Forster does not come with me; will join | me when I like after, &c. &c. I mean that you shall initiate me into the methods of Irish travel, and keep me company so far as our routes, once fixed upon, will go together. Your friendly cheerfulness, your knowledge of Ireland, all your goodness to me, I must make available. Define to yourself what it is you specially aim towards in travelling, that I may see how far without straining I can draw upon you.

People are giving me letters, &c.; Aubrey de Vere has undertaken for "six good Irish landlords," vehemently protesting that "six" (suggested by me) is not the maximum number. He wishes to send me across direct to Kilkee (Clare County), where his friends now are. A day or two of peace at some nice bathing-place, to swim about, and then sit silent looking out on the divine salt flood, is very inviting to my fancy; but Kilkee all at once will not be the place, I find.

remember.

A Mr. Miley, a Catholic priest of your city, was to have come to me one day; but I think the unfortunate painter must have deterred Lucas and him; at all events, they did not

appear.

You have your "routes in a state of readi ness that we may be able at once to get to business. At present, Maynooth, Kildare town, and then some march across to Glendalough, or through Wicklow, is figuring in my imagination; after which Wexford, Ross, Waterford, &c. But in my present state of insight all hangs in the clouds. I wish only I were fairly among the hills and green places, with the summer breeze blowing round me, and a friendly soul to guide and cheer me in my pilgrimage. Kildare, I repeat, for Bridg et's sake-Bridekirk (her kirk, I suppose) was almost the place of my birth; and Bridget herself, under the oaks 1400 years ago, is for her own sake beautiful to me. One Fitzgerald, a Suffolk Irish friend of long standing, offers me introduction to some specifically Irish family of his kindred in that region - on the Curragh itself, if I remember. We shall see.

All kinds of business yet remain for me, and not a minute to spare. People say the Queen is coming to look at Ireland, foolish creature! Yours ever truly, T. CARLYLE.

Twistleton brought his successor Power down with him last night; I hoped Power might have been an Irishman; but I do not think he is. Twistleton is decidedly a loss to Ireland, I reckon, as matters now stand; a Carlyle reached Dublin on the 3rd of man of much loyalty, pious affection, stout intelligence, and manful capability every way. July, and spent a week in accepting hosI have read a good many of your friend Fer-pitalities from a few of his original friends guson's "Irish Counties," which is slow of 1846 who remained, and from various work, if one hold fast by the map; but is very official personages, to whom he brought instructive. I wish these articles existed as a introductions from London. He left beseparate book. I would take them with me hind some hasty notes of his Irish journey, as the best vade mecum on such a journey. which have unhappily been published Have you got the book "Facts from Gu- since his death. He gave them to his dore"? I never could see it yet, but consider amanuensis soon after they were written; it well worth seeing. Irish songs you also they passed through several hands, and finally reached a firm of publishers, who printed them, and sent proofs to certain of Carlyle's friends for consideration. I recommended that the proposed volume should be suppressed, out of respect for his memory; but Mr. Froude, who could speak with more authority in the premises, was of opinion that the publishers were free to do what they pleased with what had become their property, and he saw no objection to their giving it to the world. Carlyle describes himself as setting out from Scotland, "in sad health and sad humor," and this temporary gloom discolors the book. Though he is universally courteous in his reference to the friends to whom I presented him in Dublin and during the subsequent journey, some of them country gentlemen, barristers, and doctors, who a few months before had been political prisoners, or inscribed in the Castle list of suspects, he writes of notable persons of both sexes in Dublin who received him with lavish hospitality with a license of language which I am persuaded he himself would neither have justified nor sanctioned had he lived to

Enough for this day; on Monday a more definite prophecy, as to time at least. Yours ever truly,

T. CARLYLE.

CHELSEA, June 26, 1849. DEAR DUFFY, -On Wednesday, by the Athlone, or by something else better if I fail in the Athlone (of which you shall have notice); expect me, therefore, not later than that day; and so let one point, the preliminary of all, be fixed at last.

A stock of letters, to be used or not, for Dublin and other places, especially for the ruined West, is accumulating on me; in Dublin I have a Dr. Stokes, Dr. Kennedy, Chambers, Walker, and various military and official people; certainly longer than "two days" will be needed in Dublin if I am to get much good of these people; but I will make what despatch proves possible.

