Thomas Carlyle Part 3

Carlyle proposed that after the "dreaded ceremony" he and his bride and his brother John should travel together by the stage-coach from Dumfries to Edinburgh. In "the last dying speech and marrying words" she objects to this arrangement, and after the event (October 17th 1826) they drove in a post-chaise to 21 Comely Bank, where Mrs. Welsh, now herself settled at Templand, had furnished a house for them. Meanwhile the Carlyle family migrated to Scotsbrig. There followed eighteen comparatively tranquil months, an oasis in the wilderness, where the anomalous pair lived in some respects like other people. They had seats in church, and social gatherings--Wednesday "At Homes," to which the celebrity of their brilliant conversational powers attracted the brightest spirits of the northern capital, among them Sir William Hamilton, Sir David Browster, John Wilson, De Quincey, forgiven for his review, and above all Jeffrey, a friend, though of opposite character, nearly as true as Irving himself.

Procter had introduced Carlyle to the famous editor, who, as a Scotch cousin of the Welshes, took from the first a keen interest in the still struggling author, and opened to him the door of the _Edinburgh Review_.

The appearance, of the article on _Richter_, 1827, and that, in the course of the same year, on _The State of German Literature,_ marks the beginning of a long series of splendid historical and critical essays--closing in 1855 with the _Prinzenraub_--which set Carlyle in the front of the reviewers of the century. The success in the _Edinburgh_ was an "open sesame;" and the conductors of the _Foreign_ and _Foreign Quarterly_ Reviews, later, those of _Fraser_ and the _Westminster_, were ready to receive whatever the new writer might choose to send.

To the _Foreign Review_ he contributed from Comely Bank the _Life and Writings of Werner_, a paper on _Helena_, the leading episode of the second part of "Faust," and the first of the two great Essays on _Goethe_, which fixed his place as the interpreter of Germany to England.

In midsummer 1827 Carlyle received a letter from Goethe cordially acknowledging the _Life of Schiller_, and enclosing presents of books for himself and his wife. This, followed by a later inquiry as to the author of the article on _German Literature_, was the opening of a correspondence of sage advice on the one side and of lively grat.i.tude on the other, that lasted till the death of the veteran in 1832. Goethe a.s.sisted, or tried to a.s.sist, his admirer by giving him a testimonial in a candidature for the Chair (vacant by the promotion of Dr. Chalmers) of Moral Philosophy at St. Andrews. Jeffrey, a frequent visitor and host of the Carlyles, still regarded as "a jewel of advocates ... the most lovable of little men," urged and aided the canva.s.s, but in vain. The testimonials were too strong to be judicious, and "it was enough that"

the candidate "was described as a man of original and extraordinary gifts to make college patrons shrink from contact with him." Another failure, about the same date and with the same backing, was an application for a Professors.h.i.+p in London University, practically under the patronage of Brougham; yet another, of a different kind, was Carlyle's attempt to write a novel, which having been found--better before than after publication--to be a failure, was for the most part burnt. "He could not," says Froude, "write a novel any more than he could write poetry. He had no _invention._"

[Footnote: Carlyle's verses also demonstrate that he had no metrical ear.

The only really good lines he ever wrote, save in translations where the rhythm was set to him, are those constantly quoted about the dawn of "another blue day." Those sent to his mother on "Proud Hapsburg," and to Jane Welsh before marriage are unworthy of Macaulay's school-boy, "Non di non homines;" but it took much hammering to persuade Carlyle of the fact, and when persuaded he concluded that verse-writing was a mere tinkling of cymbals!]

"His genius was for fact; to lay hold on truth, with all his intellect and all his imagination. He could no more invent than he could lie."

