Essays on Literature 9780520974463

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Essays on Literature

The Norman and Charlotte Strouse Edition of the Writings of

Thomas Carlyle

Essays on Literature

Introduction and Notes by

Fleming McClelland, Brent E. Kinser, and Chris R. Vanden Bossche Text Established by

Chris R. Vanden Bossche

University of California Press

University of California Press Oakland, California © 2020 by The Regents of the University of California Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress. isbn 978-0-520-33984-2 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-97446-3 (ebook) Manufactured in the United States of America 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1



T HE H E R O A S DI V I N I T Y

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CONTENTS List of Illustrations

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Chronology of Carlyle’s Life

xi

Preface ix

Introduction xiii Note on the Text

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Illustrations xlv Essays on Literature Miss Baillie’s Metrical Legends. 3 Burns. 29 Voltaire. 75 Biography. 131 Boswell’s Life of Johnson. 145 Corn-Law Rhymes. 199 Diderot. 223 Sir Walter Scott. 277 Heintze’s Translation of Burns. 329 Preface to Emerson’s Essays. 335

Notes 341 Works Cited

Textual Apparatus Emendations of the Copy-Text Discussion of Editorial Decisions Line-End Hyphens in the Copy-Text Line-End Hyphens in the Present Text Alterations in the Manuscripts Historical Collation

621 633 635 671 679 683 685 687

Index 813

ILLUSTRATIONS Following page xlv 1. Carlyle's corrections to “Burns.” 2. Alexander Nasmyth. “Robert Burns” (1787). 3. Alexander Nasmyth. “Robert Burns” (1828). 4. Friedrich August Moritz Retzsch. “Faust Makes over His Soul to Mephistopheles.” 5. Thomas Lawrence. ”James Boswell.”

PREFACE Although Thomas Carlyle was acclaimed throughout the nineteenth century in both England and the United States as the “undoubted head of English letters,” reliable editions of his work, providing both an accurate text based on modern bibliographical principles and full explanatory annotation, have not been readily available. The standard edition, the Centenary, originally published 1896–1899, is unsatisfactory: it is without annotation and textually inaccurate (see On Heroes c–ci). This injustice, both to Carlyle and his readers, the editors of the Strouse Carlyle Edition seek to redress. To establish an accurate text the editors have devised an integrated system for the computer-assisted production of the edition. The application of electronic technology in every stage of the editorial process, from the collation of the texts through the final typesetting, allows a high level of accuracy, while leaving all decisions requiring editorial judgment in the control of scholars. The text is preceded by a discussion of the evidence and editorial principles used to establish it, and a full textual apparatus is appended, including a list of all emendations of the copy-text and a complete collation of authoritative versions, keyed to the present text by page and line number. To facilitate reading, we present Carlyle’s work as clear text, without added editorial or reference symbols. The introduction is intended to elaborate the significance of the work for Carlyle’s era and to suggest its importance for our own, as well as explaining its origin and biographical context. By providing a full critical and explanatory annotation, the editors hope to assist the contemporary reader in negotiating Carlyle’s densely referential prose. A tissue of quotation from varied and disparate sources intertwined with the historic events of Victorian life, Carlyle’s art weaves together multifarious references and allusions, which we have sought, wherever possible, to identify, gloss, and translate. The editors hope that the explanatory annotation, like the critical text, will be a starting point for the work of reading and interpretation, a foundation on which readers of the present and future may build the often-changing structures of cultural analysis. We have resisted the temptation to impose our own readings, offering instead the essential materials for interpretation, hoping thereby to approximate Carlyle’s own ideal book, in which the reader is “excited .  .  . to self-activity.” In planning this selected edition of Carlyle’s works, the editorial committee decided that it would be useful to scholars and students to follow the precedent established in other editions of Victorian prose writers and organize Carlyle’s essays by subject. Unlike books composed and published ix

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as single works, the Critical and Miscellaneous Essays was a constantly changing and expanding collection of essays, poems, and translations, roughly, but not entirely, chronological in arrangement. The arrangement adopted for this edition will enable the scholar to study Carlyle’s essays on literature in one volume. The impetus for this edition came in large part from the resources of the Norman and Charlotte Strouse Collection of Thomas Carlyle, housed in Special Collections, University Library, at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In recognition of their inestimable service to Carlyle studies, the edition is dedicated to Norman and Charlotte Strouse. This work would not have been possible without the assistance of many people and institutions. Their contributions can only imperfectly be acknowledged by a brief mention here. Funding for the present volume was provided by several research grants from the University of Notre Dame. We would like to thank in particular the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts of the College of Arts and Letters, without whose support we would not have been been able to complete this project. We have received the help of many libraries, including the National Art Library of the Victorian and Albert Museum, the National Library of Scotland, Carlyle’s House, the Beinecke Library, Yale University, the British Library, and the London Library. Colleagues on several continents have provided assistance in tracking down Carlylean references and texts. We would like to thank in particular Ian Campbell, whose knowledge of Carlyle is truly encyclopedic. All of those mentioned here have made this volume better than it would have been without their help; none are responsible for any errors that may remain in it. Chris R. Vanden Bossche Brent E. Kinser Fleming McClelland

CHRONOLOGY 1795

Carlyle born on December 4 in Ecclefechan, Scotland.

1817

Writes articles, letters to newspapers, and occasional poems on scientific and philosophic subjects.

1822

Publishes his first literary review, of Joanna Baillie’s Metrical Legends, in the New Edinburgh Review. With his brother John’s help, he translates Legendre’s Elements of Geometry.

1823

Translates Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1824) and expands an article on Schiller into The Life of Schiller (1825).

1825

Translates various German authors.

1826

Begins an autobiographical bildungsroman, the unfinished Wotton Reinfred.

1827

German Romance published in four volumes.

1828

Publishes “Burns” in the Edinburgh Review and articles on German literature both there and in the Foreign Review.

1829

Publishes “Voltaire” in the Foreign Review.

1830 Begins Sartor Resartus. 1832

Publishes “Biography” and “Boswell’s Life of Johnson” in Fraser's Magazine and “Corn-Law Rhymes” in the Edinburgh Review.

1833

Sartor Resartus is published serially in Fraser’s Magazine from November 1833 to August 1834. “Diderot” appears in the Foreign Quarterly Review.

1834

In September, Carlyle begins to write The French Revolution.

1836

Sartor Resartus first published in book form, in Boston.

1837

Gives seven public lectures on German literature beginning in May. The French Revolution is published.

1838

Publishes “Sir Walter Scott” in the London and Westminster Review. Course of twelve lectures on European literature. Sartor Resartus is published in book form in London. With Emerson’s help, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays is published, in Boston.

1839

Six lectures on the revolutions of modern Europe. Chartism published. xi

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1840

Delivers six lectures on heroes. Publishes short notice of a translation of Burns by Heinrich Heintze. Considers writing a biography of Cromwell.

1841

On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History published. Arranges publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays and writes a preface for it.

1843

Past and Present published.

1845

Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches published.

1849

Publishes newspaper articles about political and cultural conditions in Britain as well as “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.”

1850 Publishes Latter-Day Pamphlets. 1851

Life of John Sterling published. Begins to consider Frederick the Great as a subject for a biography.

1856

Completes the writing of the first two volumes of Frederick the Great.

1857–58 Collected Works (the Uniform Edition) published in sixteen volumes. 1858

First two volumes of Frederick the Great published.

1863

Volume 3 of Frederick the Great is published.

1864

Volume 4 of Frederick the Great is published.

1865 Completes Frederick the Great; volumes 5 and 6 are published. 1866

On April 2, Carlyle delivers his “Inaugural Address” in Edinburgh.

1867

In August, he publishes an attack on the Reform Bill of 1867, “Shooting Niagara: And After?”

1869

A second edition of the Collected Works (the Library Edition, thirty volumes) begins publication.

1881

On February 5, Carlyle dies at Cheyne Row. He is buried on February 10 next to his parents in the churchyard at Ecclefechan.

INTRODUCTION Carlyle and the Literary Review Although the works included in this volume were collected as “essays,” they began their lives under the more modest guise of the literary review. The difference might be defined in terms of the role of the writer. Essayists present their own ideas, whereas reviewers recapitulate and critique the ideas of others. This distinction was familiar to Carlyle and his contemporaries. According to Joanne Shattock, “The difference between an essay and a review was never articulated by reviewers and editors, but it is clear from correspondence that most reviewers considered themselves to be writing either one or the other” (110). Nonetheless, as Carlyle’s essays reveal, while many reviewers aimed primarily to convey the basic qualities and ideas of the work under review, they could, and often did, use the occasion of commenting on someone else’s writing as an opportunity for developing their own ideas. The review often metamorphosed into the essay. Literary reviews first appeared in England in the early eighteenth century, with the number of periodicals publishing reviews increasing rapidly after midcentury. The standard for the latter half of the century was set by the Monthly Review, which began publication in 1748. Other reviews (the most widely circulated of which was the Critical Review) soon appeared, but they all followed more or less the same model. They aimed to be comprehensive, reviewing all publications of substance, which meant that they included many short reviews and a smaller number of more in-depth reviews. The Monthly is also credited with introducing evaluation along with the abstracts and summaries typical of the earliest reviews. The aim of these periodicals was to present the current state of knowledge (Roper 20), and thus, while reviews assessed the quality of books, they primarily sought to convey to the reader what the book said. While the Monthly and its imitators survived well into the nineteenth century, they were supplanted as the leading reviews by the Edinburgh Review, which first appeared in 1802, and the Quarterly Review, introduced in 1809. As Derek Roper has pointed out, the goal of reviewing all new publications had by the end of the eighteenth century become unsustainable because of the rapid increase in their number (28). Francis Jeffrey therefore determined from the beginning that the Edinburgh Review would be selective in what it reviewed and thereby freed authors not only to review in depth but also to write something more like

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an essay.1 These reviews continued to cover a wide range of topics—indeed, commentary on literature and literary authors represented a small percentage of all reviews—but they did not confine themselves to conveying the substance and providing evaluation of the works reviewed. Nor did they attempt to be neutral; on the contrary, in keeping with their sponsorship—the Whigs for the Edinburgh and the Tories for the Quarterly—they sought to provide a point of view and to present an argument. Most significantly, they attempted to provide a broad context for understanding the work under review. Thomas Babington Macaulay’s famous essay on Milton is a case in point. While putatively reviewing Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana, Macaulay used its discovery as an occasion, as he put it, “to say something of his moral and intellectual qualities” and so to “commemorate . . . the genius and virtues of John Milton” (306). That said, reviews continued to rely heavily on description, in the service of which they often printed extensive extracts of the work reviewed. For example, Jeffrey’s review of Carlyle’s translation of Wilhelm Meister begins with ten pages of general commentary and then provides a thirty-page summary consisting primarily of extracts, before proceeding to a brief conclusion. Carlyle’s reviews mirror this historical shift. As we might expect, his early reviews adhere to the norms of the day. His first review, of Joanna Baillie’s Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters (1821), is largely descriptive, with extensive summary and quoted extracts. However, it is also, in keeping with the recent trend, evaluative. Carlyle begins with a series of criticisms of what he takes to be the shortcomings of Baillie’s dramas. He also emphasizes biographical and historical contexts, privileges content over form, and showcases his own formidable learning and taste in the increasingly rich allusiveness that he would continue to develop as a hallmark of his style. Nonetheless, the focus remains firmly on Baillie’s text, and Carlyle does not stray into a general discussion of drama. When he became a reviewer of German literature, this pattern continued. If anything, summary and quotation became more prominent, no doubt because he was introducing material unfamiliar to readers for whom his translations of extracts often provided the first exposure of these works to an English-speaking audience. By the end of the 1820s, however, Carlyle was eager to become an author in his own right and sought to emulate reviewers like Macaulay. A key moment was Carlyle’s 1828 pronouncement that he would only “pretend reviewing” John Gibson Lockhart’s Life of Robert Burns and would instead produce his own 1

This paragraph is indebted to Roper chapter 1 and Shattock chapter 1.

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essay on the qualities of Burns’s poetry (Letters 4:383). The review itself bears out his intentions, commencing as it does with Carlyle’s views on the nature of poetry and how Burns, and by comparison Byron, fail or succeed in meeting the standards implied by these pronouncements. The opportunity in 1832 to review a new edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson led Carlyle to speculations on biography so distinctive that James Fraser published them as a separate essay, introductory to Carlyle’s review of Boswell. The contrast between Carlyle’s and Macaulay’s reviews is instructive. For Macaulay, the imperative lesson, as in many of his writings, is to demonstrate the Whig myth of progress in contrast to the backwardness and provinciality of Toryism in all its guises, including that of Johnson, one of its most famous and stalwart defenders. Carlyle, on the other hand, argues that Johnson’s greatness transcends his Toryism, that Johnson is great in spite of his Tory affiliation, however limiting such an affiliation might be. Another sign of Carlyle’s growing independence was that he began proposing his own topics. He had sought a commission from the Edinburgh Review to review Boswell’s Life, and, when this offer was declined (in preference to Macaulay), he obtained one from Fraser’s Magazine. In proposing a review of the relatively obscure “Corn-Law Poet” (Ebenezer Elliott) later that year, he sought an opportunity to make his own intervention in the contemporary debates over passage of the Reform Bill. Similarly, his essay on Diderot can be classed with his “Count Cagliostro” and “The Diamond Necklace” as occasions to sketch out views of the French Revolution that he would expand on in his history of that event, which he began writing a year and a half later. Ultimately, Carlyle’s desire to express his own views brought his career as a literary reviewer to an end. His last two substantial reviews, “Sir Walter Scott” and “Varnhagen Von Ense’s Memoirs,” appeared in 1838. While he wrote a few essays during the lean years before his books began producing income, by the end of the 1830s proceeds from The French Revolution and new editions of Sartor Resartus and the Critical and Miscellaneous Essays improved his financial position considerably, relieving him of the necessity of writing periodical articles. The last two items in this volume, his review of Heintze’s translation of Burns’s poems and his preface to Emerson’s Essays, both brief pieces, were, as discussed below, written as favors to the authors and probably did not result in any income for Carlyle. His infrequent contributions to periodical publications would henceforth deal with subjects associated with the longer historical works or with topics of contemporary social or political import. Now established as a major literary figure, he had realized his ambition of trading his role as reviewer for that of author reviewed.

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Carlyle’s critical principles, to which he adheres consistently throughout his writings on literature, are for the most part in keeping with nineteenth-century aesthetics. In accord with Romantic views of literature, he regards the artist as an inspired visionary who has the capacity to comprehend the deepest aspects of human existence. At the same time, he fears that artists may become too focused on themselves as prophetic seers or on aesthetic objects themselves. Accordingly, he is among those who first set forth the Victorian principle that art should serve a higher moral purpose. For Carlyle the true artist has the capacity to reveal the divine within the natural world. The authors he admires gaze into the infinite, interpret it, and give it voice in human language. As he writes in “Burns”: “Man’s life and nature is, as it was, and as it will ever be. But the poet must have an eye to read these things, and a heart to understand them; or they come and pass away before him in vain. He is a vates, a seer; a gift of vision has been given him. Has life no meanings for him, which another cannot equally decipher; then he is no poet, and Delphi itself will not make him one” (below 39). He thus describes Samuel Johnson as an author who “can . . . hold real communion with the Highest” (181), and he insists that Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn-Law Rhymer, “is an earnest, truth-speaking man; no theorizer, sentimentalizer, but a practical man of work and endeavour” (206). While he contends that Scott has serious limitations as an artist, he praises him for being “a genuine man, which itself is a great matter. No affectation, fantasticality or distortion, dwelt in him; no shadow of cant” (288). By contrast, Diderot’s failure is that his writings manifest “no Seer, but only possibilities of a Seer, transient irradiations of a Seer looking through the organs of a Philosophe” with the consequence that his “habitual world . . . is a half-world, distorted into looking like a whole; it is properly a poor, fractional, insignificant world; partial, inaccurate, perverted from end to end” (261-62, 261). Equally important for Carlyle is that the artist’s insight reveal to us not only the nature of our universe but also how we ought to act in it. He disdains literature that aims merely to entertain and, while he does not espouse overt didacticism, insists that art must be morally serious. Voltaire cannot be called a great man, he argues, because of “his inborn levity of nature, his entire want of Earnestness” (86). Although Scott is genuine and eschews cant, he nonetheless fails to meet this standard of earnestness: “If Literature had no task but that of harmlessly amusing indolent, languid men, here was the very perfection of Literature; that a man, here more emphatically than ever elsewhere, might fling himself back, exclaiming, ‘Be mine to lie on this sofa, and read everlasting Novels of Walter Scott!’” (317). “Literature,” Carlyle concludes, “has other aims than

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that of harmlessly amusing indolent, languid men: or if Literature have them not, then Literature is a very poor affair” (318). By contrast, he writes apropos of Johnson: “Such knowledge of the transcendental, immeasurable character of Duty, we call the basis of all Gospels, the essence of all Religion: he who with his whole soul knows not this, as yet knows nothing, as yet is properly nothing” (180). It is no coincidence that Carlyle here compares the writings of the true seer with the most profound religious teaching. Here he unites Romantic claims for the author as visionary seer with Victorian demands for moral high seriousness in order to cast the poet as heroic shaper of a society and its beliefs. the writing, publishing, and reception of the essays on literature The success and prestige of the Edinburgh Review, and then of the Quarterly, meant that up-and-coming authors wanted to be reviewed and to review there. As Shattock points out, “Almost from its inception the Edinburgh became the Review for which most reviewers wished to write and in which authors wished to be reviewed” (8). Although reviews were published anonymously, they could still bring one fame. The leading reviewers were well known, and readers often knew or guessed their identity (Shattock 15-18). Moreover, these reviewers could earn a decent income. Because the quarterlies published longer, and fewer, reviews than the Monthly and its imitators, they paid better. Jeffrey established the minimum rate of sixteen guineas a sheet, with some authors getting up to twenty-five, and he allotted them two or three sheets, meaning that an author could earn up to seventy-five guineas per review. Not surprisingly, then, the young Carlyle, seeking to establish a career in literature, aimed to write for the Edinburgh Review. Since at least the mid1810s he had been following the Edinburgh and the Quarterly, usually, like his contemporaries, reading them from cover to cover (Letters 1:23-24 and 46-47n11). Like others, he recognized the emergence of Macaulay as a leading reviewer, and in his notebooks we can see him implicitly measuring himself against his rival when he insists that, in spite of his obvious talent, Macaulay has no “divine idea,” the latter being the essential quality of the literary man in the formulation of Johann Gottlieb Fichte that became Carlyle’s own measuring stick (Two Note Books 236; see 276-77). In the winter of 1819-1820, he wrote a review in the hopes of publishing it in the Edinburgh and left it at Jeffrey’s home, but, to his extreme disappointment, never heard back from him.2 2 Reminiscences 316; see Letters 1:216. For a detailed discussion of this episode, see Campbell.

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Unable to obtain a commission from the Edinburgh, Carlyle began his career writing encyclopedia articles, translations, and biography.3 Not long after the failure of his attempt to publish in the Edinburgh, he received an introduction to write for the New Edinburgh Review, which in July 1821 had been converted from a monthly to a quarterly and which, as the notice published at that time indicates, sought to compete with the major quarterlies in breadth and quality. This invitation resulted in his first two reviews, the aforementioned “Miss Baillie’s Metrical Legends,” in October 1821, and “Goethe’s Faust,” in April 1822, but did not immediately lead to further opportunities for reviewing. During the five years that followed, he returned to the translations and kindred literary work that slowly established his reputation as a man of letters and eventually led to the long-sought opportunity to contribute to the Edinburgh Review. One of these, his translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, was noticed by Jeffrey in the October 1825 Edinburgh Review. Carlyle was “gratified” by this review no doubt not only because being reviewed there was itself a benefit but also because it meant that his work had at last come to the attention of its powerful editor (Letters 3:400). Carlyle’s real career as a writer of reviews began when, two years later, in 1827, he finally received the opportunity to write for the Edinburgh Review. His work for the Edinburgh bookended the principal period of his career as a literary reviewer, from 1827 to 1832. This work in turn established his credentials as a literary authority and led to commissions from a number of other reviews. His first two essays in the Edinburgh were soon followed by the first of eight reviews in the Foreign Review, which was eventually absorbed into the Foreign Quarterly Review, where three additional reviews appeared. During this period, he also published in the Westminster Review and (after it merged with the London Review) its successor, the London and Westminster Review. In 1830, prospects for publication in the Edinburgh having become uncertain and the Foreign Review having gone broke, he began writing for Fraser’s Magazine, which would be his most financially rewarding venue, publishing nine of his essays as well as a number of miscellaneous poems and fictions, including Sartor Resartus. In what follows, we discuss in more detail the history of the publication of the essays included in this volume. Early in his career, Carlyle’s friend Robert Mitchell put him in contact with 3 These included articles on several literary figures, including Montaigne, Montesquieu, and Lady Montagu. They are not included in this edition precisely because of the limited scope of this genre of writing. They have been reprinted in Essays, vol. 5.

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Baillie John Waugh (Letters 1:147n1; see 153), who was launching the Edinburgh Monthly Review. The initial introduction, in late 1818, came to naught, and it was not until March 1821, when Waugh was relaunching his journal as the New Edinburgh Review, that he offered Carlyle a commission for his review of Joanna Baillie’s Legends: “Waugh (the Review-man) sent me a book the other day, with a wish and an assurance that I ‘would write a very elegant and spirited critique on it’—which I am not so certain of as the magistrate pretends to be, but shall attempt notwithstanding” (Letters 1:342; see also 331-32). Although he was busy with his Life of Schiller (1825), translations, and articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, Carlyle seems to have been eager to undertake the review, perhaps because it gave him greater freedom to express his own views, but perhaps also because he had heard that Waugh paid well. As it turned out, Carlyle was somewhat disappointed when he received only “fifteen pounds, where there should have been five-and-twenty” (Letters 2:80). Given that it was Carlyle’s first attempt at writing a review, it is perhaps not surprising that the editor, Richard Poole, wanted to discuss changes with him. Carlyle conjectured that Poole thought it was too long, and when he received the proofs in late September, the novice reviewer acknowledged that the more experienced editor “has done some good by retrenching and less evil than I expected: he has only made two pieces of sheer nonsense in the whole paper” (Letters 1:385-96). The review appeared in the October number. In 1827, Bryan Waller Procter (Barry Cornwall) provided him with an introduction to Francis Jeffrey at the Edinburgh Review, who, as discussed above, had reviewed his translation of Wilhelm Meister two years earlier. Because Carlyle’s translations and biography of Schiller had established him as a leading exponent of contemporary German literature, Jeffrey commissioned him to write a review of Heinrich Doering’s biography of Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (Letters 4:185 and n. 9). His next five reviews were also concerned with German literature, and with them, as he later wrote, he felt “launched upon” a career in “Literature” (Reminiscences 318). While his expertise in German literature provided him with many review commissions, he was eager to survey a broader range of literature. In October 1827, he conjectured that his next article for the Edinburgh would be on Tasso (Letters 4:263, 270). This project came to nothing, but in June 1828, Jeffrey commissioned him to write a review of John Gibson Lockhart’s Life of Robert Burns. By this time he had promised two articles for the Foreign Review (“Goethe” and “The Life of Heyne”) and so did not begin “Burns” until August. On August 25, he reported that he was “very busy, and third part done, with a ‘fair full and free’

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Essay on Burns,” which he finished in September (Letters 4:399, 407). Now brimming with self-confidence and no longer the acquiescent novice who reviewed Joanna Baillie six years earlier, he insisted privately that he would only “pretend reviewing” Lockhart’s biography, as he intended to use his essay as a means of delineating his own views on Burns (Letters 4:383). Not surprisingly, then, he found himself for the first time in direct conflict with an editor, commenting, when he received the proofs in early October: Jeffrey had clipt the first portion of it all into shreds (partly by my permission), simple [sic] because it was too long. My first feeling was of indignation, and to demand the whole back again, that it might lie in my drawer and worm-eat, rather than come before the world in that horrid souterkin shape. . . . However, I determined to do nothing for three days; and now by replacing and readjusting many parts of the first sixteen pages . . . I have once more put the thing into a kind of publishable state; and mean to send it back, with a private persuasion that probably I shall not soon write another for that quarter. Nevertheless, I will keep friends with the man; for he really has extraordinary worth, and likes me, at least heartily wishes me well. (Letters 4:413-14) Although Carlyle suggests that Jeffrey made cuts merely to shorten the essay, another reference to the conflict suggests that, like others to follow, he also wanted Carlyle to tone down the “Mysticism” that often baffled his readers (Letters 5:6). That the episode still rankled two years later is apparent from his warning to Macvey Napier, Jeffrey’s successor: “Your Predecessor had some difficulty with me in adjusting the respective prerogatives of Author and Editor: for tho’ not, as I hope, insensible to fair reason, I used sometimes to rebel against what I reckoned mere authority; and this partly perhaps as a matter of literary conscience; being wont to write nothing without studying it if possible to the bottom, and writing always with an almost painful feeling of scrupulosity, that light Editorial hacking and hewing to right and left was in general nowise to my mind” (Letters 5:195-96). Ten years later he was still complaining about the “Editorial blotches” that were “common in Jeffrey’s time in the Edinr Review” (Letters 10:229). Nonetheless, Carlyle managed to maintain cordial relations with Jeffrey, with whom he and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, became fairly close (Letters

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4:424). His move away from the Edinburgh Review was prompted in large part because Jeffrey gave up the editorship in the middle of 1829, and Carlyle felt uncertain how the new editor, Macvey Napier, would receive his work. At first it seemed that Napier was eager to retain Carlyle as one of his reviewers, writing in November of 1830 that he would welcome articles from Carlyle. Carlyle soon thereafter resumed his contributions to the Review, but, as it turned out, he would contribute only three more essays, all published in 1831-1832 (Letters 5:196). In the meantime, Carlyle had developed a good relationship with William Fraser and the Foreign Review. Having already made the valuable introduction to Jeffrey, Proctor also introduced Carlyle to Fraser, and in 1828 Carlyle began contributing essays to the Foreign Review at an even faster pace than for the Edinburgh (Letters 4:290). Most of these were reviews of German literature, but in November 1828 he reported plans to write on the memoirs of Voltaire, which had been published in 1826 (Letters 4:422). He was working on this review by early March and seems to have finished by the end of the month (Letters 5:9, 15-16) for it appeared in the April number. In the spring or summer 1831, he became eager to review John Wilson Croker’s new edition of James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (see Letters 5:245). He proposed reviewing it for the Edinburgh, but Napier had already promised it to the much better established Macaulay (Letters 5:310n1, 311), so Carlyle approached James Fraser, in whose Fraser’s Magazine he had begun publishing in early 1830 (Letters 5:419). At this time, the Foreign Review was failing, and William Fraser (no relation to James) suggested that two essays that had been scheduled for publication there be transferred to Fraser’s Magazine. Because Fraser’s was just getting off the ground, resulting in delays and difficulties, Carlyle approached James Fraser with some diffidence, all the more because he felt that “Fraser’s Magazine gives the most scurvy remuneration of any Periodical extant, and shall have no more stuff of mine at that rate, barring worse fortune than I have yet seen” (Letters 5:215). However, when that December Carlyle inquired about delays in publishing “Schiller,” Fraser conciliated him by commissioning a review of Boswell and promising fifteen guineas a sheet, a sum close to the standard payment at Jeffrey’s Edinburgh Review (Letters 6:72, 79, 92). In early January 1832 Carlyle was still reading the Life (Letters 6:85), but by January 21 he had begun writing an introductory piece that would eventually be published separately as “Biography” (Two Note Books 245-46). He originally hoped to have both parts done by mid-February (Letters 6:96) but did not finish until about March 8 (Letters 6:130; Two Note Books 252). When he wrote on March 5 to settle the terms for the articles, he insisted that Fraser take it as is or allow him to offer it

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to another editor (Letters 6:124, 125, 137-38). In the end, there was some confusion about the rate of pay—Carlyle regarded Fraser’s promise of fifteen guineas a sheet as equivalent to the one pound per page of the Foreign Review—and they had to negotiate the difference (Letters 6:137-38 and n. 1). They finally came to terms on March 17, two days after Carlyle submitted the manuscript (Two Note Books 252, 255). From the beginning he was uncertain whether his review would suit Fraser, whose Magazine he compared to a “dog’s-meat cart” (Letters 6:85; see Two Note Books 255). Perhaps for this reason, Carlyle sought to try a new “more currente calamo [extempore] style of writing” that he thought “more suitable” for “magazines and the like” (Two Note Books 230; see 246). After the review appeared, he somewhat diffidently reported that he had heard from “the Fraser’s Magazine people” that his “Paper on Johnson [was] reckoned by some (unhappily very simple persons) to be ‘singularly excellent,’” and he was clearly pleased with the response of John Stuart Mill, whose “approval,” he reported, “gratified” him “more than a Stoic philosopher should be willing to confess” (Letters 6:169, 174). At the end of that year (December 23, 1831), Carlyle recorded that he had been reading the poems of Ebenezer Elliott, a self-taught iron worker and manufacturer, who became known as the “Corn Law Rhymer” after his most famous volume, Corn Law Rhymes (1831), which had been receiving some attention in the literary reviews (Two Note Books 230).4 He soon began thinking about a review of the Rhymer (Two Note Books 233), and on February 6, 1832, wrote to Napier: I write at present mainly to ask you about some Poetical Pieces, entitled Corn-Law Rhymes, the Village Patriarch, &c; and whether a short notice of them would be acceptable for your next Number. The Author appears to be a middle-aged Mechanic, at least Poor Man, of Sheffield or the neighbourhood; a Radical, yet not without devoutness; passionate, affectionate, thoroughly in earnest. His Rhymes have more of sincerity, and genuine natural fire than anything that has come in my way of late years: both on himself and his writings, and their 4 It is likely that Carlyle encountered Elliott’s writings in the New Monthly Magazine. Soon after he became editor of the Magazine, in November 1831, Edward Bulwer-Lytton indicated his desire to have contributions from Carlyle, and it is possible that he suggested Elliott as a topic. In any case, Carlyle began reading the Magazine soon thereafter (Letters 6:71; see 85) and likely would have seen Bulwer Lytton’s notice on Elliott’s poetry in the January 1831 issue (31:289-95). Carlyle could also have seen the review of Elliott published in the June 11, 1831 issue of the Athenaeum (189:369-71).

