "dismal continual wrestle with Friedrich," perhaps the most characteristic of which is this: "My Frederick looks as if it would never take shape in me; in fact the problem is to burn away the immense dungheap of the eighteenth century, with its ghastly cants, foul, blind sensualities, cruelties, and inanity now fallen putrid, rotting inevitably towards annihilation; to destroy and extinguish all that, having got to know it, and to know that it must be rejected for evermore; after which the perennial portion, pretty much Friedrich and Voltaire so far as I can see, may remain conspicuous and capable of being delineated."
Is this the man who would have equality amongst all his fellow-creatures, and who calls a compositor a printer's devil? Is this the man who cants about the pre-eminence of mind and the perfections of intellect, and yet now takes advantage of his rank, of his supporters, of the cry of his partisans, to bear down the voice of reason?
I say that you might easily gather this impression from the manner in which many persons speak of scientific inquiry, or talk about inductive and deductive philosophy, or the principles of the "Baconian philosophy." I do protest that, of the vast number of cants in this world, there are none, to my mind, so contemptible as the pseudoscientific cant which is talked about the "Baconian philosophy."
The shanty is of rough plank, and cants over on one side; but it was surrounded by another building by the Queen of Holland, to protect it from further decay. It contains but two rooms, one above the other, the former reached only by a ladder. Alexander of Russia placed over the chimney-piece a marble slab bearing the inscription, "Nothing is too small for a great man."
It is the pride of his cellar; he knows it, and he has a right to praise it. He takes up the bottle, fashioned so slenderly takes it up tenderly, cants it with care, places it before his friends, declares how good it is, with honest pride, and wishes he had a hundred dozen bottles more of the same wine in his cellar. Si quid novisti, &c., I shall be very glad to hear from you.
Mordicai defied him to tell him any thing he did not know, Paddy, parting with an untasted bit of tobacco, began and recounted some of Sir Terence O'Fay's exploits in evading duns, replevying cattle, fighting sheriffs, bribing subs, managing cants, tricking custodees, in language so strange, and with a countenance and gestures so full of enjoyment of the jest, that, whilst Mordicai stood for a moment aghast with astonishment, Lord Colambre could not help laughing, partly at, and partly with, his countryman.
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