Probably Sir Samuel Ferguson's topographical papers in the Dublin University Magazine.

see it in print.* There is nothing which | tête. If I be a man who has entitled a man might not have written to his wife himself to be believed, I ask those who or friend without offence, but much quite unfit to be launched into publicity.†

Carlyle was at this time past fifty years of age, had a strong, well-knit frame, a dark, ruddy complexion, piercing blue eyes, close-drawn lips, and an air of silent composure and authority. He was commonly dressed in a dark suit, a black stock, and a wide-brimmed hat, sometimes changed for one of soft felt. A close observer would have recognized him as a Scotchman, and probably concluded that he was a Scotchman who had filled some important employment. There was not a shade of discontent or impatience discernible in his countenance; if these feelings arose they were kept in check by a disciplined will. It must be remembered that by this time his life had grown tranquil; he had outlived his early struggles to obtain a footing in life, and a hearing from the world; he had written the "French Revolution and Cromwell," and his place in literature was no longer in doubt. A number of young Englishmen, beginning to distinguish themselves as writers or in public life, recognized him as master, and one of the show-places which distinguished foreigners were sure to visit in London was the narrow house in a little street off the Thames, where the philosopher of Chelsea resided.

66

have come to regard Carlyle as exacting and domineering among associates, to accept as the simple truth the fact that during those weeks of close and constant intercourse, there was not one word or act of his to the young man who accompanied him unworthy of an indulgent father. Of arrogance or impatience not a shade. In debating the arrangements of the journey, and all the questions in which fellow-trav. ellers have a joint interest, instead of exercising the authority to which his age and character entitled him, he gave and took with complaisance and good fellowship.

I do not desire the reader to infer that the stories of a contrary character are absolutely unfounded. But they have been exaggerated out of reasonable relation to fact, and have caused him to be grievously misunderstood. He was a man of genuine good nature, with deep sympathy and tenderness for human suffering, and of manly patience under troubles. In all the serious cares of life, the repeated disappointment of reasonable hope, in privation bordering on penury, and in long delayed recognition by the world, he bore himself with constant courage and forbearance. He was easily disturbed, indeed, by petty troubles, if they interfered with his life's work, never otherwise. Silence is the necessary condition of serious thought, and he was impatient of any disturbance which interrupted it. Unexpected intrusion breaks the thread of reflection, often past repair, and he was naturally averse to such intrusion. He had sacrificed what is called success in life in order to be free to think in solitude and silence; and this precious peace, the atmosphere in which his work prospered, he guarded rigorously. At times he suffered from dyspepsia, and critics are sometimes disposed to forget ↑ A curious pedigree of Irish discontent might be extracted from Carlyle's experience on this journey. that dyspepsia is as much a malady, and He was the guest in Dublin, Kilkenny, Cork, Galway, as little a moral blemish, as toothache or and other towns, of men who were embodiments of a passion which had quite recently exploded in an unsuc-gout, and the sufferer a victim rather than cessful insurrection. The introductions he brought an offender. I shall have occasion to refrom London were sometimes to men who were sons of noted rebels of a previous generation, who had conspired with Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Wolfe Tone for separation from England. Dr. Stokes, president of the College of Physicians, and a professor in the university, he notes as "son of an United Irishman." Sir Alexander MacDonnell, chief commissioner of education, as "son of an United Irishman, too;" and in a young fellow of the university he recognizes the laureate of '98. He even encountered the Irish discontent, which was ripening for an eruption twenty

new.

This is the aspect he presented among men to whom he was for the most part But I must speak of his relation to his fellow-traveller. If you want to know a man, says the proverb, make a solitary journey with him. We travelled for six weeks on a stretch, nearly always tête-à

This is the book known as

Reminiscences of

my

Irish Journey in 1849." By Thomas Carlyle. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co. 1882.

years later, in the person of Isaac Butt, not yet an avowed Nationalist. "I saw, among others, Councillor Butt, brought up to me by Duffy; a terribly black, burly son of earth; talent visible in him, but still more animalism; big bison-head, black, not quite unbrutal; glad when he went off to the Galway Cir

cuit' or whithersoever."

turn to this subject later, and I am content to say here that I have often seen a "brisk little somebody critic and whipper-snapper in a rage to set things to rights "show more temper in an hour than this mabigned man in an exhausting journey of weeks.