The remaining incidents of Carlyle's Edinburgh life are few: a visit from his mother; a message from Goethe transmitting a medal for Sir Walter Scott; sums generously sent for his brother John's medical education in Germany; loans to Alexander, and a frustrate scheme for starting a new Annual Register, designed to be a literary _resume_ of the year, make up the record. The "rift in the lute," Carlyle's incapacity for domestic life, was already showing itself. Within the course of an orthodox honeymoon he had begun to shut himself up in interior solitude, seldom saw his wife from breakfast till 4 P.M., when they dined together and read _Don Quixote_ in Spanish. The husband was half forgotten in the author beginning to prophesy: he wrote alone, walked alone, thought alone, and for the most part talked alone, _i.e._ in monologue that did not wait or care for answer. There was respect, there was affection, but there was little companions.h.i.+p. Meanwhile, despite the _Review_ articles, Carlyle's other works, especially the volumes on German romance, were not succeeding, and the mill had to grind without grist. It seemed doubtful whether he could afford to live in Edinburgh; he craved after greater quiet, and when the farm, which was the main Welsh inheritance, fell vacant, resolved on migrating thither. His wife yielding, though with a natural repugnance to the extreme seclusion in store for her, and the Jeffreys kindly a.s.sisting, they went together in May 1828 to the Hill of the Hawks.

Craigenputtock is by no means "the dreariest spot in all the British dominions." On a sunny day it is an inland home, with wide billowy straths of gra.s.s around, inestimable silence broken only by the placid bleating of sheep, and the long rolling ridges of the Solway hills in front. But in the "winter wind," girt by drifts of snow, no post or apothecary within fifteen miles, it may be dreary enough. Here Carlyle allowed his wife to serve him through six years of household drudgery; an offence for which he was never quite forgiven, and to estimate its magnitude here seems the proper place. He was a model son and brother, and his conjugal fidelity has been much appraised, but he was as unfit, and for some of the same reasons, to make "a happy fireside clime" as was Jonathan Swift; and less even than Byron had he a share of the mutual forbearance which is essential to the closest of all relations.

"Napoleon," says Emerson, "to achieve his ends risked everything and spared nothing, neither ammunition, nor money, nor troops, nor generals, nor himself." With a slight change of phrase the same may be said of Carlyle's devotion to his work. There is no more prevailing refrain in his writing, public and private, than his denunciation of literature as a profession, nor are there wiser words than those in which the veteran warns the young men, whose questions he answers with touching solicitude, against its adoption. "It should be," he declares, "the wine not the food of life, the ardent spirits of thought and fancy without the bread of action parches up nature and makes strong souls like Byron dangerous, the weak despicable." But it was nevertheless the profession of his deliberate choice, and he soon found himself bound to it as Ixion to his wheel. The most thorough worker on record, he found nothing easy that was great, and he would do nothing little. In his determination to pluck out the heart of the mystery, be it of himself, as in _Sartor_; of Germany, as in his Goethes and Richters; the state of England, as in _Chartism_ and _Past and Present;_ of _Cromwell_ or of _Friedrich,_ he faced all obstacles and overthrew them. Dauntless and ruthless, he allowed nothing to divert or to mar his designs, least of all domestic cares or even duties. "Selfish he was,"--I again quote from his biographer,--"if it be selfish to be ready to sacrifice every person dependent on him as completely as he sacrificed himself." What such a man wanted was a housekeeper and a nurse, not a wife, and when we consider that he had chosen for the latter companions.h.i.+p a woman almost as ambitious as himself, whose conversation was only less brilliant than his own, of delicate health and dainty ways, loyal to death, but, according to Mr.

Froude, in some respects "as hard as flint," with "dangerous sparks of fire," whose quick temper found vent in sarcasms that blistered and words like swords, who could declare during the time of the engagement, to which in spite of warnings manifold she clung, "I will not marry to live on less than my natural and artificial wants"; who, ridiculing his accent to his face and before his friends, could write, "apply your talents to gild over the inequality of our births"; and who found herself obliged to live sixteen miles from the nearest neighbour, to milk a cow, scour floors and mend shoes--when we consider all this we are constrained to admit that the 17th October 1826 was a _dies nefastus,_ nor wonder that thirty years later Mrs. Carlyle wrote, "I married for ambition, Carlyle has exceeded all that my wildest hopes ever imagined of him, and I am miserable,"--and to a young friend, "My dear, whatever you do, never marry a man of genius."