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social and moral purport, there were several things to be said. I would also willingly do the unknown man a kindness, or rather a piece of justice; for he is, what so few are, a man and no Clotheshorse.—— If you approve of this little project, perhaps Mr Rees can favour me with a loan of the Volumes; there are three, I think, and very thin ones: at all events, have the goodness to let me hear from you. (Letters 6:116) Napier quickly accepted Carlyle’s proposal, stipulating only that an article on “so obscure a Rhymer” should not be too long (Letters 6:130n5). Carlyle failed to meet the mid-March deadline for the April issue, then Goethe died, on March 22, and his “Death of Goethe” took priority (Letters 6:144, 145-46). As it turned out, he did not finish until “about the 4th of May” and did not manage to submit the manuscript until the end of that month (Two Note Books 267; Letters 6:161, 166). In the message accompanying the proofs, Napier apparently asked for some cuts to fit the article into the current number. While insisting that he could “find no passage in this Article which could be cut out without great loss of blood,” Carlyle did suggest cuts in the extracts of Elliott’s poetry (Letters 6:176). When, in July, the article appeared intact, he exclaimed, “There is Life in Macvey!” (Letters 6:213; see 216). He earned about £25 for the essay.5 Carlyle seems to have been pleased to appear in the guise of a “radical,” writing to Mill: “I am astonished to find on reading the thing over that it is ‘speculative-radical’ to an almost frightful degree; and glances, in a poisonous manner, at Whiggism itself ” (Letters 6:154). Carlyle probably refers not to working-class radicalism but to the philosophic radicalism of James and John Stuart Mill and their mentor Jeremy Bentham. While Carlyle would never fully align himself with the Benthamite radicals and in his later writings would repeatedly attack the principle of laissez-faire that was gospel for them, in his opposition to the Corn Laws—which contravened the principle of free trade—he was de facto joining with them. In addition to joining the radicals in support of repeal, he may also have felt, as a passage in the essay suggests (see 204.32-33 and note), that he was joining the radicals in their disappointment at the government’s failure to pass the Reform Bill, which had twice been rejected by the House of Lords earlier in 1831. A third version was passed in December while he was thinking about writing this review, and it did not receive final approval until On August 17, 1832, he wrote that Napier owed him sixty pounds for “Characteristics” and “Corn-Law Rhymes,” “some of it for nine or ten months” (Letters 6:247). The estimate of the payment is based on the proportion of pages in each article. 5

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May 1832, just as he was completing it. Even so, John Ramsey MacCulloch, who wrote on economic topics and had in 1826 published an essay in the Edinburgh arguing for repeal of the Corn Laws, was mystified as to why Napier had published “Corn-Law Rhymes” and suggested he cease publishing Carlyle’s reviews (Shattock 39-40). It was, in fact, Carlyle’s final contribution to the Edinburgh. In January 1832, around the time that Carlyle was beginning his essay on Elliott, John George Cochrane, for whose Foreign Quarterly Review he was writing an essay on Goethe’s collected works, asked him to “do something on Diderot,” more particularly to review Diderot’s works together with his memoirs, the latter having appeared in Paris the previous year (Letters 6:85-86). In July 1830, Cochrane had invited Carlyle to write for the Foreign Quarterly, which about this time absorbed its rival, the failing Foreign Review, but he did not make use of this invitation until a year later, when he contributed a portion of his abandoned history of German literature (Letters 5:122-23). In March he did some research on Diderot at the British Museum (Two Note Books 253) but seemed in no hurry to begin the essay, for he had first to read—“at the rate of one a-day”—some two dozen volumes of the philosophe’s works (Letters 6: 213; see 195, 206). He began this “tedious” project sometime in August, but by August 31, he had finished only eight volumes—if he was indeed reading one a day he must have begun about August 23—and expected to be working on the project until the end of September (Letters 6:216). The writing, together with the reading, took even longer, for he did not finish the manuscript until mid-October and did not send it to Cochrane until mid-November (Letters 6:240, 247, 258; see 243n2, 271). On January 24, Cochrane wrote to Carlyle asking him to “leave out [his] introductory reflections altogether” as they did not pertain directly to Diderot and so reduce the essay by about seven pages to forty-eight or forty-nine pages. For once Carlyle did not protest, tersely remarking to his brother only that he meant to “comply” (Letters 6:322 and n. 33). These changes likely account for the fact that publication was delayed from the March to the April number. He was paid about fifty pounds, calculated at the rate of £1 per page for the fifty pages (6:137-38). While reviewing had been for several years his primary means of financial support, Carlyle increasingly sought to explore other forms of literary publication. Not only was a reviewer more or less subordinate to the author reviewed, but Carlyle also shared with many of his contemporaries the conviction that periodical reviewing was inferior to, and less serious than, the kinds of writing reviewed. For Carlyle, there was the additional problem that income from re-

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views was unpredictable. A Macaulay could count on appearing in nearly every issue of the Edinburgh, but this was never the case for Carlyle. For a brief period in the late 1820s, Jeffrey regularly employed him for the Edinburgh and William Fraser for the Foreign Review, but they did not provide steady employment. The unreliability of his income from reviewing became clear when Jeffrey resigned his editorship in 1829 and the Foreign Review went broke in 1832. While James Fraser of Fraser’s Magazine stepped in to replace Jeffrey and William Fraser (even taking articles written for the defunct Foreign Review), Carlyle clearly considered it a step down from the Edinburgh, not only because it was less prestigious but, just as important, because it did not pay as well. In mid-1834, about a year after the appearance of “Diderot,” Carlyle became occupied with writing The French Revolution, and his major articles during the next several years were on related historical topics. Still in need of income after the appearance of his history in 1837, he briefly returned to writing for periodicals. In 1834, while preparing to launch the London Review as a vehicle for the philosophic radicals, John Stuart Mill had indicated to Carlyle that he would welcome contributions from him, and Carlyle seems to have been eager to provide them (Letters 7:70-71 and n. 6). He followed with interest the attempts to get the review off the ground, and early in 1835 as the first issue was being prepared, he thought he might have the opportunity to become its editor, especially as Mill’s employment at India House prevented him from officially occupying that post (Letters 8:51). Although Mill admired Carlyle, however, he and the others involved in launching the review were too committed to Benthamite principles to countenance Carlyle as editor, and so this prospect came to naught. Not surprisingly, given its perspective, Carlyle judged the articles in the first issue of Mill’s new periodical “barren . . . as Saha[ra],” and he thereafter insisted on its aridity (Letters 8:104). Yet he remained interested in it not only, as he sometimes suggested, because it offered him the opportunity for much-needed income, but also because it approached contemporary issues with a seriousness missing in many of its competitors. In early 1835, after the first four issues had been published, the London Review merged with the older Westminster Review (in which Carlyle had published “The Nibelungen Lied” [1831]) to form the London and Westminster Review. The establishment of this new venue, together with the fact that his father, James, had died, prompted Mill to make the review more expansive than its predecessor, and he again encouraged Carlyle to contribute, with the result that two of his essays on the French Revolution era appeared there (Letters 8:307; see “Westminster Review,”

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Wellesley Index). In June, the editors asked him to review Hannah More, but other obligations prevented him from doing so (Letters 8:124n1, 150). In September 1837, Mill invited Carlyle to review John Gibson Lockhart’s Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (Letters 9:311). In early October, Carlyle received six of the seven volumes, which he finished reading by the end of the month (Letters 9:327, 337, 350). Before writing the review, however, Carlyle decided to try to negotiate terms that would give him the steady income he had long desired (a steady income from his books was still a couple of years in the future). In a letter to Mill that anticipates his discussion of “permanence” of employment in Past and Present (4.5.171-76), he wrote: Doubtless I have often told you how the Editorial world found it convenient to deal with me some five or six years ago. Today, work, work in breathless superfluity; tomorrow, whistled down the wind, left to go and die if you like, you know not for what! It is one of the damnablest positions a man can find himself in. After some reflexion, I have resolved not to get into it again. I think I either ought to make some engagement of some permanence, we will say for a year; or not to intermeddle with the Periodical concern farther at all. The thing I want to ask you therefore is, contrasting honestly in your mind my capabilities with the wants of your Enterprise, What is the utmost amount of employment (I mean money-amount, at so much per page, or otherwise reckoned on what principle you liked) your Review could afford me, say from this December 1837 till the same date of 1838? That is the first of all questions. If (which is very likely) you can promise nothing, this Article only, and the rest on peradventure,—then my decision must be also, at least till there come something pressing me for utterance thro’ this vehicle more than another, nothing. . . . If, on the other hand, you answer Something; and your maximum of wages will meet my minimum of necessities, then I will joyfully say Done, and set myself forthwith to perform, to see on what terms performance may be possible, may be useful and pleasant for all of us. (Letters 9:337-38; see 342-43) Mill met with Carlyle and explained that the finances of the Review made it impossible to offer such a long-term contract but that he would be happy

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to accept an article every other issue. Carlyle agreed to write the Scott review and possibly others (including one on Davy Crockett!), but as it turned out, he made only one further contribution (“Varnhagen von Ense’s Memoirs”) (Letters 9:364; see 350 and n. 1). Once he committed himself to the essay on Scott, he set to work almost immediately, finishing it on December 6 (Letters 9:350-51, 357; see 364). He expected to be paid about fifty pounds (£1 per page [Letters 9:354]) but received only forty-five (Letters 10:23n4, 41). He recorded in his journal that “people seem to speak well of ” the article, an especially satisfying result considering the audience of the review (Letters 10:23n4; see 41). From that time forward, Carlyle only produced periodical articles under special circumstances, either in order to help out an editor (in which case he sometimes offered something he already had to hand) or because he had a special desire to write about a topic. Such an occasion arose when, in September 1840, Heinrich Heintze sent Carlyle a copy of his new German translation of Burns’s poetry. While Carlyle did not know Heintze, his admiration for Burns and, presumably, his appreciation of Heintze’s translation, prompted him to write to John Forster, editor of the Examiner, asking whether he knew “any good reader of German that would review it” (Letters 12:261; see 257). We do not have Forster’s reply, but the upshot was that Carlyle himself wrote the brief review, which appeared in the September 27 issue of the Examiner. If Carlyle was willing to help out a German translator he did not even know, he was more than happy to provide an introductory appreciation for the English edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s first volume of essays. He had known Emerson since the American had sought him out during his 1833 visit to Great Britain. In the following years, Emerson acted more or less as Carlyle’s literary agent in America. The first edition of the Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1838-1839), in which seven of the ten essays in this volume were first collected in book form, was published in Boston under Emerson’s direction, as was the first book edition of Sartor Resartus, in 1836. When, in 1841, Emerson published his first book, Essays: First Series, Carlyle reciprocated by arranging with his own publisher, James Fraser, for the publication of the first English edition (Letters 13:163). On May 8, Carlyle wrote to Emerson that he had been reading his book “all yesterday” and praising him as the “voice of one crying [in] the desart” (Letters 13:128). He made no mention of seeking to get the book published, but he must have set to work soon thereafter, for on June 21 he was working on his preface, and four days later he wrote to Emerson about the arrangements he had made (Letters 13:159, 163). With this preface, Carlyle had published his last commentary on a literary text. In a writing career that would extend into the 1870s, he would now devote himself to history and social commentary

NOTE ON THE TEXT The texts of Carlyle’s essays in this volume that were incorporated into the various editions of the Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (often referred to as the Miscellanies) reflect the form into which Carlyle revised them for their first appearance in successive editions of that collection. Having the editorial process more fully under his control gave Carlyle the opportunity to restore passages excised by intrusive editors, to reintroduce his own preferred spelling and punctuation, and to correct factual errors. Thus while the present edition incorporates corrections, a few minor changes of wording, and some second thoughts introduced in later editions, it retains the freshness of the essays as they first appeared in print. The same holds true for the essays in this volume that were never incorporated into the Miscellanies, in which case our edition reflects the form in which they originally appeared. The texts of the essays in this volume are critical texts. The copy-text is the earliest published version in a serial publication, with the exception of “Heintze’s Translation of Burns,” for which the manuscript serves as copy-text. For the present edition, the copy-texts were collated with all lifetime editions in which Carlyle is known to have participated, and the apparatus at the end of this volume accounts for all variants, including punctuation and typographical errors, in the collated versions of the texts. Thus any historically and textually relevant edition of any essay can be reconstructed from the present volume. In order to maximize readability, this edition presents the text without editorial symbols or indications of variations; the tables of variants and emendations are instead keyed to the page and line of the text. As we have discussed in the Note on the Text for the Historical Essays, collation confirms that each new edition of the Critical and Miscellaneous Essays was typeset from a copy of the most recent previous edition. The result is that variations introduced in each new edition were for the most part repeated in succeeding editions. Some of these variations can be attributed to Carlyle, but many must have been made by compositors, intentionally or unintentionally, and others by individuals Carlyle employed to prepare copy for new editions. In addition to making errors in typesetting, compositors may have introduced changes to accommodate a house style or their own views of typesetting. A further complication is that assistants were involved in the preparation of at least three editions of the Miscellanies: the 1838 Boston edition, the 1857 Uniform Edition, and the 1869 Library Edition. These assistants almost certainly regularized punctuation and spelling and made other changes they thought xxix

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appropriate. The imposition of house style is an especially important issue, for Carlyle’s essays appeared in a number of different journals over a time span encompassing more than four decades. The house styles imposed on the essays therefore varied not only from publisher to publisher but from decade to decade. House style was much more important in reviews and newspapers than in books, for it gave unity to an entire publication. It was thus imposed not only by printers in matters of punctuation and orthography but also by editors, who felt empowered to alter material in order to improve texts or make them consistent with the review’s general style and political views. Such editorial intervention led Carlyle to complain that his early essays were marred by “Editorial blotches” such as the “notes of admiration, dashes, ‘we thinks’ &c &c” that were “common in Jeffrey’s time in the Edinr Review” (Letters 10:229). “Burns” appeared in this period and, as we have discussed in the introduction, Carlyle came into conflict with Jeffrey over it (“Corn-Law Rhymes” appeared in the Edinburgh Review after Francis Jeffrey stepped down as editor). Similarly, William Maginn, the editor of Fraser’s Magazine, in which “Biography,” “Boswell’s Life of Johnson,” and “Death of Edward Irving” first appeared, is known to have made changes to material published there (Thrall 185). The historical collation demonstrates that Carlyle carefully prepared copy whenever an essay was to be included in the Critical and Miscellaneous Essays for the first time, which suggests that he was not satisfied with them because of his lack of control over their publication in the reviews. Yet here too the intervention of typesetters can also be assumed, for in the nineteenth century typesetters considered it their responsibility to mend minor matters of punctuation and spelling. Because of this practice, we cannot safely assign to Carlyle changes that involve a shift to more regular rule-bound punctuation unless there is other evidence of his involvement. We have, however, sought to determine Carlyle’s preference by consulting his manuscripts and letters and the results of the various collations, especially noting variations among different compositors, printing houses, and publishers. In establishing the text for this critical edition, we have adopted only those changes that were most likely made or ordered by Carlyle. In most cases, there are no manuscripts or proof sheets that would enable us to distinguish what Carlyle wrote from those aspects of the texts that editors and compositors imposed. As previous analyses of the essays, as well as of On Heroes, Sartor Resartus, and Past and Present, have demonstrated that Carlyle could concern himself with even the most minor details of punctuation, we have accepted

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certain types of changes as Carlyle’s, but whenever there is no clear reason to conclude that a change is his, we have not adopted it. For a further discussion of our emendations, see the Discussion of Editorial Decisions. Carlyle did not prepare copy or read proof for the 1838 Miscellanies, but he did authorize the edition and send a list of corrections to the editors. Therefore, we have adopted some of its changes of wording, all of which correct likely misprints in the first publication. The 1838 Miscellanies also employed a uniform system for quotation marks that accords for the most part with Carlyle’s practice of using double quotation marks for quoted speech and single quotation marks for citations, titles, and so on. This meant that it reversed double to single and single to double quotation marks for essays that appeared in publications that used the opposite system; in the present volume, this applies to “Biography” and “Boswell’s Life of Johnson,” published in Fraser’s Magazine; “Diderot,” published in the Foreign Quarterly Review; and “Memoirs of the Life of Scott,” published in the London and Westminster Review (see headnote to the Historical Collation for our handling of this form of variant). Apart from obvious corrections, we have rejected changes of punctuation, capitalization, and spelling in the 1838 Miscellanies. Carlyle did carefully prepare copy and read proof for the 1840 Miscellanies, and in later editions of the Miscellanies he followed the same pattern in that he carefully prepared copy of the essays that he had published since the previous edition. We have therefore given special consideration to changes that appear in these editions. For the moment, we can let the 1840 edition stand for all cases. From the large number of variants and the evidence that Carlyle carefully revised the 1840 edition, it is highly likely that, in addition to changes of wording, many of the changes of capitalization, spelling, and punctuation are his. Nonetheless, it does not seem likely that he looked at each item of punctuation with an eye to whether it followed his own desires or preferences. For example, he sometimes restored his preferred spellings, but the fact that in some instances he did not do so does not necessarily indicate his acceptance of an alternative spelling; it seems more likely that he either missed the particular instance or acquiesced in the compositor’s preference, especially when restoring his preferred spelling in a particular instance might lead to inconsistent spelling throughout the text. Therefore, when there is no compelling reason to believe that a change is Carlyle’s, we retain the copy-text reading, but if the change conforms to Carlyle’s known preferences or is of a type that is more likely to have been made by the author than by the compositor, we have adopted it when it occurs in an essay appearing in the Miscellanies for the first time. Conversely, modernizing spellings,

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regularizations of punctuation, and most cases of lowercasing are not adopted. Changes in later editions of the essays are much less likely to be authorial. There is little evidence that Carlyle prepared copy or read proof for these editions, except for material that was appearing in them for the first time. Thus, apart from some changes of wording that are convincingly authorial (often in the final paragraphs) and a few corrections, changes in the 1847 edition and after are not adopted for the essays that appeared in the 1838 Miscellanies. While there is some evidence that Carlyle prepared copy for the Library Edition (1869), the changes do not necessarily indicate his direct involvement. Therefore, while we adopt some corrections, mostly of the spelling of foreign words, we do not adopt other changes. For further details concerning the principles underlying the adoption or nonadoption of variant readings, the reader is directed to the Discussion of Editorial Decisions. Because each of the essays has its own history, we will first discuss the textual history of individual essays and then the history of the Miscellanies. “Miss Baillie’s Metrical Legends” “Miss Baillie’s Metrical Legends” first appeared in the New Edinburgh Review 1, no. 2 (October 1821): 393-414, which was printed by Balfour and Clarke. Carlyle completed and submitted the manuscript about April 3 (Letters 1:352) but did not receive proof until October (Letters 1:385). This review was never reprinted in Carlyle’s lifetime. “Burns” “Burns” first appeared in the Edinburgh Review 48, no. 96 (December 1828): 267-312, which was printed by Ballantyne and Company. Carlyle completed the manuscript in late August or the first part of September and received proofs in late September or early October (Letters 4:399, 413). As discussed in the introduction, Carlyle was unhappy with the cuts Francis Jeffrey made to shorten the essay, but by the time he finished correcting the proofs, he was satisfied that he had “readjusted” it (Letters 4:413-14). The essay was printed by late November (Letters 4:424). It was subsequently incorporated into all lifetime editions of the Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1838, 1840, 1847, 1857, 1869, 1872). In 1854, Chapman and Hall, which had become the publisher of his works, published “Burns” as a pamphlet. The historical collation indicates that it was set from a copy of the 1847 edition of the Miscellanies but was not used as copy-text for later editions. The 1854 edition introduced fifty-five variants, nearly

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all of them minor changes of spelling or punctuation. There are five changes of wording, four of which are likely compositor errors, as they involve the omission of a word or, in one case, two words. Only one change looks as if it could be authorial. “Dr Currie and Mr Walker, the principal of these writers, have both, we think, mistaken one essentially important thing” becomes in 1854 “Dr Currie and Mr Walker, the principal of these writers, have both, as was not so unnatural at that point of time, mistaken one essentially important thing.” This change clearly seeks to take into account the passage of time since the first publication of the essay. Yet Carlyle did not order the change in subsequent editions of the essay, so it is not clear whether he, or someone assisting him, was responsible for this insertion. “Voltaire” “Voltaire” first appeared in the Foreign Review 3, no. 6 (April 1829): 41975, which was printed by William Clowes. Carlyle completed the manuscript sometime in March or April (Letters 5:9; Two Note Books 140). He may not have read proof, for on March 31 he complained that the proofs had not come; of course, they may have arrived later (Letters 5:15-16). This article was subsequently incorporated into all lifetime editions of the Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1838, 1840, 1847, 1857, 1869, 1872). “Biography” “Biography” first appeared in Fraser’s Magazine 5, no. 27 (April 1832): 25360, which was printed by J. Moyes. Carlyle completed the manuscript of what would become both “Biography” and “Boswell’s Life of Johnson” in early March and submitted them on March 15 (Two Note Books 252). We do not know whether he read proof, but it is likely that either he or his brother John did so. A year earlier, his brother read proof for “Schiller,” and Carlyle authorized him to read proof for other essays in Fraser’s (Letters 5:233n2); however, a year later Carlyle himself revised the proof for “Count Cagliostro” (Letters 6:395). This article was subsequently incorporated into all lifetime editions of the Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1839, 1840, 1847, 1857, 1869, 1872). “Boswell’s Life of Johnson” “Boswell’s Life of Johnson” first appeared in Fraser’s Magazine 5, no. 28 (May 1832): 379-413, which was printed by J. Moyes. Carlyle completed the

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manuscript in early March and submitted it March 15 (see “Biography,” above). It is likely that either he or his brother John read proof (see the preceding discussion of “Biography”). This article was subsequently incorporated into all lifetime editions of the Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1838, 1840, 1847, 1857, 1869, 1872). “Corn-Law Rhymes” “Corn-Law Rhymes” first appeared in the Edinburgh Review 55, no. 110 ( July 1832): 338-61, which was printed by Ballantyne and Company. Carlyle completed the manuscript about May 4 (Letters 6:146-47; Two Note Books 267) but did not submit it until May 28 (Letters 6:166-67). When he sent the proofs to Carlyle, Napier requested that, owing to space constraints, he make some cuts. Carlyle returned the corrected proof on June 22, and in the accompanying letter gave instructions about where Napier might make cuts. However, the passages that Carlyle designated appeared in the published review, so Napier must have decided no cuts were necessary (Letters 6:176, 213, 216). Although Carlyle requested separate copies, it is not clear whether he ever received them, as we have not been able to locate any exemplars (Letters 6:208). This article was subsequently incorporated into all lifetime editions of the Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1838, 1840, 1847, 1857, 1869, 1872). “Diderot” “Diderot” first appeared in the Foreign Quarterly Review 11, no. 22 (April 1833): 261-315, which was printed by C. Roworth and Sons. Carlyle finished the manuscript on October 15, 1832, but did not submit it until November 19 (Letters 6:237, 247n7, 258). The editor, John George Cochrane, requested cuts to the seven pages of “introductory reflections,” and Carlyle replied that he was willing to make them (Letters 6:322n33). Carlyle had expected to correct proofs in December, but because of a delay in publication did not do so until early March 1833 (Letters 6:271, 349). He had “separate cop[ies]” printed (Letters 4:405), but no known copies have survived. This article was subsequently incorporated into all lifetime editions of the Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1838, 1840, 1847, 1857, 1869, 1872). “Memoirs of the Life of Scott” “Memoirs of the Life of Scott” first appeared in the London and Westmin-

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ster Review 32, no. 1 ( January 1838): 293-345, which was printed by Charles Reynell. Carlyle completed the manuscript on December 6 (Letters 9:357) and submitted it to John Robertson (the nominal editor) on December 7 (Letters 9:363). Although it is likely that he did so (see Letters 9:375), we have no explicit evidence that he read proof. In an apparent reference to the published article, Carlyle remarked that it had arrived in a “very rude condition” (Letters 10:16); thus, when he sent it to the Boston editors of the Miscellanies he gave directions for some corrections. The historical collation indicates that the American editors or compositors were very liberal in making these “corrections.” For more details, see the discussion of the 1838 Miscellanies below. This article was subsequently incorporated into all lifetime editions of the Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1838, 1840, 1847, 1857, 1869, 1872). “Heintze’s Translation of Burns” “Heintze’s Translation of Burns” first appeared in the Examiner no. 1704 (September 27, 1840): 612-13, which was printed by Charles Reynell. Carlyle completed the manuscript sometime between September 17 and 26. He seems to have read proof about September 23 (Letters 12:265). The manuscript (Victoria and Albert Forster F.48.E.18 item 176 cat. no. 85) survives and serves as copy-text. The compositor has freely added punctuation, in accord with the contemporary practice by which printers did not limit themselves to merely reproducing the manuscript. We have assumed that Carlyle expected the compositor to expand abbreviated words, including “thro,’” and that, like other nineteenth-century authors, in matters of punctuation he treated the compositor more or less as a copy editor. We have therefore adopted most of these changes of punctuation, except in cases that run contrary to Carlyle’s normal practice, especially as Carlyle seems to have read proof. The essay was never republished during Carlyle’s lifetime. “Preface to Emerson’s Essays” Carlyle’s preface debuted in the first English edition of Emerson’s Essays (London: James Fraser, 1841), which was printed by Charles Robson of Robson, Levey, and Franklyn. Although he wrote it in late June, the preface is dated August 11, 1841 (Letters 13:163). The book appeared either in September or October.1 1 It is on the list of new publications in the October number of the Edinburgh Review (74: 259) and the subject of a review in the October Monthly Review (3: 274-79).

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Carlyle read proof for the volume and this presumably included the preface, though it should be noted that he entrusted Robson with correcting a portion of the book (Letters 13:218, 163). The sheets of this edition were taken over first by G. W. Nickisson and then by Chapman and Hall, who published a new edition in 1847. We have not been able to locate a copy of the 1847 printing (none is listed in the OCLC catalog). A reprinting (whether a separate edition or just a new printing we cannot determine) appeared in 1853. The historical collation indicates that Carlyle almost certainly did not participate in the preparation of the 1853 edition, and if, as was the custom, it was set from the 1847 edition, he did not participate in that edition either. There are no changes of wording, and all of the changes of punctuation and capitalization (many uppercase words became lowercase) can be attributed to the publisher or compositor. We have made one emendation, a correction of spelling from tarif to tariff (337.5), a word that Carlyle always spells conventionally. the 1833 volume of carlyle’s essays In 1833 Carlyle assembled a collection of the essays he had published up to that date and had them bound as a gift for Jane Carlyle. The volume, which is in the Beinecke Library, Yale University, contains most but not all of the essays published by November 1833, the date he inscribed along with Jane Carlyle’s name on the flyleaf.2 To create the volume Carlyle used pages taken from copies of the reviews in which the essays originally appeared. The essays in this volume are represented by “Burns,” “Voltaire,” “Biography,” “Boswell’s Life of Johnson,” and “Diderot.” While Carlyle may have intentionally excluded “Miss Baillie’s Metrical Legends,” it may have been the case that he simply did not possess copies of his New Edinburgh contributions. Some of the essays in the 1833 collection have extensive corrections in Carlyle’s hand, but there are only a small number in the essays included in the present volume. There are six changes in “Burns” and three in “Diderot.” There are no changes in “Biography” or “Voltaire.” The one change in “Boswell’s Life of Johnson”—the correction of “openly” to “opened” (154.11) is an anomaly, as the incorrect “openly” does not appear in our exemplar of the first publication. This may be one of the separate copies Carlyle requested, but these were generally set from and identical to the periodical publication. The evidence of these essays suggests that Carlyle may 2 Beinecke C198 C2. Portions of the volume have been digitized and are available through the Beinecke digital collections.

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have consulted this volume when preparing his list of corrections for the 1838 edition and when preparing copy for 1840. Two of the corrections to “Burns” appear in 1838, and neither is of a type that the Boston editors would have made independently (30.9, 68.12). One change (55.9) appears also in 1840, and another was further changed in that edition (39.25). Two changes never appeared in any edition of the Miscellanies; we have adopted one of them in the present edition (51.36; for the other, see 30.21). As all three changes in “Diderot” appear in 1838, it is highly likely they were on the list of corrections Carlyle provided to the editors (245.8 and two at 265.21). Critical and Miscellaneous Essays The works collected in Carlyle’s Critical and Miscellaneous Essays were truly miscellaneous. This may be because there were no standards for republication of reviews as essays. Carlyle was among the first to have his articles collected. Albany Fonblanque’s Examiner articles appeared the same year. Macaulay, more famous at the time as a reviewer, resisted publication until pirated American editions led him to acquiesce in requests for an authorized edition, but not until 1840 (see Shattock 108). The Boston editors compiled the contents based on a list supplied by Carlyle, which in turn probably reflects the contents of the 1833 volume. The contents, arranged, with some exceptions, in order of publication, changed throughout his lifetime, new material was added to each edition, and on some occasions material was shifted to other parts of the collected works. The Centenary Edition, long considered the standard edition of Carlyle’s works, incorporated in the Miscellanies works that were never included during Carlyle’s lifetime and partially broke with the practice of chronological arrangement. Because the arrangement of the essays in the Miscellanies was never authoritatively established, this edition organizes the essays by subject matter but retains the chronological arrangement within each volume. the 1838 edition In late 1837, the year The French Revolution established Carlyle as a major writer, two Americans decided it was time to publish an edition of his essays. Ellis Loring sought permission to prepare a collected edition, and Ralph Waldo Emerson planned a selected edition (Letters 10:5, 9; Emerson and Carlyle 178). Neither man initially knew of the other’s plans, and much confusion ensued in the early months of 1838 as their letters to and from Carlyle kept crossing each in other in the mail. In the end, they agreed on a single course of action.

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They would follow Loring’s plan of publishing a collected edition, but Emerson would take charge of the project (Letters 10:50; Emerson and Carlyle 179, 183). The list of essays and errata that Carlyle had sent to Loring were turned over to two of Emerson’s associates, Charles Stearns Wheeler and Henry Swasy McKean, who prepared the texts for the printer (Metcalf, Torry, and Ballou) and corrected proof (Emerson and Carlyle 186, 191; Emerson 2:124). The first two volumes were published by James Munroe and Company in July 1838, and Emerson informed Carlyle that he stood to make $1,000 from them.3 There was to be an interval before publication of the third and fourth volumes, but Carlyle decided not to furnish corrected copy, in part because he did not have copies of the essays readily available and in part, he wrote, because the newer articles were “of themselves a little more correct” and so there was “nothing but misprints to deal with” (Letters 10:229). Printing began near the end of 1838 but was not completed until summer 1839. More copies were printed this time, but otherwise the history of volumes 3 and 4 is the same as that of the first two volumes.4 With the minor exceptions mentioned above, Carlyle did not participate in the production of these volumes. The editors used copies of the articles obtained from American sources.5 When he received the first two volumes, Carlyle praised Loring, McKean, and Wheeler for producing an “extremely correct” edition; however, he meant only that the essays had everywhere been “silently emended,” and indeed many minor typesetting errors were corrected (Letters 10:229). Yet Carlyle’s judgment of the edition’s correctness was not based on a careful line-by-line reading, for he spotted only one of several new misprints (Letters 11:178; see 227). Unfortunately, because Carlyle’s list of errata has not survived, we cannot know for certain which changes he ordered and which were made by the editors. Collation confirms that they made many changes probably not attributable to the typesetters, and these changes are not all simply corrections of typesetting errors. The seven essays in this volume that were incorporated into the MiscellaEmerson and Carlyle 190, 197. For further details, see Historical Essays lxxxv, n. 12. Emerson and Carlyle 210, 246; Emerson 2:193. Wheeler seems to have done the bulk of the editorial work on these volumes. 1,500 copies were printed this time (Emerson and Carlyle 242), and another 260 were sold under Fraser’s imprint. For Emerson’s accounting, see Emerson 2:401. 5 Emerson obtained copies of the essays that had appeared in the Foreign Review from his acquaintance Convers Francis and some issues of Fraser’s Magazine from the Boston Athenaeum (Emerson and Carlyle 191, 233). In other cases, he probably supplied copies that Carlyle had sent to him for his personal use. 3

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nies all appeared in this edition. In these essays, there are over 800 variants of punctuation and some 250 of spelling. As it seems unlikely that Carlyle’s list of errata included such changes, they can be attributed to the American editors and compositors. We have therefore rejected them except in a few instances in which they make obvious corrections or anticipate 1840 in restoring Carlyle’s preferred spelling. There are just over a hundred minor changes in wording, the vast majority of which are also probably the work of editors and compositors. The results of the collation suggest both that one must proceed with caution in giving authority to the 1838 edition and that the 1840 edition was prepared with unusual care, often restoring the readings of the review essays. the 1840 (second) edition On December 8, 1839, Carlyle wrote that he was “revising the American copy” of the Miscellanies for a new edition to be published by Fraser in London (Letters 11:227; see 236). This comment, together with the evidence of the collations, establishes that the 1840 edition was set from a copy of the 1838 edition. The first two volumes were printed by J. L. Cox and Sons, and the third through fifth by Charles Robson, who had become Carlyle’s preferred printer when his firm set the third volume of The French Revolution (see On Heroes xc–xci). Carlyle’s interventions in 1840 are so extensive as to indicate that even the smallest change might be attributed to him. By the same token, because he had so thoroughly revised them, he seems to have felt that the essays collected in this edition had reached their final form. As he corrected proof in late December 1840, he remarked: “I am in the last volume now, and shall then have very little fash [bother] farther,—nothing but correcting the Proof-sheets where they vary from what I am now settling” (Letters 11:236). He finished correcting proof in February, and the Miscellanies were available by April 22 (Letters 12:46, 117). In the essays in this volume, the 1840 edition introduces about 850 changes of punctuation, 250 changes of capitalization (about half of them uppercasing in “Sir Walter Scott”), and over 150 spelling variants. Except where associated with other changes or when they reflect Carlyle’s clear preferences, we do not adopt these changes. As established in our edition of the Historical Essays, however, there are several classes of changes in the 1840 edition that can be considered authorial and are adopted in this edition (for a full discussion see the Discussion of Editorial Decisions). These include the substitution of commas for parentheses, the dropping of the comma with too, also, perhaps, the uppercasing

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of nouns, and changes in conformity with Carlyle’s spelling preferences. Two classes of changes that occur less frequently—the addition of italics and the use of the comma dash—can also be considered authorial. No variant has been accepted automatically because it falls into one of the aforementioned classes; rather, in each case we have considered whether or not the change was more likely to be the result of Carlyle’s pen or of compositorial intervention. In this edition, many parentheses were removed (sometimes accompanied by changes of wording), a change that is most likely authorial and therefore adopted. There are over 200 changes of wording, nearly half of them in “Burns.” Whereas the changes in other editions are most often merely a single word, here the changes often involved the omission, addition, or substitution of several words, and we thus conclude that they are in almost all cases authorial. In 1842 Chapman and Hall reprinted this edition from the original plates. James Fraser had died in 1841, and Chapman and Hall purchased the plates from Fraser’s estate. Hinman collation has previously confirmed that this edition is simply a reprinting of the 1840 edition. Therefore, we have not included it in the Historical Collation. the 1847 (third edition) Edward Chapman broached the subject of a new edition of the Miscellanies in January 1846, at a time when new editions of nearly all of Carlyle’s works were being prepared (Letters 20:115).6 Later that spring Carlyle included the Miscellanies in a list of books he needed to read over and correct for new editions, and in May he reported that he had been “revising” all his old books (Letters 20:182, 187, 196). Because he had so carefully prepared the Miscellanies for the 1840 edition, however, he was not sure he would do anything to them and initially put off the task of looking them over. At the end of May he told his mother that he had been through all his books “but the Miscellanies,—and this, after some consideration, we decide to leave standing exactly as it is, and trust altogether to the Bookseller Printer [Robson], for it seems quite correct, and he is himself an extremely accurate man” (Letters 20:198). Nevertheless, he did give some attention to the Miscellanies in the course of the next two weeks, for on June 17 he was writing that he had now “got the Miscellanies ready for Printing” (Letters 20:206). At this point, Carlyle felt that the edition was “settled,” and he decided 6 The negotiations continued into the summer, with Chapman finally agreeing to pay £400 for the edition (Letters 20:223).

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he need “not trouble [him]self with proofsheets” (Letters 20:218). Although the copy was ready by the summer of 1846, the new edition of the Miscellanies was not published until autumn 1847, perhaps because Chapman and Hall wished to spread out publication of the series of new editions (Letters 21:205, 22:154). In the essays included in this volume there are nearly 600 changes of punctuation and capitalization and nearly a hundred of spelling. There are some forty changes of wording, all of them minor and, with rare exceptions, not likely authorial. Carlyle’s pattern of revision, together with his casual approach to preparing copy for this edition, suggests that he considered the essays in this volume that were incorporated into the Miscellanies to have reached their final form in the 1840 edition. The patterns of systematic regularization imposed in 1847 are most likely the result of Robson’s attempt to achieve consistency.7 Apart from a small number of corrections, therefore, we do not adopt variants from this edition. As noted in our edition of the Historical Essays, Carlyle at this time gave permission to the publishers Carey and Hart to produce a new US edition of the Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (Letters 20:202), but both external evidence and our collations have demonstrated that he had no role in the preparation of this edition. Therefore we do not include it in the Historical Collation. the 1857 uniform edition In 1857 the Critical and Miscellaneous Essays were published as volumes 2 to 5 of the Uniform Edition, the first collected edition of Carlyle’s works; it was printed by Robson, Levey, and Franklyn. Several individuals, including Alexander Gilchrist, Henry Larkin, Joseph Neuberg, and Vernon Lushington, assisted Carlyle in the preparation of this edition. Carlyle asked these helpers, he said, “to correct the Press, to make Indexes, etc., and steadily oversee the thing” (Letters 31:85). Although their main task was the preparation of summaries and indexes, their participation is notable because it means that individuals other than Carlyle and his printers were involved in the preparation of the 7 One such pattern involves the use of a comma to set off a series. The 1847 edition frequently eliminates the serial comma. This kind of change can also be found in the 1840 edition and in editions after 1847 but is especially frequent here. It conforms with Carlyle’s manuscript practice, but given the evidence cited above it seems unlikely that Carlyle made these changes himself, as he had ample opportunity to do so when he corrected the 1840 edition.