We travelled slowly during a great part of July and August, through Leinster, Munster, and Connaught, in journeys of many hours at a time, made in the carriages of our friends, in railway trains, stage coaches, or Irish cars. There were

opportunities for continued talk, which I is transacted as the phantom land of the turned to account in a manner which Carlyle describes in his "Irish Reminiscences." Two or three extracts will sufficiently indicate how the daily tête-àtête was employed.

Waterford car at last, in the hot afternoon we rattled forth into the dust. Scrubby ill-cultivated country. Duffy talking much, that is making me talk. Kilmacthomas, clean, white village, hanging on the steep decliningly. Duffy discovered; enthusiasm of all for him, even the policeman. Driver privately whispered me he would like to give a cheer. "Don't, it would do him no good." ... Jerpoint Abbey, huge distressing mass of ruins, huts leaning on the back of it-to me nothing worth at all, or less than nothing if dilettantism must join with it. Rest of the road singularly forgotten; Duffy keeping me so busy at talk, I suppose. Carrickshock" farm on the west, where "18 police," seizing for tithes, were set upon and all killed some eighteen or more years ago. And next? Vacancy, not even our talk remembered in the least probably of questions which I had to answer. Duffy, &c.

"Pilgrim's Progress." It is sometimes forgotten how completely posterity has pardoned in Carlyle's peers characteristics which are treated as unpardonable crimes in him. His sense of personal superiority was not so constant or so vigilant as Wordsworth's, though the poet was perhaps more cautious in the exhibition of it; Burke was far more liable to explosions of passion, and Johnson harsher and more peremptory every day of his life, than Carlyle at rare intervals in some £t of dyspepsia.

cordially, and manifestly not unmindful of the contrast his levity presented to his ordinary mood. Though he commonly spoke the ordinary tongue of educated Englishmen, if he was moved, especially if he was moved by indignation or contempt, he was apt to fall into what Mrs. Carlyle calls "very decided Annandale."

Of his manner, I ought, perhaps, to say a word. In a tête-à-tête he did not declaim but conversed. His talk was a clear, rippling stream that flowed on without interruption, except when he acted the scene he was describing, or mimicked the person he was citing. With the play of hands and head he was not a bad mimic, but his countenance and voice, which expressed wrath or authority with singular power, were clumsy instruments for badinage. But his attempts were more enjoySometimes we seem th have got on dan-able than skilful acting, he entered so gerously explosive topics. "This after- frankly into the farce himself, laughing noon was it I argued with Duffy about Smith O'Brien; I infinitely vilipending, he hotly eulogizing the said Smith," or "Sadly weary; Duffy reads Irish ballads to me, unmusical enough," where his temporary mood probably influences his judgment. But the talk was chiefly of eminent men whom he had known. When I named a man in whom I was interested, he spoke of him forthwith. When I named another he took up the second, and so throughout the day. I knew that one of his most notable gifts was the power of making by a few touches a likeness of a man's moral or physical aspect, not easily forgotten. His portraits were not always free from a strain of exaggeration, but they were never malicious, never intentionally caricatured; they represented his actual estimate of the person in question. It has been said of him that he had a habit which seemed instinctive of looking down upon his contemporaries, but it must not be forgotten that it was from a real, not an imaginary eminence. He insisted on a high and perhaps impossible standard of duty in the men whom he discussed, but it was a standard he lived up to himself, and it only became chimerical when it was applied indiscriminately to all who were visible above the crowd. His own life was habitually spent in work, and belonged to a moral world almost as far apart from the world in which the daily business of life

