"I say, Find me the true _Koenning_, King, Able Man, and he _has_ a divine right over me." Carlyle thus throws down the gauntlet at once to the scientific and to the democratic movements of his time.

His pronounced antagonism to the modern spirit in these two most important manifestations must be kept steadily in mind in our study of him.
Finally, we have to remember that in the whole tone and temper of his teaching Carlyle is fundamentally the Puritan.

The dogmas of Puritanism he had indeed outgrown; but he never outgrew its ethics.
His thought was dominated and pervaded to the end, as Froude rightly says, by the spirit of the creed he had dismissed.

By reference to this one fact we may account for much of his strength, and also for most of his limitations in outlook and sympathy.

Those limitations the reader will not fail to notice for himself.