he had left them.  The remaining lectures were given like his conversation, which no one can hear without feeling that, with all its glow and inspiration, every sentence would be, if taken down, found faultless.  It was so in his remarkable extemporaneous address yesterday.  He had no notes whatever.  ‘But,’ says our correspondent, in transmitting the report, ’I have never heard a speech of whose more remarkable qualities so few can be conveyed on paper.  You will read of “applause” and “laughter,” but you will little realize the eloquent blood flaming up the speaker’s cheek, the kindling of his eye, or the inexpressible voice and look when the drolleries were coming out.  When he spoke of clap-trap books exciting astonishment ’in the minds of foolish persons,’ the evident halting at the word ‘fools,’ and the smoothing of his hair, as if he must be decorous, which preceded the change to ‘foolish persons,’ were exceedingly comical.  As for the flaming bursts, they took shape in grand tones, whose impression was made deeper, not by raising, but by lowering the voice.  Your correspondent here declares that he should hold it worth his coming all the way from London in the rain in the Sunday night train were it only to have heard Carlyle say, “There is a nobler ambition than the gaining of all California, or the getting of all the suffrages that are on the planet just now!"’ In the first few minutes of the address there was some hesitation, and much of the shrinking that one might expect in a secluded scholar; but these very soon cleared away, and during the larger part, and to the close of the oration, it was evident that he was receiving a sympathetic influence from his listeners, which he did not fail to return tenfold.  The applause became less frequent; the silence became that of a woven spell; and the recitation of the beautiful lines from Goethe, at the end, was so masterly—­so marvellous—­that one felt in it that Carlyle’s real anathemas against rhetoric were but the expression of his knowledge that there is a rhetoric beyond all other arts.”

In the Times the following leader appeared upon Mr. Carlyle’s address:—­

“There is something in the return of a man to the haunts of his youth, after he has acquired fame and a recognised position in the world, which is of itself sufficient to arrest attention.  We are interested in the retrospect and the contrast, the juxtaposition of the old and the new, the hopes of early years, the memory of the struggles and contests of manhood, the repose of victory.  A man may differ as much as he pleases from the doctrines of Mr. Carlyle, he may reject his historical teachings, and may distrust his politics, but he must be of a very unkindly disposition not to be touched by his reception at Edinburgh.  It is fifty-four years, he told the students of the University, since he, a boy of fourteen, came as a student, ’full of wonder and expectation,’ to the old capital of his native country, and now he returns, having accomplished the days of man spoken of by the Psalmist, that he may be honoured by students of this generation, and may give them a few words of advice on the life which lies before them.