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published text. Indeed, it is fairly clear that Lushington and Larkin probably were involved in correcting proof as well as preparing summaries and indexes (see Sartor Resartus cxx–cxxii). The historical collation suggests that Carlyle may have had no hand in the changes made to the essays included in this volume. Overall, there were far fewer changes than in previous editions: there are 200 changes of punctuation, thirty-five of spelling, and only three changes of wording. Nearly half of the changes of punctuation involve the insertion of hyphens (see On Heroes c and Sartor Resartus cxx–cxxi). While as a general rule, therefore, we have not adopted these changes, we have in a few cases adopted changes that impose Carlyle’s preferred spellings (e.g., “forever” rather than “for ever”), especially in cases in which other instances had been changed in previous editions but the particular instance had been missed. the 1869 library edition In 1869 the Critical and Miscellaneous Essays appeared as volumes 6 to 11 of the Library Edition (1869–1871) of Carlyle’s works, which was printed by Robson and sons. As previous editors have noted, John Carlyle reported that his brother “corrected the final proofs himself, making no alterations at all, only rectifying errors wherever he could discover any.”8 Collation of the essays, like that of On Heroes and Sartor Resartus, supports the suggestion that any such revisions were kept to a minimum. There are corrections of foreign-language spellings, as well as some English spellings, which must have been made by Carlyle or by others with his approval. By contrast, the insertion of new paragraph breaks and the shifting of question marks and exclamation points from the inside to the outside of closing quotation marks, which also mirror similar changes in other volumes of the Library Edition, are most likely the result of compositor activity. Furthermore, the dozen changes of wording in the essays that had appeared in previous editions of the Miscellanies are not convincingly authorial; some are simply errors, while others are regularizations or attempts at making a correction where no correction is needed.

8

Unpublished letter in the University of Edinburgh Library (see On Heroes ci).

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the 1872 people’s edition In 1872 the Critical and Miscellaneous Essays appeared as volumes 6 to 12 of the People’s Edition (1871–1874) of Carlyle’s works, which, like the Library Edition, was printed by Robson and sons. John Carlyle’s letter regarding the Library Edition, cited above, comments further, “A ‘People’s Edition’ in the same number of volumes has been begun, but [Carlyle] has no charge of it at all, the printers merely having to follow the Library Edition which is stereotyped.” The People’s Edition was not in fact printed from the stereotyped plates of the Library Edition, as John Carlyle’s statement might seem to imply, but his statement does indicate that Thomas Carlyle had little or no role in the preparation of this edition. Intended as an inexpensive alternative to the Library Edition, rather than as a new edition, it did not require special preparation. As reported in the “Note on the Text” of the Historical Essays, collation of the People’s Edition of the Miscellanies in all cases supports this external evidence. Therefore, we have not included this edition in the Historical Collation.

Plate 1. A page of “Burns” corrected by Carlyle. From the 1833 gift copy (see Note on the Text). General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Plate 2. Alexander Nasmyth. “Robert Burns.” Frostispiece to Poems (Edinburgh: 1787).

Plate 3. Alexander Nasmyth. “Robert Burns.” At the head of chapter one of Lockhart’s Life of Burns (Edinburgh: 1828).

Plate 4. Friedrich August Moritz Retzsch. “Faust Makes over His Soul to Mephistopheles.” Faustus Illustrated in Twenty-Six Outlines (London: 1825).

Plate 5. Thomas Lawrence. ”James Boswell.” Frontispiece to volume 4 of John Wilson Croker’s edition of Boswell’ Life of Samueal Johnson (London: 1831).

Essays on Literature

MISS BAILLIE’S METRICAL LEGENDS.

Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters. By Joanna Baillie, author of “Plays on the Passions,” &c. London, Longman & Co. 1821. Pp. 373. Miss Baillie has long enjoyed a large tribute of public favour; and the powers she possesses are no doubt fully sufficient to vindicate her claims to it. Yet, if we mistake not, this distinction has been earned more by the display of intellectual superiority in general, than of eminent poetical genius; more by the avoidance of great blemishes, than the production of great beauties. Her poetry rarely belongs to the higher departments of the art; she deals little in the exhibition of sublime emotions—whether of an energetic or a tender cast; her store of imagery, her range of feeling, are both circumscribed; and though her studies have been professedly devoted, with an exclusive preference, to the workings of passion and the various aspects of human character, it is only with passions and characters of a common stamp that she appears to be completely successful. Her tragic portraits are certainly, in some cases, strongly sketched; yet in general they are nothing more than sketches, and sketches too by one who has observed rather than felt,—who has seen the effects produced by great conjunctures and surprising emergencies, but who has little power to conceive the actual being of an impassioned spirit subjected to their influence. From this cause it follows, that, in Miss Baillie’s dramas, the characteristic lineaments of her heroes are educed—if educed at all—rather by the management of external situations, than by the direct expression of internal consciousness; rather by the display of actions, than the collision of feelings manifesting themselves naturally in the progress of the dialogue. With great inventive powers, 3

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indeed, something impressive may possibly be accomplished, even in this less poetic method: but invention is not a quality in which Miss Baillie particularly excels; and hence her management of those untoward instruments she employs is not always the most felicitous. These original deficiencies, important enough in themselves, have been enhanced, unfortunately, and rendered prominent, by Miss Baillie’s mode of composition. Her performances have too much the appearance of forethought and plan, to pass for any relatives of nature; we find abundance of criticism and logic in them, but too little of genuine poetic fervour; and the project of producing two plays, a tragedy and a comedy, on each of the passions, not only had something mechanical in it, something very alien to the spontaneous inspiration which poets boast of, but also tended to render her characters too abstract and uncompounded to excite much interest. The beings wrought out on such a system are apt to resemble personifications rather than persons; they must hate, or envy, or love; and an author, in his anxiety to make them do so, with sufficient energy to give effect, is in danger of forgetting that they have any thing to do besides. Much ingenuity, and much vividness of conception may be evinced in this manner, as Godwin and others have exemplified; but it is not thus, we imagine, that deep feeling will be awakened in a reader, or any character brought forward, that shall have much chance to dwell on his memory. In a word, we may think them to be very amiable or very detestable, but we do not feel them to be men. It is true, that Miss Baillie’s plays are not all liable, in the same, or in any eminent degree, to this objection; but in all of them its force may be discovered more or less distinctly, and never without great injury to the result. With such weighty drawbacks, it is sufficiently clear that our author has no title to rank among the first class of poets. But it is equally so, we readily admit, that she possesses gifts enough to raise her far above the lowest; nor should it be forgotten, that, as her pretensions are much less urgent than her merits, so if she has fallen short of the highest excellence, our censure of her failure should be less marked than our commendation of her partial success. But, independently of such claims to indulgence, an attentive reader cannot avoid being struck with the many beauties that are scattered over her writings. She cannot be compared with our older dramatists. Basil and Ethwall are not known to us like Othello and Macbeth; they do not incorporate themselves with our thoughts, and become part of the mind’s household goods; but, though incomplete and unequal as dramatic characters, they bear traces of keen observation and energetic feeling, accompanied at times with a strength of conception—which, if it had extended over the general surface of those poems—comprising the exalted, as it often does



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the common mental condition of the agent, would have amply contradicted our previous criticisms. Nor is the effect of those intrinsic qualities obstructed by a depraved taste or a faulty style. The allusions and metaphors are always pure, often at once expressive and picturesque; while the language in which they are clothed, is formed on the best models, and exhibits those beauties to the greatest advantage. In her less distinguished productions, the same fundamental excellencies, though more sparingly developed, are still discernible. There is a frank and vigorous air about her poetry, which pleases by seeming to perform all that it attempts. She has an acute relish for the simple affections of humanity, and the simple aspects of nature; and occasionally there are thrills of wild sublimity,—which, as they rise without violence from the surrounding emotions, give dignity and relief to their unpretending beauties. Indeed, it is this unpretendingness, this utter want of affectation, which constitutes the redeeming quality of Miss Baillie’s writings. Be the subject high or low, she seems as if she were completely mistress of it; or at least, she avoids all unnatural expedients, and goes quietly along her destined course—indifferent to success, if it cannot be purchased without the sacrifice of truth and moderation. Good and evil are always mixed. It is probably by the undue cultivation of her reasoning faculties, that Miss Baillie has enfeebled the imaginative vigour of her poetry; and by the same process, no less probably, she has also imparted to it this unaffected simplicity, its principal ornament. To the same cause must likewise be ascribed, at least in part, the tone of wholesome, honest feeling, which pervades all her writings, and so agreeably distinguishes them, in an age when poetry is deformed by a spirit of morbid exaggeration, the more baneful, as its tendency is to inspire disrespect or disgust for every thing that is peaceable or happy in the ordinary ways of men. In Miss Baillie’s writings, if we fail to meet with glowing, yet faithful exhibitions of perturbed and sublimated feelings, we also fail to meet with the reckless wailings, the bitter execrations of existing institutions, the cold derision of human nature, and the meretricious charms, not more dazzling than pernicious, which so deeply infect much of our present literature. In the absence of heroes, we are not presented with ruffians, decked out in colours which embellish rather than conceal their villainy; if we have less impetuous sentiment, what we have is all genuine; it does not array itself in oriental gorgeousness, it does not languish in diseased melancholy, or rave in the frenzy of despair,—but moves calmly and steadily along in cheerful comeliness, and the heart is better for it. Miss Baillie, in short, though not a great poet, is in every sense a good one.

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With such impressions of Miss Baillie’s powers, and such dispositions to like, if not to admire, any thing proceeding from her pen, we expected to receive more delight from the present volume than a perusal of it has actually afforded us. At first view, the title “metrical legends of exalted characters” suggests the idea of an undertaking eminently calculated to give room for the introduction of much striking description, and much delightful, as well as highly valuable sentiment. Though poetry is an imaginative art, its productions must be founded on reality in some sense, or they cannot yield us gratification. The ancient critical precept, that every drama should have for its groundwork some historical or credited event, was not without a shew of reason; for although the imagination may be filled, and the heart touched, as modern experience has frequently proved, by events and characters purely fictitious, yet still there is a hankering after truth in all of us; and the idea that what we are contemplating did actually in part take place, and for aught we know, in whole—that the characters before us were in fact real inhabitants of this earth, creatures of flesh and blood like ourselves, adds a wonderful vivacity to our impressions at the time we receive them. The most hardened novel reader is now and then assailed by a chilling qualm, even at the very nodus of his story, on reflecting that all this mighty stir around him is but a fantasy; and though he strives to banish such suggestions, they return upon him when the intoxication is over, and never return without a sensible diminution of his pleasure. No doubt this disadvantage must continue to be quietly submitted to; the real occurrences of the world are too circumscribed and prosaic to give scope to our full energies; and it is a grand privilege possessed by us, that we can at will frame an ideal scene, where all shall be fair and free, where the passions and powers of our nature may be arranged, and set in opposition, and developed as we choose, while things without us offer no obstruction to our creative efforts. But if this shadowy world delights us merely as it seems to afford space for the unrestrained exertion of human will, the effect must depend on our belief, however transient, of its reality; and hence, if cases should occur, in which the restraints alluded to were wanting in a great measure, and might be removed entirely without violating, not the transient, but the permanent belief we have of their reality, the effect of such cases would be more intense, and therefore more poetical. Now “exalted characters” furnish just such cases as we have supposed. They are men in whom the low elements of humanity are feeble or almost extinct; and the poet has no task to perform with regard to them, but to present their mind, and such of their actions as unfold it, full and luminous before us, with all the colouring and accompaniments which his art can lend. From their very nature, characters and events susceptible of this



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treatment must be rare; and the student of history who wishes to enlarge his heart, and extend his compass of thought, as well as to store his memory with facts, may justly regret their being so. A historical personage, depicted in the colours of poetry, is like a bright sun-spot in the grey cold twilight of ordinary narrative. Richard and Wallenstein are no longer the thin shadows they appeared to us, in the mirror of Holinshed and Harte; they are living men, with all their attributes, whom we almost seem to know personally; and the new interest we take in them is extended to the whole groups in which they mingle. No one can read the meagerest chronicle of our old French wars, without finding a warmer glow spread over all the scene, a more intimate presence in it, communicated from the plays of Shakspeare. In Henry’s army we discover well known faces; the king and his valiant captains, even the ancient Pistol and Bardolph, “a soldier firm of heart,” are all dear to our memories. We follow the progress of the host, as it were with our eyes; and hear the armourers give “dreadful note of preparation,” every time the victory of Agincourt is mentioned to us. Nor is the increased animation which this particular species of poetry diffuses over the most striking passages of history, the only, or even the principal advantage we derive from it. Besides ministering to our pleasure, it contributes to our improvement. If history is valuable, chiefly as it offers examples by which human nature is illustrated, and human conduct may be regulated, then it is of the highest importance that such great characters as have influenced the destinies of men, be held up to us in the degree of light that shall most powerfully elicit the generous expansion of soul, which a view of them is fitted to inspire. We cannot feel too strongly the admiration of highly-gifted virtue, or the fear of highly-gifted wickedness; and if poetry profess to occupy a more exalted rank in the scale of our pursuits than that of being merely an elegant amusement,—if it profess to elevate our nature by giving scope to its higher qualities, and communicating new beauty to the ordinary things around us,—we do not see how it can better vindicate such claims, than by adorning the memory of those our illustrious brethren, who have journeyed through life in might and rectitude before us. Every time the poet can seize the impress of such a character, and transmit it warm to our bosoms, he performs not only the most delightful but the most beneficial function of his art. He rescues from obscurity or neglect a token of the dignity of man; and thus presenting another high example, to which we may appeal in the day of trial, he enriches and exalts the moral treasury of our race. With regard to the illustrious wicked, poetical representation is profitable in this way likewise. The spectacle of mental power tends to enlarge the mind

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of him who beholds it; and what is more, the penalties attached to its misemployment, the “compunctious visitings” of conscience, or its still more frightful insensibility, form a lesson of awful import, which it is fit that all of us should study. When the poet converts our admiration of greatness into admiration of the crimes it is employed to effect, he does not use, but abuse his authority over us, and our feelings refuse to obey him. True poetry will have another aim. Filippo and Macbeth are not less instructive than Brutus or Virginius. If this reasoning be correct, the increase of pleasure and profit, derived from this species of poetry, must appear to be great and indubitable. At the same time, however, like every earthly good, it is mixed with some alloy. The poet cannot secure to us those advantages, without invading and apparently violating the province of the historian and biographer. Poetry and history have long been at issue on this matter. There is a kind of debateable ground between them, the limits of which are nothing like ascertained, and where each lays claim to the right of dominion. On one hand, the sticklers for accuracy allege, that, by distorting the events, and exaggerating the characters of former ages, the face of history becomes disfigured in the imaginations of men; and erroneous notions thus silently propagated, must inevitably, though imperceptibly, vitiate the conclusions and inferences to be deduced from the real course of things, which has now been displaced in a great measure from our thoughts, to make room for a series more splendid, invented by the poet for a purpose altogether foreign. On the other hand are set forth the manifold advantages enumerated above, and the narrow compass to which the injury complained of is limited. The poet, it is said, will never violate the truth of history to any important extent, as he is in general sufficiently restrained by considerations affecting his own pursuits alone. He knows well enough that no subject over which the full day light of history has once been shed, and which has thus become familiar in all its details, and settled in the public mind, can by any management be rendered a fit subject for poetry. His efforts will, therefore, be chiefly directed to the more obscure and remote departments of history, concerning which little can be known, or at least is known, to contradict his statements; and in those distant scenes, if he find a few facts applicable to his purpose, why, it is asked, should he not be permitted, nay invited, to seize them? For the great characters there dimly shadowed forth, he becomes a kind of new creator. The faint traces they have left remain uninterpreted and barren in the eyes of the chronicler: to the poet’s eye they are like the fragments of an antediluvian animal, as contemplated by the mind of a Cuvier—dark to others and void of meaning, but discovering to his experienced sagacity, the form and habits of a species long extinct. And



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if, by a similar power, the plastic and far-sighted genius of a poet, can, from those slender hints, detect the structure and essence of the sublime character to whom they relate, why should he not disclose it, and thus offer to us a mass of exalted thoughts and noble feelings, which, but for such a power, we should never have recovered from the darkness that buried them? Let the poet, then, say his admirers, take what liberty he pleases with history. For his own sake, he will avoid falsifying the characters and transactions recorded there, to any fatal degree; because long before it prove hurtful to the moral judgments of his audience, this proceeding will prove still more hurtful to the effect of his poetry, which will in vain solicit favour from minds that are revolted by an open contradiction of what they know to be true. We do not pretend to settle this controversy; but we cannot help observing, that the advocates for history seem to overrate their claim of damages. No one, it is certain, is likely to recur to the pages of a drama or an epic for settling a date or a disputed fact; and for all moral purposes, the poetical selection of circumstances may convey as faithful an idea of the subject treated, as the historical narrative in which every circumstance is minutely detailed. The truth of historical characters is indeed a more grave consideration; but the force and vividness of the delineation are also an important particular, and the omission of some circumstances which enfeeble the general result, rather than change its nature, has so many advantages, and gives such a powerful engine for poetry to impress us with, at once delightfully and beneficially, that considerable latitude ought to be allowed even here. Miss Baillie is aware of those conflicting rights, and is puzzled, like ourselves, how to reconcile them. Admitting that history is too indistinct, and biography too minute and familiar to call forth “that rousing and generous admiration which the more simple and distant view of heroic worth is fitted to inspire;” she conceives that romance in verse or prose, “by throwing over the venerated form of a majestic man, a gauzy veil, on which is delineated the fanciful form of an angel,” is no less injurious than unfaithful to the memory of the mighty dead. She proceeds, “Having this view of the subject in my mind, and a great desire, notwithstanding, to pay some tribute to the memory of a few characters for whom I felt a peculiar admiration and respect, I have ventured upon what may be considered, in some degree, as a new attempt,—to give a short descriptive chronicle of those noble beings, whose existence has honoured human nature and benefited mankind. “In relating a true story, though we do not add any events or material circumstances to it, and abstain from attributing any motives for action which have not been credibly

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reported, or may not be fairly inferred, yet, how often do we spontaneously, almost unwittingly, add description similar to what we know must have belonged to the actors and scenery of our story?”—“In imitation then of this human propensity, from which we derive so much pleasure, though mischievous, when not indulged with charity and moderation, I have written the following metrical legends, describing such scenes as truly belong to my story, with occasionally the feelings, figures, and gestures of those whose actions they relate, and also assigning their motives of action, as they may naturally be supposed to have existed. “The events they record are taken from sources sufficiently authentic; and where any thing has been reasonably questioned, I give some notice of the doubt. I have endeavoured to give them with the brief simplicity of a chronicle, though frequently stopping in my course, where occasion for reflection or remark naturally offered itself, or proceeding more slowly, when objects capable of interesting or pleasing description tempted me to linger. Though my great desire has been to display such portraitures of real worth and noble heroism as might awaken high and generous feelings in a youthful mind; yet I have not, as far as I know, imputed to my heroes motives or sentiments beyond what their noble deeds do fairly warrant. I have made each legend short enough to be read in one moderate sitting, that the impression might be undivided, and that the weariness of a story, not varied or enriched by minuter circumstances, might be, if possible, avoided. It has, in short, been my aim to produce sentimental and descriptive memorials of exalted worth.”

The disadvantages of this plan are too obvious to require much discussion. A versified chronicle, confined within the rigid limits of historical truth, is evidently one of the most unpoetical things in nature. And although the degree of licence which forms the discriminating feature of these metrical legends may admit of introducing much fine description, both of scenery and feeling, yet for the main purpose, that of exhibiting a great character in glowing colours, and impressing us with it strongly, few things could be worse calculated than this new species of poem. With heroic characters, especially, we think it would fail in the very best hands; and with any character, it is plainly impossible that it should ever become the vehicle of high poetry. It leaves no room for invention, little for imagination, except of a low kind, partly allowed even in prose: there can be no unity of action, for no man’s life was ever in whole directed to a single object; hence no unity of interest, no unity of result. These disadvantages are palpable enough. What compensation do we get for them? If the truth of the narrative be all our compensation, it is a very poor one. Granting the narrative to be true in every particular—we ask, of what avail is it? We did not take it up for historical information, but to obtain a sublime view of mental greatness. The



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facts of a hero’s life are worth nothing to us except as they represent the powers of his mind; and so the latter be displayed with the greatest truth and effect, the former may be as they will. Does Miss Baillie think a straggling narrative of a man’s whole life and conversation the best mode of presenting an intense and faithful view of his character? We imagine, on the contrary, it would not be difficult to prove, that, for exhibiting the character in all its truth and completeness, it must frequently be advisable to alter, always more than advisable to concentrate, the events which have displayed it. We say truth, and we meant to use the term in its highest sense. The actions of a man are never more than a feeble and imperfect emblem of what is passing within. To a common mind they discover little of the unseen movements which a sympathising mind infers from their presence; and to any mind they offer but a faint copy of the reality. Besides, they disclose the various mental features only in succession, and the trace left by one event is apt to be erased before that of another is communicated. Hence, to give a true picture of any character, particularly a great character, true, we mean, both in its proportions and vividness, it must often be requisite to forsake the straight-forward track of narrative, to accumulate, either secretly, as historians do in forming their judgment, or avowedly, as poets do in presenting theirs, and combine the several impressions which the story has produced upon us,—uniting them in their proper situation and relative strength to establish the true proportion, and accompanying them with all the influence of poetry to impart the true degree of vividness. Now, a “metrical legend,” if it adhere to the actual series of events as they occurred, and reject all but the slenderest embellishments of fancy, can never effect this. Without immense means, it will effect nothing. To give us even an approximate likeness of a great man, so feeble an implement would need to be wielded by an artist no way inferior to Shakspeare himself. The poet must be able, not merely to understand the character he is delineating, but to enter into it even to the minutest ramifications; not merely to estimate his hero, but to transfuse his own being into him—to see with his hero’s eyes, and feel with his hero’s heart. But Miss Baillie’s talent, we have already said, does not lie here. She does not conceive a deep agitated nature very fully, or embody her conceptions of it very happily; and her success, partial as it is, in this respect, depends more on the display of incidents than of emotions. Her present system, however, prohibits not only the invention of new incidents, but even the new arrangement of such as are prescribed; and she is thus left to overcome the difficulties of her undertaking—great and many in other respects—by a resource, in the management of which she has never shewn much power, by delineating internal feeling without the external movement which bespeaks it. The result

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is such as might have been expected. On a first perusal, her “Metrical Legends” of exalted characters disappoint us extremely. They give us next to no idea at all of the heroes whose characters it is their purpose to celebrate; and we throw down the book in a state of irritated ennui, declaring it to be tedious and prosaic beyond endurance. On a second perusal, it is true, we are again disappointed; we now discover much beautiful and spirited poetry sprinkled over its barren groundwork; but still we cannot avoid feeling, that the main design of the performance has failed, and the great powers, we see misdirected to accomplish it, are calculated to make us judge of it more harshly. The first legend in the volume turns upon the history of William Wallace, a name dear to every lover of freedom, and amply meriting all the celebrity which poetry can give it. The fate of Wallace has been singularly hard, both in life and after it. The deliverers of Switzerland, Tell and Stauffacher, and all the rest, have had their deeds recorded in the annals of their country—gratefully dwelt upon by historians of other countries, and at last depicted on the imperishable canvass of Schiller. But in the very period when the tyranny of Gessler had called forth the spirit that slumbered in the mountain peasants, as stern a spirit was roused, by a far more formidable tyrant, as fierce a contest was waging among our own bleak hills, and the patriot that guided it had an arm as strong, a heart as firm, as the time required. Now mark the difference! Tell died beside his own hearth, amid affectionate grandchildren; a people blessed him, (des Vaterlandes Schütz und Erretter;) and a poet, fitted to appreciate and fathom his manly soul, has embalmed the memory of its worth for ever: while Wallace, as unblemished after greater trials, insulted and betrayed, but never yielding, perished on the scaffold far from his native land, and before the freedom he had bought for it was achieved, leaving his fame to the charge of a vulgar rhymer. Nor since the days of Blind Harry has the case been mended. Wallace, slightly mentioned by historians, though the author of a mighty revolution in his country, has become the prey of novelists and poetasters. They have made him into a sentimental philosopher, a woe-begone lover, a mere “carpet knight.” Nay, Metastasio has not scrupled to trick him out into a “metre ballad-monger:” and Valla (for the very name is lost,) trills forth his patriotism and his gallantry in many a quaver, as an opera-hero ought, but resembling our own rugged, massy, stern, indomitable Wallace wight, just about as much as a Vauxhall tin-cascade resembles the falls of Niagara. We wish all this were remedied. Why does not the author of Waverley bestir himself ? He has done a faithful duty to the Cavaliers and Covenanters: a higher name than any of them is still behind. The Wizard, if he liked, could image back to us the very form and pressure of those far off times,



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the very life and substance of the strong and busy spirits that adorned them. It would be glorious to behold all this in his magic glass, and then to say, “It is all our own—and the magician too is ours.” The task, which we have thus presumed to recommend to the Great Novelist, and which, in spite of all its obstacles, we seriously wish he would undertake, has not in any measure been forestalled by this attempt of Miss Baillie’s. Her Wallace is a lamentable failure. His exploits are related certainly in clear language, and not without gleams of poetic imagery here and there, such as the unhappy nature of the plan allowed; but those exploits have no union among themselves; they are isolated, and point different ways; they do not combine to bring out or to strengthen one great effect, and Wallace remains as much unknown to us as before. We have, in fact, nothing but the ghost of him here. He moves about the country—sets fire to the barns of Ayr—fights at Stirling—offers to fight at Stanmore—refuses at Falkirk—overcomes the Red Reaver—is betrayed, and dies very edifyingly. Now, all this is excellent, but nothing to the point in view: the hero has still no individuality about him; his features are invisible; and, if we try to grasp him, he proves to be an empty shade. We are told, frequently and emphatically, that Wallace is a very strong person, expert at the broad sword, and a great patriot; with many other things which we knew somewhat before, and do not yet know better, or see more clearly: but the stern spirit of the man, with all its fervid movements, the fiery joy of victory, the stubborn resolution of defeat, the grandeur of purpose, the unconquerable will, his whole heroic nature, are wanting. We see none of those living energies that nerved him for his task; none of the great thoughts and great desires, the overshadowings of despondency, the visions of generous hope, that chequered and sublimed his restless existence. It is impossible to conceive how this Wallace could have freed his country, or risen to command its armies: he shews no powers of such a kind, few powers of any kind, except mere physical strength;—his actions are recorded in free and expressive language; but his character is left to our own inferences,—that is to say, just where it was. We regret that Miss Baillie should have attempted the depicting of Wallace; but, above all, that she should have attempted it on such a plan. If delivered from the invincible obstructions thus voluntarily created, though perhaps she could not have given us Wallace in his full majesty, she would at least have given us some visible and pleasing outline of him. Her verses, though unequal, are by no means destitute of beauty. It is only on contrasting what is done with what is aimed at, that they become disagreeable. The poem contains many brilliant similies and fine allusions; it has few faults except deficiencies; and, though these

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are numerous, we frequently discover the free step and blithe face of Miss Baillie’s early muse. If we wished to shew this “legend” to be very tame and feeble in many places, we should have no difficult task. It were easy to produce not a few stanzas of metred prose; we could even point out half a page, in which there is literally nothing but names, and names so unmusical, that prose itself would have paused before admitting them. But though not a difficult, it would be a grating task; and the reader will obtain a more agreeable, and a far juster notion of the general style and merits of the poem, from such an extract as the following. It is the proëmium. “Insensible to high heroic deeds, Is there a spirit clothed in mortal weeds, Who at the patriot’s moving story, Devoted to his country’s good, Devoted to his country’s glory, Shedding for freemen’s rights his generous blood;— List’neth not with breath heaved high, Quiv’ring nerve, and glistening eye, Feeling within a spark of heavenly flame, That with the hero’s worth may humble kindred claim? If such there be, still let him plod On the dull foggy paths of care, Nor raise his eyes from the dank sod To view creation fair: What boots to him the wond’rous works of God? His soul with brutal things hath ta’en its earthly lair. Come, youths, whose eyes are forward cast, And in the future see the past,— The past, as winnow’d in the early mind With husk and prickle left behind! Come; whether under lowland vest, Or, by the mountain tartan prest, Your gen’rous bosoms heave; Pausing a while in thoughtful rest, My legend lay receive. Come, aged sires, who love to tell What fields were fought, what deeds were done;



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What things in olden times befell,— Those good old times, whose term is run! Come ye, whose manly strength with pride Is breasting now the present tide Of worldly strife, and cast aside A hasty glance at what hath been! Come, courtly dames, in silken sheen, And ye, who under thatched roofs abide; Yea, ev’n the barefoot child by cottage fire, Who doth some shreds of northern lore acquire, By the stirr’d embers’ scanty light,— List to my legend lay of Wallace wight.”

This we conceive to be at least an average specimen of the work. If it contains fewer beautiful strokes than some other passages—the battle of Stirling, for example—it contains none of their fallings-off; and it gives no idea of the languor and disappointment resulting from the whole narrative, and inseparable from the principles on which it is conducted. To shew what we might have had on other principles, we need only appeal to the fine sketch which follows—excepting, of course, the two first stanzas. Wallace is hastening to meet the English chiefs assembled in court at Ayr,—according to the plausible but insidious invitation which had been sent to all the neighbouring barons. The bridle of his horse is laid hold of by a friendly hand— “‘Oh! go not to the Barns of Ayr! Kindred and friends are murder’d there. The faithless Southrons, one by one, On them the hangman’s task hath (have) done. Oh, turn thy steed, and fearful ruin shun!’ He, shudd’ring, heard, with visage pale, Which quickly chang’d to wrath’s terrific hue; And then apace came sorrow’s bursting wail; The noble heart could weep that could not quail, ‘My friends, my kinsmen, war-mates bold and true! Met ye a villain’s end! Oh is it so with you!’ The hero turn’d his chafing steed, And to the wild woods bent his speed.

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essays on literature But not to keep in hiding there, Or give his sorrow to despair, For the fierce tumult in his breast To speedy, dreadful action press’d. And there within a tangled glade, List’ning the courser’s coming tread, With hearts that shared his ire and grief, A faithful band receiv’d their chief. In Ayr the guilty Southrons held a feast, When that dire day its fearful course had run, And laid them down their weary limbs to rest Where the foul deed was done. But ere beneath the cottage thatch Cocks had crow’d the second watch; When sleepers breathe in heavy plight, Press’d with the visions of the night, And spirits, from unhallow’d ground, Ascend to walk their silent round; When trembles dell or desert heath, The witches’ orgy dance beneath,— To the rous’d warders fearful gaze, The Barns of Ayr were in a blaze. The dense dun smoke was mounting slow And stately, from the flaming wreck below, And mantling far aloft in many a volum’d wreath; Whilst town and woods, and ocean wide did lye, Tinctur’d like glowing furnace-iron, beneath Its awful canopy. Red mazy sparks soon with the dense smoke blended, And far around like fiery sleet descended. From the scorch’d and crackling pile Fierce burst the growing flames the while; Thro’ creviced wall and buttress strong, Sweeping the rafter’d roofs along; Which, as with sudden crash they fell, Their raging fierceness seem’d to quell,



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And for a passing instant spread O’er land and sea a lurid shade; Then with increasing brightness, high In spiral form, shot to the sky With momentary height so grand, That chill’d beholders breathless stand. Thus rose and fell the flaming surgy flood, ’Till fencing round the gulphy light, Black, jagg’d, and bare, a fearful sight! Like ruin grim of former days, Seen ’thwart the broad sun’s setting rays, The guilty fabric stood. And dreadful are the deaths, I ween, Which midst that fearful wreck have been. The pike and sword, and smoke and fire, Have minister’d to vengeful ire. New-wak’d wretches stood aghast To see the fire-flood in their rear, Close to their breast the pointed spear, And in wild horror yell’d their last. But what dark figures now emerge From the dread gulf and cross the light, Appearing on its fearful verge, Each like an armed sprite? Whilst one above the rest doth tower,— A form of stern gigantic power, Whirling from his lofty stand The smold’ring stone or burning brand? Those are the leagued for Scotland’s native right, Whose clashing arms rang Southrons knell, When to their fearful work they fell,— That form is Wallace wight.”

