“Well, I call this an excellent good book, by far the best of the autobiographic kind I remember to have read in the English language; and indeed, except it be Boswell’s of Johnson, I do not know where we have such a picture drawn of a human life, as in these three volumes.

“A pious, ingenious, altogether human and worthy book; imaging, with graceful honesty and free felicity, many interesting objects and persons on your life-path, and imaging throughout, what is best of all, a gifted, gentle, patient, and valiant human soul, as it buffets its way through the billows of the time, and will not drown though often in danger; cannot be drowned, but conquers and leaves a track of radiance behind it:  that, I think, conies out more clearly to me than in any other of your books;—­and that, I can venture to assure you, is the best of all results to realise in a book or written record.  In fact, this book has been like an exercise of devotion to me; I have not assisted at any sermon, liturgy or litany, this long while, that has had so religious an effect on me.  Thanks in the name of all men.  And believe, along with me, that this book will be welcome to other generations as well as to ours.  And long may you live to write more books for us; and may the evening sun be softer on you (and on me) than the noon sometimes was!

“Adieu, dear Hunt (you must let me use this familiarity, for I am an old fellow too now, as well as you).  I have often thought of coming up to see you once more; and perhaps I shall, one of these days (though horribly sick and lonely, and beset with spectral lions, go whitherward I may):  but whether I do or not believe for ever in my regard.  And so, God bless you,

  “Prays heartily,

  “T.  CARLYLE.”

On the other hand Leigh Hunt had an enthusiastic reverence for Carlyle.  There are several incidental allusions to the latter, of more or less consequence, in Hunt’s Autobiography, but the following is the most interesting:—­

“Carlyle’s Paramount Humanity.—­I believe that what Mr. Carlyle loves better than his fault-finding, with all its eloquence, is the face of any human creature that looks suffering, and loving, and sincere; and I believe further, that if the fellow-creature were suffering only, and neither loving nor sincere, but had come to a pass of agony in this life which put him at the mercies of some good man for some last help and consolation towards his grave, even at the risk of loss to repute, and a sure amount of pain and vexation, that man, if the groan reached him in its forlornness, would be Thomas Carlyle."[A]

[Footnote A:  “Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, with Reminiscences of friends and Contemporaries.” (Lond. 1850.)]

It was in “Leigh Hunt’s Journal,”—­a short-lived Weekly Miscellany (1850—­1851)—­that Carlyle’s sketch, entitled “Two Hundred and Fifty Years Ago,"[A] first appeared.

[Footnote A:  “Two Hundred and Fifty Years Ago.  From a waste paper bag of T. Carlyle.”  Reprinted in Carlyle’s Miscellanies, Ed. 1857.]