man the most plastic little fellow in the planet, and he liked Nero’s death, Qualis artifex pereo! better than most history.  He worships a man that will manifest any truth to him.  At one time he had inquired and read a good deal about America.  Landor’s principle was mere rebellion, and that, he feared, was the American principle.  The best thing he knew of that country was, that in it a man can have meat for his labor.  He had read in Stewart’s book, that when he inquired in a New York hotel for the Boots, he had been shown across the street, and had found Mungo in his own house dining on roast turkey.

“We talked of books.  Plato he does not read, and he disparaged Socrates; and, when pressed, persisted in making Mirabeau a hero.  Gibbon he called the splendid bridge from the old world to the new.  His own reading had been multifarious.  Tristram Shandy was one of his first books after Robinson Crusoe and Robertson’s America, an early favorite.  Rousseau’s Confessions had discovered to him that he was not a dunce; and it was now ten years since he had learned German, by the advice of a man who told him he would find in that language what he wanted.

“He took despairing or satirical views of literature at this moment; recounted the incredible sums paid in one year by the great booksellers for puffing.  Hence it comes that no newspaper is trusted now, no books are bought, and the booksellers are on the eve of bankruptcy.

“He still returned to English pauperism, the crowded country, the selfish abdication by public men of all that public persons should perform.  ’Government should direct poor men what to do.  Poor Irish folk come wandering over these moors; my dame makes it a rule to give to every son of Adam bread to eat, and supplies his wants to the next house.  But here are thousands of acres which might give them all meat, and nobody to bid these poor Irish go to the moor and till it.  They burned the stacks, and so found a way to force the rich people to attend to them.’

“We went out to walk over long hills, and looked at Criffel, then without his cap, and down into Wordsworth’s country.  There we sat down and talked of the immortality of the soul.  It was not Carlyle’s fault that we talked on that topic, for he has the natural disinclination of every nimble spirit to bruise itself against walls, and did not like to place himself where no step can be taken.  But he was honest and true, and cognizant of the subtile links that bind ages together, and saw how every event affects all the future.  ’Christ died on the tree that built Dunscore kirk yonder:  that brought you and me together.  Time has only a relative existence.’

“He was already turning his eyes towards London with a scholar’s appreciation.  London is the heart of the world, he said, wonderful only from the mass of human beings.  He liked the huge machine.  Each keeps its own round.  The baker’s boy brings muffins to the window at a fixed hour every day, and that is all the Londoner knows or wishes to know on the subject.  But it turned out good men.  He named certain individuals, especially one man of letters, his friend, the best mind he knew, whom London had well served.”