The beauties of this description, at once so chaste and so expressive, are sufficient to remind us that much of what is feeble and faulty in the execution of

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this poem, is to be ascribed to errors in the original design, which no powers, however great, could have entirely surmounted. In the life of Wallace, those original defects are more than usually sensible. In that of Christopher Columbus, the subject of our second “Legend,” they are less so; the scenes to be pourtrayed are more vast and striking: the events to be recorded are more numerous; they follow in quicker succession, have more of a consentaneous character, and bear more upon a single object. In this piece, accordingly, our disappointment has been smaller. It is impossible, indeed, for any one to write a history of Columbus, how imperfectly soever, without intermingling something of poetry with his narrative. The character of Columbus, so richly furnished with intellectual and moral endowments, his fate, and the great things he accomplished, are of themselves poetical. To view him, after long years of anxious waiting, at length embarked with his slender crew,—alone with them upon the wide and wasteful deep, which no keel had ever ploughed, no human eyes had ever seen before; yet bearing fearlessly on, destined to discover a new world, to found new empires, and change the fate of the old,—might strike some sparks of feeling from the very dullest heart. With such advantages inherent in its subject, the “Legend of Columbus” is calculated to afford considerable pleasure. It contains some poetical sentiment and thought, with much poetical description; the story proceeds less tediously*, is less broken into fragments; and the sinkings into prose are less frequent and alarming. Yet the innate perversity of Miss Baillie’s plan—which the weak points of her genius tend to aggravate, are but too apparent here also. Nearly all that is historical is prosaic: we have nothing of Columbus but what is external; no strong impression of the enthusiastic heart and warm imagination, that supported him so long and so bravely. If we wished to get,—we do not say a true * It may seem inconsistent in us to complain of omissions in the narrative. In fact, we wish they had been much more numerous: but we see no reason why, in such a professed account of Columbus’s achievements and sufferings, the last and greatest of his sufferings, the year of bitterness which he spent in Jamaica, after the loss of his ships, (1504,) should not be mentioned at all,—or what is worse, mentioned so as to convey a totally false impression of it. Miss Baillie notices the prediction of the eclipse; but she does not notice the ultimate hostility of the Indians, the mutinies of the Spaniards, and the savage conduct of the governor of St. Domingo, who not only refused to give any assistance of ships or provisions, but accompanied his refusal with inhuman mockery. The fatigue, the famine, and the horrors of this year quite broke the constitution, and broke the heart of Columbus, who died soon after. A letter, expressive of extreme agony, and said to have been written by him here, may be seen in Edwards’ History of the West Indies, vol. i.



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idea, but any idea—of his character, it is not to this “metrical legend” that we should have recourse. Robertson’s prose would answer the purpose infinitely better. And we do not think there can be a more convincing proof of this system being radically bad, than the fact—of which an experiment will satisfy any one—that Columbus’s character, extraordinary in every sense, and full of the elements of poetry as it is, scarcely appears at all in the reader’s imagination, and is never the primary object there. The narrative is not, however, void of beauties: and the life of Columbus, though itself unheeded, or at least unpoetical, is made the platform on which some true poetry is built. The following thought is just, and not ill stated, though the soul of imagination is a new entity. “But hath there lived of mortal mould Whose fortunes with his thoughts could hold An even race? Earth’s greatest son That e’er earned fame, or empire won, Hath but fulfill’d, within a narrow scope, A stinted portion of his ample hope. With heavy sigh and look depress’d, The greatest men will some times hear The story of their acts address’d To the young stranger’s wond’ring ear, And check the half-swoln tear. Is it or modesty, or pride, Which may not open praise abide? No; read his inward thoughts: they tell His deeds of fame he prizes well. But, ah! they in his fancy stand, As relics of a blighted band, Who, lost to man’s approving sight, Have perish’d in the gloom of night, Ere yet the glorious light of day Had glitter’d on their bright array. His mightiest feat had once another, Of high imagination born,— A loftier and a nobler brother, From dear existence torn; And she for those, who are not, steeps Her soul in woe,—like Rachel, weeps.”

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The moving circumstances of Columbus’s first voyages are, of course, attended to. There is beauty in the picture, though not so much as might have been. 5

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“From shore and strait, and gulph and bay, The vessels held their daring way, Left far behind, in distance thrown, All land to Moor or Christian known, Left far behind the misty isle, Whose fitful shroud, withdrawn the while, Shews wood and hill and headland bright, To later seamen’s wond’ring sight; And tide and sea left far behind That e’er bore freight of human kind; Where ship or bark to shifting gales E’er tacked their (her) course or spread their (her) sails. Around them lay a boundless main In which to hold their silent reign; But for the passing current’s flow, And cleft waves brawling round the prow, They might have thought some magic spell Had bound them, weary fate! for ever there to dwell. What did this trackless waste supply To soothe the mind or please the eye? The rising morn thro’ dim mist breaking, The flicker’d east with purple streaking; The mid-day cloud thro’ thin air flying, With deeper blue the blue sea dying; Long ridgy waves their white mains rearing, And in the broad gleam disappearing; The broaden’d blazing sun declining, And western waves like fire-flood shining; The sky’s vast dome to darkness given, And all the glorious host of heaven. Full oft upon the deck, while other’s slept, To mark the bearing of each well-known star That shone aloft, or on th’ horizon far,



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The anxious chief his lonely vigil kept; The mournful wind, the hoarse wave breaking near The breathing groans of sleep, the plunging lead, The steersman’s call, and his own stilly tread, Are all the sounds of night that reach his ear. His darker form stalk’d thro’ the sable gloom With gestures discomposed and features keen, That might not in the face of day be seen, Like some unblessed spirit from the tomb. Night after night, and day succeeding day So pass’d their dull, unvaried time away Till Hope, the seaman’s worship’d queen, had flown From every valiant heart but his alone; Where still, by day, enthron’d she held her state With sunny look and brow elate.”

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A rapid glance is afterwards taken of the new world, to which this voyage led. We need not insist on its merits. Where he, the sea’s unwearied, dauntless rover, Thro’ many a gulph and straight, did first discover That continent, whose mighty reach From th’ utmost frozen north doth stretch Ev’n to the frozen south; a land Of surface fair and structure grand. There, thro’ vast regions rivers pour, Whose mid-way skiff scarce sees the shore; Which, rolling on in lordly pride, Give to the main their ample tide; And dauntless (?) then, with current strong, Impetuous, roaring, bear along, And still their sep’rate honours keep, In bold contention with the mighty deep. There broad-based mountains from the sight Conceal in clouds their vasty height, Whose frozen peaks, a vision rare,

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essays on literature Above the girdling clouds rear’d far in upper air, At times appear, and soothly seem To the far distant, up-cast eye, Like snowy watch-towers of the sky,— Like passing visions of a dream. There forests grand of olden birth, O’ercanopy the darken’d earth, Whose trees, growth of unreckon’d time, Rear o’er whole regions far and wide A chequer’d dome of lofty pride Silent, solemn, and sublime,— A pillar’d lab’rinth, in whose trackless gloom, Unguided feet might stray till close of mortal doom. There grassy plains of verdant green Spread far beyond man’s ken are seen, Whose darker bushy spots that lie Strewed o’er the level vast, descry Admiring strangers, from the brow Of hill or upland steep, and show, Like a calm ocean’s peaceful isles, When morning light thro’ rising vapour smiles.”

From the contemplation of those great scenes, we are transported to a very different class of objects, in the fourth “Legend”—that of Lady Griseld Baillie, by far the most successful in the volume. This matter-of-fact poetry is here in its proper place; its advantages, such as they are, come now to be of service. The exploits of a powerful and violently agitated mind, if they are intended to indicate its nature, must be compressed into a narrow space, and made to tell upon us at once with their united force, seconded by the poet’s interpretation and display of them. It is from the failure in this, owing to the prescribed events being diffused over so large a circle, and alloyed with so large a portion of the meanness of ordinary life, as well as to the want of a capacity to enter fully into the spirit of an exalted and strong character, that Miss Baillie has not succeeded in conveying to us any vivid or even distinct idea of Wallace and Columbus. The case is different with her most amiable kinswoman.



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——“She of gentler nature, softer, dearer, Of daily life the active, kindly cheerer; With generous bosom, age, or childhood shielding, And in the storms of life, tho’ mov’d, unyielding; Strength in her gentleness, hope in her sorrow, Whose darkest hours some ray of brightness borrow From better days to come, whose meek devotion Calms every wayward passion’s wild commotion; In want and suff ’ring, soothing, useful, sprightly, Bearing the press of evil hap so lightly, Till evil’s self seems its strong hold betraying To the sweet witch’ry of such winsome playing; Bold from affection, if by nature fearful, With varying brow, sad, tender, anxious, cheerful,— This is meet partner for the loftiest mind, With crown or helmet grac’d,—yea, this is womankind!”

The simple doings of such a meek, unambitious creature, will speak for themselves; and, if they needed an interpreter, Miss Baillie understands them well. Besides, they speak with that small still voice, which requires to be often repeated before it will be listened to. A being like this is not to be described by combining a few of its bold and brilliant manifestations. Lady Griseld has nothing bold or brilliant in her character, and its excellencies must be unfolded by a minute and patient display of the trying, though retired scenes in which she proved their power. The particulars of her life should be detailed at full length: and the problem is to detail them with that sprightliness and vivacity which shall gain for them a welcome admission, and prevent their littleness from wearying our attention and dissipating our sympathies. It is another circumstance in favour of this Legend, that, no expectations being previously entertained with regard to its heroine, her modest worth comes upon us with all the advantages of surprise. Lady Griseld’s character and very existence are now for the first time presented to our thoughts. Her name does not, like that of Wallace or Columbus, occupy a large extent in our imaginations, and awaken the idea of something magnificent and vast whenever it is pronounced. She is not mentioned in history, nor would she make a figure there. The “dear and helpful child” of Sir Patrick Hume might watch over her father, when tyranny compelled him to hide in the burial-vault of his ancestors; she might accompany her parents when the same tyranny compelled them to

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take shelter with their family in a foreign country; her affectionate, cheerful, unwearied efforts might sweeten their exile; in due time she might be united to her early friend, (the younger Jerviswood,) and as a wife and mother become no less exemplary than she had been as a daughter—and still continued even when a widow: but, though her quiet virtues gave happiness or solace to all connected with her, they are not of a kind which historians love to dwell upon. In every point of view, then, Lady Griseld was the fittest subject for this species of legend. Her actions were full of lowly beauty; they required to be developed minutely, that their beauty might be demonstrated, and to be decorated with all the graceful drapery of fancy, that it might be attractive. And what is more important still, her mind, and the situations in which she was called upon to act, were at once familiar to the every-day thoughts of Miss Baillie, and such as afforded room for employing the most valuable and uncontested faculties of her genius. Lady Griseld, accordingly, is quite a lovely person. She does not, of course, pretend to be an epic heroine, to sway over us by the potency and dazzling attributes of her character and actions: but she is something fully as good, and far more difficult for any but a true poet to pourtray with interest and yet without exaggeration. A calm, unprofessing benefactress, she is busied about humble things, which pass without notice in the world’s turmoil: but her simple life is described so gracefully; she has withal such an elastic, though silent strength of feeling, such a generous forgetfulness of self; there is such a heavenly innocence of soul, pervading and beautifying the earthly duties, to which she bends unweariedly; she appears so saintlike, and yet so warm and cheerful, and “studious of household good;” her character throughout is so emphatically simplex munditiis, that no one can regard her without an affectionate admiration. There is scarcely any thing more amiable in romance; and the thought, that it is all real, occurs most opportunely to confirm and sanction our delight. We dare not venture upon a more detailed account of her life; our coarse attempt would but spoil it; and therefore we more earnestly exhort all our readers to study Lady Griseld for themselves, and spare us that unthankful labour. They will find her as winning as we have said; and described in this “Legend” with a gentle ardour, an unconscious dignity, a sedulous faithfulness, befitting her character, and of kindred to it. All this is, no doubt, far enough from having any connexion with that sublime species of poetry, which gains its end by inflaming our hearts or expanding our imaginations; but it is an exquisite specimen of that humbler species, which seeks to enliven our kindly sympathies, and brighten the scenery of our common existence. The style both of language and of versification is well adapted to the style of thought. Miss Baillie’s language has always



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many good qualities, particularly in the present volume. It is never inflated; it has often a careless elegance, and at times a shrewd expressiveness, to which few living authors have attained. But in the case before us, there is joined with those beauties a certain airy carriage, a witching coquetry, if we may speak so, which it is as impossible to resist as to describe. Our readers will naturally call for a sample of those various and vaunted excellencies—outward as well as substantial; and none that we can select will convey any adequate impression. The following is all we are able to afford: it contains but a few simple flowers out of a most fragrant and healthful garden. Sir Patrick Hume has fled to Holland, (for his share in Monmouth’s invasion,) and is living there with his family—poor, but comforted in the hope of better times. “And well, with ready hand and heart, Each task of toilsome duty taking Did one dear inmate play her part, The last asleep, the earliest waking. Her hands each nightly couch prepared, And frugal meal on which they fared; Unfolding spread the servet white, And deck’d the board with tankard bright. Thro’ fretted hose and garment rent, Her tiny needle deftly went, Till hateful penury, so graced, Was scarcely in their dwelling traced. With rev’rence to the old she clung, With sweet affection to the young. To her was crabbed lesson said, To her the sly petition made. To her was told each petty care; By her was lisp’d the tardy prayer, What time the urchin, half undrest And half asleep, was put to rest. There is a sight all hearts beguiling,— A youthful mother to her infant smiling, Who, (which,) with spread arms and dancing feet, And cooing voice returns its answer sweet. Who does not love to see the grandame mild,

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essays on literature Lesson with yearning looks the list’ning child? But ’tis a thing of saintlier nature, Amidst her friends of pigmy stature, To see the maid in youth’s fair bloom, A guardian sister’s charge assume, And, like a touch of angel’s bliss, Receive from each its grateful kiss.— To see them, when their hour of love is past, Aside their grave demeanour cast. With her in mimic war they wrestle; Beneath her twisted robe they nestle; Upon her glowing cheek they revel, Low bended to their tiny level; While oft, her lovely neck bestriding Crows some arch imp, like huntsman riding. This is a sight the coldest heart may feel,— To make down rugged cheeks the kindly tear to steal. But when the toilsome sun was set, And ev’ning groups together met, (For other strangers shelter’d there Would seek with them to lighten care,) Her feet still in the dance mov’d lightest, Her eye with merry glance beam’d brightest, Her braided locks were coil’d the neatest, Her carol song was trilled the sweetest; And round the fire, in winter cold No archer tale than hers was told.”

We meant to say a few words in favour of the “Elden tree” and “Malcolm’s heir,” two of the ballads which conclude this volume. But it is impossible now; nor is it necessary: we can part in kindness with Miss Baillie here as well as elsewhere; and we wish to part in kindness with one whom we love so much. For though we have censured freely, it has been more in sorrow than in anger; in sorrow to see such efforts wasted on a task which no human powers could fully accomplish. We never distrusted Miss Baillie’s talents, and the present volume has raised them in our esteem. It is only her mode of employing them that we condemn. If she can find any more Lady Griselds, it will be well: but we would



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advise her to be cautious in future of meddling with such persons as Wallace or Columbus,—and above all, of treating them by way of “Metrical Legend.” 5

BURNS.

The Life of Robert Burns. By J. G. Lockhart, LL.B. Edinburgh, 1828. In the modern arrangements of society, it is no uncommon thing that a man of genius must, like Butler, ‘ask for bread and receive a stone;’ for in spite of our grand maxim of supply and demand, it is by no means the highest excellence that men are most forward to recognise. The inventor of a spinning-jenny is pretty sure of his reward in his own day; but the writer of a true poem, like the apostle of a true religion, is nearly as sure of the contrary. We do not know whether it is not an aggravation of the injustice, that there is generally a posthumous retribution. Robert Burns, in the course of Nature, might yet have been living: but his short life was spent in toil and penury; and he died in the prime of his manhood, miserable and neglected; and yet already a brave mausoleum shines over his dust, and more than one splendid monument has been reared in other places to his fame: the street where he languished in poverty is called by his name; the highest personages in our literature have been proud to appear as his commentators and admirers, and here is the sixth narrative of his Life, that has been given to the world! Mr. Lockhart thinks it necessary to apologize for this new attempt on such a subject: but his readers, we believe, will readily acquit him; or, at worst, will censure only the performance of his task, not the choice of it. The character of Burns, indeed, is a theme that cannot easily become either trite or exhausted; and will probably gain rather than lose in its dimensions by the distance to which it is removed by Time. No man, it has been said, is a hero to his valet: and this is probably true; but the fault is at least as likely to be the valet’s as the hero’s: 29

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For it is certain that to the vulgar eye few things are wonderful that are not distant. It is difficult for men to believe that the man, the mere man whom they see, nay perhaps painfully feel, toiling at their side through the poor jostlings of existence, can be made of finer clay than themselves. Suppose that some dining acquaintance of Sir Thomas Lucy’s, and neighbour of John a Combe’s, had snatched an hour or two from the preservation of his game, and written us a Life of Shakspeare! What dissertations should we not have had,—not on Hamlet and The Tempest, but on the wool-trade, and deer-stealing, and the libel and vagrant laws; and how the Poacher became a Player; and how Sir Thomas and Mr. John had Christian bowels, and did not push him to extremities! In like manner we believe, with respect to Burns, that till the companions of his pilgrimage, the Honourable Excise Commissioners, and the Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt, and the Dumfries Aristocracy, and all the Squires and Earls, equally with the Ayr Writers, and the New and Old Light Clergy, whom he had to do with, shall have become invisible in the darkness of the Past, or visible only by light borrowed from his juxtaposition, it will be difficult to measure him by any true standard, or to estimate what he really was and did, in the eighteenth century, for his country and the world. It will be difficult, we say; but still a fair problem for literary historians; and repeated attempts will give us repeated approximations. His former Biographers have done something, no doubt, but by no means a great deal, to assist us. Dr. Currie and Mr. Walker, the principal of these writers, have both, we think, mistaken one essentially important thing: Their own and the world’s true relation to their author, and the style in which it became such men to think and to speak of such a man. Dr. Currie loved the poet truly; more perhaps than he avowed to his readers, or even to himself; yet he everywhere introduces him with a certain patronising, apologetic air; as if the polite public might think it strange and half unwarrantable that he, a man of science, a scholar, and gentleman, should do such honour to a rustic. In all this, however, we readily admit that his fault was not want of love, but weakness of faith; and regret that the first and kindest of all our poet’s biographers, should not have seen farther, or believed more boldly what he saw. Mr. Walker offends more deeply in the same kind: and both err alike in presenting us with a detached catalogue of his several supposed attributes, virtues, and vices, instead of a delineation of the resulting character as a living unity. This, however, is not painting a portrait; but gauging the length and breadth of the several features, and jotting down their dimensions in arithmetical ciphers. Nay, it is not so much as this: for we are yet to learn by what arts or instruments the mind could be so measured and gauged.

burns 31 Mr. Lockhart, we are happy to say, has avoided both these errors. He uniformly treats Burns as the high and remarkable man the public voice has now pronounced him to be: and in delineating him, he has avoided the method of separate generalities, and rather sought for characteristic incidents, habits, actions, sayings; in a word, for aspects which exhibit the whole man, as he looked and lived among his fellows. The book accordingly, with all its deficiencies, gives more insight, we think, into the true character of Burns, than any prior biography: though, being written on the very popular and condensed scheme of an article for Constable’s Miscellany, it has less depth than we could have wished and expected from a writer of such power; and contains rather more, and more multifarious quotations, than belong of right to an original production. Indeed, Mr. Lockhart’s own writing is generally so good, so clear, direct and nervous, that we seldom wish to see it making place for another man’s. However, the spirit of the work is throughout candid, tolerant, and anxiously conciliating; compliments and praises are liberally distributed, on all hands, to great and small; and, as Mr. Morris Birkbeck observes of the society in the backwoods of America, ‘the courtesies of polite life are never lost sight of for a moment.’ But there are better things than these in the volume; and we can safely testify, not only that it is easily and pleasantly read a first time, but may even be without difficulty read again. Nevertheless, we are far from thinking that the problem of Burns’s Biography has yet been adequately solved. We do not allude so much to deficiency of facts or documents,—though of these we are still every day receiving some fresh accession,—as to the limited and imperfect application of them to the great end of Biography. Our notions upon this subject may perhaps appear extravagant; but if an individual is really of consequence enough to have his life and character recorded for public remembrance, we have always been of opinion, that the public ought to be made acquainted with all the inward springs and relations of his character. How did the world and man’s life, from his particular position, represent themselves to his mind? How did co-existing circumstances modify him from without; how did he modify these from within? With what endeavours and what efficacy rule over them; with what resistance and what suffering sink under them? In one word, what and how produced was the effect of society on him; what and how produced was his effect on society? He who should answer these questions, in regard to any individual, would, as we believe, furnish a model of perfection in Biography. Few individuals, indeed, can deserve such a study; and many lives will be written, and, for the gratification of innocent curiosity, ought to be written, and read, and forgotten, which are

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not in this sense biographies. But Burns, if we mistake not, is one of these few individuals; and such a study, at least with such a result, he has not yet obtained. Our own contributions to it, we are aware, can be but scanty and feeble; but we offer them with good-will, and trust they may meet with acceptance from those they are intended for. Burns first came upon the world as a prodigy; and was, in that character, entertained by it, in the usual fashion, with loud, vague, tumultuous wonder, speedily subsiding into censure and neglect; till his early and most mournful death again awakened an enthusiasm for him, which, especially as there was now nothing to be done, and much to be spoken, has prolonged itself even to our own time. It is true, the ‘nine days’ have long since elapsed; and the very continuance of this clamour proves that Burns was no vulgar wonder. Accordingly, even in sober judgments, where, as years passed by, he has come to rest more and more exclusively on his own intrinsic merits, and may now be wellnigh shorn of that casual radiance, he appears not only as a true British poet, but as one of the most considerable British men of the eighteenth century. Let it not be objected that he did little: He did much, if we consider where and how. If the work performed was small, we must remember that he had his very materials to discover; for the metal he worked in lay hid under the desert moor, where no eye but his had guessed its existence; and we may almost say that, with his own hand, he had to construct the tools for fashioning it. For he found himself in deepest obscurity, without help, without instruction, without model; or with models only of the meanest sort. An educated man stands, as it were, in the midst of a boundless arsenal and magazine, filled with all the weapons and engines which man’s skill has been able to devise from the earliest time; and he works accordingly, with a strength borrowed from all past ages. How different is his state who stands on the outside of that storehouse, and feels that its gates must be stormed, or remain forever shut against him! His means are the commonest and rudest; the mere work done is no measure of his strength. A dwarf behind his steam-engine may remove mountains; but no dwarf will hew them down with the pickaxe; and he must be a Titan that hurls them abroad with his arms. It is in this last shape that Burns presents himself. Born in an age the most prosaic Britain had yet seen, and in a condition the most disadvantageous, where his mind, if it accomplished aught, must accomplish it under the pressure of continual bodily toil, nay, of penury and desponding apprehension of the worst evils, and with no furtherance but such knowledge as dwells in a poor man’s hut, and the rhymes of a Ferguson or Ramsay for his standard of beauty, he sinks not

burns 33 under all these impediments: Through the fogs and darkness of that obscure region, his lynx eye discerns the true relations of the world and human life; he grows into intellectual strength, and trains himself to intellectual expertness. Impelled by the expansive movement of his own irrepressible soul, he struggles forward into the general view, and with haughty modesty lays down before us, as the fruit of his labour, a gift, which Time has now pronounced imperishable. Add to all this, that his darksome drudging childhood and youth was by far the kindliest era of his whole life; and that he died in his thirty-seventh year: and then ask if it be strange that his poems are imperfect, and of small extent, or that his genius attained no mastery in its art? Alas, his Sun shone as through a tropical tornado; and the pale Shadow of Death eclipsed it at noon! Shrouded in such baleful vapours, the genius of Burns was never seen in clear azure splendour, enlightening the world: But some beams from it did, by fits, pierce through; and it tinted those clouds with rainbow and orient colours into a glory and stern grandeur, which men silently gazed on, with wonder and tears! We are anxious not to exaggerate; for it is exposition rather than admiration that our readers require of us here; and yet to avoid some tendency to that side, is no easy matter. We love Burns, and we pity him; and love and pity are prone to magnify. Criticism, it is sometimes thought, should be a cold business; we are not so sure of this; but at all events, our concern with Burns is not exclusively that of critics. True and genial as his poetry must appear, it is not chiefly as a poet, but as a man, that he interests and affects us. He was often advised to write a tragedy: time and means were not lent him for this; but through life he enacted a tragedy, and one of the deepest. We question whether the world has since witnessed so utterly sad a scene; whether Napoleon himself, left to brawl with Sir Hudson Lowe, and perish on his rock, ‘amid the melancholy main,’ presented to the reflecting mind such a ‘spectacle of pity and fear,’ as did this intrinsically nobler, gentler, and perhaps greater soul, wasting itself away in a hopeless struggle with base entanglements, which coiled closer and closer round him, till only Death opened him an outlet. Conquerors are a class of men with whom, for most part, the world could well dispense; nor can the hard intellect, the unsympathizing loftiness, and high but selfish enthusiasm of such persons, inspire us in general with any affection; at best, it may excite amazement; and their fall, like that of a pyramid, will be beheld with a certain sadness and awe. But a true Poet, a man in whose heart resides some effluence of Wisdom, some tone of the ‘Eternal Melodies,’ is the most precious gift that can be bestowed on a generation: we see in him a freer, purer developement of whatever is noblest

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in ourselves; his life is a rich lesson to us, and we mourn his death, as that of a benefactor who loved and taught us. Such a gift had Nature in her bounty bestowed on us in Robert Burns; but with queenlike indifference she cast it from her hand, like a thing of no moment; and it was defaced and torn asunder, as an idle bauble, before we recognised it. To the ill-starred Burns was given the power of making man’s life more venerable, but that of wisely guiding his own life was not given. Destiny—for so in our ignorance we must speak—his faults, the faults of others, proved too hard for him; and that spirit, which might have soared, could it but have walked, soon sank to the dust, its glorious faculties trodden under foot in the blossom, and died, we may almost say, without ever having lived. And so kind and warm a soul; so full of inborn riches, of love to all living and lifeless things! How his heart flows out in sympathy over universal Nature; and in her bleakest provinces, discerns a beauty and a meaning! The ‘Daisy’ falls not unheeded under his ploughshare; nor the ruined nest of that ‘wee, cowering, timorous beastie,’ cast forth, after all its provident pains, to ‘thole the sleety dribble, and cranreuch cauld.’ The ‘hoar visage’ of Winter delights him: he dwells with a sad and oft-returning fondness in these scenes of solemn desolation; but the voice of the tempest becomes an anthem to his ears; he loves to walk in the sounding woods, for ‘it raises his thoughts to Him that walketh on the wings of the wind.’ A true Poet-soul, for it needs but to be struck, and the sound it yields will be music! But observe him chiefly as he mingles with his brother men. What warm, all-comprehending fellow-feeling, what trustful, boundless love, what generous exaggeration of the object loved! His rustic friend, his nut-brown maiden, are no longer mean and homely, but a hero and a queen, whom he prizes as the paragons of Earth. The rough scenes of Scottish life, not seen by him in any Arcadian illusion, but in the rude contradiction, in the smoke and soil of a too harsh reality, are still lovely to him: Poverty is indeed his companion, but Love also, and Courage; the simple feelings, the worth, the nobleness, that dwell under the straw roof, are dear and venerable to his heart: and thus over the lowest provinces of man’s existence, he pours the glory of his own soul; and they rise, in shadow and sunshine, softened and brightened into a beauty which other eyes discern not in the highest. He has a just self-consciousness, which too often degenerates into pride; yet it is a noble pride, for defence, not for offence, no cold, suspicious feeling, but a frank and social one. The Peasant Poet bears himself, we might say, like a King in exile: he is cast among the low, and feels himself equal to the highest; yet he claims no rank, that none may be disputed to him. The forward he can repel, the supercilious he can subdue; pretensions of

burns 35 wealth or ancestry are of no avail with him; there is a fire in that dark eye, under which the ‘insolence of condescension’ cannot thrive. In his abasement, in his extreme need, he forgets not for a moment the majesty of Poetry and Manhood. And yet, far as he feels himself above common men, he wanders not apart from them, but mixes warmly in their interests; nay, throws himself into their arms; and, as it were, intreats them to love him. It is moving to see how, in his darkest despondency, this proud being still seeks relief from friendship; unbosoms himself, often to the unworthy; and, amid tears, strains to his glowing heart a heart that knows only the name of friendship. And yet he was ‘quick to learn;’ a man of keen vision, before whom common disguises afforded no concealment. His understanding saw through the hollowness even of accomplished deceivers; but there was a generous credulity in his Heart. And so did our Peasant show himself among us; ‘a soul like an Æolian harp, in whose strings the vulgar wind, as it passed through them, changed itself into articulate melody.’ And this was he for whom the world found no fitter business than quarrelling with smugglers and vintners, computing excise dues upon tallow, and gauging alebarrels! In such toils was that mighty Spirit sorrowfully wasted; and a hundred years may pass on, before another such is given us to waste. All that remains of Burns, the Writings he has left, seem to us, as we hinted above, no more than a poor mutilated fraction of what was in him; brief, broken glimpses of a genius that could never show itself complete; that wanted all things for completeness: culture, leisure, true effort, nay, even length of life. His poems are, with scarcely any exception, mere occasional effusions, poured forth with little premeditation, expressing, by such means as offered, the passion, opinion, or humour of the hour. Never in one instance was it permitted him to grapple with any subject with the full collection of his strength, to fuse and mould it in the concentrated fire of his genius. To try by the strict rules of Art such imperfect fragments, would be at once unprofitable and unfair. Nevertheless, there is something in these poems, marred and defective as they are, which forbids the most fastidious student of poetry to pass them by. Some sort of enduring quality they must have: for, after fifty years of the wildest vicissitudes in poetic taste, they still continue to be read; nay, are read more and more eagerly, more and more extensively; and this not only by literary virtuosos, and that class upon whom transitory causes operate most strongly, but by all classes, down to the most hard, unlettered, and truly natural class, who read little, and especially no poetry, except because they find pleasure in it. The grounds of so singular and wide a popularity, which extends, in a literal sense, from the palace to the hut,

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and over all regions where the English tongue is spoken, are well worth inquiring into. After every just deduction, it seems to imply some rare excellence in these works. What is that excellence? To answer this question will not lead us far. The excellence of Burns is, indeed, among the rarest, whether in poetry or prose; but, at the same time, it is plain and easily recognised: his Sincerity, his indisputable air of Truth. Here are no fabulous woes or joys; no hollow fantastic sentimentalities; no wiredrawn refinings, either in thought or feeling: the passion that is traced before us has glowed in a living heart; the opinion he utters has risen in his own understanding, and been a light to his own steps. He does not write from hearsay, but from sight and experience; it is the scenes that he has lived and laboured amidst, that he describes: those scenes, rude and humble as they are, have kindled beautiful emotions in his soul, noble thoughts, and definite resolves; and he speaks forth what is in him, not from any outward call of vanity or interest, but because his heart is too full to be silent. He speaks it with such melody and modulation as he can; ‘in homely rustic jingle;’ but it is his own, and genuine. This is the grand secret for finding readers and retaining them: let him who would move and convince others, be first moved and convinced himself. Horace’s rule, Si vis me flere, is applicable in a wider sense than the literal one. To every poet, to every writer, we might say: Be true, if you would be believed. Let a man but speak forth with genuine earnestness the thought, the emotion, the actual condition, of his own heart, and other men, so strangely are we all knit together by the tie of sympathy, must and will give heed to him. In culture, in extent of view, we may stand above the speaker, or below him; but in either case, his words, if they are earnest and sincere, will find some response within us; for in spite of all casual varieties in outward rank, or inward, as face answers to face, so does the heart of man to man. This may appear a very simple principle, and one which Burns had little merit in discovering. True, the discovery is easy enough: but the practical appliance is not easy; is indeed the fundamental difficulty which all poets have to strive with, and which scarcely one in the hundred ever fairly surmounts. A head too dull to discriminate the true from the false; a heart too dull to love the one at all risks, and to hate the other in spite of all temptations, are alike fatal to a writer. With either, or, as more commonly happens, with both, of these deficiencies, combine a love of distinction, a wish to be original, which is seldom wanting, and we have Affectation, the bane of literature, as Cant, its elder brother, is of morals. How often does the one and the other front us, in poetry, as in life! Great poets themselves are not always free of this vice; nay, it

burns 37 is precisely on a certain sort and degree of greatness that it is most commonly ingrafted. A strong effort after excellence will sometimes solace itself with a mere shadow of success; he who has much to unfold, will sometimes unfold it imperfectly. Byron, for instance, was no common man: yet if we examine his poetry with this view, we shall find it far enough from faultless. Generally speaking, we should say that it is not true. He refreshes us, not with the divine fountain, but too often with vulgar strong waters, stimulating indeed to the taste, but soon ending in dislike, or even nausea. Are his Harolds and Giaours, we would ask, real men, we mean, poetically consistent and conceivable men? Do not these characters, does not the character of their author, which more or less shines through them all, rather appear a thing put on for the occasion; no natural or possible mode of being, but something intended to look much grander than nature? Surely, all these stormful agonies, this volcanic heroism, superhuman contempt, and moody desperation, with so much scowling, and teeth-gnashing, and other sulphurous humour, is more like the brawling of a player in some paltry tragedy, which is to last three hours, than the bearing of a man in the business of life, which is to last three score and ten years. To our minds, there is a taint of this sort, something which we should call theatrical, false, affected, in every one of these otherwise so powerful pieces. Perhaps Don Juan, especially the latter parts of it, is the only thing approaching to a sincere work, he ever wrote; the only work where he showed himself, in any measure, as he was; and seemed so intent on his subject as, for moments, to forget himself. Yet Byron hated this vice; we believe, heartily detested it: nay, he had declared formal war against it in words. So difficult is it even for the strongest to make this primary attainment, which might seem the simplest of all: to read its own consciousness without mistakes, without errors involuntary or wilful! We recollect no poet of Burns’s susceptibility who comes before us from the first, and abides with us to the last, with such a total want of affectation. He is an honest man, and an honest writer. In his successes and his failures, in his greatness and his littleness, he is ever clear, simple, true, and glitters with no lustre but his own. We reckon this to be a great virtue; to be, in fact, the root of most other virtues, literary as well as moral. Here, however, let us say, it is to the Poetry of Burns that we now allude; to those writings which he had time to meditate, and where no special reason existed to warp his critical feeling, or obstruct his endeavour to fulfil it. Certain of his Letters, and other fractions of prose composition, by no means deserve this praise. Here, doubtless, there is not the same natural truth of style; but on the contrary, something not only stiff, but strained and twisted; a certain high-