Carlyle's own references to the life at Craigenputtock are marked by all his aggravating inconsistency. "How happy we shall be in this Craig o'

Putta," he writes to his wife from Scotsbrig, April 17th 1827; and later to Goethe:--

Here Rousseau would have been as happy as on his island of Saint Pierre. My town friends indeed ascribe my sojourn here to a similar disposition, and forebode me no good results.

But I came here solely with the design to simplify my way of life, and to secure the independence through which I could be enabled to be true to myself. This bit of earth is our own; here we can live, write, and think as best pleases ourselves, even though Zoilus himself were to be crowned the monarch of literature. From some of our heights I can descry, about a day's journey to the west, the hill where Agricola and the Romans left a camp behind them. At the foot of it I was born, and there both father and mother still live to love me.... The only piece of any importance that I have written since I came here is an Essay on Burns.

This Essay,--modified at first, then let alone, by Jeffrey,--appeared in the _Edinburgh_ in the autumn of 1828. We turn to Carlyle's journal and find the entry, "Finished a paper on Burns at this Devil's Den,"

elsewhere referred to as a "gaunt and hungry Siberia." Later still he confesses, when preparing for his final move south, "Of solitude I have really had enough."

Romae Tibur amem ventosus, Tibure Romam.

Carlyle in the moor was always sighing for the town, and in the town for the moor. During the first twenty years of his London life, in what he called "the Devil's oven," he is constantly clamouring to return to the den. His wife, more and more forlorn though ever loyal, consistently disliked it; little wonder, between s.l.u.ttish maid-servants and owl-like solitude: and she expressed her dislike in the pathetic verses, "To a Swallow Building under our Eaves," sent to Jeffrey in 1832, and ending--

G.o.d speed thee, pretty bird; may thy small nest With little ones all in good time be blest; I love thee much For well thou managest that life of thine, While I! Oh, ask not what I do with mine, Would I were such!

_The Desert._

The monotony of the moorland life was relieved by visits of relations and others made and repaid, an excursion to Edinburgh, a residence in London, and the production of work, the best of which has a chance of living with the language. One of the most interesting of the correspondences of this period is a series of letters, addressed to an anonymous Edinburgh friend who seems to have had some idea of abandoning his profession of the Law for Literature, a course against which Carlyle strenuously protests. From these letters, which have only appeared in the columns of the _Glasgow Herald_, we may extract a few sentences:--

Don't disparage the work that gains your bread. What is all work but a drudgery? no labour for the present joyous, but grievous. A man who has nothing to admire except himself is in the minimum state. The question is, Does a man really love Truth, or only the market price of it? Even literary men should have something else to do. Katnes was a lawyer, Roscoe a merchant, Hans Sachs a cobbler, Burns a gauger, etc.

The following singular pa.s.sage, the style of which suggests an imitation of Sterne, is the acme of unconscious self-satire:--

You are infinitely unjust to Blockheads, as they are called.

Ask yourself seriously within your own heart--what right have you to live wisely in G.o.d's world, and they not to live a little less wisely? Is there a man more to be condoled with, nay, I will say to be cherished and tenderly treated, than a man that has no brain? My Purse is empty, it can be filled again; the Jew Rothschild could fill it; or I can even live with it very far from full. But, gracious heavens!

What is to be done with my _empty Head_?

