brother suitable antecedents were alleged, and the front was said to bear marks indicating that the body had been thrown on the face and decapitated after death, the hole through which the pike had gone being plainly visible. Carlyle, being suspicious of imposture, was content not to inquire too curiously into the authenticity of the craniological relic. Replying to my brother's offer to place him in communication with the owner of the skull, Carlyle wrote: Chelsea, 3 November, 1842. The history of poor Oliver from his cradle to his grave, and even beyond it, is such a mere mass of stupid fables as never or hardly ever elsewhere clustered themselves round the memory of a great man. In other times and countries he would have been sung as a demi-god; and here Tyburn gallows was in all ways the lot of him! It is really painful to consider-such depths of sheer thick stupidity and total want of sense for the Godlike in man is very sure to punish itself-as, alas, we find it now, in these quack-ridden generations, everywhere too fatally doing. The subject was now well in hand, and its progress was followed with great interest by Mrs. Strachey and her daughter, at whose suggestion copies of some of the documents in point were sent to Carlyle through my brother-in-law. A letter from Cheyne Row on the sub ject is subjoined : Chelsea, 23 May, 1844. Many thanks for your two Cromwell letters, a most welcome gift to me. I am assiduously collecting all letters and authentic utterances that came from Oliver himself; these, entirely credible and true as I have everywhere found them, promise to form a kind of firm basis for me, in the abyss of lies, stupidities, and delirium which his "History" hitherto has been for us. The letter to Mrs. Cromwell has already gone abroad and was known to me, but I am very happy to know accurately in whose hands the original now is. Does your brother live at Clifton too, or what is his specific designation? The letter to Hazlerig I never before saw or knew of, and it is certainly very curious. The date is clear enough from the contents. It must have been written at Dunbar, on the night of 2 September, 1650-a "wet night," with the victorious enemy hanging all round on this hand, and the wild autumn sea beating against the rocks on that— under as ominous circumstances as a man has often stood in; and it is a right brave letter. Will you name to me who the actual proprietor of this is, and if he knows at all by what road it came into his hands? Your brother (the owner of the letter to Mrs. Cromwell), who is skilful in such things, pronounces it an undoubted original. That it is genuine the style itself will testify. Oliver's handwriting, however, is very recognisable. A copy of your brother's letter from Monck, at any time when your leisure serves, will be another favour to me. I do not recollect to have elsewhere fallen in with this document. What the old close-mouthed horsedealer of a general saw good to write to Richard Cromwell in 1658 or 9 cannot but be curious to me! Mrs. Strachey I was sorry to find suffering somewhat under our bitter east wind; I myself have fallen under the same bad influence, or I should have called a second time. With kind remembrances to Mrs. Hare, with many thanks to yourself, I remain always, yours sincerely, T. CARLYLE. The close-mouthed horsedealer's letter is still in the possession of Mr. Sholto Hare, who informs me that it was addressed to Richard Cromwell soon after the Protector's death. It recommends the appointment of certain sheriffs of counties, colonels of regiments, and captains of warships, and serves to show how, in conjunction with Fairfax and the Loyalist clergyman, the Rev. Edward Bowles [an ancestor of the Hare family], Monck was preparing to work for the restoration of Charles II. The said letter to Mrs. Cromwell from the Protector, which is dated the day after the battle of Dunbar, bore three seals, whose juxtaposition suggested problems of authenticity and date on which Mr. Sholto Hare in after years consulted Carlyle, who answered thus: Chelsea, 24 November, 1853. I am very sorry I cannot form the smallest guess as to the motto on those two seals of your Oliver letter. One thing seems evident: they were not put there by Oliver; the third seal will alone be his, and the other two must have been appended by some subsequent possessor of the letter. By whom, or with what intention, can only be matter of the vaguest conjecture; but Oliver himself, we may be as good as certain, sealed only once, especially on that occasion, and by so sure a conveyance. "Faithful subject of the King, and palladium (salus) of the kingdom": these words might have been, in the language of flattery, till some three years before, a description of Oliver himself, in the dialect of the time; but now (in 1650), there is no "king" nor "kingdom"; it must have been an obsolete seal (signet ring or the like), probably applied long afterwards by Mrs. Cromwell, or we know not what possessor of the letter, in finally repositing the same. For the test, I have no considerable skill in such matters, having seen very few of Oliver's seals, and that only by accident, while looking for other objects. What you say of Penn's grave is very interesting, but I have little personal love for that heavy vain blockhead, in spite of his merits in several respects, and will not trouble you at present on that score. With kind regards to your brother and his lady, if they have not quite forgotten me, I remain in haste, Sincerely yours, T. CARLYLE. Allusions to the progress of the Cromwell appear in Carlyle's correspondence with his Clifton friend, Mrs. Strachey. In a letter to her, dated November 23rd, 1844, he writes: I am exceedingly busy; fishing up, out of the depths of brutallest Human stupidity, washing clean and making legible, the letters and speeches of Oliver Cromwell, a heroic man buried in such an element of mud and darkness as few Heroes ever were. It is an infinitely ugly kind of drudgery; I know no man living whom Stupidity and Brutality do more disgust than me: but it seems a kind of duty lying on the like of me; I say "He fought; thy poor trade is but to speak; speak then for him." Happily this branch of the business is now almost done we must then try others, which, if still harder work, offer work a little more inspiring. I begin to be much disaffected to the whole business of books; and often think, if I had once done with this, I will never