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flown inflated tone; the stilting emphasis of which contrasts ill with the firmness and rugged simplicity of even his poorest verses. Thus no man, it would appear, is altogether unaffected. Does not Shakspeare himself sometimes premeditate the sheerest bombast! But even with regard to these Letters of Burns, it is but fair to state that he had two excuses. The first was his comparative deficiency in language. Burns, though for most part he writes with singular force, and even gracefulness, is not master of English prose, as he is of Scottish verse; not master of it, we mean, in proportion to the depth and vehemence of his matter. These Letters strike us as the effort of a man to express something which he has no organ fit for expressing. But a second and weightier excuse is to be found in the peculiarity of Burns’s social rank. His correspondents are often men whose relation to him he has never accurately ascertained; whom therefore he is either forearming himself against, or else unconsciously flattering, by adopting the style he thinks will please them. At all events, we should remember that these faults even in his Letters, are not the rule, but the exception. Whenever he writes, as one would ever wish to do, to trusted friends and on real interests, his style becomes simple, vigorous, expressive, sometimes even beautiful. His Letters to Mrs. Dunlop are uniformly excellent. But we return to his Poetry. In addition to its Sincerity, it has another peculiar merit, which indeed is but a mode, or perhaps a means, of the foregoing: this displays itself in his choice of subjects, or rather in his indifference as to subjects, and the power he has of making all subjects interesting. The ordinary poet, like the ordinary man, is forever seeking in external circumstances the help which can be found only in himself. In what is familiar and near at hand, he discerns no form or comeliness: home is not poetical but prosaic; it is in some past, distant, conventional heroic world, that poetry resides; were he there and not here, were he thus and not so, it would be well with him. Hence our innumerable host of rose-coloured Novels and iron-mailed Epics, with their locality not on the Earth, but somewhere nearer to the Moon. Hence our Virgins of the Sun, and our Knights of the Cross, malicious Saracens in turbans, and copper-coloured Chiefs in wampum, and so many other truculent figures from the heroic times or the heroic climates, who on all hands swarm in our poetry. Peace be with them! But yet as a great moralist proposed preaching to the men of this century, so would we fain preach to the poets ‘a sermon on the duty of staying at home.’ Let them be sure that heroic ages and heroic climates can do little for them. That form of life has attraction for us, less because it is better or nobler than our own, than simply because it is different; and even this attraction must be of the most transient sort. For will not our own age, one day, be an ancient one; and

burns 39 have as quaint a costume as the rest; not contrasted with the rest, therefore, but ranked along with them, in respect of quaintness? Does Homer interest us now, because he wrote of what passed beyond his native Greece, and two centuries before he was born; or because he wrote of what passed in God’s world, and in the heart of man, which is the same after thirty centuries? Let our poets look to this: is their feeling really finer, truer, and their vision deeper than that of other men, they have nothing to fear, even from the humblest subject; is it not so,—they have nothing to hope, but an ephemeral favour, even from the highest. The poet, we imagine, can never have far to seek for a subject: the elements of his art are in him, and around him on every hand; for him the Ideal world is not remote from the Actual, but under it and within it: nay, he is a poet, precisely because he can discern it there. Wherever there is a sky above him, and a world around him, the poet is in his place; for here too is man’s existence, with its infinite longings and small acquirings; its ever-thwarted, ever-renewed endeavours; its unspeakable aspirations, its fears and hopes that wander through Eternity; and all the mystery of brightness and of gloom that it was ever made of, in any age or climate, since man first began to live. Is there not the fifth act of a Tragedy in every death-bed, though it were a peasant’s, and a bed of heath? And are wooings and weddings obsolete, that there can be Comedy no longer? Or are men suddenly grown wise, that Laughter must no longer shake his sides, but be cheated of his Farce? Man’s life and nature is, as it was, and as it will ever be. But the poet must have an eye to read these things, and a heart to understand them; or they come and pass away before him in vain. He is a vates, a seer; a gift of vision has been given him. Has life no meanings for him, which another cannot equally decipher; then he is no poet, and Delphi itself will not make him one. In this respect, Burns, though not perhaps absolutely a great poet, better manifests his capability, better proves the truth of his genius, than if he had, by his own strength, kept the whole Minerva Press going, to the end of his literary course. He shows himself at least a poet of Nature’s own making; and Nature, after all, is still the grand agent in making poets. We often hear of this and the other external condition being requisite for the existence of a poet. Sometimes it is a certain sort of training; he must have studied certain things, studied for instance ‘the elder dramatists,’ and so learned a poetic language; as if poetry lay in the tongue, not in the heart. At other times we are told, he must be bred in a certain rank, and must be on a confidential footing with the higher classes; because, above all things, he must see the world. As to seeing the world, we apprehend this will cause him little difficulty, if he have but eyesight to see it

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with. Without eyesight, indeed, the task might be hard. The blind or the purblind man ‘travels from Dan to Beersheba, and finds it all barren.’ But happily every poet is born in the world; and sees it, with or against his will, every day and every hour he lives. The mysterious workmanship of man’s heart, the true light and the inscrutable darkness of man’s destiny, reveal themselves not only in capital cities, and crowded saloons, but in every hut and hamlet where men have their abode. Nay, do not the elements of all human virtues, and all human vices; the passions at once of a Borgia and of a Luther, lie written, in stronger or fainter lines, in the consciousness of every individual bosom, that has practised honest self-examination? Truly, this same world may be seen in Mossgiel and Tarbolton, if we look well, as clearly as it ever came to light in Crockford’s, or the Tuileries itself. But sometimes still harder requisitions are laid on the poor aspirant to poetry; for it is hinted that he should have been born two centuries ago; inasmuch as poetry, about that date, vanished from the earth, and became no longer attainable by men! Such cobweb speculations have, now and then, overhung the field of literature; but they obstruct not the growth of any plant there: the Shakspeare, or the Burns, unconsciously, and merely as he walks onward, silently brushes them away. Is not every genius an impossibility till he appear? Why do we call him new and original, if we saw where his marble was lying, and what fabric he could rear from it? It is not the material but the workman that is wanting. It is not the dark place that hinders, but the dim eye. A Scottish peasant’s life was the meanest and rudest of all lives, till Burns became a poet in it, and a poet of it; found it a man’s life, and therefore significant to men. A thousand battle-fields remain unsung; but the Wounded Hare has not perished without its memorial; a balm of mercy yet breathes on us from its dumb agonies, because a poet was there. Our Halloween had passed and repassed, in rude awe and laughter, since the era of the Druids; but no Theocritus, till Burns, discerned in it the materials of a Scottish Idyl: neither was the Holy Fair any Council of Trent, or Roman Jubilee; but nevertheless, Superstition, and Hypocrisy, and Fun having been propitious to him, in this man’s hand it became a poem, instinct with satire, and genuine comic life. Let but the true poet be given us, we repeat it, place him where and how you will, and true poetry will not be wanting. Independently of the essential gift of poetic feeling, as we have now attempted to describe it, a certain rugged sterling worth pervades whatever Burns has written: a virtue as of green fields and mountain breezes, dwells in his poetry; it is redolent of natural life, and hardy natural men. There is a decisive strength in him, and yet a sweet native gracefulness: he is tender, he is vehement, yet

burns 41 without constraint or too visible effort; he melts the heart, or inflames it, with a power which seems habitual and familiar to him. We see that in this man there was the gentleness, the trembling pity of a woman, with the deep earnestness, the force and passionate ardour of a hero. Tears lie in him, and consuming fire; as lightning lurks in the drops of the summer cloud. He has a resonance in his bosom for every note of human feeling; the high and the low, the sad, the ludicrous, the joyful, are welcome in their turns to his ‘lightly-moved and allconceiving spirit.’ And observe with what a fierce prompt force he grasps his subject, be it what it may! How he fixes, as it were, the full image of the matter in his eye; full and clear in every lineament; and catches the real type and essence of it, amid a thousand accidents and superficial circumstances, no one of which misleads him! Is it of reason; some truth to be discovered? No sophistry, no vain surface-logic detains him; quick, resolute, unerring, he pierces through into the marrow of the question; and speaks his verdict with an emphasis that cannot be forgotten. Is it of description; some visual object to be represented? No poet of any age or nation is more graphic than Burns: the characteristic features disclose themselves to him at a glance; three lines from his hand, and we have a likeness. And, in that rough dialect, in that rude, often awkward, metre, so clear and definite a likeness! It seems a draughtsman working with a burnt stick; and yet the burin of a Retzsch is not more expressive or exact. Of this last excellence, the plainest and most comprehensive of all, being indeed the root and foundation of every sort of talent, poetical or intellectual, we could produce innumerable instances from the writings of Burns. Take these glimpses of a snow-storm from his Winter Night (the italics are ours): When biting Boreas, fell and doure, Sharp shivers thro’ the leafless bow’r, And Phœbus gies a short-liv’d glowr Far south the lift, Dim-dark’ning thro’ the flaky show’r Or whirling drift: ’Ae night the storm the steeples rock’d, Poor labour sweet in sleep was lock’d, While burns wi’ snawy wreeths upchok’d, Wild-eddying swhirl, Or thro’ the mining outlet bock’d, Down headlong hurl.

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Are there not ‘descriptive touches’ here? The describer saw this thing; the essential feature and true likeness of every circumstance in it; saw, and not with the eye only. ‘Poor labour locked in sweet sleep;’ the dead stillness of man, unconscious, vanquished, yet not unprotected, while such strife of the material elements rages, and seems to reign supreme in loneliness: this is of the heart as well as of the eye!—Look also at his image of a thaw, and prophecied fall of the Auld Brig: When heavy, dark, continued, a’-day rains Wi’ deepening deluges o’erflow the plains; When from the hills where springs the brawling Coil, Or stately Lugar’s mossy fountains boil, Or where the Greenock winds his moorland course Or haunted Garpal* draws his feeble source, Arous’d by blustring winds, and spotting thowes, In mony a torrent down his snaw-broo rowes; While crashing ice, borne on the roaring speat, Sweeps dams and mills and brigs a’ to the gate; And from Glenbuck down to the Rottonkey, Auld Ayr is just one lengthen’d tumbling sea; Then down ye’ll hurl, Deil nor ye never rise! And dash the gumlie jaups up to the pouring skies.

The last line is in itself a Poussin-picture of that Deluge! The welkin has, as it were, bent down with its weight; the ‘gumlie jaups’ and the ‘pouring skies’ are mingled together; it is a world of rain and ruin.—In respect of mere clearness and minute fidelity, the Farmer’s commendation of his Auld Mare, in plough, or in cart, may vie with Homer’s Smithy of the Cyclops, or yoking of Priam’s Chariot. Nor have we forgotten stout Burn-the-wind and his brawny customers, inspired by Scotch Drink: but it is needless to multiply examples. One other trait of a much finer sort we select from multitudes of such among his Songs. It gives, in a single line, to the saddest feeling, the saddest environment and local habitation: The pale Moon is setting beyond the white wave, And Time is setting wi’ me O; * Fabulosus Hydaspes!

burns 43 Farewell false friends, false lover, farewell! I’ll nae mair trouble them nor thee O.

This clearness of sight we have called the foundation of all talent; for in fact, unless we see our object, how shall we know how to place or prize it, in our understanding, our imagination, our affections? Yet it is not in itself perhaps a very high excellence; but capable of being united indifferently with the strongest, or with ordinary powers. Homer surpasses all men in this quality: but strangely enough, at no great distance below him are Richardson and Defoe. It belongs, in truth, to what is called a lively mind; and gives no sure indication of the higher endowments that may exist along with it. In all the three cases we have mentioned, it is combined with great garrulity; their descriptions are detailed, ample, and lovingly exact; Homer’s fire bursts through, from time to time, as if by accident; but Defoe and Richardson have no fire. Burns, again, is not more distinguished by the clearness than by the impetuous force of his conceptions. Of the strength, the piercing emphasis with which he thought, his emphasis of expression may give a humble but the readiest proof. Who ever uttered sharper sayings than his; words more memorable, now by their burning vehemence, now by their cool vigour and laconic pith? A single phrase depicts a whole subject, a whole scene. We hear of ‘a gentleman that derived his patent of nobility direct from Almighty God.’ Our Scottish forefathers in the battle-field struggled forward ‘red-wat-shod:’ in this one word, a full vision of horror and carnage, perhaps too frightfully accurate for Art! In fact, one of the leading features in the mind of Burns is this vigour of his strictly intellectual perceptions. A resolute force is ever visible in his judgments, as in his feelings and volitions. Professor Stewart says of him, with some surprise: ‘All the faculties of Burns’s mind were, as far as I could judge, equally vigorous; and his predilection for poetry was rather the result of his own enthusiastic and impassioned temper, than of a genius exclusively adapted to that species of composition. From his conversation I should have pronounced him to be fitted to excel in whatever walk of ambition he had chosen to exert his abilities.’ But this, if we mistake not, is at all times the very essence of a truly poetical endowment. Poetry, except in such cases as that of Keats, where the whole consists in a weak-eyed maudlin sensibility, and a certain vague random tunefulness of nature, is no separate faculty, no organ which can be superadded to the rest, or disjoined from them; but rather the result of their general harmony and completion. The feelings, the gifts, that exist in the Poet, are those that exist, with more or less developement, in every human soul: the imagination, which shudders at the

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Hell of Dante, is the same faculty, weaker in degree, which called that picture into being. How does the Poet speak to men, with power, but by being still more a man than they? Shakspeare, it has been well observed, in the planning and completing of his tragedies, has shown an Understanding, were it nothing more, which might have governed states, or indited a Novum Organum. What Burns’s force of understanding may have been, we have less means of judging: it had to dwell among the humblest objects; never saw Philosophy, never rose, except by natural effort and for short intervals, into the region of great ideas. Nevertheless sufficient indication, if no proof sufficient, remains for us in his works: we discern the brawny movements of a gigantic though untutored strength, and can understand how, in conversation, his quick sure insight into men and things may, as much as aught else about him, have amazed the best thinkers of his time and country. But, unless we mistake, the intellectual gift of Burns is fine as well as strong. The more delicate relations of things could not well have escaped his eye, for they were intimately present to his heart. The logic of the senate and the forum is indispensable, but not all sufficient; nay, perhaps the highest Truth is that which will the most certainly elude it. For this logic works by words, and ‘the highest,’ it has been said, ‘cannot be expressed in words.’ We are not without tokens of an openness for this higher truth also, of a keen though uncultivated sense for it, having existed in Burns. Mr. Stewart, it will be remembered, ‘wonders,’ in the passage above quoted, that Burns had formed some distinct conception of the ‘doctrine of association.’ We rather think that far subtler things than the doctrine of association had from of old been familiar to him. Here for instance: ‘We know nothing,’ thus writes he, ‘or next to nothing, of the structure of our souls, so we cannot account for those seeming caprices in them, that one should be particularly pleased with this thing, or struck with that, which, on minds of a different cast, makes no extraordinary impression. I have some favourite flowers in spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the hare-bell, the fox-glove, the wild-brier rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight. I never hear the loud solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of grey plover in an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can this be owing. Are we a piece of machinery, which, like the Æolian harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident? or do these workings argue something within us above the trodden clod? I own myself partial to such proofs of those awful and important realities: a God

burns 45 that made all things, man’s immaterial and immortal nature, and a world of weal or woe beyond death and the grave.’

Force and fineness of understanding are often spoken of as something different from general force and fineness of nature, as something partly independent of them. The necessities of language so require it; but in truth these qualities are not distinct and independent: except in special cases, and from special causes, they ever go together. A man of strong understanding is generally a man of strong character; neither is delicacy in the one kind often divided from delicacy in the other. No one, at all events, is ignorant that in the Poetry of Burns, keenness of insight keeps pace with keenness of feeling; that his light is not more pervading than his warmth. He is a man of the most impassioned temper; with passions not strong only, but noble, and of the sort in which great virtues and great poems take their rise. It is reverence, it is Love towards all Nature that inspires him, that opens his eyes to its beauty, and makes heart and voice eloquent in its praise. There is a true old saying, that ‘Love furthers knowledge:’ but above all, it is the living essence of that knowledge which makes poets; the first principle of its existence, increase, activity. Of Burns’s fervid affection, his generous allembracing Love, we have spoken already, as of the grand distinction of his nature, seen equally in word and deed, in his Life and in his Writings. It were easy to multiply examples. Not man only, but all that environs man in the material and moral universe is lovely in his sight: ‘the hoary hawthorn,’ the ‘troop of grey plover,’ the ‘solitary curlew,’ all are dear to him; all live in this Earth along with him, and to all he is knit as in mysterious brotherhood. How touching is it, for instance, that amidst the gloom of personal misery, brooding over the wintry desolation without him and within him, he thinks of the ‘ourie cattle’ and ‘silly sheep,’ and their sufferings in the pitiless storm! I thought me on the ourie cattle, Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle O’ wintry war; Or thro’ the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle, Beneath a scaur. Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing, That in the merry months o’ spring, Delighted me to hear thee sing, What comes o’ thee?

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essays on Literature Where wilt thou cow’r thy chittering wing, And close thy ee?

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The tenant of the mean hut, with its ‘ragged roof and chinky wall,’ has a heart to pity even these! This, is worth several homilies on Mercy; for it is the voice of Mercy herself. Burns, indeed, lives in sympathy; his soul rushes forth into all realms of being; nothing that has existence can be indifferent to him. The very Devil, he cannot hate with right orthodoxy! But fare you weel, auld Nickie-ben; O wad ye tak a thought and men’! Ye aiblins might—I dinna ken— Still hae a stake; I’m wae to think upo’ yon den, Even for your sake!

“He is the father of curses and lies,” said Dr. Slop; “and is cursed and damned already.”—“I am sorry for it,” quoth my uncle Toby!—A Poet without Love, were a physical and metaphysical impossibility. But has it not been said in contradiction to this principle, that, ‘Indignation makes verses’? It has been so said, and is true enough: but the contradiction is apparent, not real. The Indignation which makes verses is, properly speaking, an inverted Love; the love of some right, some worth, some goodness, belonging to ourselves or others, which has been injured, and which this tempestuous feeling issues forth to defend and avenge. No selfish fury of heart, existing there as a primary feeling, and without its opposite, ever produced much Poetry: otherwise, we suppose, the Tiger were the most musical of all our choristers. Johnson said, he loved a good hater; by which he must have meant, not so much one that hated violently, as one that hated wisely; hated baseness from love of nobleness. However, in spite of Johnson’s paradox, tolerable enough for once in speech, but which need not have been so often adopted in print since then, we rather believe that good men deal sparingly in hatred, either wise or unwise: nay that a ‘good’ hater is still a desideratum in this world. The Devil, at least, who passes for the chief and best of that class, is said to be nowise an amiable character. Of the verses which Indignation makes, Burns has also given us specimens: and among the best that were ever given. Who will forget his ‘Dweller in yon Dungeon dark;’ a piece that might have been chaunted by the Furies of Æschylus?

burns 47 The secrets of the infernal Pit are laid bare; a boundless baleful ‘darkness visible;’ and streaks of hell-fire quivering madly in its black haggard bosom! Dweller in yon Dungeon dark, Hangman of Creation, mark! Who in widow’s weeds appears, Laden with unhonoured years, Noosing with care a bursting purse, Baited with many a deadly curse?

Why should we speak of Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled; since all know of it, from the king to the meanest of his subjects? This dithyrambic was composed on horseback; in riding in the middle of tempests, over the wildest Galloway moor, in company with a Mr. Syme, who, observing the poet’s looks, forbore to speak,—judiciously enough—for a man composing Bruce’s Address might be unsafe to trifle with. Doubtless this stern hymn was singing itself, as he formed it, through the soul of Burns: but to the external ear, it should be sung with the throat of the whirlwind. So long as there is warm blood in the heart of Scotchman or man, it will move in fierce thrills under this war-ode, the best, we believe, that was ever written by any pen. Another wild stormful Song, that dwells in our ear and mind with a strange tenacity, is Macpherson’s Farewell. Perhaps there is something in the tradition itself that co-operates. For was not this grim Celt, this shaggy Northland Cacus, that ‘lived a life of sturt and strife, and died by treacherie,’ was not he too one of the Nimrods and Napoleons of the earth, in the arena of his own remote misty glens, for want of a clearer and wider one? Nay, was there not a touch of grace given him? A fibre of love and softness, of poetry itself, must have lived in his savage heart; for he composed that air the night before his execution; on the wings of that poor melody, his better soul would soar away above oblivion, pain, and all the ignominy and despair, which, like an avalanche, was hurling him to the abyss! Here also, as at Thebes, and in Pelops’ line, was material Fate matched against man’s Freewill; matched in bitterest though obscure duel; and the ethereal soul sunk not, even in its blindness, without a cry which has survived it. But who, except Burns, could have given words to such a soul; words that we never listen to without a strange half-barbarous, half-poetic fellow-feeling? Sae rantingly, sae wantonly, Sae dauntingly gaed he;

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essays on Literature He play’d a spring, and danced it round, Below the gallows tree.

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Under a lighter disguise, the same principle of Love, which we have recognised as the great characteristic of Burns, and of all true poets, occasionally manifests itself in the shape of Humour. Everywhere, indeed, in his sunny moods, a full buoyant flood of mirth rolls through the mind of Burns; he rises to the high, and stoops to the low, and is brother and playmate to all Nature. We speak not of his bold and often irresistible faculty of caricature; for this is Drollery rather than Humour: But a much tenderer sportfulness dwells in him; and comes forth here and there, in evanescent and beautiful touches; as in his Address to the Mouse, or the Farmer’s Mare, or in his Elegy on Poor Mailie, which last may be reckoned his happiest effort of this kind. In these pieces, there are traits of a Humour as fine as that of Sterne; yet altogether different, original, peculiar—the Humour of Burns. Of the tenderness, the playful pathos, and many other kindred qualities of Burns’s Poetry, much more might be said; but now, with these poor outlines of a sketch, we must prepare to quit this part of our subject. To speak of his individual Writings, adequately, and with any detail, would lead us far beyond our limits. As already hinted, we can look on but few of these pieces as, in strict critical language, deserving the name of Poems; they are rhymed eloquence, rhymed pathos, rhymed sense; yet seldom essentially melodious, aerial, poetical. Tam o’ Shanter itself, which enjoys so high a favour, does not appear to us, at all decisively, to come under this last category. It is not so much a poem, as a piece of sparkling rhetoric; the heart and body of the story still lies hard and dead. He has not gone back, much less carried us back, into that dark, earnest, wondering age, when the tradition was believed, and when it took its rise; he does not attempt, by any new-modelling of his supernatural ware, to strike anew that deep mysterious chord of human nature, which once responded to such things; and which lives in us too, and will forever live, though silent now, or vibrating with far other notes, and to far different issues. Our German readers will understand us, when we say, that he is not the Tieck but the Musäus of this tale. Externally it is all green and living; yet look closer, it is no firm growth, but only ivy on a rock. The piece does not properly cohere; the strange chasm which yawns in our incredulous imaginations between the Ayr public-house and the gate of Tophet, is nowhere bridged over, nay, the idea of such a bridge is laughed at; and thus the Tragedy of the adventure becomes a mere drunken phantasmagoria, or manycoloured spectrum painted on ale-vapours, and the Farce alone has any reality.

burns 49 We do not say that Burns should have made much more of this tradition; we rather think that, for strictly poetical purposes, not much was to be made of it. Neither are we blind to the deep, varied, genial power displayed in what he has actually accomplished; but we find far more ‘Shakspearean’ qualities, as these of Tam o’ Shanter have been fondly named, in many of his other pieces; nay, we incline to believe, that this latter might have been written, all but quite as well, by a man who, in place of genius, had only possessed talent. Perhaps we may venture to say, that the most strictly poetical of all his ‘poems’ is one, which does not appear in Currie’s Edition; but has been often printed before and since, under the humble title of The Jolly Beggars. The subject truly is among the lowest in Nature; but it only the more shows our Poet’s gift in raising it into the domain of Art. To our minds, this piece seems thoroughly compacted; melted together, refined; and poured forth in one flood of true liquid harmony. It is light, airy, soft of movement; yet sharp and precise in its details; every face is a portrait; that raucle carlin, that wee Apollo, that Son of Mars, are Scottish, yet ideal; the scene is at once a dream, and the very Rag-castle of ‘Poosy Nansie.’ Farther, it seems in a considerable degree complete, a real self-supporting Whole, which is the highest merit in a poem. The blanket of the Night is drawn asunder for a moment; in full, ruddy, flaming light, these rough tatterdemalions are seen in their boisterous revel; for the strong pulse of Life vindicates its right to gladness even here; and when the curtain closes, we prolong the action, without effort; the next day as the last, our Caird and our Balladmonger are singing and soldering; their ‘brats and callets’ are hawking, begging, cheating; and some other night, in new combinations, they will wring from Fate another hour of wassail and good cheer. Apart from the universal sympathy with man which this again bespeaks in Burns, a genuine inspiration and no inconsiderable technical talent are manifested here. There is the fidelity, humour, warm life, and accurate painting and grouping of some Teniers, for whom hostlers and carousing peasants are not without significance. It would be strange, doubtless, to call this the best of Burns’s writings: we mean to say only, that it seems to us the most perfect of its kind, as a piece of poetical composition, strictly so called. In the Beggar’s Opera, in the Beggar’s Bush, as other critics have already remarked, there is nothing which, in real poetic vigour, equals this Cantata; nothing, as we think, which comes within many degrees of it. But by far the most finished, complete, and truly inspired pieces of Burns are, without dispute, to be found among his Songs. It is here that, although through a small aperture, his light shines with least obstruction; in its highest beauty, and pure sunny clearness. The reason may be, that Song is a brief simple

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species of composition; and requires nothing so much for its perfection, as genuine poetic feeling, genuine music of heart. Yet the Song has its rules equally with the Tragedy; rules which in most cases are poorly fulfilled, in many cases are not so much as felt. We might write a long essay on the Songs of Burns; which we reckon by far the best that Britain has yet produced: for indeed since the era of Queen Elizabeth, we know not that, by any other hand, aught truly worth attention has been accomplished in this department. True, we have songs enough ‘by persons of quality’; we have tawdry, hollow, wine-bred, madrigals; many a rhymed speech ‘in the flowing and watery vein of Ossorius the Portugal Bishop,’ rich in sonorous words, and, for moral, dashed perhaps with some tint of a sentimental sensuality; all which many persons cease not from endeavouring to sing; though for most part, we fear, the music is but from the throat outwards, or at best from some region far enough short of the Soul; not in which, but in a certain inane Limbo of the Fancy, or even in some vaporous debateable-land on the outskirts of the Nervous System, most of such madrigals and rhymed speeches seem to have originated. With the Songs of Burns we must not name these things. Independently of the clear, manly, heartfelt sentiment that ever pervades his poetry, his Songs are honest in another point of view: in form, as well as in spirit. They do not affect to be set to music, but they actually and in themselves are music; they have received their life, and fashioned themselves together, in the medium of Harmony, as Venus rose from the bosom of the sea. The story, the feeling, is not detailed, but suggested; not said, or spouted, in rhetorical completeness and coherence; but sung, in fitful gushes, in glowing hints, in fantastic breaks, in warblings not of the voice only, but of the whole mind. We consider this to be the essence of a song; and that no songs since the little careless catches, and, as it were, drops of song, which Shakspeare has here and there sprinkled over his Plays, fulfil this condition in nearly the same degree as most of Burns’s do. Such grace and truth of external movement, too, presupposes in general a corresponding force and truth of sentiment, and inward meaning. The Songs of Burns are not more perfect in the former quality, than in the latter. With what tenderness he sings, yet with what vehemence and entireness! There is a piercing wail in his sorrow, the purest rapture in his joy; he burns with the sternest ire, or laughs with the loudest or slyest mirth; and yet he is sweet and soft, ‘sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet, and soft as their parting tear!’ If we farther take into account the immense variety of his subjects; how, from the loud flowing revel in Willie brew’d a peck o’ Maut, to the still, rapt enthusiasm of sadness for Mary in Heaven; from the glad kind greeting of Auld Langsyne, or the comic archness of Duncan Gray, to the fire-eyed fury of Scots, wha hae wi’

burns 51 Wallace bled, he has found a tone and words for every mood of man’s heart,—it will seem a small praise if we rank him as the first of all our Song-writers; for we know not where to find one worthy of being second to him. It is on his Songs, as we believe, that Burns’s chief influence as an author will ultimately be found to depend: nor, if our Fletcher’s aphorism is true, shall we account this a small influence. ‘Let me make the Songs of a people,’ said he, ‘and you shall make its Laws.’ Surely, if ever any Poet might have equalled himself with Legislators, on this ground, it was Burns. His Songs are already part of the mother-tongue not of Scotland only but of Britain, and of the millions that in all ends of the earth speak a British language. In hut and hall, as the heart unfolds itself in many-coloured joy and woe of existence, the name, the voice of that joy and that woe, is the name and voice which Burns has given them. Strictly speaking, perhaps, no British man has so deeply affected the thoughts and feelings of so many men, as this solitary and altogether private individual, with means, apparently the humblest. In another point of view, moreover, we incline to think that Burns’s influence may have been considerable: we mean, as exerted specially on the Literature of his country, at least on the Literature of Scotland. Among the great changes which British, particularly Scottish literature, has undergone since that period, one of the greatest will be found to consist in its remarkable increase of nationality. Even the English writers most popular in Burns’s time, were little distinguished for their literary patriotism, in this its best sense. A certain attenuated cosmopolitanism had, in good measure, taken place of the old insular home-feeling; literature was, as it were, without any local environment; was not nourished by the affections which spring from a native soil. Our Grays and Glovers seemed to write almost as if in vacuo; the thing written bears no mark of place; it is not written so much for Englishmen, as for men; or rather, which is the inevitable result of this, for certain Generalisations which philosophy termed men. Goldsmith is an exception: not so Johnson; the scene of his Rambler is little more English than that of his Rasselas. But if such was, in some degree, the case with England, it was, in the highest degree, the case with Scotland. In fact, our Scottish literature had at that period, a very singular aspect; unexampled, so far as we know, except perhaps at Geneva, where the same state of matters appears still to continue. For a long period after Scotland became British, we had no literature: at the date when Addison and Steele were writing their Spectators, our good Thomas Boston was writing, with the noblest intent, but alike in defiance of grammar and philosophy, his Fourfold State of Man. Then came the schisms in our National Church, and the fiercer schisms in our Body Politic: Theologic ink,

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and Jacobite blood, with gall enough in both cases, seemed to have blotted out the intellect of the country; however, it was only obscured, not obliterated. Lord Kames made nearly the first attempt at writing English; and ere long, Hume, Robertson, Smith, and a whole host of followers, attracted hither the eyes of all Europe. And yet in this brilliant resuscitation of our ‘fervid genius,’ there was nothing truly Scottish, nothing indigenous; except, perhaps, the natural impetuosity of intellect, which we sometimes claim, and are sometimes upbraided with, as a characteristic of our nation. It is curious to remark that Scotland, so full of writers, had no Scottish culture, nor indeed any English; our culture was almost exclusively French. It was by studying Racine and Voltaire, Batteux and Boileau, that Kames had trained himself to be a critic and philosopher: it was the light of Montesquieu and Mably that guided Robertson in his political speculations; Quesnay’s lamp that kindled the lamp of Adam Smith. Hume was too rich a man to borrow; and perhaps he reacted on the French more than he was acted on by them: but neither had he aught to do with Scotland; Edinburgh, equally with La Flèche, was but the lodging and laboratory, in which he not so much morally lived, as metaphysically investigated. Never, perhaps, was there a class of writers, so clear and well-ordered, yet so totally destitute, to all appearance, of any patriotic affection, nay, of any human affection whatever. The French wits of the period were as unpatriotic: but their general deficiency in moral principle, not to say their avowed sensuality and unbelief in all virtue, strictly so called, render this accountable enough. We hope, there is a patriotism founded on something better than prejudice; that our country may be dear to us, without injury to our philosophy; that in loving and justly prizing all other lands, we may prize justly, and yet love before all others our own stern Motherland, and the venerable Structure of social and moral Life, which Mind has through long ages been building up for us there. Surely there is nourishment for the better part of man’s heart in all this: surely the roots, that have fixed themselves in the very core of man’s being, may be so cultivated as to grow up not into briers, but into roses, in the field of his life! Our Scottish sages have no such propensities: the field of their life shows neither briers nor roses: but only a flat, continuous thrashing floor for Logic, whereon all questions, from the ‘Doctrine of Rent,’ to the ‘Natural History of Religion,’ are thrashed and sifted with the same mechanical impartiality! With Sir Walter Scott at the head of our literature, it cannot be denied that much of this evil is past, or rapidly passing away: our chief literary men, whatever other faults they may have, no longer live among us like a French Colony, or some knot of Propaganda Missionaries; but like natural-born subjects of the soil,

burns 53 partaking and sympathizing in all our attachments, humours, and habits. Our literature no longer grows in water, but in mould, and with the true racy virtues of the soil and climate. How much of this change may be due to Burns, or to any other individual, it might be difficult to estimate. Direct literary imitation of Burns was not to be looked for. But his example, in the fearless adoption of domestic subjects, could not but operate from afar; and certainly in no heart did the love of country ever burn with a warmer glow than in that of Burns: ‘a tide of Scottish prejudice,’ as he modestly calls this deep and generous feeling, ‘had been poured along his veins; and he felt that it would boil there till the floodgates shut in eternal rest.’ It seemed to him, as if he could do so little for his country, and yet would so gladly have done all. One small province stood open for him; that of Scottish Song, and how eagerly he entered on it; how devotedly he laboured there! In his toilsome journeyings, this object never quits him; it is the little happy-valley of his careworn heart. In the gloom of his own affliction, he eagerly searches after some lonely brother of the muse, and rejoices to snatch one other name from the oblivion that was covering it! These were early feelings, and they abode with him to the end. ——a wish, (I mind its power,) A wish, that to my latest hour Will strongly heave my breast;

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That I, for poor auld Scotland’s sake, Some useful plan or book could make, Or sing a sang at least. The rough bur Thistle spreading wide Amang the bearded bear, I turn’d my weeding-clips aside, And spared the symbol dear.

