Note 290 — Chapter IX · REFLECTIONS ON THE FOREGOING

The blind advocate of this unholy trinity, and one whose books are a blot on English literature, because in this case stupidity is criminal, was the pompous and enthusiastic nineteenth-century writer, Samuel Smiles, who with resolute vulgarity wrote the Magnificats of the Engineers. He was a doctor and a railway director, he was also editor-in-chief of the Leeds Times; but whatever else he may have been, he was certainly one of the most incurable old sentimentalists the nineteenth century ever produced, and that is placing him high in the hierarchy of nonsense.