I made notes of his talk daily, and finally offered them to him to read. He playfully excused himself, but tacitly sanctioned the practice, which I continued down to his death. It is more than forty years since the earliest notes were written. I have omitted many which time has rendered obsolete, but otherwise they remain as they were set down on the day of the conversation. I more than once meditated destroying them as they had answered their original purpose, which was simply my personal instruction, but when I considered what would be the worth of Bacon or Burke's impression of his most notable contemporaries, I shrank from destroying Carlyle's judgments on men, concerning many of whom the world maintains a permanent interest. What most of us enjoy with the keenest relish in the memoirs and correspondence of men of letters is their judgment of each other. We can rarely accept it without reserve, but what Montaigne thought of Rabelais, what Ben Jonson thought of Shakespeare, Rousseau's private opinion of Voltaire, Samuel John

son's estimate of Fielding and Richardson | had been drinking perfumed water in one will always be memorable. Even Byron's case, and in the other you got the sense of rash judgment on Wordsworth and Keats, a deep, earnest man, who had thought Southey's contempt for Shelley, or, to silently and painfully on many things. come lower down, Brougham's estimate There was one exception to your satisfacof Macaulay, or Macaulay's estimate of tion with the man. When he spoke of Brougham are only obiter dicta in criti- poetry he harangued about metres, cacism, but are tit-bits in literary gossip. dences, rhythms, and so forth, and one We do not regard Fielding as a blockhead could not be at the pains of listening to and a barren rascal because Johnson pro- him. But on all other subjects he had nounced him to be so, or Wordsworth as more sense in him of a sound and instruca poetical charlatan and a political parasite tive sort than any other literary man in on the authority of Byron, and when England. Brougham declares that Macaulay could not reason, and had no conception of what an argument was, or when Macaulay affirms that Carlyle might as well take at once to Irving's unknown tongue as write such an essay as 66 Characteristics," there is no harm done except to the critic himself, but we would not willingly lose even the splenetic judgments of men of genius, much less judgments which are often profoundly wise and always substantially fair, like those uttered by Carlyle.

WORDSWORTH.

ON our first day's journey, the casual mention of Edmund Burke induced me to ask Carlyle who was the best talker he had met among notable people in London. He said that when he met Wordsworth first he had been assured that he talked better than any man in England. It was his habit to talk whatever was in his mind at the time, with total indifference to the impression it produced on his hearers; on this occasion he kept discoursing on how far you could get carried out of London on this side and on that for sixpence. One was disappointed perhaps, but, after all, this was the only healthy way of talking to say what is actually in your mind, and let sane creatures who listen make what they can of it. Whether they understood or not, Wordsworth maintained a stern composure, and went his way, content that the world went quite another road. When he knew him better, he found that no man gave you so faithful and vivid a picture of any person or thing which he had seen with his own eyes.

I inquired if Wordsworth came up to this description he had heard of him as the best talker in England.

Well, he replied, it was true you could get more meaning out of what Wordsworth had to say to you than from anybody else. Leigh Hunt would emit more pretty, pleasant, ingenious flashes in an hour than Wordsworth in a day. But in the end you would find, if well considered, that you

I suggested that Wordsworth might naturally like to speak of the instrumental part of his art, and consider what he had to say very instructive, as by modifying the instrument, he had wrought a revolution in English poetry. He taught it to speak in unsophisticated language and of the humbler and more familiar interests of life.

Carlyle said, no, not so; all he had got to say in that way was like a few driblets from the great ocean of German specula tion on kindred subjects by Goethe and others. Coleridge, who had been in Germany, brought it over with him, and they translated Teutonic thought into a poor, disjointed, whitey-brown sort of English, and that was nearly all. But Wordsworth, after all, was the man of most practical mind of any of the persons connected with literature whom he had encountered; though his pastoral pipings were far from being of the importance his admirers imagined. He was essentially a cold, hard, silent, practical man, who, if he had not fallen into poetry, would have done effectual work of some sort in the world. This was the impression one got of him as he looked out of his stern blue eyes, superior to men and circumstances.

I said I had expected to hear of a man of softer mood, more sympathetic and less taciturn.

Carlyle said, no, not at all; he was a man quite other than that; a man of an immense head and great jaws like a crocodile's, cast in a mould designed for prodigious work.

FRANCIS JEFFREY.

AFTER a pause he resumed. As far as talk might be regarded as simply a recreation, not an inquiry after truth and sense, Jeffrey said more brilliant and interesting things than any man he had met in the world. He was a bright-eyed, lively, ingenious little fellow, with something fascinating and radiant in him when he got into his drawing-room tribune. He was