But to leave the mere literary character of Burns, which has already detained us too long. Far more interesting than any of his written works, as it appears to us, are his acted ones: the Life he willed, and was fated to lead among his fellow men. These Poems are but like little rhymed fragments scattered here and there in the grand unrhymed Romance of his earthly existence; and it is only when intercalated in this at their proper places, that they attain their full measure of significance. And this too, alas, was but a fragment! The plan of a mighty edifice had been sketched; some columns, porticoes, firm masses of building, stand completed; the rest more or less clearly indicated; with many a

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far-stretching tendency, which only studious and friendly eyes can now trace towards the purposed termination. For the work is broken off in the middle, almost in the beginning; and rises among us, beautiful and sad, at once unfinished and a ruin! If charitable judgment was necessary in estimating his Poems, and justice required that the aim and the manifest power to fulfil it, must often be accepted for the fulfilment; much more is this the case in regard to his Life, the sum and result of all his endeavours, where his difficulties came upon him not in detail only, but in mass; and so much has been left unaccomplished, nay, was mistaken, and altogether marred. Properly speaking, there is but one era in the life of Burns, and that the earliest. We have not youth and manhood; but only youth: For, to the end, we discern no decisive change in the complexion of his character; in his thirtyseventh year, he is still, as it were, in youth. With all that resoluteness of judgment, that penetrating insight, and singular maturity of intellectual power, exhibited in his writings, he never attains to any clearness regarding himself; to the last, he never ascertains his peculiar aim, even with such distinctness as is common among ordinary men; and therefore never can pursue it with that singleness of will, which insures success and some contentment to such men. To the last, he wavers between two purposes: glorying in his talent, like a true poet, he yet cannot consent to make this his chief and sole glory, and to follow it as the one thing needful, through poverty or riches, through good or evil report. Another far meaner ambition still cleaves to him; he must dream and struggle about a certain ‘Rock of Independence;’ which, natural and even admirable as it might be, was still but a warring with the world, on the comparatively insignificant ground of his being more completely or less completely supplied with money, than others; of his standing at a higher, or at a lower altitude in general estimation, than others. For the world still appears to him, as to the young, in borrowed colours: he expects from it what it cannot give to any man; seeks for contentment, not within himself, in action and wise effort, but from without, in the kindness of circumstances, in love, friendship, honour, pecuniary ease. He would be happy, not actively and in himself, but passively, and from some ideal cornucopia of Enjoyments, not earned by his own labour, but showered on him by the beneficence of Destiny. Thus, like a young man, he cannot gird himself up for any worthy well-calculated goal, but swerves to and fro, between passionate hope, and remorseful disappointment: rushing onwards with a deep tempestuous force, he surmounts or breaks asunder many a barrier; travels, nay, advances far, but advancing only under uncertain guidance, is ever and anon turned from his path: and to the last, cannot reach the only true happiness of

burns 55 a man, that of clear, decided Activity in the sphere, for which, by nature and circumstances, he has been fitted and appointed. We do not say these things in dispraise of Burns: nay, perhaps they but interest us the more in his favour. This blessing is not given soonest to the best; but rather, it is often the greatest minds that are latest in obtaining it; for where most is to be developed, most time may be required to develope it. A complex condition had been assigned him from without, as complex a condition from within: no ‘pre-established harmony’ existed between the clay soil of Mossgiel and the empyrean soul of Robert Burns; it was not wonderful that the adjustment between them should have been long postponed, and his arm long cumbered, and his sight confused, in so vast and discordant an economy, as he had been appointed steward over. Byron was, at his death, but a year younger than Burns; and through life, as it might have appeared, far more simply situated: yet in him too, we can trace no such adjustment, no such moral manhood; but at best, and only a little before his end, the beginning of what seemed such. By much the most striking incident in Burns’s Life is his journey to Edinburgh; but perhaps a still more important one, is his residence at Irvine, so early as in his twenty-third year. Hitherto his life had been poor and toil-worn; but otherwise not ungenial, and with all its distresses, by no means unhappy. In his parentage, deducting outward circumstances, he had every reason to reckon himself fortunate: his father was a man of thoughtful, intense, earnest character, as the best of our peasants are; valuing knowledge, possessing some, and, what is far better and rarer, open-minded for more; a man with a keen insight, and devout heart; reverent towards God, friendly therefore at once, and fearless towards all that God has made; in one word, though but a hard-handed peasant, a complete and fully unfolded Man. Such a father is seldom found in any rank of society; and was worth descending far in society to seek. Unfortunately, he was very poor; had he been even a little richer, almost never so little, the whole might have issued far otherwise. Mighty events turn on a straw; the crossing of a brook decides the conquest of the world. Had this William Burns’s small seven acres of nursery ground anywise prospered, the boy Robert had been sent to school; had struggled forward, as so many weaker men do, to some university; come forth not as a rustic wonder, but as a regular well-trained intellectual workman, and changed the whole course of British Literature—for it lay in him to have done this! But the nursery did not prosper; poverty sank his whole family below the help of even our cheap school system: Burns remained a hard-worked plough-boy, and British literature took its own course. Nevertheless, even in this rugged scene, there is much to nourish him. If he drudges, it is with his

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brother, and for his father and mother, whom he loves, and would fain shield from want. Wisdom is not banished from their poor hearth, nor the balm of natural feeling: the solemn words, Let us worship God, are heard there from a ‘priest-like father;’ if threatenings of unjust men throw mother and children into tears, these are tears not of grief only, but of holiest affection; every heart in that humble group feels itself the closer knit to every other; in their hard warfare they are there together, a ‘little band of brethren.’ Neither are such tears, and the deep beauty that dwells in them, their only portion. Light visits the hearts as it does the eyes of all living: there is a force, too, in this youth, that enables him to trample on misfortune; nay, to bind it under his feet to make him sport. For a bold, warm, buoyant humour of character has been given him; and so the thick-coming shapes of evil are welcomed with a gay, friendly irony, and in their closest pressure, he bates no jot of heart or hope. Vague yearnings of ambition fail not, as he grows up; dreamy fancies hang like cloud-cities around him; the curtain of Existence is slowly rising, in many-coloured splendour and gloom: and the auroral light of first love is gilding his horizon, and the music of song is on his path; and so he walks ——in glory and in joy, Behind his plough, upon the mountain side!

We ourselves know, from the best evidence, that up to this date, Burns was happy; nay, that he was the gayest, brightest, most fantastic, fascinating being to be found in the world; more so even than he ever afterwards appeared. But now, at this early age, he quits the paternal roof; goes forth into looser, louder, more exciting society; and becomes initiated in those dissipations, those vices, which a certain class of philosophers have asserted to be a natural preparative for entering on active life; a kind of mud-bath, in which the youth is, as it were, necessitated to steep, and, we suppose, cleanse himself, before the real toga of Manhood can be laid on him. We shall not dispute much with this class of philosophers; we hope they are mistaken; for Sin and Remorse so easily beset us at all stages of life, and are always such indifferent company, that it seems hard we should, at any stage, be forced and fated not only to meet, but to yield to them, and even serve for a term in their leprous armada. We hope it is not so. Clear we are, at all events, it cannot be the training one receives in this Devil’s-service, but only our determining to desert from it, that fits us for true manly Action. We become men, not after we have been dissipated, and disappointed in the chase of false pleasure; but after we have ascertained in any way,

burns 57 what impassable barriers hem us in through this life; how mad it is to hope for contentment to our infinite soul from the gifts of this extremely finite world; that a man must be sufficient for himself; and that for suffering and enduring there is no remedy but striving and doing. Manhood begins when we have in any way made truce with Necessity; begins even when we have surrendered to Necessity, as the most part only do; but begins joyfully and hopefully only when we have reconciled ourselves to Necessity; and thus, in reality, triumphed over it, and felt that in Necessity, we are free. Surely, such lessons as this last, which, in one shape or other, is the grand lesson for every mortal man, are better learned from the lips of a devout mother, in the looks and actions of a devout father, while the heart is yet soft and pliant, than in collision with the sharp adamant of Fate, attracting us to shipwreck us, when the heart is grown hard, and may be broken, before it will become contrite! Had Burns continued to learn this, as he was already learning it, in his father’s cottage, he would have learned it fully, which he never did—and been saved many a lasting aberration, many a bitter hour and year of remorseful sorrow. It seems to us another circumstance of fatal import in Burns’s history, that at this time too he became involved in the religious quarrels of his district; that he was enlisted and feasted, as the fighting man of the New-Light Priesthood, in their highly unprofitable warfare. At the tables of these free-minded clergy, he learned much more than was needful for him. Such liberal ridicule of fanaticism awakened in his mind scruples about Religion itself; and a whole world of Doubts, which it required quite another set of conjurors than these men to exorcise. We do not say that such an intellect as his could have escaped similar doubts, at some period of his history; or even that he could, at a later period, have come through them altogether victorious and unharmed: but it seems peculiarly unfortunate that this time, above all others, should have been fixed for the encounter. For now, with principles assailed by evil example from without, by ‘passions raging like demons’ from within, he had little need of sceptical misgivings to whisper treason in the heat of the battle, or to cut off his retreat if he were already defeated. He loses his feeling of innocence; his mind is at variance with itself; the old divinity no longer presides there; but wild Desires and wild Repentance alternately oppress him. Ere long, too, he has committed himself before the world; his character for sobriety, dear to a Scottish peasant, as few corrupted worldlings can even conceive, is destroyed in the eyes of men; and his only refuge consists in trying to disbelieve his guiltiness, and is but a refuge of lies. The blackest desperation now gathers over him, broken only by red lightnings of remorse. The whole fabric of his life is blasted asunder; for now

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not only his character, but his personal liberty, is to be lost; men and Fortune are leagued for his hurt; ‘hungry Ruin has him in the wind.’ He sees no escape but the saddest of all: exile from his loved country, to a country in every sense inhospitable and abhorrent to him. While the ‘gloomy night is gathering fast,’ in mental storm and solitude as well as in physical, he sings his wild farewell to Scotland: Farewell, my friends, farewell, my foes! My peace with these, my love with those: The bursting tears my heart declare; Adieu, my native banks of Ayr!

Light breaks suddenly in on him in floods; but still a false transitory light, and no real sunshine. He is invited to Edinburgh; hastens thither with anticipating heart; is welcomed as in a triumph, and with universal blandishment and acclamation; whatever is wisest, whatever is greatest, or loveliest there, gathers round him, to gaze on his face, to show him honour, sympathy, affection. Burns’s appearance among the sages and nobles of Edinburgh, must be regarded as one of the most singular phenomena in modern Literature; almost like the appearance of some Napoleon among the crowned sovereigns of modern Politics. For it is nowise as ‘a mockery king,’ set there by favour, transiently, and for a purpose, that he will let himself be treated; still less is he a mad Rienzi, whose sudden elevation turns his too weak head: but he stands there on his own basis; cool, unastonished, holding his equal rank from Nature herself; putting forth no claim which there is not strength in him, as well as about him, to vindicate. Mr. Lockhart has some forcible observations on this point: ‘It needs no effort of imagination,’ says he, ‘to conceive what the sensations of an isolated set of scholars (almost all either clergymen or professors) must have been in the presence of this big-boned, black-browed, brawny stranger, with his great flashing eyes, who, having forced his way among them from the plough-tail, at a single stride, manifested, in the whole strain of his bearing and conversation, a most thorough conviction that in the society of the most eminent men of his nation, he was exactly where he was entitled to be; hardly deigned to flatter them by exhibiting even an occasional symptom of being flattered by their notice; by turns calmly measured himself against the most cultivated understandings of his time in discussion; overpowered the bon mots of the most celebrated convivialists by broad floods of merriment, impregnated with all the burning life of genius; astounded bosoms habitually enveloped in the thrice-piled folds of social

burns 59 reserve, by compelling them to tremble—nay to tremble visibly—beneath the fearless touch of natural pathos; and all this without indicating the smallest willingness to be ranked among those professional ministers of excitement, who are content to be paid in money and smiles for doing what the spectators and auditors would be ashamed of doing in their own persons, even if they had the power of doing it; and last, and probably worst of all, who was known to be in the habit of enlivening societies which they would have scorned to approach, still more frequently than their own, with eloquence no less magnificent; with wit, in all likelihood still more daring; often enough, as the superiors whom he fronted without alarm might have guessed from the beginning, and had, ere long, no occasion to guess, with wit pointed at themselves.’

The farther we remove from this scene, the more singular will it seem to us: details of the exterior aspect of it are already full of interest. Most readers recollect Mr. Walker’s personal interviews with Burns as among the best passages of his Narrative: a time will come when this reminiscence of Sir Walter Scott’s, slight though it is, will also be precious. ‘As for Burns,’ writes Sir Walter, ‘I may truly say, Virgilium vidi tantum. I was a lad of fifteen in 1786-7, when he came first to Edinburgh, but had sense and feeling enough to be much interested in his poetry, and would have given the world to know him; but I had very little acquaintance with any literary people, and still less with the gentry of the west country, the two sets that he most frequented. Mr. Thomas Grierson was at that time a clerk of my father’s. He knew Burns, and promised to ask him to his lodgings to dinner, but had no opportunity to keep his word; otherwise I might have seen more of this distinguished man. As it was, I saw him one day at the late venerable Professor Fergusson’s, where there were several gentlemen of literary reputation, among whom I remember the celebrated Mr. Dugald Stewart. Of course, we youngsters sat silent, looked and listened. The only thing I remember which was remarkable in Burns’s manner, was the effect produced upon him by a print of Bunbury’s, representing a soldier lying dead on the snow, his dog sitting in misery on one side,—on the other, his widow, with a child in her arms. These lines were written beneath: “Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden’s plain, Perhaps that mother wept her soldier slain; Bent o’er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew, The big drops mingling with the milk he drew, Gave the sad presage of his future years, The child of misery baptized in tears.”

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‘Burns seemed much affected by the print, or rather by the ideas which it suggested to his mind. He actually shed tears. He asked whose the lines were, and it chanced that nobody but myself remembered that they occur in a half-forgotten poem of Langhorne’s, called by the unpromising title of “The Justice of Peace.” I whispered my information to a friend present, he mentioned it to Burns, who rewarded me with a look and a word, which, though of mere civility, I then received and still recollect with very great pleasure. ‘His person was strong and robust; his manners rustic, not clownish; a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity, which received part of its effect perhaps from one’s knowledge of his extraordinary talents. His features are represented in Mr. Nasmyth’s picture; but to me it conveys the idea that they are diminished, as if seen in perspective. I think his countenance was more massive than it looks in any of the portraits. I should have taken the poet, had I not known what he was, for a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch school, i. e. none of your modern agriculturists who keep labourers for their drudgery, but the douce gudeman who held his own plough. There was a strong expression of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and of a dark cast, which glowed (I say literally glowed) when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time. His conversation expressed perfect self-confidence, without the slightest presumption. Among the men who were the most learned of their time and country, he expressed himself with perfect firmness, but without the least intrusive forwardness; and when he differed in opinion, he did not hesitate to express it firmly, yet at the same time with modesty. I do not remember any part of his conversation distinctly enough to be quoted; nor did I ever see him again, except in the street, where he did not recognise me, as I could not expect he should. He was much caressed in Edinburgh; but (considering what literary emoluments have been since his day) the efforts made for his relief were extremely trifling. ‘I remember on this occasion I mention, I thought Burns’s acquaintance with English poetry was rather limited; and also, that having twenty times the abilities of Allan Ramsay and of Ferguson, he talked of them with too much humility as his models: there was doubtless national predilection in his estimate. ‘This is all I can tell you about Burns. I have only to add, that his dress corresponded with his manner. He was like a farmer dressed in his best to dine with the laird. I do not speak in malam partem, when I say I never saw a man in company with his superiors in station or information, more perfectly free from either the reality or the affectation of embarrassment. I was told, but did not observe it, that his address to females was extremely deferential, and always with a turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged their attention particularly. I have heard the late Duchess of Gordon remark this.—I do not know anything I can add to these recollections of forty years since.’

burns 61 The conduct of Burns under this dazzling blaze of favour; the calm, unaffected, manly manner, in which he not only bore it, but estimated its value, has justly been regarded as the best proof that could be given of his real vigour and integrity of mind. A little natural vanity, some touches of hypocritical modesty, some glimmerings of affectation, at least some fear of being thought affected, we could have pardoned in almost any man; but no such indication is to be traced here. In his unexampled situation the young peasant is not a moment perplexed; so many strange lights do not confuse him, do not lead him astray. Nevertheless, we cannot but perceive that this winter did him great and lasting injury. A somewhat clearer knowledge of men’s affairs, scarcely of their characters, it did afford him; but a sharper feeling of Fortune’s unequal arrangements in their social destiny it also left with him. He had seen the gay and gorgeous arena, in which the powerful are born to play their parts; nay, had himself stood in the midst of it; and he felt, more bitterly than ever, that here he was but a looker on, and had no part or lot in that splendid game. From this time a jealous indignant fear of social degradation takes possession of him; and perverts, so far as aught could pervert, his private contentment, and his feelings towards his richer fellows. It was clear to Burns that he had talent enough to make a fortune, or a hundred fortunes, could he but have rightly willed this; it was clear also that he willed something far different, and therefore could not make one. Unhappy it was that he had not power to choose the one, and reject the other; but must halt forever between two opinions, two objects; making hampered advancement towards either. But so is it with many men: we ‘long for the merchandise, yet would fain keep the price;’ and so stand chaffering with Fate, in vexatious altercation, till the Night come, and our fair is over! The Edinburgh Learned of that period were in general more noted for clearness of head than for warmth of heart: with the exception of the good old Blacklock, whose help was too ineffectual, scarcely one among them seems to have looked at Burns with any true sympathy, or indeed much otherwise than as at a highly curious thing. By the great also, he is treated in the customary fashion; entertained at their tables, and dismissed: certain modica of pudding and praise are, from time to time, gladly exchanged for the fascination of his presence; which exchange once effected, the bargain is finished, and each party goes his several way. At the end of this strange season, Burns gloomily sums up his gains and losses, and meditates on the chaotic future. In money he is somewhat richer: in fame and the show of happiness, infinitely richer; but in the substance of it, as poor as ever. Nay poorer, for his heart is now maddened still more with the fever of worldly Ambition; and through long years the disease

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will rack him with unprofitable sufferings, and weaken his strength for all true and nobler aims. What Burns was next to do or to avoid; how a man so circumstanced was now to guide himself towards his true advantage, might, at this point of time, have been a question for the wisest. It was a question, too, which apparently he was left altogether to answer for himself: of his learned or rich patrons it had not struck any individual to turn a thought on this so trivial matter. Without claiming for Burns the praise of perfect sagacity, we must say, that his Excise and Farm scheme does not seem to us a very unreasonable one; that we should be at a loss, even now, to suggest one decidedly better. Certain of his admirers have felt scandalized at his ever resolving to gauge; and would have had him lie at the pool, till the spirit of Patronage stirred the waters, that so, with one friendly plunge, all his sorrows might be healed. Unwise counsellors! They know not the manner of this spirit; and how, in the lap of most golden dreams, a man might have happiness, were it not that in the interim the he must die of hunger! It reflects credit on the manliness and sound sense of Burns, that he felt so early on what ground he was standing; and preferred self-help, on the humblest scale, to dependence and inaction, though with hope of far more splendid possibilities. But even these possibilities were not rejected in his scheme: he might expect, if it chanced that he had any friend, to rise, in no long period, into something even like opulence and leisure; while again, if it chanced that he had no friend, he could still live in security; and for the rest, he ‘did not intend to borrow honour from any profession.’ We reckon that his plan was honest and well-calculated: all turned on the execution of it. Doubtless it failed; yet not, we believe, from any vice inherent in itself. Nay, after all, it was no failure of external means, but of internal, that overtook Burns. His was no bankruptcy of the purse, but of the soul; to his last day, he owed no man anything. Meanwhile he begins well: with two good and wise actions. His donation to his mother, munificent from a man whose income had lately been seven pounds a-year, was worthy of him, and not more than worthy. Generous also, and worthy of him, was the treatment of the woman whose life’s welfare now depended on his pleasure. A friendly observer might have hoped serene days for him: his mind is on the true road to peace with itself: what clearness he still wants will be given as he proceeds; for the best teacher of duties that still lie dim to us, is the Practice of those we see, and have at hand. Had the ‘patrons of genius,’ who could give him nothing, but taken nothing from him, at least nothing more! The wounds of his heart would have healed, vulgar ambition would have died away. Toil and Frugality would have been welcome, since Virtue dwelt with

burns 63 them, and Poetry would have shone through them as of old; and in her clear ethereal light, which was his own by birthright, he might have looked down on his earthly destiny, and all its obstructions, not with patience only, but with love. But the patrons of genius would not have it so. Picturesque tourists,* all manner of fashionable danglers after literature, and, far worse, all manner of convivial Mecænases, hovered round him in his retreat; and his good as well as his weak qualities secured them influence over him. He was flattered by their notice; and his warm social nature made it impossible for him to shake them off, and hold on his way apart from them. These men, as we believe, were proximately the means of his ruin. Not that they meant him any ill; they only meant themselves a little good; if he suffered harm, let him look to it! But they wasted his precious time and his precious talent; they disturbed his composure, broke down his returning habits of temperance and assiduous contented exertion. Their pampering was baneful to him; their cruelty, which soon followed, was equally baneful. The old grudge against Fortune’s inequality, awoke with new bitterness in their neighbourhood, and Burns had no retreat but to the ‘Rock of Independence,’ which is but an air-castle, after all, that looks well at a distance, but will screen no one from real wind and wet. Flushed with irregular excitement, exasperated alternately by contempt of others, and contempt of himself, Burns was no longer regaining his peace of mind, but fast losing it forever. There was a hollowness at the heart of his life, for his conscience did not now approve what he was doing. Amid the vapours of unwise enjoyment, of bootless remorse, and angry discontent with Fate, his true loadstar, a life of Poetry, with Poverty, nay with Famine if it must be so, was too often altogether hidden from his eyes. And yet he sailed a sea, where, without some such loadstar there was no right steering. * There is one little sketch by certain ‘English gentlemen’ of this class, which, though adopted in Currie’s Narrative, and since then repeated in most others, we have all along felt an invincible disposition to regard as imaginary: ‘On a rock that projected into the stream, they saw a man employed in angling, of a singular appearance. He had a cap made of fox-skin on his head, a loose great-coat fixed round him by a belt, from which depended an enormous Highland broadsword. It was Burns.’ Now, we rather think, it was not Burns. For to say nothing of the fox-skin cap, the loose and quite Hibernian watch-coat with the belt, what are we to make of this ‘enormous Highland broadsword’ depending from him? More especially, as there is no word of parish constables on the outlook to see whether, as Dennis phrases it, he had an eye to his own midriff, or that of the public! Burns, of all men, had the least need, and the least tendency, to seek for distinction, either in his own eyes, or those of others, by such poor mummeries.

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Meteors of French Politics rise before him, but these were not his stars. An accident this, which hastened, but did not originate, his worst distresses. In the mad contentions of that time, he comes in collision with certain official Superiors; is wounded by them; cruelly lacerated, we should say, could a dead mechanical implement, in any case, be called cruel: and shrinks in indignant pain, into deeper self-seclusion, into gloomier moodiness than ever. His life has now lost its unity: it is a life of fragments; led with little aim, beyond the melancholy one of securing its own continuance,—in fits of wild false joy, when such offered, and of black despondency when they passed away. His character before the world begins to suffer: calumny is busy with him; for a miserable man makes more enemies than friends. Some faults he has fallen into, and a thousand misfortunes; but deep criminality is what he stands accused of, and they that are not without sin, cast the first stone at him! For is he not a wellwisher of the French Revolution, a Jacobin, and therefore in that one act guilty of all? These accusations, political and moral, it has since appeared, were false enough: but the world hesitated little to credit them. Nay, his convivial Mecænases themselves were not the last to do it. There is reason to believe that, in his later years, the Dumfries Aristocracy had partly withdrawn themselves from Burns, as from a tainted person, no longer worthy of their acquaintance. That painful class, stationed, in all provincial cities, behind the outmost breastwork of Gentility, there to stand siege and do battle against the intrusions of Grocerdom and Grazierdom, had actually seen dishonour in the society of Burns, and branded him with their veto; had, as we vulgarly say, cut him! We find one passage in this Work of Mr. Lockhart’s, which will not out of our thoughts: ‘A gentleman of that county, whose name I have already more than once had occasion to refer to, has often told me that he was seldom more grieved, than when riding into Dumfries one fine summer evening about this time to attend a county ball, he saw Burns walking alone, on the shady side of the principal street of the town, while the opposite side was gay with successive groups of gentlemen and ladies, all drawn together for the festivities of the night, not one of whom appeared willing to recognise him. The horseman dismounted, and joined Burns, who on his proposing to cross the street said: “Nay, nay, my young friend, that’s all over now;” and quoted, after a pause, some verses of Lady Grizzel Baillie’s pathetic ballad: “His bonnet stood ance fu’ fair on his brow, His auld ane look’d better than mony ane’s new;

burns 65 But now he lets’t wear ony way it will hing, And casts himsell dowie upon the corn-bing. “O were we young, as we ance hae been, We sud hae been galloping down on yon green, And linking it ower the lily-white lea! And werena my heart light I wad die.” It was little in Burns’s character to let his feelings on certain subjects escape in this fashion. He, immediately after reciting these verses, assumed the sprightliness of his most pleasing manner; and taking his young friend home with him, entertained him very agreeably till the hour of the ball arrived.’

Alas! when we think that Burns now sleeps ‘where bitter indignation can no longer lacerate his heart,’* and that most of those fair dames and frizzled gentlemen already lie at his side, where the breastwork of Gentility is quite thrown down,—who would not sigh over the thin delusions and foolish toys that divide heart from heart, and make man unmerciful to his brother! It was not now to be hoped that the genius of Burns would ever reach maturity, or accomplish aught worthy of itself. His spirit was jarred in its melody; not the soft breath of natural feeling, but the rude hand of Fate, was now sweeping over the strings. And yet what harmony was in him, what music even in his discords! How the wild tones had a charm for the simplest and the wisest; and all men felt and knew that here also was one of the Gifted! ‘If he entered an inn at midnight, after all the inmates were in bed, the news of his arrival circulated from the cellar to the garret; and ere ten minutes had elapsed, the landlord and all his guests were assembled!’ Some brief, pure moments of poetic life were yet appointed him, in the composition of his Songs. We can understand how he grasped at this employment; and how, too, he spurned all other reward for it but what the labour itself brought him. For the soul of Burns, though scathed and marred, was yet living in its full moral strength, though sharply conscious of its errors and abasement: and here, in his destitution and degradation, was one act of seeming nobleness and self-devotedness left even for him to perform. He felt, too, that with all the ‘thoughtless follies’ that had ‘laid him low,’ the world was unjust and cruel to him; and he silently appealed to another and calmer time. Not as a hired soldier, but as a patriot, would he strive for the glory of his country: so he cast from him the poor sixpence a-day, and served zealously as * Ubi sæva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit.—Swift’s Epitaph.

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a volunteer. Let us not grudge him this last luxury of his existence; let him not have appealed to us in vain! The money was not necessary to him; he struggled through without it: long since, these guineas would have been gone, and now the high-mindedness of refusing them, will plead for him in all hearts forever. We are here arrived at the crisis of Burns’s life; for matters had now taken such a shape with him as could not long continue. If improvement was not to be looked for, Nature could only for a limited time maintain this dark and maddening warfare against the world and itself. We are not medically informed whether any continuance of years was, at this period, probable for Burns; whether his death is to be looked on as in some sense an accidental event, or only as the natural consequence of the long series of events that had preceded. The latter seems to be the likelier opinion; and yet it is by no means a certain one. At all events, as we have said, some change could not be very distant. Three gates of deliverance, it seems to us, were open for Burns: clear poetical activity; madness; or death. The first, with longer life, was still possible, though not probable; for physical causes were beginning to be concerned in it: and yet Burns had an iron resolution; could he but have seen and felt, that not only his highest glory, but his first duty, and the true medicine for all his woes, lay here. The second was still less probable; for his mind was ever among the clearest and firmest. So the milder third gate was opened for him: and he passed, not softly, yet speedily, into that still country, where the hail-storms and fire-showers do not reach, and the heaviest-laden wayfarer at length lays down his load! Contemplating this sad end of Burns, and how he sank unaided by any real help, uncheered by any wise sympathy, generous minds have sometimes figured to themselves, with a reproachful sorrow, that much might have been done for him; that by counsel, true affection, and friendly ministrations, he might have been saved to himself and the world. We question whether there is not more tenderness of heart than soundness of judgment in these suggestions. It seems dubious to us whether the richest, wisest, most benevolent individual, could have lent Burns any effectual help. Counsel, which seldom profits any one, he did not need; in his understanding, he knew the right from the wrong, as well perhaps as any man ever did; but the persuasion which would have availed him, lies not so much in the head, as in the heart, where no argument or expostulation could have assisted much to implant it. As to money again, we do not believe that this was his essential want; or well see how any private man could, even presupposing Burns’s consent, have bestowed on him an independent fortune, with much prospect of decisive advantage. It is a mortifying truth,

burns 67 that two men in any rank of society could hardly be found virtuous enough to give money, and to take it, as a necessary gift, without injury to the moral entireness of one or both. But so stands the fact: Friendship, in the old heroic sense of that term, no longer exists; except in the cases of kindred or other legal affinity, it is in reality no longer expected, or recognised as a virtue among men. A close observer of manners has pronounced ‘Patronage,’ that is, pecuniary or other economic furtherance, to be ‘twice cursed;’ cursing him that gives, and him that takes! And thus, in regard to outward matters also, it has become the rule, as in regard to inward, it always was and must be the rule, that no one shall look for effectual help to another; but that each shall rest contented with what help he can afford himself. Such, we say, is the principle of modern Honour; naturally enough growing out of that sentiment of Pride, which we inculcate and encourage as the basis of our whole social morality. Many a poet has been poorer than Burns; but no one was ever prouder: we may question, whether, without great precautions, even a pension from Royalty would not have galled and encumbered, more than actually assisted him. Still less, therefore, are we disposed to join with another class of Burns’s admirers, who accuse the higher ranks among us of having ruined Burns by their selfish neglect of him. We have already stated our doubts whether direct pecuniary help, had it been offered, would have been accepted, or could have proved very effectual. We shall readily admit, however, that much was to be done for Burns; that many a poisoned arrow might have been warded from his bosom; many an entanglement in his path cut asunder by the hand of the powerful; and light and heat shed on him from high places, would have made his humble atmosphere more genial; and the softest heart then breathing might have lived and died with some fewer pangs. Nay, we shall grant farther, and for Burns it is granting much, that with all his pride, he would have thanked, even with exaggerated gratitude, any one who had cordially befriended him: patronage, unless once cursed, needed not to have been twice so. At all events, the poor promotion he desired in his calling might have been granted: it was his own scheme, therefore likelier than any other to be of service. All this it might have been a luxury, nay, it was a duty, for our nobility to have done. No part of all this, however, did any of them do; or apparently attempt, or wish to do: so much is granted against them. But what then is the amount of their blame? Simply that they were men of the world, and walked by the principles of such men; that they treated Burns, as other nobles and other commoners had done other poets; as the English did Shakspeare, as King Charles and his Cavaliers did Butler, as King Philip and his Grandees did Cervantes. Do men gather

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grapes of thorns? or shall we cut down our thorns for yielding only a fence, and haws? How, indeed, could the ‘nobility and gentry of his native land’ hold out any help to this ‘Scottish Bard, proud of his name and country?’ Were the nobility and gentry so much as able rightly to help themselves? Had they not their game to preserve; their borough interests to strengthen; dinners, therefore, of various kinds to eat and give? Were their means more than adequate to all this business, or less than adequate? Less than adequate in general: few of them in reality were richer than Burns; many of them were poorer; for sometimes they had to wring their supplies, as with thumbscrews, from the hard hand; and in their need of guineas, to forget their duty of mercy; which Burns was never reduced to do. Let us pity and forgive them. The game they preserved and shot, the dinners they ate and gave, the borough interests they strengthened, the little Babylons they severally builded by the glory of their might, are all melted, or melting back into the primeval Chaos, as man’s merely selfish endeavours are fated to do: and here was an action, extending, in virtue of its worldly influence, we may say, through all time; in virtue of its moral nature, beyond all time, being immortal as the Spirit of Goodness itself; this action was offered them to do, and light was not given them to do it. Let us pity and forgive them. But, better than pity, let us go and do otherwise. Human suffering did not end with the life of Burns; neither was the solemn mandate, ‘Love one another, bear one another’s burdens,’ given to the rich only, but to all men. True, we shall find no Burns to relieve, to assuage by our aid or our pity; but celestial natures, groaning under the fardels of a weary life, we shall still find; and that wretchedness which Fate has rendered voiceless and tuneless, is not the least wretched, but the most. Still we do not think that the blame of Burns’s failure lies chiefly with the world. The world, it seems to us, treated him with more, rather than with less kindness, than it usually shows to such men. It has ever, we fear, shown but small favour to its Teachers: hunger and nakedness, perils and reviling, the prison, the cross, the poison-chalice, have, in most times and countries, been the market-price it has offered for Wisdom, the welcome with which it has greeted those who have come to enlighten and purify it. Homer and Socrates, and the Christian Apostles, belong to old days; but the world’s Martyrology was not completed with these. Roger Bacon and Galileo languish in priestly dungeons, Tasso pines in the cell of a madhouse, Camoens dies begging on the streets of Lisbon. So neglected, so ‘persecuted they the Prophets,’ not in Judea only, but in all places where men have been. We reckon that every poet of Burns’s order is, or should be, a prophet and teacher to his age; that he has no right to expect great kindness from it, but rather is bound to do it great kindness; that Burns,

burns 69 in particular, experienced fully the usual proportion of the world’s goodness; and that the blame of his failure, as we have said, lies not chiefly with the world. Where then does it lie? We are forced to answer: With himself; it is his inward, not his outward misfortunes, that bring him to the dust. Seldom, indeed, is it otherwise; seldom is a life morally wrecked, but the grand cause lies in some internal mal-arrangement, some want less of good fortune than of good guidance. Nature fashions no creature without implanting in it the strength needful for its action and duration; least of all does she so neglect her masterpiece and darling, the poetic soul. Neither can we believe that it is in the power of any external circumstances utterly to ruin the mind of a man; nay, if proper wisdom be given him, even so much as to affect its essential health and beauty. The sternest sum-total of all worldly misfortunes is Death; nothing more can lie in the cup of human woe: yet many men, in all ages, have triumphed over Death, and led it captive; converting its physical victory into a moral victory for themselves, into a seal and immortal consecration for all that their past life had achieved. What has been done, may be done again: nay, it is but the degree and not the kind of such heroism that differs in different seasons; for without some portion of this spirit, not of boisterous daring, but of silent fearlessness, of Self-denial, in all its forms, no good man, in any scene or time, has ever attained to be good. We have already stated the error of Burns; and mourned over it, rather than blamed it. It was the want of unity in his purposes, of consistency in his aims; the hapless attempt to mingle in friendly union the common spirit of the world with the spirit of poetry, which is of a far different and altogether irreconcilable nature. Burns was nothing wholly; and Burns could be nothing, no man formed as he was can be anything, by halves. The heart, not of a mere hotblooded, popular Verse-monger, or poetical Restaurateur, but of a true Poet and Singer, worthy of the old religious heroic times, had been given him: and he fell in an age, not of heroism and religion, but of scepticism, selfishness, and triviality, when true Nobleness was little understood, and its place supplied by a hollow, dissocial, altogether barren and unfruitful principle of Pride. The influences of that age, his open, kind, susceptible nature, to say nothing of his highly untoward situation, made it more than usually difficult for him to cast aside, or rightly subordinate; the better spirit that was within him ever sternly demanded its rights, its supremacy: he spent his life in endeavouring to reconcile these two; and lost it, as he must lose it, without reconciling them. Burns was born poor; and born also to continue poor, for he would not endeavour to be otherwise: this it had been well, could he have once for all admitted, and considered as finally settled. He was poor, truly; but hundreds

