things.  Nickerson has taken his measures, will reduce the price of his remaining copies; indeed, he informs me the best part of his edition was already sold, and he has even some color of money due from England to Emerson through me!  With pride enough will I transmit this mournful, noble peculium:  and after that, as I perceive, such chivalrous international doings must cease between us. Past and Present, some one told me, was, in spite of all your precautions, straightway sent forth in modest gray, and your benevolent speculation ruined.  Here too, you see, it is the same.  Such chivalries, therefore, are now impossible; for myself I say, “Well, let them cease; thank God they once were, the Memory of that can never cease with us!”

In this last Number of the Dial which by the bye your Bookseller never forwarded to me, I found one little Essay, a criticism on myself,* which, if it should do me mischief, may the gods forgive you for!  It is considerably the most dangerous thing I have read for some years.  A decided likeness of myself recognizable in it, as in the celestial mirror of a friend’s heart; but so enlarged, exaggerated, all transfigured,—­the most delicious, the most dangerous thing!  Well, I suppose I must try to assimilate it also, to turn it also to good, if I be able.  Eulogies, dyslogies, in which one finds no features of one’s own natural face, are easily dealt with; easily left unread, as stuff for lighting fires, such is the insipidity, the wearisome nonentity of pabulum like that:  but here is another sort of matter!  “The beautifulest piece of criticism I have read for many a day,” says every one that speaks of it.  May the gods forgive you!—­I have purchased a copy for three shillings, and sent it to my Mother:  one of the indubitablest benefits I could think of in regard to it.

---------
* A criticism by Emerson of Past and Present, in the Dial
for July, 1843.   It embodies a great part of the extract
from Emerson’s Diary given in a preceding note, and is well
worth reading in full for its appreciation of Carlyle’s powers
and defects.
---------

There have been two friends of yours here in these very days:  Dr. Russell, just returning from Paris; Mr. Parker, just bound thither.* We have seen them rather oftener than common, Sterling being in town withal.  They are the best figures of strangers we have had for a long time; possessions, both of them, to fall in with in this pilgrimage of life.  Russell carries friendliness in his eyes, a most courteous, modest, intelligent man; an English intelligence too, as I read, the best of it lying unspoken, not as a logic but as an instinct.  Parker is a most hardy, compact, clever little fellow, full of decisive utterance, with humor and good humor; whom I like much.  They shine like suns, these two, amid multitudes of watery comets and tenebrific constellations, too sorrowful without such admixture on occasion!