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take your place in the Infernal Cohort, under the old. Black Flag that we know."

The book is a great favourite in Germany, and it made Carlyle doubly dear to the people of that country. Well might they be grateful to this illustrious Scotsman, who had devoted two of the three epochs of his working life to the exposition of their national literature and history. When the Empress of Germany was in England in the May of 1872 she personally communicated to Carlyle a flattering message from the Emperor thanking him for his Life of Frederick; and in 1873, on the death of Manzoni, he was presented with the Prussian "Order for Merit." Some people were foolish enough to feel, and even to express, surprise when Carlyle declined the Grand Cross of the Bath, offered in 1875 through Mr Disraeli, the more especially as he had not long before accepted the Ordre pour le Mérite. They overlooked several important facts, which led others to rejoice that the English honour had been rejected. In the first place, it was ludicrously inadequate-Carlyle ought to have had long before a seat in the House of Lords; secondly, it came too late. Goethe was only 27 years of age when Karl August made him a member of the Privy Council. To offer Carlyle a G.C.B. at 80 was almost worse than to leave him in the evening of his life, as he had been left during his working days, without recognition from the State to which he had rendered such splendid service. He consulted the dignity of letters as well as his own personal honour when he declined to accept the tardy and insignificant decoration. There were in his native Scotland country gentlemen under forty who had for years been called "Right Honourables" by grace of the

monarch who had suffered her greatest Scottish subject to spend all his years of arduous toil without one token of favour. As respects the honour that came from Germany, well might Carlyle accept that; not only had it come more timeously, it was of far higher significance and value. The Ordre pour le Mérite is not given by the Sovereign or the Minister, but by the Knights of the Order themselves, the King only confirming their choice. The number of the Knights is strictly limited (there are no more than 30 German and 30 Foreign Knights), so that every Knight knows who will be his peers. Not even Bismarck is a Knight of this Order. Moltke was elected, but simply as the representative of military science; nor does he rank higher in this Order than did Bunsen, the representative of physical science, or Ranke the historian.

CHAPTER XVIII.

ELECTED LORD RECTOR AT EDINBURGH-HIS INAUGURAL ADDRESS AT THOMAS ERSKINE'S-DEATH OF MRS CARLYLE-HER FUNERAL-THE MINISTRY OF SORROW -OLD BETTY BRAID: A PERPETUAL GOSPEL "-THE LORD'S PRAYER THE VOICE OF MAN'S SOUL-KNOX MEMORIAL AND SCOTTISH MONUMENTS-AT HIS WIFE'S GRAVE.

ALMOST immediately after the completion of what was destined to be Carlyle's last literary work of importance, came an honour that, of all things the world had to offer, was perhaps the one most likely to be grateful to his heart. In the previous decade an attempt had been made by some of his admirers among the students at Edinburgh University to secure his nomination for the office of Lord Rector; but the few adventurous spirits of 1856 discovered that they were before their time. They were obliged to yield to objections which few who made them would care to see recalled to-day. Ten years later the tide had turned; and a second endeavour, made in the November of 1865, was crowned with triumphant success. By a majority-the largest on record-of 657 against 310, he was elected Lord Rector in preference to Mr Disraeli.* There have been few such days even in

* Twice before his election by his own University he had been invited to allow himself to be nominated for the office of Lord Rector, once by students in the University of Glasgow, and once by those of Aberdeen; but both of these invitations he had declined.

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Edinburgh as that Easter Monday, the 2d of April 1866, on which he delivered his Inaugural Address in the Music Hall before an audience that included, not only his young constituents, but many people from distant parts of the country, and even from foreign shores, attracted thither by the prospect of witnessing Carlyle's reception in the capital of his native land. It was his first appearance as a public speaker since he gave his lectures on HeroWorship twenty-six years before. Like those lectures his address was a purely extemporaneous utterance, delivered conversationally and without a single note; and, as must have been expected by those who really knew the man, there was in it a singular mellowness of thought and feeling, admirably reflected in the homely language in which it was couched, and the fine flashes of humour and sarcasm by which it was irradiated. The main subject of his discourse was "The Choice of Books ;" and the chief lessons he had to enforce were to avoid cram, to be painstaking, diligent, and patient in the acquisition of knowledge. With remarkable emphasis he insisted on the vital distinction between knowledge and hypothesis. The hypothetical and the known are never confounded without loss to man, loss of strength, loss of truth, for is not truth the soul's strength? He protested against the notion that a University is the place where a man is to be fitted for the special work of a profession; its function, he contended, is to prepare a man for mastering any science by teaching him the method of all. There were but two points trenching on politics in the address, and one was the quotation from Machiavelli of the statement -with which he evidently agreed himself, though he refrained from asking assent to it-that the history of

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Rome shows that a democracy could not permanently exist without the occasional intervention of a Dictator. The other was a declaration of the necessity for recognising the hereditary principle in government, if there is to be any fixity in things." Proclaiming anew his old doctrine no the virtue of Silence, he lamented that "the first nations in the world-the English and the American-are going all away into wind and tongue." One hearer from London declared that it was worth coming all the way in the rain in the Sunday night train were it only to have heard Carlyle utter the final sentence of his penultimate paragraph, "There is a nobler ambition than the gaining of all California, or the getting of all the suffrages that are on the planet just now!" One of his last words counselled the students to take care of their health; the old word for "holy" in the German language, heilig, also means "healthy." He also exhorted them to read Knox's History of the Reformation, "a glorious book," full of humour and of "the sunniest glimpses of things;" and there was hearty laughter when he advised them to "keep out of literature, as a general rule." He had talked for an hour and a half. At times his eye kindled, and the eloquent blood flamed up the speaker's cheek; the occasional drolleries came out with an inexpressible voice and look; as for the fiery bursts, they took shape in grand tones, the impression made deeper, not by raising, but by lowering the voice. Alexander Smith, the University, wrote the

poet, who was secretary to the most vivid sketch of the proceedings; it is included in his Last Leaves. He describes Carlyle's voice as "a soft, downy voice," with "not a tone in it of the shrill, fierce kind that one would expect it to be in reading the