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even of his own class and order of minds have been poorer, yet have suffered nothing deadly from it: nay, his own Father had a far sorer battle with ungrateful destiny than his was; and he did not yield to it, but died courageously warring, and to all moral intents prevailing, against it. True, Burns had little means, had even little time for poetry, his only real pursuit and vocation; but so much the more precious was what little he had. In all these external respects his case was hard; but very far from the hardest. Poverty, incessant drudgery, and much worse evils, it has often been the lot of Poets and wise men to strive with, and their glory to conquer. Locke was banished as a traitor; and wrote his Essay on the Human Understanding, sheltering himself in a Dutch garret. Was Milton rich or at his ease, when he composed Paradise Lost? Not only low, but fallen from a height; not only poor but impoverished; in darkness and with dangers compassed round, he sang his immortal song, and found fit audience, though few. Did not Cervantes finish his work, a maimed soldier, and in prison? Nay, was not the Araucana, which Spain acknowledges as its Epic, written without even the aid of paper; on scraps of leather, as the stout fighter and voyager snatched any moment from that wild warfare? And what then had these men, which Burns wanted? Two things; both which, it seems to us, are indispensable for such men. They had a true, religious principle of morals; and a single not a double aim in their activity. They were not self-seekers and self-worshippers; but seekers and worshippers of something far better than Self. Not personal Enjoyment was their object; but a high heroic idea of Religion, of Patriotism, of heavenly Wisdom in one or the other form, ever hovered before them; in which cause, they neither shrunk from suffering, nor called on the earth to witness it as something wonderful; but patiently endured, counting it blessedness enough so to spend and be spent. Thus the ‘golden-calf of Self-love,’ however curiously carved, was not their Deity; but the Invisible Goodness, which alone is man’s reasonable service. This feeling was as a celestial fountain, whose streams refreshed into gladness and beauty all the provinces of their otherwise too desolate existence. In a word, they willed one thing, to which all other things were subordinated, and made subservient; and therefore they accomplished it. The wedge will rend rocks; but its edge must be sharp and single: if it be double, the wedge is bruised in pieces and will rend nothing. Part of this superiority these men owed to their age; in which heroism and devotedness were still practised, or at least not yet disbelieved in: but much of it likewise, they owed to themselves. With Burns again it was different. His morality, in most of its practical points, is that of a mere worldly man; enjoyment, in a finer or coarser shape, is the only thing he longs and strives for. A noble

burns 71 instinct sometimes raises him above this; but an instinct only, and acting only for moments. He has no Religion; in the shallow age, where his days were cast, Religion was not discriminated from the New and Old Light forms of Religion; and was, with these, becoming obsolete in the minds of men. His heart, indeed, is alive with a trembling adoration, but there is no temple in his understanding. He lives in darkness and in the shadow of doubt. His religion, at best, is an anxious wish—like that of Rabelais, ‘a great Perhaps.’ He loved Poetry warmly, and in his heart—could he but have loved it purely, and with his whole undivided heart, it had been well. For Poetry, as Burns could have followed it, is but another form of Wisdom, of Religion; is itself Wisdom and Religion. But this also was denied him. His poetry is a stray vagrant gleam, which will not be extinguished within him, yet rises not to be the true light of his path, but is often a wildfire that misleads him. It was not necessary for Burns to be rich, to be, or to seem, ‘independent;’ but it was necessary for him to be at one with his own heart; to place what was highest in his nature, highest also in his life; ‘to seek within himself for that consistency and sequence, which external events would forever refuse him.’ He was born a poet; poetry was the celestial element of his being, and should have been the soul of his whole endeavours. Lifted into that serene ether, whither he had wings given him to mount, he would have needed no other elevation: Poverty, neglect, and all evil, save the desecration of himself and his Art, were a small matter to him; the pride and the passions of the world lay far beneath his feet; and he looked down alike on noble and slave, on prince and beggar, and all that wore the stamp of man, with clear recognition, with brotherly affection, with sympathy, with pity. Nay, we question whether for his culture as a Poet, poverty, and much suffering for a season, were not absolutely advantageous. Great men, in looking back over their lives, have testified to that effect. ‘I would not for much,’ says Jean Paul, ‘that I had been born richer.’ And yet Paul’s birth was poor enough; for, in another place, he adds: ‘The prisoner’s allowance is bread and water; and I had often only the latter.’ But the gold that is refined in the hottest furnace comes out the purest; or, as he has himself expressed it, ‘the canary-bird sings sweeter, the longer it has been trained in a darkened cage.’ A man like Burns might have divided his hours between poetry and virtuous industry; industry which all true feeling sanctions, nay prescribes, and which has a beauty, for that cause, beyond the pomp of thrones: but to divide his hours between poetry and rich men’s banquets, was an ill-starred and inauspicious attempt. How could he be at ease at such banquets? What had he to do there, mingling his music with the coarse roar of altogether earthly voices, and

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brightening the thick smoke of intoxication with fire lent him from heaven? Was it his aim to enjoy life? To-morrow he must go drudge as an Exciseman! We wonder not that Burns became moody, indignant, and at times an offender against certain rules of society; but rather that he did not grow utterly frantic, and run amuck against them all. How could a man, so falsely placed, by his own or others’ fault, ever know contentment or peaceable diligence for an hour? What he did, under such perverse guidance, and what he forbore to do, alike fill us with astonishment at the natural strength and worth of his character. Doubtless there was a remedy for this perverseness: but not in others; only in himself; least of all in simple increase of wealth and worldly ‘respectability.’ We hope we have now heard enough about the efficacy of wealth for poetry, and to make poets happy. Nay, have we not seen another instance of it in these very days? Byron, a man of an endowment considerably less ethereal than that of Burns, is born in the rank not of a Scottish ploughman, but of an English peer: the highest worldly honours, the fairest worldly career, are his by inheritance; the richest harvest of fame he soon reaps, in another province, by his own hand. And what does all this avail him? Is he happy, is he good, is he true? Alas, he has a poet’s soul, and strives towards the Infinite and the Eternal; and soon feels that all this is but mounting to the house-top to reach the stars! Like Burns, he is only a proud man; might like him have ‘purchased a pocket-copy of Milton to study the character of Satan;’ for Satan also is Byron’s grand exemplar, the hero of his poetry, and the model apparently of his conduct. As in Burns’s case too, the celestial element will not mingle with the clay of earth; both poet and man of the world he must not be; vulgar Ambition will not live kindly with poetic Adoration; he cannot serve God and Mammon. Byron, like Burns, is not happy; nay, he is the most wretched of all men. His life is falsely arranged: the fire that is in him is not a strong, still, central fire, warming into beauty the products of a world; but it is the mad fire of a volcano; and now—we look sadly into the ashes of a crater, which, erelong, will fill itself with snow! Byron and Burns were sent forth as missionaries to their generation, to teach it a higher Doctrine, a purer Truth: they had a message to deliver, which left them no rest till it was accomplished; in dim throes of pain, this divine behest lay smouldering within them; for they knew not what it meant, and felt it only in mysterious anticipation, and they had to die without articulately uttering it. They are in the camp of the Unconverted. Yet not as high messengers of rigorous though benignant truth, but as soft flattering singers, and in pleasant fellowship will they live there: they are first adulated, then persecuted; they accomplish little for others; they find no peace for themselves, but only death and the peace

burns 73 of the grave. We confess, it is not without a certain mournful awe that we view the fate of these noble souls, so richly gifted, yet ruined to so little purpose with all their gifts. It seems to us there is a stern moral taught in this piece of history—twice told us in our own time! Surely to men of like genius, if there be any such, it carries with it a lesson of deep impressive significance. Surely it would become such a man, furnished for the highest of all enterprises, that of being the Poet of his Age, to consider well what it is that he attempts, and in what spirit he attempts it. For the words of Milton are true in all times, and were never truer than in this: ‘He who would write heroic poems, must make his whole life a heroic poem.’ If he cannot first so make his life, then let him hasten from this arena; for neither its lofty glories, nor its fearful perils, are fit for him. Let him dwindle into a modish balladmonger; let him worship and be-sing the idols of the time, and the time will not fail to reward him—if, indeed, he can endure to live in that capacity! Byron and Burns could not live as idol-priests, but the fire of their own hearts consumed them; and better it was for them that they could not. For it is not in the favour of the great, or of the small, but in a life of truth, and in the inexpugnable citadel of his own soul, that a Byron’s or a Burns’s strength must lie. Let the great stand aloof from him, or know how to reverence him. Beautiful is the union of wealth with favour and furtherance for literature; like the costliest flower-jar enclosing the loveliest amaranth. Yet let not the relation be mistaken. A true poet is not one whom they can hire by money or flattery to be a minister of their pleasures, their writer of occasional verses, their purveyor of table-wit; he cannot be their menial, he cannot even be their partisan. At the peril of both parties, let no such union be attempted! Will a Courser of the Sun work softly in the harness of a Dray-horse? His hoofs are of fire, and his path is through the heavens, bringing light to all lands: will he lumber on mud highways, dragging ale for earthly appetites, from door to door? But we must stop short in these considerations, which would lead us to boundless lengths. We had something to say on the public moral character of Burns; but this also we must forbear. We are far from regarding him as guilty before the world, as guiltier than the average; nay, from doubting that he is less guilty than one of ten thousand. Tried at a tribunal far more rigid than that where the Plebiscita of common civic reputations are pronounced, he has seemed to us even there less worthy of blame than of pity and wonder. But the world is habitually unjust in its judgments of such men; unjust on many grounds, of which this one may be stated as the substance: It decides, like a court of law, by dead statutes; and not positively but negatively, less on what is done right, than on what is, or is not done wrong. Not the few inches of deflection from the

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mathematical orbit, which are so easily measured, but the ratio of these to the whole diameter, constitutes the real aberration. This orbit may be a planet’s, its diameter the breadth of the solar system; or it may be a city hippodrome; nay, the circle of a ginhorse, its diameter a score of feet or paces. But the inches of deflection only are measured; and it is assumed that the diameter of the ginhorse and that of the planet, will yield the same ratio when compared with them! Here lies the root of many a blind cruel condemnation of Burnses, Swifts, Rousseaus, which one never listens to with approval. Granted, the ship comes into harbour with shrouds and tackle damaged; the pilot is blame-worthy; for he has not been all-wise and all-powerful; but to know how blame-worthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been round the Globe, or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs. With our readers in general, with men of right feeling anywhere, we are not required to plead for Burns. In pitying admiration, he lies enshrined in all our hearts, in a far nobler mausoleum than that one of marble; neither will his Works, even as they are, pass away from the memory of men. While the Shakspeares and Miltons roll on like mighty rivers through the country of Thought, bearing fleets of traffickers and assiduous pearl-fishers on their waves; this little Valclusa Fountain will also arrest our eye: For this also is of Nature’s own and most cunning workmanship, bursts from the depths of the earth with a full gushing current, into the light of day; and often will the traveller turn aside to drink of its clear waters, and muse among its rocks and pines!

VOLTAIRE.

Mémoires sur Voltaire, et sur ses Ouvrages, par Longchamp et Wagnière, ses Secrétaires; suivis de divers Écrits inédits de la Marquise du Châtelet, du Président Hénault, &c. tous relatifs à Voltaire (Memoirs concerning Voltaire and his works, by Longchamp and Wagnière, his Secretaries; with various unpublished pieces by the Marquise du Châtelet, &c., all relating to Voltaire). 2 Tomes. Paris, 1826. Could ambition always chuse its own path, and were will in human undertakings synonymous with faculty, all truly ambitious men would be men of letters. Certainly, if we examine that love of power, which enters so largely into most practical calculations, nay which our Utilitarian friends have recognized as the sole end and origin, both motive and reward, of all earthly enterprises, animating alike the philanthropist, the conqueror, the money-changer and the missionary, we shall find that all other arenas of ambition, compared with this rich and boundless one of Literature, meaning thereby whatever respects the promulgation of Thought, are poor, limited and ineffectual. For dull, unreflective, merely instinctive as the ordinary man may seem, he has nevertheless, as a quite indispensable appendage, a head that in some degree considers and computes; a lamp or rush-light of understanding has been given him, which through whatever dim, besmoked, and strangely diffractive media it may shine, is the ultimate guiding light of his whole path: and, here as well as there, now as at all times in man’s history, Opinion rules the world. Curious it is, moreover, to consider, in this respect, how different appearance is from reality, and under what singular shape and circumstances the truly most 75

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important man of any given period might be found. Could some Asmodeus, by simply waving his arm, open asunder the meaning of the Present, even so far as the Future will disclose it, what a much more marvellous sight should we have, than that mere bodily one through the roofs of Madrid! For we know not what we are, any more than what we shall be. It is a high, solemn, almost awful thought for every individual man, that his earthly influence, which has had a commencement, will never through all ages, were he the very meanest of us, have an end! What is done is done; has already blended itself with the boundless, ever-living, ever-working Universe, and will also work there, for good or for evil, openly or secretly, throughout all time. But the life of every man is as the wellspring of a stream, whose small beginnings are indeed plain to all, but whose ulterior course and destination, as it winds through the expanses of infinite years, only the Omniscient can discern. Will it mingle with neighbouring rivulets, as a tributary; or receive them as their sovereign? Is it to be a nameless brook, and will its tiny waters, among millions of other brooks and rills, increase the current of some world’s-river? Or is it to be itself a Rhene or Danaw, whose goings forth are to the uttermost lands, its flood an everlasting boundary-line on the globe itself, the bulwark and highway of whole kingdoms and continents? We know not: only in either case, we know, its path is to the great ocean; its waters, were they but a handful, are here, and cannot be annihilated or permanently held back. As little can we prognosticate, with any certainty, the future influences from the present aspects of an individual. How many Demagogues, Crœsuses, Conquerors fill their own age with joy or terror, with a tumult that promises to be perennial; and in the next age, die away into insignificance and oblivion! These are the forests of gourds, that overtop the infant cedars and aloe-trees, but, like the Prophet’s gourd, wither on the third day. What was it to the Pharaohs of Egypt, in that old era, if Jethro the Midianitish priest and grazier accepted the Hebrew outlaw as his herdsman? Yet the Pharaohs, with all their chariots of war, are buried deep in the wrecks of time; and that Moses still lives, not among his own tribe only, but in the hearts and daily business of all civilized nations. Or figure Mahomet, in his youthful years, ‘travelling to the horse-fairs of Syria’! Nay, to take an infinitely higher instance, who has ever forgotten those lines of Tacitus; inserted as a small, transitory, altogether trifling circumstance in the history of such a potentate as Nero? To us it is the most earnest, sad, and sternly significant passage that we know to exist in writing: Ergo abolendo rumori Nero subdidit reos, et quæsitissimis pœnis affecit, quos per flagitia invisos, vulgus Christianos appellabat. Auctor nominis ejus Christus, qui, Tiberio imperitante, per Procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio affectus erat. Repressaque in præsens

voltaire 77 exitiabilis superstitio rursus erumpebat, non modo per Judæam originem ejus mali, sed per urbem etiam, quo cuncta undique atrocia aut pudenda confluunt, celebranturque. ‘So, for the quieting of this rumour,* Nero judicially charged with the crime, and punished with most studied severities, that class, hated for their general wickedness, whom the vulgar call Christians. The originator of that name was one Christ, who, in the reign of Tiberius, suffered death by sentence of the Procurator, Pontius Pilate. The baneful superstition, thereby repressed for the time, again broke out, not only over Judea, the native soil of that mischief, but in the City also, where from every side all atrocious and abominable things collect and flourish.’† Tacitus was the wisest, most penetrating man of his generation; and to such depth, and no deeper has he seen into this transaction, the most important that has occurred or can occur in the annals of mankind. Nor is it only to those primitive ages, when religions took their rise, and a man of pure and high mind appeared not merely as a teacher and philosopher, but as a priest and prophet, that our observation applies. The same uncertainty, in estimating present things and men, holds more or less in all times; for in all times, even in those which seem most trivial, and open to research, human society rests on inscrutably deep foundations; which he is of all others the most mistaken, who fancies he has explored to the bottom. Neither is that sequence, which we love to speak of as ‘a chain of causes,’ properly to be figured as a ‘chain,’ or line, but rather as a tissue, or superficies of innumerable lines, extending in breadth as well as in length, and with a complexity, which will foil and utterly bewilder the most assiduous computation. In fact, the wisest of us must, for by far the most part, judge like the simplest; estimate importance by mere magnitude, and expect that what strongly affects our own generation, will strongly affect those that are to follow. In this way it is that Conquerors and political Revolutionists come to figure as so mighty in their influences; whereas truly there is no class of persons, creating such an uproar in the world, who in the long run produce so very slight an impression on its affairs. When Tamerlane had finished building his pyramid of seventy thousand human skulls, and was seen ‘standing at the gate of Damascus, glittering in steel, with his battle-axe on his shoulder,’ till his fierce hosts filed out to new victories and new carnage, the pale onlooker might have fancied that Nature was in her death-throes; for havoc and despair had taken possession of the earth, the sun of manhood seemed setting in seas of blood. Yet, it might be, on that very gala-day of Tamerlane, a little boy was playing ninepins on the streets of Mentz, whose history was more important to * Of his having set fire to Rome. † Tacit. Annal. xv. 44.

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men than that of twenty Tamerlanes. The Tartar Khan, with his shaggy demons of the wilderness, ‘passed away like a whirlwind’ to be forgotten forever; and that German artisan has wrought a benefit, which is yet immeasurably expanding itself, and will continue to expand itself through all countries and through all times. What are the conquests and expeditions of the whole corporation of captains, from Walter the Pennyless to Napoleon Buonaparte, compared with these ‘moveable types’ of Johannes Faust? Truly, it is a mortifying thing for your Conqueror to reflect, how perishable is the metal which he hammers with such violence: how the kind earth will soon shroud up his bloody footprints; and all that he achieved and skilfully piled together will be but like his own ‘canvas city’ of a camp,—this evening loud with life, to-morrow all struck and vanished, ‘a few earth-pits and heaps of straw!’ For here, as always, it continues true, that the deepest force is the stillest; that, as in the Fable, the mild shining of the sun shall silently accomplish what the fierce blustering of the tempest has in vain essayed. Above all, it is ever to be kept in mind, that not by material, but by moral power, are men and their actions governed. How noiseless is thought! No rolling of drums, no tramp of squadrons, or immeasurable tumult of baggagewaggons, attends its movements: in what obscure and sequestered places may the head be meditating, which is one day to be crowned with more than imperial authority; for Kings and Emperors will be among its ministering servants; it will rule not over, but in, all heads, and with these its solitary combinations of ideas, as with magic formulas, bend the world to its will! The time may come, when Napoleon himself will be better known for his laws than for his battles; and the victory of Waterloo prove less momentous than the opening of the first Mechanics’ Institute. We have been led into such rather trite reflections, by these Volumes of Memoirs on Voltaire; a man in whose history the relative importance of intellectual and physical power is again curiously evinced. This also was a private person, by birth nowise an elevated one; yet so far as present knowledge will enable us to judge, it may be said, that to abstract Voltaire and his activity from the eighteenth century, were to produce a greater difference in the existing figure of things, than the want of any other individual, up to this day, could have occasioned. Nay, with the single exception of Luther, there is perhaps, in these modern ages, no other man of a merely intellectual character, whose influence and reputation have become so entirely European as that of Voltaire. Indeed, like the great German Reformer’s, his doctrines too, almost from the first, have affected not only the belief of the thinking world, silently propagating

voltaire 79 themselves from mind to mind; but in a high degree also, the conduct of the active and political world; entering as a distinct element into some of the most fearful civil convulsions which European history has on record. Doubtless, to his own contemporaries, to such of them at least as had any insight into the actual state of men’s minds, Voltaire already appeared as a noteworthy and decidedly historical personage: yet, perhaps, not the wildest of his admirers ventured to assign him such a magnitude as he now figures in, even with his adversaries and detractors. He has grown in apparent importance, as we receded from him, as the nature of his endeavours became more and more visible in their results. For, unlike many great men, but like all great agitators, Voltaire everywhere shows himself emphatically as the man of his century: uniting in his own person whatever spiritual accomplishments were most valued by that age; at the same time, with no depth to discern its ulterior tendencies, still less with any magnanimity to attempt withstanding these, his greatness and his littleness alike fitted him to produce an immediate effect; for he leads whither the multitude was of itself dimly minded to run, and keeps the van not less by skill in commanding, than by cunning in obeying. Besides, now that we look on the matter from some distance, the efforts of a thousand coadjutors and disciples, nay, a series of mighty political vicissitudes, in the production of which these efforts had but a subsidiary share, have all come, naturally in such a case, to appear as if exclusively his work; so that he rises before us as the paragon and epitome of a whole spiritual period, now almost passed away, yet remarkable in itself, and more than ever interesting to us, who seem to stand, as it were, on the confines of a new and better one. Nay, had we forgotten that ours is the ‘Age of the Press,’ when he who runs may not only read but furnish us with reading; and simply counted the books, and scattered leaves, thick as the autumnal in Vallombrosa, that have been written and printed concerning this man, we might almost fancy him the most important person, not of the eighteenth century, but of all the centuries from Noah’s Flood downwards. We have Lives of Voltaire by friend and by foe: Condorcet, Duvernet, Lepan, have each given us a whole; portions, documents, and all manner of authentic or spurious contributions have been supplied by innumerable hands; of which we mention only the labours of his various Secretaries: Collini’s, published some twenty years ago, and now these Two massive Octavos from Longchamp and Wagnière. To say nothing of the Baron de Grimm’s Collections, unparalleled in more than one respect; or of the six-and-thirty volumes of scurrilous eavesdropping, long since printed under the title of Mémoires de Bachaumont; or of the daily and hourly attacks and

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defences that appeared separately in his lifetime, and all the judicial pieces, whether in the style of apotheosis or of excommunication, that have seen the light since then; a mass of fugitive writings, the very diamond edition of which might fill whole libraries. The peculiar talent of the French in all narrative, at least in all anecdotic, departments, rendering most of these works extremely readable, still farther favoured their circulation, both at home and abroad: so that now, in most countries, Voltaire has been read of and talked of, till his name and life have grown familiar like those of a village acquaintance. In England, at least, where for almost a century the study of foreign literature has, we may say, confined itself to that of the French, with a slight intermixture from the elder Italians, Voltaire’s writings, and such writings as treated of him, were little likely to want readers. We suppose, there is no literary era, not even any domestic one, concerning which Englishmen in general have such information, at least have gathered so many anecdotes and opinions, as concerning this of Voltaire. Nor have native additions to the stock been wanting, and these of a due variety in purport and kind: maledictions, expostulations, and dreadful death-scenes painted like Spanish Sanbenitos, by weak well-meaning persons of the hostile class; eulogies, generally of a gayer sort, by open or secret friends: all this has been long and extensively carried on among us. There is even an English Life of Voltaire;* nay, we remember to have seen portions of his writings cited, in terrorem, and with criticisms, in some pamphlet, ‘by a country gentleman,’ either on the Education of the People, or else on the question of Preserving the Game. With the ‘Age of the Press,’ and such manifestations of it on this subject, we are far from quarrelling. We have read great part of these thousand-and-first ‘Memoirs on Voltaire,’ by Longchamp and Wagnière, not without satisfaction; and can cheerfully look forward to still other ‘Memoirs’ following in their train. Nothing can be more in the course of Nature than the wish to satisfy oneself with knowledge of all sorts about any distinguished person, especially of our own era; the true study of his character, his spiritual individuality, and peculiar manner of existence, is full of instruction for all mankind: even that of his looks, sayings, habitudes, and indifferent actions, were not the records of them generally lies, is rather to be commended; nay, are not such lies themselves, when they * ‘By Frank Hall Standish, Esq.’ (London, 1821); a work, which we can recommend only to such as feel themselves in extreme want of information on this subject, and except in their own language, unable to acquire any. It is written very badly, though with sincerity, and not without considerable indications of talent; to all appearance, by a minor; many of whose statements and opinions (for he seems an inquiring, honest-hearted, rather decisive character) must have begun to astonish even himself, several years ago.

voltaire 81 keep within bounds, and the subject of them has been dead for some time, equal to snipe-shooting, or Colburn-Novels, at least little inferior, in the great art of getting done with life, or, as it is technically called, killing time? For our own part, we say,—would that every Johnson in the world had his veridical Boswell, or leash of Boswells! We could then tolerate his Hawkins also, though not veridical. With regard to Voltaire, in particular, it seems to us not only innocent but profitable, that the whole truth regarding him should be well understood. Surely, the biography of such a man, who, to say no more of him, spent his best efforts, and as many still think, successfully, in assaulting the Christian religion, must be a matter of considerable import: what he did, and what he could not do; how he did it, or attempted it, that is, with what degree of strength, clearness, especially with what moral intents, what theories and feelings on man and man’s life, are questions that will bear some discussing. To Voltaire individually, for the last fifty-one years, the discussion has been indifferent enough; and to us it is a discussion not on one remarkable person only, and chiefly for the curious or studious, but involving considerations of highest moment to all men, and inquiries which the utmost compass of our philosophy will be unable to embrace. Here, accordingly, we are about to offer some farther observations on this quæstio vexata; not without hope that the reader may accept them in good part. Doubtless, when we look at the whole bearings of the matter, there seems little prospect of any unanimity respecting it, either now, or within a calculable period: it is probable that many will continue, for a long time, to speak of this ‘universal genius,’ this ‘apostle of Reason,’ and ‘father of sound Philosophy;’ and many again of this ‘monster of impiety,’ this ‘sophist,’ and ‘atheist,’ and ‘ape-demon;’ or, like the late Dr. Clarke of Cambridge, dismiss him more briefly with information that he is ‘a driveller:’ neither is it essential that these two parties should, on the spur of the instant, reconcile themselves herein. Nevertheless, truth is better than error, were it only ‘on Hannibal’s vinegar.’ It may be expected that men’s opinions concerning Voltaire, which is of some moment, and concerning Voltairism, which is of almost boundless moment, will, if they cannot meet, gradually at every new comparison approach towards meeting; and what is still more desirable, towards meeting somewhere nearer the truth than they actually stand. With honest wishes to promote such approximation, there is one condition, which, above all others, in this inquiry, we must beg the reader to impose on himself: the duty of fairness towards Voltaire, of Tolerance towards him, as towards all men. This, truly, is a duty, which we have the happiness to hear daily inculcated; yet which, it has been well said, no mortal is at bottom disposed to practise. Nevertheless, if we really desire to understand the truth on any subject,

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not merely, as is much more common, to confirm our already existing opinions, and gratify this and the other pitiful claim of vanity or malice in respect of it, tolerance may be regarded as the most indispensable of all pre-requisites; the condition, indeed, by which alone any real progress in the question becomes possible. In respect of our fellow-men, and all real insight into their characters, this is especially true. No character, we may affirm, was ever rightly understood, till it had first been regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance only, but of sympathy. For here, more than in any other case, it is verified that the heart sees farther than the head. Let us be sure, our enemy is not that hateful being we are too apt to paint him. His vices and basenesses lie combined in far other order before his own mind, than before ours; and under colours which palliate them, nay perhaps exhibit them as virtues. Were he the wretch of our imagining, his life would be a burden to himself; for it is not by bread alone that the basest mortal lives; a certain approval of conscience is equally essential even to physical existence; is the fine all-pervading cement by which that wondrous union, a Self, is held together. Since the man, therefore, is not in Bedlam, and has not shot or hanged himself, let us take comfort, and conclude that he is one of two things: either a vicious dog, in man’s guise, to be muzzled, and mourned over, and greatly marvelled at; or a real man, and, consequently, not without moral worth, which is to be enlightened, and so far approved of. But to judge rightly of his character, we must learn to look at it, not less with his eyes, than with our own; we must learn to pity him, to see him as a fellow-creature, in a word, to love him, or his real spiritual nature will ever be mistaken by us. In interpreting Voltaire, accordingly, it will be needful to bear some things carefully in mind, and to keep many other things as carefully in abeyance. Let us forget that our opinions were ever assailed by him, or ever defended, that we have to thank him, or upbraid him, for pain or for pleasure; let us forget that we are Deists or Millennarians, Bishops, or Radical Reformers, and remember only that we are men. This is a European subject, or there never was one; and must, if we would in the least comprehend it, be looked at neither from the parish belfry, nor any Peterloo platform; but, if possible, from some natural and infinitely higher point of vision. It is a remarkable fact, that throughout the last fifty years of his life, Voltaire was seldom or never named, even by his detractors, without the epithet ‘great’ being appended to him; so that, had the syllables suited such a junction, as they did in the happier case of Charle-Magne, we might almost have expected that, not Voltaire, but Voltaire-ce-grand-homme would be his designation with posterity. However, posterity is much more stinted in its allowances on that score; and a

voltaire 83 multitude of things remain to be adjusted, and questions of very dubious issue to be gone into, before such coronation titles can be conceded with any permanence. The million, even the wiser part of them, are apt to lose their discretion, when ‘tumultuously assembled;’ for a small object, near at hand, may subtend a large angle; and often a Pennenden Heath has been mistaken for a Field of Runnymead; whereby the couplet on that immortal Dalhousie proves to be the emblem of many a man’s real fortune with the public: And thou, Dalhousie, the great God of War, Lieutenant-Colonel to the Earl of Mar; the latter end corresponding poorly with the beginning. To ascertain what was the true significance of Voltaire’s history both as respects himself and the world; what was his specific character and value as a man; what has been the character and value of his influence on society, of his appearance as an active agent in the culture of Europe: all this leads us into much deeper investigations; on the settlement of which, however, the whole business turns. To our own view, we confess, on looking at Voltaire’s life, the chief quality that shows itself is one for which adroitness seems the fitter name. Greatness implies several conditions, the existence of which, in his case, it might be difficult to demonstrate; but of his claim to this other praise there can be no disputing. Whatever be his aims, high or low, just or the contrary, he is, at all times, and to the utmost degree, expert in pursuing them. It is to be observed, moreover, that his aims in general were not of a simple sort, and the attainment of them easy: few literary men have had a course so diversified with vicissitudes as Voltaire’s. His life is not spent in a corner, like that of a studious recluse, but on the open theatre of the world; in an age full of commotion, when society is rending itself asunder, Superstition already armed for deadly battle against Unbelief; in which battle he himself plays a distinguished part. From his earliest years, we find him in perpetual communication with the higher personages of his time, often with the highest: it is in circles of authority, of reputation, at lowest, of fashion and rank, that he lives and works. Ninon de l’Enclos leaves the boy a legacy to buy books; he is still young, when he can say of his supper companions, “We are all Princes or Poets.” In after life, he exhibits himself in company or correspondence with all manner of principalities and powers, from Queen Caroline of England to the Empress Catherine of Russia, from Pope Benedict to Frederick the Great. Meanwhile, shifting from side to side of Europe, hiding in the country, or living sumptuously in capital cities, he quits

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not his pen, with which, as with some enchanter’s rod, more potent than any king’s sceptre, he turns and winds the mighty machine of European Opinion; approves himself, as his schoolmaster had predicted, the Coryphée du Déisme; and, not content with this elevation, strives, and nowise ineffectually, to unite with it a poetical, historical, philosophic and even scientific pre-eminence. Nay we may add, a pecuniary one; for he speculates in the funds, diligently solicits pensions and promotions, trades to America, is long a regular victualling-contractor for armies; and thus, by one means and another, independently of literature which would never yield much money, raises his income from 800 francs a-year to more than centuple that sum.* And now, having, besides all this commercial and economical business, written some thirty quartos, the most popular that were ever written, he returns after long exile to his native city, to be welcomed there almost as a religious idol; and closes a life, prosperous alike in the building of country-seats, and the composition of Henriades and Philosophical Dictionaries, by the most appropriate demise; by drowning, as it were, in an ocean of applause, so that as he lived for fame, he may be said to have died of it. Such various, complete success, granted only to a small portion of men in any age of the world, presupposes, at least, with every allowance for good fortune, an almost unrivalled expertness of management. There must have been a great talent of some kind at work here: a cause proportionate to the effect. It is wonderful, truly, to observe with what perfect skill Voltaire steers his course through so many conflicting circumstances: how he weathers this Cape Horn, darts lightly through that Mahlstrom; always either sinks his enemy, or shuns him; here waters, and careens, and traffics with the rich savages; there lies land-locked till the hurricane is overblown; and so, in spite of all billows, and sea-monsters, and hostile fleets, finishes his long Manilla voyage, with streamers flying, and deck piled with ingots! To say nothing of his literary character, of which this same dexterous address will also be found to be a main feature, let us glance only at the general aspect of his conduct, as manifested both in his writings and actions. By turns, and ever at the right season, he is imperious and obsequious; now shoots abroad, from the mountain tops, Hyperion-like, his keen, innumerable shafts; anon, when danger is advancing, flies to obscure nooks; or, if taken in the fact, swears it was but in sport, and that he is the peaceablest of men. He bends to occasion; can, to a certain extent, blow hot or blow cold; and never attempts force, where cunning will serve his turn. The beagles of the Hierarchy and of the Monarchy, proverbially quick of scent, and sharp of tooth, are out in quest of him; but this is a lion-fox which cannot be captured. By wiles * See Tome ii. p. 328 of these Mémoires.

voltaire 85 and a thousand doublings, he utterly distracts his pursuers; he can burrow in the earth, and all trace of him is gone.* With a strange system of anonymity and publicity, of denial and assertion, of Mystification in all senses, has Voltaire surrounded himself. He can raise no standing armies for his defence, yet he too is a ‘European Power,’ and not undefended; an invisible, impregnable, though hitherto unrecognised bulwark, that of Public Opinion, defends him. With great art, he maintains this stronghold; though ever and anon sallying out from it, far beyond the permitted limits. But he has his coat of darkness, and his shoes of swiftness, like that other Killer of Giants. We find Voltaire a supple courtier, or a sharp satirist; he can talk blasphemy, and build churches, according to the signs of the times. Frederick the Great is not too high for his diplomacy, nor the poor Printer of his Zadig too low;† he manages the Cardinal Fleuri, and the Curé of St. Sulpice; and laughs in his sleeve at all the world. We should pronounce him to be one of the best politicians on record; as we have said, the adroitest of all literary men. At the same time, Voltaire’s worst enemies, it seems to us, will not deny that he had naturally a keen sense for rectitude, indeed for all virtue: the utmost vivacity of temperament characterizes him; his quick susceptibility for every form of beauty is moral as well as intellectual. Nor was his practice without indubitable and highly creditable proofs of this. To the help-needing he was at all times a ready benefactor: many were the hungry adventurers who profited of his bounty, and then bit the hand that had fed them. If we enumerate his generous acts, from the case of the Abbé Desfontaines down to that of the Widow Calas, and the Serfs of Saint Claude, we shall find that few private men have had so wide a circle of charity, and have watched over it so well. Should it be objected that love of reputation entered largely into these proceedings, Voltaire can afford a handsome deduction on that head: should the uncharitable even calculate that love of reputation was the sole motive, we can only remind them that love of such reputation is itself the effect of a social, humane disposition; and wish, as an immense improvement, that all men were animated with it. Voltaire was not without his experience of human baseness; but he still had a fellow feeling * Of one such ‘taking to cover’ we have a curious and rather ridiculous account in this Work, by Longchamp. It was with the Duchess du Maine that he sought shelter, and on a very slight occasion: nevertheless he had to lie perdue, for two months, at the Castle of Sceaux; and, with closed windows, and burning candles in daylight, compose Zadig, Babouc, Memnon, &c. for his amusement. † See in Longchamp (pp. 154-163) how by natural legerdemain, a knave may be caught, and the change rendu à des imprimeurs infidèles.

