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and this end of this Cheyne Row was usually his goal. One day, as he walked discoursing with a friend, he declared himself able to swim from here to London Bridge, distant about five miles. His friend offered a wager that it was impossible; and he, upon the instant stripping, plunged boldly in, and started for his mark, while his friend, bearing the clothes, strode down the bank; and a great multitude of spectators, growing ever greater as he proceeded, followed to see the feat.

"He, with brave stroke and lusty sinew buffeting the tide, gained the bridge and the wager. Whereupon, amidst great acclamations, the people suggested that he should start a swimming-school. But God had other work for him to do: for in later years he was to teach the people of your continent how, by Frugality and Labor, and Patience and Courage, any man might buffet the waves of Fortune, and swim straight on to prosperity and success. And that was the swimming-school which he was to establish."

These "table-talks" which Milburn has reproduced took place in about 1860, when Carlyle had reached the age of three-score and five. A Scottish journalist, not many years before, gave a penand-ink picture of the outward aspect of the man, which we give, with much abridgment: "The long spare figure is before me, wiry too and elastic, stretched at careless ease in his elbowchair, yet ever with strong natural motions and starts, as the inward spirit stirs. The face too is before me-long and thin, with a certain tinge of paleness, but no sickness or attenuation; pensive,

almost solemn, yet open and cordial and tender. The eye, as generally happens, is the chief outward index of the soul-an eye not easy to describe, but felt even after one has looked thereon and therein. It is dark and full, shadowed over by a compact and prominent forehead. The expression is, so to speak, heavy-laden-as if betokening untold burdens of thought, and long fiery struggles resolutely endured-endured until they had been in some practical manner overcome. The whole form and expression remind one of Dante. It wants the classic element and the mature and matchless harmony which distinguish the countenance of the great Florentine. something in the cast and the look, especially in the heavy-laden but dauntless eye, is very much alike. Thus does the presence of Thomas Carlyle rise before me."

But

Few faces are better known from engravings than that of Thomas Carlyle. Beginning from about 1834, when Count D'Orsay sketched his likeness making him look almost like a dandy, or when his portrait appeared among the contributors to "Fraser's Magazine," seated at a banquet given by Maginn, its clever punch-loving editor, down to our own day, when we see him shaggy and bowed by age and infirmity, a considerable gallery of Carlyle portraits might be collected from the illustrated newspapers. In late days until the weight of years pressed heavily upon him,

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 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,

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