Three of the visits of this period are memorable. Two from the Jeffreys (in 1828 and 1830) leave us with the same uncomfortable impression of kindness ungrudgingly bestowed and grudgingly received. Jeffrey had a double interest in the household at Craigenputtock--an almost brotherly regard for the wife, and a belief, restrained by the range of a keen though limited appreciation, in the powers of the husband, to whom he wrote: "Take care of the fair creature who has entrusted herself so entirely to you," and with a half truth, "You have no mission upon earth, whatever you may fancy, half so important as to be innocently happy." And again: "Bring your blooming Eve out of your blasted Paradise, and seek shelter in the lower world." But Carlyle held to the "banner with a strange device," and was either deaf or indignant. The visits pa.s.sed, with satirical references from both host and hostess; for Mrs. Carlyle, who could herself abundantly scoff and scold, would allow the liberty to no one else. Jeffrey meanwhile was never weary of well-doing. Previous to his promotion as Lord Advocate and consequent transference to London, he tried to negotiate for Carlyle's appointment as his successor in the editors.h.i.+p of the _Review,_ but failed to make him accept the necessary conditions. The paper ent.i.tled _Signs of the Times_ was the last production that he had to revise for his eccentric friend. Those following on Taylor's _German Literature_ and the _Characteristics_ were brought out in 1831 under the auspices of Macvey Napier. The other visit was from the most ill.u.s.trious of Carlyle's English-speaking friends, in many respects a fellow-worker, yet "a spirit of another sort," and destined, though a transcendental mystic, to be the most practical of his benefactors. Twenty-four hours of Ralph Waldo Emerson (often referred to in the course of a long and intimate correspondence) are spoken of by Mrs. Carlyle as a visit from the clouds, brightening the prevailing gray.

He came to the remote inland home with "the pure intellectual gleam" of which Hawthorne speaks, and "the quiet night of clear fine talk" remained one of the memories which led Carlyle afterwards to say, "Perhaps our happiest days were spent at the Craig." Goethe's letters, especially that in which he acknowledges a lock of Mrs. Carlyle's hair, "eine unvergleichliche schwarze Haar locke," were also among the gleams of 1829. The great German died three years later, after receiving the birthday tribute, in his 82nd year, from English friends; and it is pleasant to remember that in this instance the disciple was to the end loyal to his master. To this period belong many other correspondences. "I am scribble scribbling," he says in a letter of 1832, and mere scribbling may fill many pages with few headaches; but Carlyle wrestled as he wrote, and not a page of those marvellous _Miscellanies_ but is red with his life's blood. Under all his reviewing, he was set on a work whose fortunes were to be the strangest, whose result was, in some respects, the widest of his efforts. The plan of _Sartor Resartus_ is far from original. Swift's _Tale of a Tub_ distinctly antic.i.p.ates the Clothes Philosophy; there are besides manifest obligations to Reinecke Fuchs, Jean Paul Richter, and other German authors: but in our days originality is only possible in the handling; Carlyle has made an imaginary German professor the mere mouthpiece of his own higher aspirations and those of the Scotland of his day, and it remains the most popular as surely as his _Friedrich_ is the greatest of his works. The author was abundantly conscious of the value of the book, and super-abundantly angry at the unconsciousness of the literary patrons of the time. In 1831 he resolved if possible to go up to London to push the prospects of this first-born male child. The _res angusta_ stood in the way. Jeffrey, after asking his friend "what situation he could get him that he would detest the least,"

pressed on him "in the coolest, lightest manner the use of his purse."

This Carlyle, to the extent of 50 as a loan (carefully returned), was induced ultimately to accept. It has been said that "proud men never wholly forgive those to whom they feel themselves obliged," but their resenting benefits is the worst feature of their pride. Carlyle made his second visit to London to seek types for _Sartor_, in vain. Always preaching reticence with the sound of artillery, he vents in many pages the rage of his chagrin at the "Arimaspian" publishers, who would not print his book, and the public which, "dosed with froth," would not buy it. The following is little softened by the chiaroscuro of five-and-thirty years:--

Done, I think, at Craigenputtock between January and August 1830, _Teufelsdrockh_ was ready, and I decided to make for London; night before going, how I remember it....

