“The opening sentences were lost in the applause.  What need of quoting a speech which by this time has been read by everybody?  Appraise it as you please, it was a thing per se.  Just as, if you wish a purple dye you must fish up the Murex; if you wish ivory you must go to the east; so if you desire an address such as Edinburgh listened to the other day, you must go to Chelsea for it.  It may not be quite to your taste, but, in any case, there is no other intellectual warehouse in which that kind of article is kept in stock.

“The gratitude I owe to him is—­or should be—­equal to that of most.  He has been to me only a voice, sometimes sad, sometimes wrathful, sometimes scornful; and when I saw him for the first time with the eye of flesh stand up amongst us the other day, and heard him speak kindly, brotherly, affectionate words—­his first appearance of that kind, I suppose, since he discoursed of Heroes and Hero Worship to the London people—­I am not ashamed to confess that I felt moved towards him, as I do not think in any possible combination of circumstances I could have felt moved towards any other living man."[A]

[Footnote A:  The Argosy, May, 1866.]

The Edinburgh correspondent to a London paper thus describes what took place:—­

“A vast interest among the intelligent public has been excited by the prospect of Mr. Thomas Carlyle’s appearance to be installed as Lord Rector of the University of Edinburgh.  With the exception of the delivery of his lectures on Heroes and Hero-worship, he has avoided oratory; and to many of his admirers the present occasion seemed likely to afford their only chance of ever seeing him in the flesh, and hearing his living voice.  The result has been, that the University authorities have been beset by applications in number altogether unprecedented—­to nearly all of which they could only give the reluctant answer, that admission for strangers was impossible.  The students who elect Mr. Carlyle received tickets, if they applied within the specified time, and the members of the University council, or graduates, obtained the residue according to priority of application.  Ladies’ tickets to the number of one hundred and fifty were issued, each professor obtaining four, and the remaining thirty being placed at the disposal of Sir David Brewster, the Principal.  And the one hundred and fifty lucky ladies were conspicuous in the front of the gallery to-day, having been admitted before the doors for students and other males were open.

“The hour appointed for letting them in was kept precisely—­it was half-past one P.M., but an hour before it, despite occasional showers of rain, a crowd had begun to gather at the front door of the music-hall, and at the opening of the door it had gathered to proportions sufficient to half fill the building, its capacity under severe crushing being about two thousand.

“When the door was opened, they rushed in as crowds of young men only can and dare rush, and up the double stairs they streamed like a torrent; which torrent, however, policemen and check-gates soon moderated.  I chanced to fall into a lucky current of the crowd, and got in amongst the first two or three hundred, and got forward to the fourth seat from the platform, as good a place for seeing and hearing as any.