“He seems, to me, quite isolated,—­lonely as the desert,—­yet never was a man more fitted to prize a man, could he find one to match his mood.  He finds them, but only in the past.  He sings, rather than talks.  He pours upon you a kind of satirical, heroical, critical poem, with regular cadences, and generally catching up, near the beginning, some singular epithet, which serves as a refrain when his song is full, or with which, as with a knitting needle, he catches up the stitches, if he has chanced, now and then, to let fall a row.

“For the higher kinds of poetry he has no sense, and his talk on that subject is delightfully and gorgeously absurd.  He sometimes stops a minute to laugh at it himself, then begins anew with fresh vigour; for all the spirits he is driving before him seem to him as Fata Morganas, ugly masks, in fact, if he can but make them turn about; but he laughs that they seem to others such dainty Ariels.  His talk, like his books, is full of pictures; his critical strokes masterly.  Allow for his point of view, and his survey is admirable.  He is a large subject.  I cannot speak more or wiselier of him now, nor needs it;—­his works are true, to blame and praise him,—­the Siegfried of England,—­great and powerful, if not quite invulnerable, and of a might rather to destroy evil, than legislate for good."[A]

[Footnote A:  “Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli.” (Boston, 1852.) Vol. iii., pp. 96-104.]

In 1848 Mr. Carlyle contributed a series of articles to the Examiner and Spectator, principally on Irish affairs, which, as he has never yet seen fit to reprint them in his Miscellanies, are apparently quite unknown to the general public.  With the exception of the last, they may be considered as a sort of alarum note, sounded to herald the approach of the Latter-Day Pamphlets, which appeared shortly afterwards.

The following is a list of these newspaper articles:—­

In The Examiner, 1848.

  March 4.  “Louis Philippe.” 
  April 29.  “Repeal of the Union.” 
  May 13.  “Legislation for Ireland.”

In The Spectator, 1848.

  May 13.  “Ireland and the British Chief Governor.”
     " “Irish Regiments (of the New Era).”

In The Examiner, 1848.

  Dec. 2.  “Death of Charles Buller.”

The last-named paper, a tribute to the memory of his old pupil, we shall give entire.  Another man of genius,[A] now also gone to his rest, sang sorrowfully on the same occasion: 

[Footnote A:  W.M.  Thackeray.]

  “Who knows the inscrutable design? 
    Blest be He who took and gave! 
  Why should your mother, Charles, not mine,
    Be weeping at her darling’s grave?

  We bow to Heaven that will’d it so,
    That darkly rules the fate of all,
  That sends the respite or the blow,
    That’s free to give, or to recall.”