vessel, whose tone grated on feelings excited by patriotic neurosis. The narrative was reviewed (with much over-emphasis, no doubt) in a style which aroused the spleen of Cheyne Row, where the cudgels were warmly taken up on behalf of the captors, and, in particular for the Russian Commandant of Odessa, of whom the critic had not spoken with sufficient respect. The unknown delinquent, being one day assailed to his face by Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle in combination, thought fit to unfold himself. The avowal caused much momentary indignation, and a fire of arguments or asseverations was exchanged between the Czar's enemy and his Scotch allies. Soon that effusive and irrepressible lap-dog, Nero, observant of the fray, intervened with a bark between the combatants. This created a diversion, laughter ensued, and the incident was closed with the Horatian tu missus abibis.

A paragraph of Hero-Worship puts the question whether Shakespeare or India be the greater glory to our nation. In the characters and careers of our Asiatic proconsuls, in the military foundations of our rule, in the exercise of the government of the peninsula, not by Downing Street and the stump oratory of Sir Jabez Windbag and the Honourable Felicissimus Zero, but by "the divine Silences "-in these and other circumstances of its past and present, the Eastern dependency of Great Britain typified some of Carlyle's historical and political ideals. Members of the junior generation of our family, returning from Tibet, or from Rajpootana or Almora, or from the battlefields of Aliwal and Sobraon, were thus doubly welcome in Cheyne Row. In the spring of 1857, the year of the great Mutiny, my brother, Sir John Strachey, was spending an evening with the Carlyles, when there was much conversation about India. Although, at this time, no one foresaw the particular catastrophe which was near the horizon, there were certain mutterings of an approaching storm, and my brother had expressed in emphatic language his conviction of the utter rottenness of the native army. After the Mutiny broke out, a domestic incident had to be reported by my brother to Carlyle, whose congratulations on the event were conveyed in the appended letter, which refers in detail to the revolt of the troops, and gives his correspondent credit for his prophetic language of the previous spring :

Chelsea, 7 September, 1857.

I am very glad to hear of the pleasant event that has taken place in your family, and much obliged by your kindness in notifying it to me. I hope the little fellow will grow up to be a credit to his kindred and country-and perhaps

be heard of to his advantage, in England and the East, as his ancestors have been!

The East is not at all a pleasant place at present, since you left it; I have often thought how fatally soon your worst prognostications of it, that evening, have verified themselves! I cannot bear to read those inhuman details in the newspapers, nor do I love in the least the spirit in which the English People mainly have taken it up. To punish the Sepoys and mince them all to pieces, &c., &c. : it were far better if the English People thought of punishing themselves for the very great folly they have manifested there, and indeed I grieve to think, in nearly all departments of their affairs lately, whereby such results have become possible, had become inevitable. People only weary me assigning "causes,"-I seek, at present, no further than the uppermost cause: An army commanded for fifty years by imaginary captains; probably the most conspicuously portentous Entity the sun can look down upon; and capable of fermenting into results of any required degree of hideousness, against a given (though unknown) day. The English army generally, in India and elsewhere, has to me in these late years (whilst I have been reading about real armies) been a subject of endless wonder, deep and far from joyful. England thinks herself the "wisest nation of the world" quite as a settled truism, not worth asserting: England will, before long, become less conspicuously the most blockhead Nation in the world, or India will not be the last ill-news she hears! In fact, I am grieved and miserable about these things; and have no resource but to banish them wholly out of my head, and to think of my own work while I have any.

My wife came home, Wednesday last, from a two-months in Scotland, undertaken for health's sake, evidently not without some profit that way. I have been grinding along here, and shall be, without interval, for a period alarming to think of. Do not neglect us when you come to town again.

With best regards to the young mother, I am always, Yours sincerely,

(signed) T. CARLYLE.

The first volume of the work which has placed Carlyle's name by the side of those of Thucydides, Guicciardini, and Gibbon was entitled, with a certain sarcastic intention, History of Frederick the Second of Prussia, "called" Frederick the Great. During its gestation his letters and talk were thickly larded with curses of the bad luck that had led him to look for a hero in that mother of dead dogs, the eighteenth century. This "unutterable book," he said, had inflicted on him a slavery" which was "far beyond that of any penal colony or treadmill," and he compared his life under such hateful pressure to that of a galley slave. My Chelsea correspondence relative to "the nightmare King" included a reply from Carlyle to the announcement that I had discovered in Holland some secret diplomatic documents calculated to throw light on the latter years of Frederick's life. He commences (date November 25th, 1862) with the congratulations of Mrs. Carlyle and

himself on a sentimental incident of which he had been informed, and, after indulging in some personal prophecies which have remained elaborately unfulfilled, shortly gravitates to the familiar growl at the nightmare King.

He writes:

I got your letter several days ago; but have not had the least minute to myself; and this is literally the first note I have written since to any address whatever. Never in my days was I kept in such a perpetual whirl of hurries and botherations, you know with what, and how extremely profitable it is likely to be! In six months, if it be possible to hold out so long, I shall be thro' the worst; and in eight or nine months hence shall have done with it altogether that is the one blessed quality I know in the affair.

