The Last Fruit off the Old Tree. 321 the able editor of Fraser. In the same year he published in the same magazine a paper which, unlike the Norse sketches, had been newly written. The Portraits of John Knox was the last fruit off the old tree; and the vivid sketch of the great Reformer from the pen of the venerable octogenarian proved that his hand had lost none of its cunning, while it deepened the sorrow that this vignette was all we were ever to get from that hand on the same subject. By permission, from the Medal by J. E. Boehm, Esq., A.R.A. CHAPTER XXI. DENOUNCES -HIS PERSONAL REMINISCENCES OF CARLYLE-HIS ASPECT IN It was in one of the opening years of the last decade of his life that we enjoyed the privilege of first meeting Carlyle. On entering that presence, in the drawing-room upstairs where he sat reading a newly-issued number of the Quarterly, the feeling, we are free to confess, was one of almost pained surprise. It was hard to realise that this could indeed be Thomas Carlyle. Not because he was so much more feeble in his physical aspect than we had expected to find him, with one shoulder so much raised as to amount to a deformity; but because that aspect was likewise so very homely, the air so rustic and Peasant-like, not to say uncouth. When, some time afterwards, we opened the newly-published Memoirs of George Ticknor, we could understand how it came to pass that the dandiacal person from Boston who met Carly'e upwards of forty years ago, when he was known merely as a contributor to the magazines and reviews, described him in his journal as "a vulgar-looking little His Rustic Appearance. 323 man." That was, beyond question, the impression any person, taking a merely superficial look, would have carried away. What we saw was simply such a face and form as we had come across hundreds of times in the glens and on the moorlands of Western Scotland-mending a feal dyke, seeing to the sheep, or hoeing potatoes in a cottage kailyard by the roadside. Met with in any one of these positions, he would have seemed in his natural place; only a keen inspection could have suggested the suspicion to any passer-by that there was something out of or beyond the ordinary run of peasants in this man. Surely no other cultured Scotsman ever went through the world with so little change of the external appearance and air that he had before leaving the cottage of his birth. At no period of his life, from all that we have been able to make out from conversations with his sister and others who had known him well, was Robert Burns so much of the rustic in appearance, deportment, or speech; and yet Carlyle was a student from his earliest. days, mixed for years in the best society of Edinburgh before he was thirty, got a highly cultivated lady for his wife, and an estate along with her, while for upwards of forty years he had been the intellectual leader in the Great Metropolis - latterly such a potentate in the literary world of the nineteenth as Johnson was in that of the eighteenth century, and even a little more. There is something profoundly significant in the tenacity with which Carlyle must have resisted those social influences that usually rub off the provincial angularities and impart at least an external polish. That tenacity was in keeping with one of the root principles of his teaching, and reflected, perhaps to an exaggerated extent, his abhor |