The present volume derives an interest for Americans from its relation
to our great contest. Mr. Kingsley has been represented as intensely
hostile to the North, and as using all his endeavor to infect his
pupils with his opinions. These lectures, however, hardly sustain such
representations. He is, indeed, anti-democratic in a high degree. He is
so as a disciple of Carlyle, as a prosperous Englishman, not destitute
of flunkyism, and also as a man whose very best power is that of
passionately admiring individual greatness. He is a believer in natural
aristocracy, in the British nobility, and in Carlyle; and democracy
could, of course, find small place in his creed. Hence he has a
sentimental sympathy with the South, and once in a foot-note speaks of
"the Southern gentleman" in a maudlin way. There is also another passage
in which he makes the South stand for the Teuton, whom he worships, and
the North for the Roman, whom he abhors. Yet this very passage occurs in
connection with a denunciation of deserved doom upon the Southern
Confederacy. He had been describing the last great battle of the Eastern
Goths, after which they literally disappeared from history.
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