The beggarly history of poor _Sartor_ among the blockheadisms is not worth recording or remembering, least of all here! In short, finding that I had got 100 (if memory serve) for _Schiller_ six or seven years before, and for _Sartor_, at least twice as good, I could not only not get 200, but even get no Murray or the like to publish it on half profits. Murray, a most stupendous object to me, tumbling about eyeless, with the evidently strong wish to say "Yes" and "No,"--my first signal experience of that sad human predicament. I said, We will make it "No," then; wrap up our MS., and carry it about for some two years from one terrified owl to another; published at last experimentally in _Fraser_, and even then mostly laughed at, nothing coming of the volume except what was sent by Emerson from America.

This summary is unfair to Murray, who was inclined, on Jeffrey's recommendation, to accept the book; but on finding that Carlyle had carried the MS. to Longmans and another publisher, in hopes of a better bargain, and that it had been refused, naturally wished to refer the matter to his "reader," and the negotiation closed. _Sartor_ struggled into half life in parts of the Magazine to which the writer had already contributed several of his German essays, and it was even then published with reluctance, and on half pay. The reception of this work, a nondescript, yet among the finest prose poems in our language, seemed to justify bookseller, editor, and readers alike, for the British public in general were of their worst opinion. "It is a heap of clotted nonsense,"

p.r.o.nounced the _Sun_. "Stop that stuff or stop my paper," wrote one of _Fraser's_ const.i.tuents. "When is that stupid series of articles by the crazy tailor going to end?" cried another. At this time Carlyle used to say there were only two people who found anything in his book worth reading--Emerson and a priest in Cork, who said to the editor that he would take the magazine when anything in it appeared by the author of _Sartor_. The volume was only published in 1838, by Saunders and Otley, after the _French Revolution_ had further raised the writer's name, and then on a guarantee from friends willing to take the risk of loss.

It does not appear whether Carlyle refers to this edition or to some slighter reissue of the magazine articles when he writes in the _Reminiscences: "I sent off six copies to six Edinburgh literary friends, from not one of whom did I get the smallest whisper even of receipt--a thing disappointing more or loss to human nature, and which has silently and insensibly led me never since to send any copy of a book to Edinburgh.... The plebs of literature might be divided in their verdicts about me; though by count of heads I always suspect the guilty clear had it; but the conscript fathers declined to vote at all."

[Footnote: _Tempora mutantur_. A few months before Carlyle's death a cheap edition of _Sartor_ was issued, and 30,000 copies were sold within a few weeks.]

In America _Sartor_ was pieced together from _Fraser_, published in a volume introduced by Alexander Everett, extolled by Emerson as "A criticism of the spirit of the age in which we live; exhibiting in the most just and novel light the present aspect of religion, politics, literature, and social life." The editors add: "We believe no book has been published for many years ... which discovers an equal mastery over all the riches of the language. The author makes ample amends for the occasional eccentricity of his genius not only by frequent bursts of pure splendour, but by the wit and sense which never fail him."

Americans are intolerant of honest criticism on themselves; but they are, more than any other nation, open to appreciate vigorous expressions of original views of life and ethics--all that we understand by philosophy--and equally so to new forms of art. The leading critics of the New England have often been the first and best testers of the fresh products of the Old. A land of experiment in all directions, ranging from Mount Lebanon to Oneida Creek, has been ready to welcome the suggestions, physical or metaphysical, of startling enterprise. Ideas which filter slowly through English soil and abide for generations, flash over the electric atmosphere of the West. Hence Coleridge, Carlyle and Browning were already accepted as prophets in Boston, while their own countrymen were still examining their credentials. To this readiness, as of a photographic plate, to receive, must be added the fact that the message of _Sartor_ crossed the Atlantic when the hour to receive it had struck.