write another. A copy of the Cromwell, inscribed with the name of his old Shooter's Hill protectress, reached Clifton shortly before her death. The matchless letter called forth by that occurrence, in which he speaks of Mrs. Strachey as "the oldest and dearest friend I anywhere had in the world," did not exhaust his grief, or his sympathies with her children in their loss. Writing six months later, to my eldest brother, Carlyle said: Chelsea, 10 May, 1847. The melancholy message which reached me last winter has not, even yet, produced its whole effect on me! New days and events turn up ever new remembrances, sad and sacred. I had not, and cannot again expect to have any other such a friend. Her life was a noble struggle; and it has ended-has left us still to struggle, yet a little further. Inexorable TIME Sweeps on, all-producing, all-devouring, and they that are Departed return not to us any more. Surely the remembrance of your noble mother will never leave me while I live in this world. . . This was not the mere flattering language of a mortuary inscription. Alluding to Mentone, in the Reminiscences Carlyle calls the Riviera and its Chelsea visitor, "all earth Paradise, inhabitant a kind of semi-Satan." That work is not overmuch pervaded by the temper of heaven, but as soon as the semi-Satan evokes the magic of the mistress of Shooter's Hill he falls into the melting mood. Always faithful to her memory, he draws her portrait in these touching superlatives: "To this day, long years after her death, I regard her as a singular pearl of a woman ; pure as dew, yet full of love; incapable of inveracity to herself or others." The more vivid of my own earlier recollections of Carlyle include an incident connected with the Hero-Worship which occurred one evening in Cheyne Row, where I called during the leisure of a Cambridge vacation. Among the topics discussed on that occasion was a murder, which, though De Quincey would hardly have classed it with the fineart performances of Mr. Williams, was the theme of general discussion at the time. In the course of our conversation, Carlyle expressed positive sympathy with the murderer, Rush, not, of course, as condoning his crime, but because the criminal had proved himself to be "a strong man," and, so far, superior to the average "poor weak flunkey" of contemporary Britain. A dumb witness to the truth of this lies on my table. Contrary to Carlyle's advice to me, not to augment the inevitable weariness of the flesh by purchasing books, I had accumulated a small library, which included a set of his own works bound by Wheeler of Oxford-the equal in tooling and superior in lettering of Hayday and Rivière-in a style which would almost have qualified them for a place on the shelves of Grolier or Madame de Pompadour. They have survived many vicissitudes of time, travel, and climate, and in the volume HeroWorship, beneath the final "Lecture VI., the Hero as King," on the page with the table of contents, may be read my pencil in memoriam written shortly afterwards: Lecture VII., the Hero as Murderer, James Bloomfield Rush, T.C., April 20th, 1849. This affair had an absurd echo. A few weeks later, a Clifton clergyman of the ultra-Evangelical school wrote to Carlyle, inquiring categorically whether, as rumoured in those parts, he had spoken of the demon Rush as deserving not the gallows, but the esteem of mankind. The suspicions of Cheyne Row attached to me as the delator probably in fault, and on my next visit I was reprimanded for my supposed indiscretion in giving circulation to remarks not intended to reach the cars of bigots and fools. The realities of the business were never investigated, but the story having travelled back to Clifton, the ecclesiastic in question incurred some local ridicule for his absurd behaviour. Carlyle's observations on Rush may have been partly jocular; but they flowed from his Doctrine of Force, and language not very unlike that just reported was drawn from him by the account of the execution of Baranelli, an assassin of a lower calibre and a later time. The virtue which Lessing called a fine weakness-I mean patriotism -found very little room in the hearts of Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle. They were not patriotic in what would now be called the Imperialistic sense, and they had none of the burning particularistic love of Burns and Scott for their restricted fatherland. During the Crimean War they were in flat opposition to the popular sentiment. They respected the Emperor Nicholas as a putative strong man, possessing some of the fibres of the hero as king, and, as we read in Hero- Worship, doing a great feat in keeping Russia together with his bayonets, Cossacks, and cannons. Then, "the unspeakable Turk" was their abhorrence, and they loathed "the scandalous copper captain," Napoleon the Third, against whom Carlyle would rave without intervallums, designating him "a dark knave." In these circumstances, they hardly desired success for our arms, and just as Charles James Fox raised his war-whoop over the disasters of Saratoga and Yorktown-just as Sir William Molesworth expressed the hope that the Canadian insurgents might beat the Guards -so our Chelsea friends refused to take the national view of the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, or of the capture of the war-steamer Tiger. At the time of the departure of the allied fleets for the Baltic, there appeared in Fraser a detailed description of Cronstadt, written by a young diplomatist, which was followed by papers on the Russian army and similar matters, then, even to "well-informed circles," a closely sealed book. These articles were approved by those in authority as being calculated to throw cold water on the prevalent belief that the walls of Cronstadt and Sebastopol would fall down under the first broadsides of the ships of France and England, and the Muscovite Empire be "crumpled up" by faith in Mr. Cobden's famous dictum. The Commentaries of the new Vegetius were carefully studied by Carlyle, who had as genuine a love as M. Thiers, or as Harry Hotspur himself, Of sallies and retires, of trenches, tents, Of basilisks, of cannon, and of culverin. But another excursion by the same writer into war topics was less well received. The Tiger, having drifted beneath the cliffs of Odessa, was compelled to haul down her flag, and the details of her mishap and surrender were made public in a work by one of the officers of the |