He was one of the most valued and cherished friends of Lady Ashburton; and as he and I were both in the habit of paying her long visits in the country (at Bay House, Alverstoke, when she was Lady Harriet Baring, at the Grange, when her husband had succeeded his father), I had opportunities of knowing him such as London cannot provide. And from Bay House I find myself writing of him to Miss Fenwick, thus, 22d January, 1848:

"We have had Carlyle here all the time-a longer time than I have hitherto seen him for. His conversation is as bright as ever, and as striking in its imaginative effects. But his mind seems utterly incapable of coming to any conclusion about anything; and if he says something that seems for the moment direct, as well as forcible, in the way of an opinion, it is hardly out of his mouth before he says something else that breaks it in pieces. He can see nothing but the chaos of his own mind reflected in the universe. Guidance, therefore, there is none to be got from him; nor any illumination, save that of storm-lights. But I suppose one cannot see anything so rich and strange as his mind is without gaining by it in some unconscious way, as well as finding pleasure and pain in it. It is fruitful of both."

And I wrote in the same sense to my mother and to Aubrey de Vere. To her: "The society of the house is gay and pleasant, divers visitors coming and going and some abiding. The only one you have any knowledge of is Carlyle, than whom none is more interesting-a striking element of the wild and grotesque to mix up with the more gay and graceful material of a fashionable set.”

To Aubrey: "As to the rest of the people we have had at Alverstoke, some of them were agreeable, but none interesting except Carlyle, who from time to time threw

his blue-lights across the conversation. Strange and brilliant he was as ever, but more than ever adrift in his opinions, if opinions he could be said to have; for they darted about like the monsters of the solar microscope, perpetually devouring each other."

I did not mean to imply, of course, that he had not, what he has made known to all the world that he had in a superlative degree, divers rooted predilections and unchangeable aversions. Both are strong in him; whether equally strong, it is not easy to say. There have been eminent men in all ages who have combined in different measures and proportions the attributes of idolater and iconoclast. They are undoubtedly combined in Carlyle; the former perhaps predominating in his writings, the latter in his conversation. What was unaccountable was that such a man should have chosen as the object of his idolatry "iste stultorum magister "-Success. Long before his "Life of Cromwell" came out, I heard him insisting in conversation upon the fact that Cromwell had been throughout his career invariably successful; and having with much satisfaction traced the long line of his successes from the beginning to the end, he added, "It is true they got him out of his grave at the Restoration and they stuck his head up over the gate at Tyburn, but not till he had quite done with it."

He would scarcely have sympathized with the sentiment to which the last breath of Brutus gave utterance:

"I shall have glory by this losing day
More than Octavius and Mark Antony

By their vile conquest shall attain unto,"

and the vile conqueror Frederick could engage more of his admiration than most honest men will be disposed to share. Perhaps, however, it was a waning admirationless as he proceeded with his history than when he began

it; and it should not be forgotten that he ended by entitling it a Life of Frederick "called " the Great.

His powers of invective and disparagement, on the other hand, are exercised in conversation, sometimes in a manifest spirit of contradiction and generally with an infusion of humor, giving them at one time the character of a passage of arms in a tournament or sham fight, at another that of a grotesque dance of mummers; so that, forcible as they often are, they are not serious enough to give offence.

He delights in knocking over any pageantry of another man's setting up. One evening at the Grange a party of gentlemen, returning from a walk in the dusk, had seen a magnificent meteor, one which filled a place in the newspapers for some days afterwards. They described what they had beheld in glowing colors and with much enthusiasm. Carlyle having heard them in silence to the end, gave his view of the phenomenon:

"Ay, some sulphuretted hydrogen, I suppose, or some rubbish of that kind."

*

In the autumn of 1845, Monckton Milnes was one of a party at the Grange at the same time with Carlyle and myself. He was famous for the interest he took in notorieties, and especially in notorious sinners, always finding some good reason for taking an indulgent view of their misdeeds. I have heard that, on the occasion of some murderer being hung, his sister, Lady Galway, expressed her satisfaction, saying that if he had been acquitted she would have been sure to have met him next week at one

*Now Lord Houghton. Called by Sydney Smith "the Cool of the Evening." Some little eccentricities of manner there may have been to suggest the epithet; but those who have known him in his acts and deeds are conversant with what is anything but cool in his nature; and there is a large measure of ardor as well as grace in his poetry.

of her brother's Thursday-morning breakfasts. At the time of this visit Sir Robert Peel had just formed his government, and had not found a place in it for Monckton Milnes, who appeared to be somewhat dissatisfied with Sir Robert on the occasion. Carlyle took a different view: he highly commended Sir Robert's judgment and penetration, insisting that no man knew better who would suit his purposes and who not, and ended by pronouncing his own opinion, that the only office Monckton Milnes was fit for was that of "perpetual president of the heaven and hell amalgamation society."

In his invectives, as well as in effusions when it would be less unexpected, there would generally be something which met the eye. When he spoke of a thing, under whatever feeling or impulse, he seemed to see it. He paid a visit to Lord Ashburton at a shooting-box in Scotland, at a time when the cholera was supposed to be approaching, and there was a retired physician staying in the house to be ready for any emergency. Carlyle was not well and was very gloomy, and shut himself up in his room for some days, admitting no one. At last Lady Ashburton was a little disturbed at his ways, and begged Dr. Wilson just to go in to him and see whether there was anything seriously amiss. The doctor went into his room and presently came flying out again; and his account was that Carlyle had received him with a volley of invectives against himself and his profession, saying that "of all the sons of Adam they were the most eminently unprofitable, and that a man might as well pour his sorrows into the long, hairy ear of a jackass." As in most of his sallies of this kind, the extravagance and the grotesqueness of the attack sheathed the sharpness of it, and the little touch of the picturesque the "long, hairy ear "-seemed to give it the character of a vision rather than a vituperation.

CHAPTER XXI.

MISS FENWICK WITH MR. AND MRS. WORDSWORTH.'

ANNO DOM. 1840-41. ANNO ET. 40-41.

I HAVE said that the change made by my marriage in the lives of my father and mother was a change full of happiness and peace.

To Miss Fenwick, also, it brought joy and great gladness of heart, and if not perfect peace, yet all the peace which her nature and the nature of her affections permitted. For in all her affections there was an element of diffidence and disturbance working up and betraying itself from time to time, as well as a profounder element of peace-profounder far-the peace of the deep sea, the

"central peace subsisting at the heart

Of endless agitation."

Perhaps there are no natures, having a rare and extraordinary largeness of love, which can hold themselves in a constant and invariable contentment with the objects of their love. It cannot be expected that, in this commonplace world, what is rare and extraordinary will fall in with what is equally rare and extraordinary; and yet absolute and uninterrupted contentment is not to be expected in the relations engendered by unequal attributes and capacities.

"Vainly heart with heart would mingle,
For the deepest still is single,"

says some one-I think, Aubrey de Vere-and there is