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 day will 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

at Chelsea, and who had good reason to speak of Carlyle's kindness in pecuniary and other matters, thus writes of him in his Autobiography: "I believe that what he loves better than his fault-finding, with all its eloquence, is the face of any human creature that looks suffering, and loving, and sincere; and I believe, further, that if the fellow creature were suffering only, and neither loving nor sincere, but had come to a pass of agony in this life which put him at the mercies of some good man for some last help and consolation toward his grave, even at the risk of loss to repute, and a sure amount of pain and vexation, that man, if the groan reached him in its forlornness, would be Thomas Carlyle."

Having thus, by way of Proem, endeavored to set forth somewhat of the personality of the man, we propose to consider his successive works; for it is in these, after all, that the true Biography of Carlyle is written.

II.

APPRENTICESHIP AND JOURNEY-WORK.

Ar fourteen Carlyle, having studied at what we should call the academy or grammar school at Annan, entered the University of Edinburgh, where he remained seven or eight years. Edward