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* Carlyle’s article on Dr. Francia in the Foreign Quarterly
Review, No. 62.   Reprinted in his Miscellanies.
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I wrote you in April or May an account of the new state of things which the cheap press has wrought in our book market, and specially what difficulties it put in the way of our edition of Past and Present. For a few weeks I believed that the letters I had written to the principal New York and Philadelphia booksellers, and the Preface, had succeeded in repelling the pirates.  But in the fourth or fifth week appeared a mean edition in New York, published by one Collyer (an unknown person and supposed to be a mask of some other bookseller), sold for twelve and one half cents, and of this wretched copy several thousands were sold, whilst our seventy-five cents edition went off slower.  There was no remedy, and we must be content that there was no expense from our edition, which before September had paid all its cost, and since that time has been earning a little, I believe.  I am not fairly entitled to an account of the book from the publishers until the 1st of January....  I have never yet done what I have thought this other last week seriously to do, namely, to charge the good and faithful E.P.  Clark, a man of accounts as he is a cashier in a bank, with the total auditing and analyzing of these accounts of yours.  My hesitation has grown from the imperfect materials which I have to offer him to make up so long a story.  But he is a good man, and, do you know it? a Carlylese of that intensity that I have often heard he has collected a sort of album of several volumes, containing illustrations of every kind, historical, critical, &c., to the Sartor. I must go to Boston and challenge him.  Once when I asked him, he seemed willing to assume it.  No more of accounts tonight.

I send you by this ship a volume of translations from Dante, by Doctor Parsons of Boston, a practising dentist and the son of a dentist.  It is his gift to you.  Lately went Henry James to you with a letter from me.  He is a fine companion from his intelligence, valor, and worth, and is and has been a very beneficent person as I learn.  He carried a volume of poems from my friend and nearest neighbor, W. Ellery Channing, whereof give me, I pray you, the best opinion you can.  I am determined he shall be a poet, and you must find him such.* I have too many things to tell you to begin at the end of this sheet, which after all this waiting I have been compelled to scribble in a corner, with company waiting for me.  Send me instant word of yourself if you love me, and of those whom you love, and so God keep you and yours.

—­R.  Waldo Emerson

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* In the second number of the Dial, in October, 1840, Emerson
had published, under the title of “New Poetry,” an article warmly
commending Mr. Channing’s then unpublished poems.
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LXXXVI.  Carlyle to Emerson