Oh, that I had faith! Oh, that I had! Then were there nothing too hard or heavy for me. Cry silently to thy inmost heart to God for it. Surely He will give it thee. At all events, it is as if my invisible schoolmaster had torn my copybook when I showed it, and said, 'No, boy! Thou must write it better.' What can I, sorrowing, do but obey-obey and think it the best? To work again; and, oh! may God be with me, for this earth is not friendly. On in His name! I was the nearest being happy sometimes these last few days that I have been for many months. My health is not so bad as it once was. I felt myself on firmish ground as to my work, and could forget all else. I will tell John, my mother, and Annandale Getreuen, but not till I feel under way again and can speak peace to them with the sorrow. To no other, I think, will I tell it, or more than allude to it.

The money part of the injury Mill was able to repair. He knew Carlyle's circumstances. He begged, and at last passionately entreated, Carlyle not to punish him by making him feel that he had occasioned real distress to friends whom he so much honoured; and he enclosed a cheque for 2007., the smallest sum which he thought that he could offer. Carlyle returned it; but, his financial condition requiring that he should lay his pride aside, he intimated that he would accept half, as representing the wages of five months' labour. To this Mill unwillingly consented. He sent a hundred pounds, and, so far as money went, Carlyle was in the same position as when he began to write. He was not aware till he tried it what difficulty he would find in replacing what had been destroyed; and he was able to write to his brother of what had happened, before he did try again, as of a thing which had ceased to distress him.

To John Carlyle.

Chelsea: March 23.

I am busy with vol. ii., toiling away with the heart of a free Roman. Indeed, I know not how it was, I had not felt so clear and independent, sure of myself and of my task, for many long years. There never in my life had come upon me any other accident of much moment; but this I could not but feel to be a sore one. The thing was lost, and perhaps worse; for I had not only forgotten all the structure of it, but the spirit it was written in was past. Only the general impression seemed to remain, and the recollection that I was on the whole satisfied with that, and could now hardly hope to equal it. Mill, whom I had to comfort and speak peace to, remained injudiciously enough till almost midnight; and my poor dame and I had to sit talking of indifferent matters, and could not till then get our lament fairly uttered. She was very good to me, and the thing did not beat us. That night was a hard one; something from time to time tying me tight, as it were, all round the region of the heart, and strange dreams haunting me. However, I was not without good thoughts too, that came like healing life into me; and I got it somewhat reasonably crushed down. I have got back my spirits, and hope I shall go on tolerably. I was for writing to you next day after it happened, but Jane suggested it would only grieve you till I could say it was in the way towards adjustment.

The image of the schoolboy whose copy had been torn up by the master had taken hold of Carlyle, for he repeated it in his letters. It was humble enough and touching, yet not without comfort, for it implied that he had a master who was interested in his work and meant it to be executed properly, and not an outcast orphan for whom no one cared. For Mill's sake the misadventure was not spoken of in London.

6

Carlyle had been idle for a week or two till he could muster strength to set to work again, and had gone into society as much as he could to distract himself. He was a frequent guest at Henry Taylor's, a good man,' he said, 'whose laugh reminds me of poor Irving's.' At Taylor's he had met Southey. Shortly after the accident he met Wordsworth at the same house.

I did not expect much (he said in a letter), but got mostly what I expected. The old man has a fine shrewdness and naturalness in his expression of face, a long Cumberland figure; one finds also a kind of sincerity in his speech. But for prolixity, thinness, endless dilution, it excels all the other speech I had heard from mortals. A genuine man, which is much, but also essentially a small genuine man. Nothing perhaps is sadder (of the glad kind) than the unbounded laudation of such a man, sad proof of the rarity of such. I fancy, however, he has fallen into the garrulity of age, and is not what he was; also that his environment and rural prophethood has hurt him much. He seems impatient that even Shakespeare should be admired. 'So much out of my own pocket.' The shake of hand he gives you is feckless, egotistical. I rather fancy he loves nothing in the world so much as one could wish. When I compare that man with a great man, alas! he is like dwindling into a contemptibility. Jean Paul, for example (neither was he great), could have worn him in a finger-ring.'

And again:

Have seen Wordsworth, an old, very loquacious—indeed, quite prosing man, with a tint of naturalness, of sincere insight, nevertheless. He has been much spoiled; king of his company, unrecognised, and then adulated. Worth little

now.

A genuine kind of man, but intrinsically and extrinsically a small one, let them sing or say what they will. The languid way in which he gives you a handful of numb unre

sponsive fingers is very significant. It seems also rather to grieve him that you have any admiration for anybody but him. The style in which he, clipping, qualifying, and wearisomely questioning without answer, spoke of Burns and Shakespeare, finding or guessing that to me he was all too little in comparison, was melancholy to hear. No man that I ever met has given me less, has disappointed me less. My peace be with him, and a happy evening to his, on the whole, respectable life.

CHAPTER II.

A.D. 1835. ET. 40.

The first volume to be replaced-Poverty and depression-John Sterling-Maurice on the Articles-Sartor-Carlyle's theologyStyle-Invitation to America-Thoughts of abandoning literatureReflections in Hyde Park-Book to be finished-London drawingrooms-First volume rewritten.

To resolve to rewrite the burnt volume was easier than to do it. The Fête des Piques' at which Carlyle had been engaged was leisurely finished. He then turned back to the death of Louis XV., the most impressive passage in the whole book as he eventually finished it, but he found that it would not prosper with him.

'The accident had grown tolerable to me,' he says, 'sometimes almost looked indifferent. But now when I actually come to try if I can repair it, I want of all things humility, faith. It is a sore loss I have had, but well taken, I will firmly believe, might become a gain. The wages part of it does next to nothing for me. I might all but as well have gone without wages. However, it was only gigmanity' that hinted at that, to which I needed not give any ear.'

Wages, indeed, could only be useful to enable the work to recover itself, but it seemed as if the

trial.

Vulgar pride; a favourite phrase of Carlyle's, taken from Thurtell's