To its publication has been attributed the origin of a movement that was almost simultaneously inaugurated by Emerson's _Harvard Discourse_. It was a revolt against the reign of Commerce in practice, Calvinism in theory, and precedent in Art that gave birth to the Transcendentalism of _The Dial_--a Pantheon in which Carlyle had at once a.s.signed to him a place. He meanwhile was busy in London making friends by his conspicuous, almost obtrusive, genius, and sowing the seeds of discord by his equally obtrusive spleen. To his visit of 1831-1832 belongs one of the worst of the elaborate invectives against Lamb which have recoiled on the memory of his critic--to the credit of English sympathies with the most lovable of slightly erring men--with more than the force of a boomorang. A sheaf of sharp sayings of the same date owe their sting to their half truth, _e.g._ to a man who excused himself for profligate journalism on the old plea, "I must live, sir." "No, sir, you need not live, if your body cannot be kept together without selling your soul." Similarly he was abusing the periodicals--"mud," "sand," and "dust magazines"--to which he had contributed, _inter alia_, the great Essay on _Voltaire_ and the consummate sketch of _Novalis_; with the second paper on _Richler_ to the _Foreign Review_, the reviews of _History_ and of _Schiller_ to _Fraser_, and that on _Goethe's Works_ to the _Foreign Quarterly_. During this period he was introduced to Molesworth, Austin, and J.S. Mill. On his summons, October 1st 1832, Mrs. Carlyle came up to Ampton Street, where he then resided, to see him safe through the rest of his London time.

They lamented over the lapse of Irving, now lost in the delirium of tongues, and made a league of friends.h.i.+p with Mill, whom he describes as "a partial disciple of mine," a friends.h.i.+p that stood a hard test, but was broken when the author of _Liberty_ naturally found it impossible to remain a disciple of the writer of _Latter-Day Pamphlets_. Mill, like Napier, was at first staggered by the _Characteristics_, though he afterwards said it was one of Carlyle's greatest works, and was enthusiastic over the review of Boswell's _Johnson_, published in _Fraser_ in the course of this year. Meanwhile Margaret, Carlyle's favourite sister, had died, and his brightest, Jean, "the Craw," had married her cousin, James Aitken. In memory of the former he wrote as a master of threnody: to the bridegroom of the latter he addressed a letter reminding him of the duties of a husband, "to do as he would be done by to his wife"! In 1832 John, again by Jeffrey's aid, obtained a situation at 300 a year as travelling physician to Lady Clare, and was enabled, as he promptly did, to pay back his debts. Alexander seems to have been still struggling with an imperfectly successful farm. In the same year, when Carlyle was in London, his father died at Scotsbrig, after a residence there of six years. His son saw him last in August 1831, when, referring to his Craigenputtock solitude, he said: "Man, it's surely a pity that thou shouldst sit yonder with nothing but the eye of Omniscience to see thee, and thou with such a gift to speak."

The Carlyles returned in March, she to her domestic services, baking bread, preserving eggs, and brightening grates till her eyes grew dim; he to work at his _Diderot_, doing justice to a character more alien to his own than even Voltaire's, reading twenty-five volumes, one per day, to complete the essay; then at _Count Cagliostro_, also for _Fraser_, a link between his last Craigenputtock and his first London toils. The period is marked by shoals of letters, a last present from Weimar, a visit to Edinburgh, and a candidature for a University Chair, which Carlyle thought Jeffrey could have got for him; but the advocate did not, probably could not, in this case satisfy his client. In excusing himself he ventured to lecture the applicant on what he imagined to be the impracticable temper and perverse eccentricity which had r.e.t.a.r.ded and might continue to r.e.t.a.r.d his advancement.

[Footnote: The last was in 1836, for the Chair of Astronomy in Glasgow.]

