his tall gaunt figure, in a long, brown, horn-buttoned coat, and broad-brimmed slouched felt hat, with a huge walking-stick in his hand, might often be seen in the quiet streets which surrounded his house in London, as late at night he took his meditative constitutional walk under the stars; for his days were given to hard and persistent work, and he was ever loath to be intruded upon. Travelers of a literary turn, especially from this side of the water, often pressed themselves upon him. These he was wont to receive courteously, although he once complained bitterly of a certain "blatherskite American who has taken away from me two mortal hours which I shall never get back to all eternity." His "Life of Frederick" was then upon his hands, and a man thus engaged could ill afford to lose two hours.

A residence of more than forty years in London has not modified the strong Scottish enunciation which Carlyle brought with him from his native Dumfriesshire. The vowels come out broad and full; the gutturals-which are so sadly clipped in modern English speech, depriving it of all masculine vigor-have their due prominence. His manner in talking is striking and peculiar ; now bursting into Titanic laughter at some odd conceit; now swelling into fierce wrath at some meanness or wrong; now sinking into low tones of the tenderest pathos; but running through all is a rhythmic flow, a sustained recitative, like that

in which we may imagine old Homer to have chanted his long-resounding hexameters. "Did you ever happen to see Louis Napoleon while he lived in London?" asked Milburn upon one occasion. To which Carlyle made answer in his most characteristic manner :

LOUIS NAPOLEON.

"Oh, yes, I chanced to meet him a few times at the houses of people who were accustomed to give dinners here; and I thought that there was even then something lurking in him of the blood of the old Napoleon, who was, as I read it, the great Highwayman of history; `his habit being to clutch King or Kaiser by the throat, and swear by the Eternal, 'If you don't stand and deliver instantly, I'll blow your brains out.' A profitable trade he did at this sort of thing, until another man-Arthur Duke of Wellington by name-succeeded in clutching him and there was an end of him.

"This Louis Napoleon, as he is called, used to talk to me about the Spirit of the Age, the Democratic Spirit, and the Progress of the Species; but, for my own part, it seemed that the only Progress the Species was making was backward, and that the Spirit of the Age was leading the people downward; and we discovered that we didn't understand each other's language; that we had no key in common for our dialects. And we parted asunder-as mayhap did Abraham and Lot-each going his several ways. It looks to me very much as if his way led him to Sodom.

"After that, I used to see him in this neighborhood (I think he had lodgings in this part of the town), with his

hands folded across his breast, and his eyes fixed with a melancholy stare upon the ground, and he looked to me like a poor opera-singer in search of an engagement. God knows he has succeeded in finding an engagement upon a stage sufficiently vast, before an audience ample enough for any man, and the whole thing got up regardless of expense. But I certainly expect that the daywill come when the blue sulphurous flames will dart from behind the scenes and consume the pile with all that are in it; or that the edifice will give way in a crash of ruin, and the whole-singer, audience, and all -sink into the nethermost depths of uttermost perdition, where, it seems to me, they certainly belong."

This was spoken in about 1860, when to all human seeming the throne of the Third Napoleon was the firmest thing in the civil and political world, and he was esteemed the arbiter of the destinies of Europe; but Sedan, and all that was to follow, lay a brief half-score years in the future, prophetically, though dimly, discerned by Carlyle. Most likely not even Bismarck or Von Moltke at this time suspected how thin was the shell upon which was built the structure of the French empire, or what a very cardboard edifice was that seemingly so solid pile.

In 1834 Carlyle left Scotland and took up his residence in Chelsea, London. Two hundred years ago, as Macaulay tell us, "Chelsea was a quiet country village with about a thousand inhabitants"; but it has been gradually absorbed into, or rather surrounded by, the great metropolis. Yet,

surrounded as it is by the ever-encroaching suburbs, it has an old-fashioned look about it. One who approaches Chelsea by way of the Thames can not fail to be struck by the antique appearance of a long terrace of houses overlooking the river and screened by a row of venerable trees. This is the "Cheyne Walk," so named after Lord Cheyne, who owned the manor house of Chelsea some two centuries ago. The houses of this row are mostly of dark-red brick, with heavy windowframes. No. 5 of this row is the house which for four-and-forty years has been the home of Carlyle. The style of the architecture indicates that it was built in the days of Queen Anne, about the beginning of the last century. In one of his later books Carlyle makes incidental mention of this house, by way of hit at the sham work of modern builders as contrasted with the sound honest work of the olden time. The wall at the head of his garden, he says, "is made of bricks burned in the reign of Henry the Eighth-well-nigh three centuries ago and is still quite sound; whereas bricks of London manufacture, in our day, are used up in about sixty years." This wall, however, is no part of the house itself, but is a part of the boundary wall of the park or garden belonging to the old Chelsea manor house. Carlyle's house is of three stories, and rather narrow. A flight of three steps leads from the pavement to the modest parlor floor. The upper stories are

Carlyle's workshop, into which few visitors have ever penetrated; but those few tell us of the great stores of books, pamphlets, and newspapers laid away and piled up in apparently inextricable confusion.

The neighbors of Carlyle, who seem to be altogether of the common sort of people, know next to nothing of the man. Still, one can pick up

from them a few anecdotes and reminiscences of him. They tell how he kept his horse, which he always groomed himself, in a stable on a piece of waste ground, among donkeys, cows, and geese. How he has been seen to rush out upon an organgrinder, who was disturbing his meditations, and, seizing him by the collar, deposit him and his instrument of torture upon the door-step of a neighbor who had made himself conspicuous by writing in favor of the noisy nuisance. How he bitterly complained of his neighbor's fowls, who would never hatch in peace, nor let him. How he one day found himself short of threepence to pay his omnibus fare, whereupon the suspicious conductor sent a boy home with him to make sure of not being bilked out of his lawful dues. And how the candy-woman, hard by his house, found him an excellent customer for her wares, with which he was wont to fill his capacious pockets for the benefit of the poor urchins whom he encountered in his walks.

Leigh Hunt, who was for a time his neighbor