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morning I looked diligently at all colleges within reach ; saw Oliver's picture in his Sidney-Sussex College; got under way again in a high wind which became thick driving rain, and about five I arrived here sound and safe. To-day, of course, I am in a very baked, hot, feverish condition.

Cromwell had been Carlyle's first thought in this riding expedition, but other subjects, as I have said, were rising between him and the Commonwealth. At St. Ives he had seen and noted more than Cromwell's farm. He had seen St. Ives poorhouse, and the paupers sitting enchanted in the sun, willing to work, but with no work provided for them. In his Journal for the 25th of October he mentions that he has been reading Eadmer, and Jocelyn de Brakelonde's Chronicle, and been meditating on the old monks' life in St. Edmund's monastery. Round these, as an incipient motive, another book was shaping itself in his mind, and making 'Cromwell' impossible till this should be done.

To Thomas Erskine, Esq.

Chelsea: October 22, 1842.

I wish all men knew and saw in very truth, as Emerson does, the everlasting worth, dignity, and blessedness of work. We should then terminate our Fox-hunting, Almacking, Cornlawing, and a variety of other things! For myself, I feel daily more and more what a truth there is in that old saying of the monks, Laborare est orare. I find really that a man cannot make a pair of shoes rightly unless he do it in a devout manner; that no man is ever paid for his real work, or should ever expect or demand angrily to be paid; that all work properly so called is an appeal from the Seen to the Unseen a devout calling upon Higher Powers; and unless they stand by us, it will not be a work, but a quackery.

Perhaps I should tell you, withal, that a set of headlong

enthusiasts have already risen up in America who, grounding themselves on these notions of Emerson, decide on renouncing the world and its ways somewhat in the style of the old eremites of the Thebaid; and retire into remote rural places to dig and delve with their own hands, to live according to Nature and Truth,' and for one thing eat vegetables only. We had a missionary of that kind here-a man of sincere convictions, but of the deepest ignorance, and calmly arrogant as an inspired man may be supposed to be on the whole, one of the intensest bores I have ever met with. He made no proselytes in this quarter; but the spiritual state of New England as rendered visible through him was very strange to me. . . .

I had three days of a riding excursion into Oliver Cromwell's country. I smoked a cigar on his broken horseblock in the old city of Ely, under the stars, beside the graves of St. Mary's Churchyard. I almost wept to stand upon the very flagstones under the setting sun where he ordered the refractory parson, 'Leave off your fooling, and come out, sir!' Alas! he too! was he paid for his work?

Do not ask me whether I yet write about Oliver. My deep and growing feeling is that it is impossible. The mighty has gone to be a ghost, and will never take body again.

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CHAPTER XI.

A.D. 1842-3. ET. 47-48.

Slow progress with 'Cromwell '-Condition of England question-Past and Present-The Dismal Science-Letter from Lockhart-Effect of Carlyle's writings on his contemporaries-Young OxfordReviews-Visit to South Wales-Mr. Redwood's visit to the Bishop of St. David's-Impressions-An inn at Gloucester-Father Mathew-Retreat in Annandale-Edinburgh-Dunbar battle-field -Return home.

Journal.

October 25, 1842.-For many months there has been no writing here. Alas! what was there to write? About myself, nothing; or less if that was possible. I have not got one word to stand upon paper in regard to Oliver. The beginnings of work are even more formidable than the executing of it. I seem to myself at present, and for a long while past, to be sunk deep, fifty miles deep, below the region of articulation, and, if I ever rise to speak again, must raise whole continents with me. Some hundreds of times I have felt, and scores of times I have said and written, that Oliver is an impossibility; yet I am still found at it, without any visible results at all. Remorse, too, for my sinful, disgraceful sloth accompanies me, as it well may. I am, as it were, without a language. Tons of dull books have I read on this matter, and it is still only looming as through thick mists. on my eye. There looming, or flaming visible-did it ever flame, which it has never yet been made to do—in what terms am I to set it forth? I wish often I could write rhyme. A new form from centre to surface, unlike what I find anywhere in myself or others, would alone be appropriate

for the indescribable chiaroscuro and waste bewilderment of

this subject.

December 21.-The Preadamite powers of Chaos are in me, and my soul, with excess of stupidity, pusillanimity, tailor melancholy, and approaches of mere desperation and dog-madness, is as if blotted out. Strange to reflect, during a three days' rain, when all is mud and misery here below, that a few miles up there is everlasting azure, and the sun shining as formerly. No Cromwell will ever come out of me in this world. I dare not even try Cromwell.

Carlyle was to try Cromwell, and was to clothe the ghost with body again, impossible as the operation seemed; but he had to raise another ghost first-an old Catholic ghost-before he could practise on the Puritans.

Events move so fast in this century, one crowding another out of sight, that most of us who were alive in 1842 have forgotten how menacing public affairs were looking in the autumn of that year. Trade was slack, owing, it was said, to the corn-laws, and hundreds of thousands of operatives were out of work. Bread was dear, owing certainly to the corn-laws, and actual famine was in the northern towns; while the noble lords and gentlemen were shooting their grouse as usual. There was no insurrection, but the hands,' unwillingly idle, gathered in the streets in dumb protest. The poorhouses overflowed, and could hold no more; local riots brought out the yeomanry, landowners and farmers, to put down the artisans, who were short of bread for their families, lest foreign competition should bring down rents and farmers' profits. Town and country were ranked against each other for the last time. Never any more was such a scene to be witnessed in England.

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In his Suffolk ride Carlyle had seen similar scenes of misery. Indignation blazed up in him at the sight of England with its enormous wealth and haggard poverty; the earth would not endure it, he thought. The rage of famished millions, held in check only by the invisible restraints of habit and traditional order, . would boil over at last. In England, as in France, if the favoured classes did not look better to their ways, revolution would and must come; and if it could create nothing, might at least shatter society to pieces. HisChartism' had been read and wondered over, but his prophecies had been laughed at, and the symptoms had grown worse. The corn-laws, it is to be remembered, were still standing. If they had continued to stand, if the growl of the hungry people had not been heard and the meaning of it. discerned, most of us think that revolution would have come, and that Carlyle's view of the matter was right.

Between him and all other work, dragging off his mind from it, lay this condition of England question. Even if the dread of revolution was a chimæra, the degradation of the once great English people, absorbed, all of them, in a rage for gold and pleasure, was itself sufficient to stir his fury. He believed that every man had a special duty to do in this world. If he had been asked what specially he conceived his own duty to be, he would have said that it was to force men to realise once more that the world was actually governed by a just God; that the old familiar story acknowledged everywhere in words on Sundays, and disregarded or denied openly on week-days, was, after all, true. His writings, every