Carlyle, never tolerant of rebuke however just, was indignant, and though an open quarrel was avoided by letters, on both sides, of courteous compromise, the breach was in reality never healed, and Jeffrey has a niche in the _Reminiscences_ as a "little man who meant well but did not see far or know much." Carlyle went on, however, like Thor, at the _Diamond Necklace,_ which is a proem to the _French Revolution,_ but inly growling, "My own private impression is that I shall never get any promotion in this world." "A prophet is not readily acknowledged in his own country"; "Mein Leben geht sehr ubel: all dim, misty, squally, disheartening at times, almost heartbreaking." This is the prose rather than the male of Byron. Of all men Carlyle could least reek his own rede.

He never even tried to consume his own smoke. His _Sartor_ is indeed more contained, and takes at its summit a higher flight than Rousseau's _Confessions,_ or the _Sorrows of Werther,_ or the first two cantos of _Childe Harold:_ but reading Byron's letters is mingling with a world gay and grave; reading Goethe's walking in the Parthenon, though the Graces in the niches are sometimes unclad; reading Carlyle's is travelling through glimpses of sunny fields and then plunging into coal black tunnels. At last he decided, "Puttock is no longer good for _me_," and his brave wife approving, and even inciting, he resolved to burn his s.h.i.+ps and seek his fortune sink or swim--in the metropolis. Carlyle, for once taking the initiative of practical trouble, went in advance on a house-hunt to London, and by advice of Leigh Hunt fixed on the now famous house in Chelsea near the Thames.

CHAPTER IV

CHEYNE ROW

[1834-1842]

The curtain falls on Craigenputtock, the bleak farm by the bleak hills, and rises on Cheyne Row, a side street off the river Thames, that winds, as slowly as Cowper's Ouse, by the reaches of Barnes and Battersea, dotted with brown-sailed s.h.i.+ps and holiday boats in place of the excursion steamers that now stop at Carlyle Pier; hard by the Carlyle Statue on the new (1874) Embankment, in front the "Carlyle mansions," a stone's-throw from "Carlyle Square." Turning up the row, we find over No.

24, formerly No. 5, the Carlyle medallion in marble, marking the house where the Chelsea prophet, rejected, recognised, and adulated of men, lived over a stretch of forty-seven years. Here were his headquarters, but he was a frequent wanderer. About half the time was occupied in trips almost yearly to Scotland, one to Ireland, one to Belgium, one to France, and two to Germany; besides, in the later days, constant visits to admiring friends, more and more drawn from the higher ranks in English society, the members of which learnt to appreciate his genius before he found a hearing among the ma.s.s of the people.

The whole period falls readily under four sections, marking as many phases of the author's outer and inner life, while the same character is preserved throughout:--

I. 1834-1842--When the death of Mrs. Welsh and the late success of Carlyle's work relieved him from a long, sometimes severe, struggle with narrow means. It is the period of the _French Revolution, The Lectures_, and _Hero-Wors.h.i.+p_, and of _Chartism_, the last work with a vestige of adherence to the Radical creed.

II. 1842-1853--When the death of his mother loosened his ties to the North. This decade of his literary career is mainly signalised by the writing and publication of the _Life and Letters of Cromwell_, of Carlyle's political works, _Past and Present_ and the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, and of the _Life of Sterling_, works which mark his now consummated disbelief in democracy, and his distinct abjuration of adherence, in any ordinary sense, to the "Creed of Christendom."

III. 1853-1866--When the laurels of his triumphant speech as Lord Rector at Edinburgh were suddenly withered by the death of his wife. This period is filled with the _History of Friedrick II._, and marked by a yet more decidedly accentuated trust in autocracy.

IV. 1866-1881.--Fifteen years of the setting of the sun.

The Carlyles, coming to the metropolis in a spirit of rarely realised audacity on a reserve fund of from 200 to 300 at most, could not propose to establish themselves in any centre of fas.h.i.+on. In their circ.u.mstances their choice of abode was on the whole a fortunate one.

Chelsea,

Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite Beyond it,