I do not intend much upon the Furstenbund; but of course I shall have to mention it ; and if your pleasure and opportunities do lead you to examine those old Fascicles at the Hague (how they got there I cannot guess) and to give me, in compass of a few pages, what you can excerpt of most remarkable in Frh.'s utterances or actions, it will be a real kindness to me. I am curious to know, had he any smell then (1784-5, I think) of the terrible French conflagration which was so near breaking out, to consume all manner of Princes and their covenants, or reduce them to a charred!—Yours, with the kindest regard to a certain lady,

T. CARLYLE.

Of a visit to Cheyne Row in the autumn of 1875 a full record is at hand. The incomparable mistress of the familiar red house was no longer there to nod from the window of the ground floor parlour, and, like the Frau Gräfin in Sartor Resartus, to dispense "æsthetic tea." Nero had been gathered to his fathers, soon to attain to immortality with Muff, the friend of Gibbon, and the dogs of Abbotsford and Newstead. The sense of desolation caused by these blanks was spared me, for the surviving inmate of the room had migrated to the first floor. The change of locality was almost more striking than the alteration in Carlyle's appearance, voice, or manner. That he wore a dressing-gown might seem a symptom of decline in a Briton however, to that Teutonic garment he had occasionally descended before. His greetings were hearty, and after precise inquiries concerning a particular fraction of the population of the German city-Dresden-from which I last came, he plunged into a discussion of the latest news and prospects of our clan, devoting, as in carlier years, a separate excursus to my cousin, the

exactly

Blumine of Sartor Resartus. These preliminaries disposed of, he put on an interrogatory relative to the Court and Government of

Saxony, the constitutional relations of the kingdom to the Imperial power, and so forth. In earlier days Carlyle had been exhaustively ignorant of everything German except the books and authors which he discussed. In one of his Essays he speaks with scorn of the suggestion that in Germany the kings of literature were "excluded from society," and there had been a time when Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle were hard to convince that if their lot had been in the Fatherland those words would have defined with scientific accuracy their place in life. However, various Anglo-German informants had enlarged our friend's knowledge in these respects, and he now made pertinent inquiries into some modern developments of the Aryan rules of caste, the segregation of men of science and learning from polite circles, and the like. He was much interested in the account of a recent attempt to localise the Dresden incident described in his Frederick, when the "Man of Sin," suddenly drawing back a curtain, revealed to old Friedrich Wilhelm and the youthful Fritz a vision of Paradise, in which Eve was represented by the lovely operatic named Formera. His eye brightened when he heard that the Royal proprietor of the premises in question had explained that the scene of the temptation could hardly be identified now, and had proceeded to quote the French traveller's lament, given by Carlyle, over the three hundred and sixty-five pairs of breeches of Count Brühl: "Montrezmoi, donc, des vertus!"

Upon this the sluices of anecdote and reflection were let go, and the descent was effected from "Augustus the Strong" to that diplomatic meteor, Hugh Elliot, whose emoluments Carlyle would like to have bestowed on one of his remote successors. From the old Germany he travelled to the new, and the survival of his prejudices of 1848 against the modern map of Europe was visible enough. He had never shown much disposition to separate King Victor Emmanuel and Cavour from the ruck of "the supreme scoundrels," and not even the crowning of the Italian edifice in 1870 had quite reconciled him to the "immense nonsense" and "incoherent Jacobinisms" of his friend Mazzini. Perhaps he could not forgive Italy for poisoning a Luxemburg Kaiser in Sacramental wine-a proceeding on which there are such bitter imprecations in the Frederick. Towards United Germany he was otherwise disposed. Still, it was plain that, in spite of his official newspaper description of the war with France as "the grandest and most beneficent of Heavenly providences in the history of my time," he was a long way from infatuation either with "pious Deutschland," as edited in 1870-71, or, be it added,

with the editor-in-chief. The politics of the Empire interested him less than the new German field-gun: of the calibre, gas-check, and initial velocity of this weapon too much could not be said.

He had not made any particular study of the late war, and asked for the name of "some solid readable history of the affair." The reply was that nothing to suit his purpose was in print except " the Genera Staff" work, which was trustworthy, but as voluminous as Kinglake himself. And, being the Law and the Prophets from which good manners did not permit the German military to dissent, no local writers had subjected it to any discussion amounting to criticism. To this Carlyle rejoined that he would have nothing to do with an official book, and went on to let fall certain expressions of scepticism in regard to Count Moltke, though without adducing reasons. The probability is that he could not bring himself to admit that Gravelotte and Sedan were comparable as strokes of art to Rossbach and Leuthen. As the historian of Frederick his feelings would naturally resemble those of the old campaigner in the French play who scorned the rapid accomplishment of Napoleon's campaigns: "Parlez-moi de la guerre de sept ans Parlez-moi de la guerre de trente ans !"

Carlyle was an uncompromising enemy of art-the subject on which he hated to hear John Sterling talk, on which, he said, "earnest men abhorrent of hypocrisy and speech that has no meaning ought to hold their tongues." If he exempted portraits, at least when engraved, from his curses on goat-footed Pan and the Correggiosity of Correggio, it was because they are a material basis of history and biography. In spite of all this, critics have solemnly discussed his obiter dicta on such topics, gathering them up into a system, as if they were the judgments of Diderot or Winckelmann. And, absurd to relate, he has even been quoted as an authority on matters musical. The ridicule with which Carlyle spoke of the admirers of Paganini is well known: his perceptions in regard to the concords of sweet sounds were fully on a level with those of our common friend Dean Stanley, whose incipient love for Jenny Lind was checked by his dislike of the ugly noises that came from her throat. He now said, horribile dictu, "Music is mostly nonsense," which, it is to be feared, drew from me the reply that he really must remember that it was a nonsense which suited my non

sense." He then partially compromised matters by observing that he had once heard Fidelio, which was of a different character from the ordinary melodious rows: "there was air in that."