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for human sufferings; and delighted, were it only as an honest luxury, to relieve them. His attachments seem remarkably constant and lasting: even such sots as Thiriot, whom nothing but habit could have endeared to him, he continues, and after repeated injuries, to treat and regard as friends. To his equals we do not observe him envious, at least not palpably and despicably so; though this, we should add, might be in him, who was from the first so paramountly popular, no such hard attainment. Against Montesquieu, perhaps against him alone, he cannot help entertaining a small secret grudge; yet ever in public he does him the amplest justice: l’Arlequin-Grotius of the fire-side becomes, on all grave occasions, the author of the Esprit des Loix. Neither to his enemies, and even betrayers, is Voltaire implacable or meanly vindictive: the instant of their submission is also the instant of his forgiveness; their hostility itself provokes only casual sallies from him; his heart is too kindly, indeed too light, to cherish any rancour, any continuation of revenge. If he has not the virtue to forgive, he is seldom without the prudence to forget: if, in his life-long contentions, he cannot treat his opponents with any magnanimity, he seldom, or perhaps never once, treats them quite basely; seldom or never with that absolute unfairness, which the law of retaliation might so often have seemed to justify. We would say that, if no heroic, he is at all times a perfectly civilized man; which considering that his war was with exasperated theologians, and a ‘war to the knife’ on their part, may be looked upon as rather a surprising circumstance. He exhibits many minor virtues, a due appreciation of the highest; and fewer faults than, in his situation, might have been expected, and perhaps pardoned. All this is well, and may fit out a highly expert and much esteemed man of business, in the widest sense of that term; but is still far from constituting a ‘great character.’ In fact, there is one deficiency in Voltaire’s original structure, which, it appears to us, must be quite fatal to such claims for him: we mean his inborn levity of nature, his entire want of Earnestness. Voltaire was by birth a Mocker, and light Pococurante; which natural disposition his way of life confirmed into a predominant, indeed all-pervading habit. Far be it from us to say, that solemnity is an essential of greatness; that no great man can have other than a rigid vinegar aspect of countenance, never to be thawed or warmed by billows of mirth! There are things in this world to be laughed at, as well as things to be admired; and his is no complete mind, that cannot give to each sort its due. Nevertheless contempt is a dangerous element to sport in; a deadly one, if we habitually live in it. How, indeed, to take the lowest view of this matter, shall a man accomplish great enterprises,—enduring all toil, resisting temptations, laying aside every weight,—unless he zealously love what he pursues? The faculty of love, of

voltaire 87 admiration is to be regarded as the sign and the measure of high souls: unwisely directed, it leads to many evils; but without it, there cannot be any good. Ridicule, on the other hand, is indeed a faculty much prized by its possessors; yet intrinsically, it is a small faculty; we may say, the smallest of all faculties that other men are at the pains to repay with any esteem. It is directly opposed to Thought, to Knowledge, properly so called; its nourishment and essence is Denial, which hovers only on the surface, while Knowledge dwells far below. Moreover, it is by nature selfish and morally trivial; it cherishes nothing but our Vanity, which may in general be left safely enough to shift for itself. Little ‘discourse of reason,’ in any sense, is implied in Ridicule: a scoffing man is in no lofty mood, for the time; shows more of the imp than of the angel. This too when his scoffing is what we call just, and has some foundation on truth: while again the laughter of fools, that vain sound, said in Scripture to resemble the ‘crackling of thorns under the pot’ (which they cannot heat, but only soil and begrime), must be regarded, in these latter times, as a very serious addition to the sum of human wretchedness; nor perhaps will it always, when the Increase of Crime in the Metropolis comes to be debated, escape the vigilance of Parliament. We have, oftener than once, endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which, however, we can find nowhere in his works, that ridicule is the test of truth. But of all chimeras, that ever advanced themselves in the shape of philosophical doctrines, this is to us the most formless and purely inconceivable. Did or could the unassisted human faculties ever understand it, much more believe it? Surely, so far as the common mind can discern, laughter seems to depend not less on the laugher than on the laughee; and now, who gave laughers a patent to be always just, and always omniscient? If the philosophers of Nootka Sound were pleased to laugh at the manœuvres of Cook’s seamen, did that render these manœuvres useless; and were the seamen to stand idle, or to take to leather canoes, till the laughter abated? Let a discerning public judge. But, leaving these questions for the present, we may observe at least that all great men have been careful to subordinate this talent or habit of ridicule; nay, in the ages which we consider the greatest, most of the arts that contribute to it have been thought disgraceful for freemen, and confined to the exercise of slaves. With Voltaire, however, there is no such subordination visible: by nature, or by practice, mockery has grown to be the irresistible bias of his disposition; so that for him, in all matters, the first question is not what is true, but what is false; not what is to be loved, and held fast, and earnestly laid to heart, but what is to be contemned and derided, and sportfully cast out of doors. Here truly

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he earns abundant triumph as an image-breaker, but pockets little real wealth. Vanity, with its adjuncts, as we have said, finds rich solacement; but for aught better, there is not much. Reverence, the highest feeling that man’s nature is capable of, the crown of his whole moral manhood, and precious, like fine gold, were it in the rudest forms, he seems not to understand, or have heard of, even by credible tradition. The glory of knowing and believing is all but a stranger to him; only with that of questioning and qualifying is he familiar. Accordingly, he sees but a little way into Nature: the mighty All, in its beauty, and infinite mysterious grandeur, humbling the small Me into nothingness, has never even for moments been revealed to him; only this and that other atom of it, and the differences and discrepancies of these two, has he looked into, and noted down. His theory of the world, his picture of man and man’s life, is little; for a Poet and Philosopher, even pitiful. Examine it, in its highest developements, you find it an altogether vulgar picture; simply a reflex, from more or fewer mirrors, of Self and the poor interests of Self. ‘The Divine Idea, that which lies at the bottom of Appearance,’ was never more invisible to any man. He reads History not with the eye of a devout Seer, or even of a Critic; but through a pair of mere anticatholic spectacles. It is not a mighty drama, enacted on the theatre of Infinitude, with Suns for lamps, and Eternity as a background; whose author is God, and whose purport and thousandfold moral lead us up to the ‘dark with excess of light’ of the Throne of God; but a poor wearisome debating-club dispute, spun through ten centuries, between the Encyclopédie and the Sorbonne. Wisdom or folly, nobleness or baseness, are merely superstitious or unbelieving: God’s Universe is a larger Patrimony of St. Peter, from which it were well and pleasant to hunt out the Pope. In this way, Voltaire’s nature, which was originally vehement rather than deep, came, in its maturity, in spite of all his wonderful gifts, to be positively shallow. We find no heroism of character in him, from first to last; nay, there is not, that we know of, one great thought, in all his six-and-thirty quartos. The high worth implanted in him by Nature, and still often manifested in his conduct, does not shine there like a light, but like a coruscation. The enthusiasm, proper to such a mind, visits him; but it has no abiding virtue in his thoughts, no local habitation and no name. There is in him a rapidity, but at the same time a pettiness; a certain violence, and fitful abruptness, which takes from him all dignity. Of his emportemens, and tragi-comical explosions, a thousand anecdotes are on record; neither is he, in these cases, a terrific volcano, but a mere bundle of rockets. He is nigh shooting poor Dorn, the Frankfort constable; actually fires a pistol, into the lobby, at him; and this, three days after that melancholy

voltaire 89 business of the ‘Œuvre de Poéshie du Roi mon Maître’ had been finally adjusted. A bookseller, who, with the natural instinct of fallen mankind, overcharges him, receives from this Philosopher, by way of payment at sight, a slap on the face. Poor Longchamp, with considerable tact, and a praiseworthy air of second-table respectability, details various scenes of this kind: how Voltaire dashed away his combs, and maltreated his wig, and otherwise fiercely comported himself, the very first morning: how once, having a keenness of appetite, sharpened by walking, and a diet of weak tea, he became uncommonly anxious for supper; and Clairaut and Madame du Châtelet, sunk in algebraic calculations, twice promised to come down, but still kept the dishes cooling, and the Philosopher, at last, desperately battered open their locked door with his foot; exclaiming “Vous êtes donc de concert pour me faire mourir?”—And yet Voltaire had a true kindness of heart; all his domestics and dependants loved him, and continued with him. He has many elements of goodness, but floating loosely; nothing is combined in steadfast union. It is true, he presents in general a surface of smoothness, of cultured regularity; yet, under it, there is not the silent, rock-bound strength of a World; but the wild tumults of a Chaos are ever bursting through. He is a man of power, but not of beneficent authority; we fear, but cannot reverence him; we feel him to be stronger, not higher. Much of this spiritual short-coming and perversion might be due to natural defect; but much of it also is due to the age into which he was cast. It was an age of discord and division; the approach of a grand crisis in human affairs. Already we discern in it all the elements of the French Revolution; and wonder, so easily do we forget how entangled and hidden the meaning of the present generally is to us, that all men did not foresee the comings on of that fearful convulsion. On the one hand, a high all-attempting activity of Intellect; the most peremptory spirit of inquiry abroad on every subject; things human and things divine alike cited without misgivings before the same boastful tribunal of so-called Reason, which means here a merely argumentative Logic; the strong in mind excluded from his regular influence in the state, and deeply conscious of that injury. On the other hand, a privileged few, strong in the subjection of the many, yet in itself weak; a piebald, and for most part altogether decrepit battalion, of Clergy, of purblind Nobility, or rather of Courtiers, for as yet the Nobility is mostly on the other side: these cannot fight with Logic, and the day of Persecution is well nigh done. The whole force of law, indeed, is still in their hands; but the far deeper force, which alone gives efficacy to law, is hourly passing from them. Hope animates one side; fear the other; and the battle will be fierce and desperate. For there is wit without wisdom on the part of the self-styled

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Philosophers; feebleness with exasperation on the part of their opponents; pride enough on all hands, but little magnanimity; perhaps nowhere any pure love of truth, only everywhere the purest, most ardent love of self. In such a state of things, there lay abundant principles of discord: these two influences hung like fast-gathering electric clouds, as yet on opposite sides of the horizon, but with a malignity of aspect, which boded, whenever they might meet, a sky of fire and blackness, thunderbolts to waste the earth, and the sun and stars, though but for a season, to be blotted out from the heavens. For there is no conducting medium to unite softly these hostile elements; there is no true virtue, no true wisdom, on the one side or on the other. Never perhaps was there an epoch, in the history of the world, when universal corruption called so loudly for reform; and they who undertook that task were men intrinsically so worthless. Not by Gracchi, but by Catalines; not by Luthers, but by Aretines, was Europe to be renovated. The task has been a long and bloody one; and is still far from done. In this condition of affairs, what side such a man as Voltaire was to take could not be doubtful. Whether he ought to have taken either side; whether he should not rather have stationed himself in the middle; the partisan of neither, perhaps hated by both; acknowledging and forwarding, and striving to reconcile, what truth was in each; and preaching forth a far deeper truth, which, if his own century had neglected it, had persecuted it, future centuries would have recognised as priceless: all this was another question. Of no man, however gifted, can we require what he has not to give: but Voltaire called himself Philosopher, nay the Philosopher. And such has often, indeed generally, been the fate of great men, and Lovers of Wisdom: their own age and country have treated them as of no account; in the great Corn-Exchange of the world, their pearls have seemed but spoiled barley, and been ignominiously rejected. Weak in adherents, strong only in their faith, in their indestructible consciousness of worth and well-doing, they have silently, or in words, appealed to coming ages, when their own ear would indeed be shut to the voice of love, and of hatred, but the Truth that had dwelt in them would speak with a voice audible to all. Bacon left his works to future generations, when some centuries should have elapsed. ‘Is it much for me,’ said Kepler, in his isolation, and extreme need, ‘that men should accept my discovery? If the Almighty waited six thousand years for one to see what He had made, I may surely wait two hundred, for one to understand what I have seen!’ All this, and more, is implied in love of wisdom, in genuine seeking of truth: the noblest function that can be appointed for a man, but requiring also the noblest man to fulfil it.

voltaire 91 With Voltaire, however, there is no symptom, perhaps there was no conception, of such nobleness; the high call for which, indeed, in the existing state of things, his intellect may have had as little the force to discern, as his heart had the force to obey. He follows a simpler course. Heedless of remoter issues, he adopts the cause of his own party; of that class with whom he lived, and was most anxious to stand well; he enlists in their ranks, not without hopes that he may one day rise to be their general. A resolution perfectly accordant with his prior habits, and temper of mind; and from which his whole subsequent procedure, and moral aspect as a man, naturally enough evolves itself. Not that we would say, Voltaire was a mere prize-fighter; one of ‘Heaven’s Swiss,’ contending for a cause which he only half or not all approved of. Far from it. Doubtless he loved truth, doubtless he partially felt himself to be advocating truth; nay we know not that he has ever yet, in a single instance, been convicted of wilfully perverting his belief; of uttering, in all his controversies, one deliberate falsehood. Nor should this negative praise seem an altogether slight one, for greatly were it to be wished that even the best of his better-intentioned opponents had always deserved the like. Nevertheless his love of truth is not that deep, infinite love, which beseems a Philosopher; which many ages have been fortunate enough to witness; nay of which his own age had still some examples. It is a far inferior love, we should say, to that of poor Jean Jacques, half-sage, half-maniac as he was; it is more a prudent calculation than a passion. Voltaire loves Truth, but chiefly of the triumphant sort: we have no instance of his fighting for a quite discrowned and outcast Truth; it is chiefly when she walks abroad, in distress, it may be, but still with queenlike insignia, and knighthoods and renown are to be earned in her battles, that he defends her, that he charges gallantly against the Cades and Tylers. Nay, at all times, belief itself seems, with him, to be less the product of Meditation than of Argument. His first question with regard to any doctrine, perhaps his final test of its worth and genuineness, is: Can others be convinced of this? Can I truck it, in the market for power? ‘To such questioners,’ it has been said, ‘Truth, who buys not, and sells not, goes on her way, and makes no answer.’ In fact, if we inquire into Voltaire’s ruling motive, we shall find that it was at bottom but a vulgar one: ambition, the desire of ruling, by such means as he had, over other men. He acknowledges no higher divinity than Public Opinion; for whatever he asserts or performs, the number of votes is the measure of strength and value. Yet let us be just to him; let us admit that he, in some degree, estimates his votes, as well as counts them. If love of fame, which, especially for such a man, we can only call another modification of Vanity, is always his ruling passion, he

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has a certain taste in gratifying it. His vanity, which cannot be extinguished, is ever skilfully concealed; even his just claims are never boisterously insisted on; throughout his whole life he shows no single feature of the quack. Nevertheless, even in the height of his glory, he has a strange sensitiveness to the judgement of the world: could he have contrived a Dionysius’ Ear, in the Rue Traversière, we should have found him watching at it, night and day. Let but any little evildisposed Abbé, any Fréron, or Piron, Pauvre Piron, qui ne fut jamais rien, Pas même Académicien, write a libel or epigram on him, what a fluster he is in! We grant he forbore much, in these cases; manfully consumed his own spleen, and sometimes long held his peace: but it was his part to have always done so. Why should such a man ruffle himself with the spite of exceeding small persons? Why not let these poor devils write; why should not they earn a dishonest penny, at his expense, if they had no readier way? But Voltaire cannot part with his ‘voices,’ his ‘most sweet voices:’ for they are his gods; take these, and what has he left? Accordingly, in literature and morals, in all his comings and goings, we find him striving, with a religious care, to sail strictly with the wind. In Art, the Parisian Parterre is his court of last appeal: he consults the Café de Procope, on his wisdom or his folly, as if it were a Delphic Oracle. The following adventure belongs to his fiftyfourth year, when his fame might long have seemed abundantly established. We translate from the Sieur Longchamp’s thin, half-roguish, mildly obsequious, most lackey-like Narrative: ‘Judges could appreciate the merits of Sémiramis, which has continued on the stage, and always been seen there with pleasure. Every one knows how the two principal parts in this piece contributed to the celebrity of two great tragedians, Mademoiselle Dumèsnil, and M. le Kain. The enemies of M. de Voltaire renewed their attempts in the subsequent representations; but it only the better confirmed his triumph. Piron, to console himself for the defeat of his party, had recourse to his usual remedy; pelting the piece with some paltry epigrams, which did it no harm. ‘Nevertheless, M. de Voltaire, who always loved to correct his works, and perfect them, became desirous to learn, more specially and at first hand, what good or ill the public were saying of his Tragedy; and it appeared to him that he could nowhere learn it better than in the Café de Procope, which was also called the Antre (Cavern) de Procope, because it was very dark, even in full day, and ill-lighted in the evenings; and because you often saw

voltaire 93 there a set of lank, sallow poets, who had somewhat the air of apparitions. In this Café, which fronts the Comédie Française, had been held, for more than sixty years, the tribunal of those self-called Aristarchs, who fancied they could pass sentence without appeal, on plays, authors and actors. M. de Voltaire wished to compear there, but in disguise, and altogether incognito. It was on coming out from the playhouse that the judges usually proceeded thither, to open what they called their great sessions. On the second night of Sémiramis, he borrowed a clergyman’s clothes; dressed himself in cassock and long cloak: black stockings, girdle, bands, breviary itself; nothing was forgotten. He clapt on a large peruke, unpowdered, very ill combed, which covered more than the half of his cheeks, and left nothing to be seen but the end of a long nose. The peruke was surmounted by a large three-cornered hat, corners half bruised in. In this equipment, then, the author of Sémiramis proceeded on foot to the Café de Procope, where he squatted himself in a corner, and waiting for the end of the play, called for a bavaroise, a small roll of bread, and the gazette. It was not long till those familiars of the Parterre and tenants of the Café stept in. They instantly began discussing the new Tragedy. Its partisans and its adversaries pleaded their cause, with warmth; each giving his reasons. Impartial persons also spoke their sentiment; and repeated some fine verses of the piece. During all this time, M. de Voltaire, with spectacles on nose, head stooping over the gazette which he pretended to be reading, was listening to the debate; profiting by reasonable observations, suffering much to hear very absurd ones, and not answer them, which irritated him. Thus, during an hour and a half, had he the courage and patience to hear Sémiramis talked of and babbled of, without speaking a word. At last, all these pretended judges of the fame of authors having gone their ways, without converting one another, M. de Voltaire also went off; took a coach in the Rue Mazarine, and returned home about eleven o’clock. Though I knew of his disguise, I confess I was struck and almost frightened to see him accoutred so. I took him for a spectre, or shade of Ninus, that was appearing to me; or at least, for one of those ancient Irish debaters, arrived at the end of their career, after wearing themselves out in school-syllogisms. I helped him to doff all that apparatus, which I carried next morning to its true owner,—a Doctor of the Sorbonne.’

This stroke of art, which cannot in any wise pass for sublime, might have its uses and rational purpose in one case, and only in one: if Sémiramis was meant to be a popular show, that was to live or die by its first impression on the idle multitude; which accordingly we must infer to have been its real, at least its chief destination. In any other case, we cannot but consider this HarounAlraschid visit to the Café de Procope as questionable, and altogether inadequate. If Sémiramis was a Poem, a living Creation, won from the empyrean by the silent power, and long-continued Promethean toil of its author, what could the Café

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de Procope know of it, what could all Paris know of it, ‘on the second night’? Had it been a Milton’s Paradise Lost they might have despised it till after the fiftieth year! True, the object of the Poet is, and must be, to ‘instruct by pleasing,’ yet not by pleasing this man and that man; only by pleasing man, by speaking to the pure nature of man, can any real ‘instruction,’ in this sense, be conveyed. Vain does it seem to search for a judgement of this kind, in the largest Café, in the largest Kingdom, ‘on the second night.’The deep, clear consciousness of one mind comes infinitely nearer it, than the loud outcry of a million that have no such consciousness; whose ‘talk,’ or whose ‘babble,’ but distracts the listener; and to most genuine Poets has, from of old, been in a great measure indifferent. For the multitude of voices is no authority; a thousand voices may not, strictly examined, amount to one vote. Mankind in this world are divided into flocks, and follow their several bell-wethers. Now, it is well known, let the bell-wether rush through any gap, the rest rush after him, were it into bottomless quagmires. Nay, so conscientious are sheep in this particular, as a quaint naturalist and moralist has noted, ‘if you hold a stick before the wether, so that he is forced to vault in his passage, the whole flock will do the like, when the stick is withdrawn; and the thousandth sheep shall be seen vaulting impetuously over air, as the first did over an otherwise impassable barrier!’ A farther peculiarity, which, in consulting Acts of Parliament, and other authentic records, not only as regards ‘Catholic Disabilities,’ but many other matters, you may find curiously verified in the human species also!—On the whole, we must consider this excursion to Procope’s literary Cavern as illustrating Voltaire in rather pleasant style; but nowise much to his honour. Fame seems a far too high, if not the highest object with him; nay, sometimes even popularity is clutched at: we see no heavenly polestar in this voyage of his; but only the guidance of a proverbially uncertain wind. Voltaire reproachfully says of St. Louis, that ‘he ought to have been above his age;’ but, in his own case, we can find few symptoms of such heroic superiority. The same perpetual appeal to his contemporaries, the same intense regard to reputation, as he viewed it, prescribes for him both his enterprises and his manner of conducting them. His aim is to please the more enlightened, at least the politer part of the world; and he offers them simply what they most wish for, be it in theatrical shows for their pastime, or in sceptical doctrines for their edification. For this latter purpose, Ridicule is the weapon he selects, and it suits him well. This was not the age of deep thoughts; no Duc de Richelieu, no Prince Conti, no Frederick the Great would have listened to such: only sportful contempt, and a thin conversational logic will avail. There may be wool-quilts, which the lath-sword of Harlequin will pierce, when the club of Hercules has rebounded

voltaire 95 from them in vain. As little was this an age for high virtues; no heroism, in any form, is required, or even acknowledged; but only, in all forms, a certain bienséance. To this rule also, Voltaire readily conforms; indeed, he finds no small advantage in it. For a lax public morality not only allows him the indulgence of many a little private vice, and brings him in this and the other windfall of menus plaisirs, but opens him the readiest resource in many enterprises of danger. Of all men, Voltaire has the least disposition to increase the Army of Martyrs. No testimony will he seal with his blood; scarcely any will he so much as sign with ink. His obnoxious doctrines, as we have remarked, he publishes under a thousand concealments; with underplots, and wheels within wheels; so that his whole track is in darkness, only his works see the light. No Proteus is so nimble, or assumes so many shapes; if, by rare chance, caught sleeping, he whisks through the smallest hole, and is out of sight, while the noose is getting ready. Let his judges take him to task, he will shuffle and evade; if directly questioned, he will even lie. In regard to this last point, the Marquis de Condorcet has set up a defence for him, which has, at least, the merit of being frank enough. ‘The necessity of lying in order to disavow any work,’ says he, ‘is an extremity equally repugnant to conscience and nobleness of character: but the crime lies with those unjust men, who render such disavowal necessary to the safety of him whom they force to it. If you have made a crime of what is not one; if, by absurd or by arbitrary laws, you have infringed the natural right, which all men have, not only to form an opinion, but to render it public; then you deserve to lose the right which every man has of hearing the truth from the mouth of another; a right, which is the sole basis of that rigorous obligation, not to lie. If it is not permitted to deceive, the reason is, that to deceive any one, is to do him a wrong, or expose yourself to do him one; but a wrong supposes a right; and no one has the right of seeking to secure himself the means of committing an injustice.’*

It is strange, how scientific discoveries do maintain themselves: here, quite in other hands, and in an altogether different dialect, we have the old Catholic doctrine, if it ever was more than a Jesuitic one, ‘that faith need not be kept with heretics.’ Truth, it appears, is too precious an article for our enemies; is fit only for friends, for those who will pay us if we tell it them. It may be observed, however, that, granting Condorcet’s premises, this doctrine also must be granted, as indeed is usual with that sharp-sighted writer. If the doing of right depends on the receiving of it; if our fellow-men, in this world, are not persons, but mere things, that for services bestowed will return services,—steam-engines that will * Vie de Voltaire, p. 32.

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manufacture calico, if we put in coals and water,—then, doubtless, the calico ceasing, our coals and water may also rationally cease; the questioner threatening to injure us for the truth, we may rationally tell him lies. But if, on the other hand, our fellow-man is no steam-engine, but a man; united with us, and with all men, and with the Maker of all men, in sacred, mysterious, indissoluble bonds, in an All-embracing Love, that encircles alike the seraph and the glow-worm; then will our duties to him rest on quite another basis than this very humble one of quid pro quo; and the Marquis de Condorcet’s conclusion will be false; and might, in its practical extensions, be infinitely pernicious. Such principles and habits, too lightly adopted by Voltaire, acted, as it seems to us, with hostile effect on his moral nature, not originally of the noblest sort, but which, under other influences, might have attained to far greater nobleness. As it is, we see in him simply a Man of the World, such as Paris and the eighteenth century produced and approved of: a polite, attractive, most cultivated, but essentially self-interested man; not without highly amiable qualities; indeed, with a general disposition which we could have accepted without disappointment in a mere Man of the World, but must find very defective, sometimes altogether out of place, in a Poet and Philosopher. Above this character of a Parisian ‘honourable man,’ he seldom or never rises; nay, sometimes we find him hovering on the very lowest boundaries of it, or perhaps even fairly below it. We shall nowise accuse him of excessive regard for money, of any wish to shine by the influence of mere wealth: let those commercial speculations, including even the victualling-contracts, pass for laudable prudence, for love of independence, and of the power to do good. But what are we to make of that hunting after pensions, and even after mere titles? There is an assiduity displayed here, which sometimes almost verges towards sneaking. Well might it provoke the scorn of Alfieri; for there is nothing better than the spirit of ‘a French plebeian’ apparent in it. Much, we know, very much should be allowed for difference of national manners, which in general mainly determine the meaning of such things: nevertheless, to our insular feelings, that famous Trajan est-il content? especially when we consider who the Trajan was, will always remain an unfortunate saying. The more so, as Trajan himself turned his back on it, without answer; declining, indeed, through life, to listen to the voice of this charmer, or disturb his own ‘âme paisible,’ for one moment, though with the best philosopher in Nature. Nay, Pompadour herself was applied to; and even some considerable progress made, by that underground passage, had not an envious hand too soon and fatally intervened. D’Alembert says, there are two things that can reach the top of a

voltaire 97 pyramid, the eagle and the reptile. Apparently, Voltaire wished to combine both methods; and he had, with one of them, but indifferent success. The truth is, we are trying Voltaire by too high a standard; comparing him with an ideal, which he himself never strove after, perhaps never seriously aimed at. He is no great Man, but only a great Persifleur; a man for whom life and all that pertains to it, has, at best, but a despicable meaning; who meets its difficulties not with earnest force, but with gay agility; and is found always at the top, less by power in swimming, than by lightness in floating. Take him in his character, forgetting that any other was ever ascribed to him, and we find that he enacted it almost to perfection. Never man better understood the whole secret of Persiflage; meaning, thereby, not only the external faculty of polite contempt, but that art of general inward contempt, by which a man of this sort endeavours to subject the circumstances of his Destiny to his Volition, and be, what is the instinctive effort of all men, though in the midst of material Necessity, morally Free. Voltaire’s latent derision is as light, copious and all-pervading, as the derision which he utters. Nor is this so simple an attainment as we might fancy; a certain kind and degree of Stoicism, or approach to Stoicism, is necessary for the completed Persifleur; as for moral, or even practical completion, in any other way. The most indifferent-minded man is not by nature indifferent to his own pain and pleasure: this is an indifference, which he must by some method study to acquire, or acquire the show of; and which, it is fair to say, Voltaire manifests in a rather respectable degree. Without murmuring, he has reconciled himself to most things: the human lot, in this lower world, seems a strange business, yet, on the whole, with more of the farce in it, than of the tragedy; to him, it is nowise heart-rending, that this Planet of ours should be sent sailing through Space, like a miserable, aimless Ship-of-Fools, and he himself be a fool among the rest, and only a very little wiser than they. He does not, like Bolingbroke, ‘patronise Providence,’ though, such sayings as, Si Dieu n’existait pas il faudrait l’inventer, seem now and then to indicate a tendency of that sort: but, at all events, he never openly levies war against Heaven; well knowing that the time spent in frantic malediction, directed thither, might be spent otherwise with more profit. There is, truly, no Werterism in him, either in its bad or its good sense. If he sees no unspeakable majesty in heaven and earth, neither does he see any unsufferable horror there. His view of the world is a cool, gently scornful, altogether prosaic one: his sublimest Apocalypse of Nature lies in the microscope and telescope; the Earth is a place for producing corn; the Starry Heavens are admirable as a nautical time-keeper. Yet, like a prudent man, he has adjusted himself to his condition, such as it is: he does not chaunt any Miserere

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over human life, calculating that no charitable dole, but only laughter, would be the reward of such an enterprise; does not hang or drown himself, clearly understanding that death of itself will soon save him that trouble. Affliction, it is true, has not for him any precious jewel in its head; on the contrary, it is an unmixed nuisance; yet, happily, not one to be howled over, so much as one to be speedily removed out of sight: if he does not learn from it Humility, and the sublime lesson of Resignation, neither does it teach him hard-heartedness, and sickly discontent; but he bounds lightly over it, leaving both the jewel and the toad at a safe distance behind him. Nor was Voltaire’s history without perplexities enough to keep this principle in exercise; to try whether in life, as in literature, the ridiculum were really better than the acre. We must own, that on no occasion does it altogether fail him; never does he seem perfectly at a nonplus; no adventure is so hideous, that he cannot, in the long run, find some means to laugh at it, and forget it. Take, for instance, that last ill-omened visit of his to Frederick the Great. This was, probably, the most mortifying incident in Voltaire’s whole life: an open experiment, in the sight of all Europe, to ascertain whether French Philosophy had virtue enough in it to found any friendly union, in such circumstances, even between its great master and his most illustrious disciple; and an experiment which answered in the negative, as was natural enough; for Vanity is of a divisive not of a uniting nature, and between the King of Letters and the King of Armies there existed no other tie. They should have kept up an interchange of flattery, from afar; gravitating towards one another like celestial luminaries, if they reckoned themselves such; yet always with a due centrifugal force; for if either shot madly from his sphere, nothing but collision, and concussion, and mutual recoil, could be the consequence. On the whole, we must pity Frederick, environed with that cluster of Philosophers: doubtless he meant rather well; yet the French at Rossbach, with guns in their hands, were but a small matter, compared with these French in Sans-Souci. Maupertuis sits sullen, monosyllabic; gloomy like the bear of his own arctic zone: Voltaire is the mad piper that will make him dance to tunes and amuse the people. In this royal circle, with its parasites and bashaws, what heats and jealousies must there not have been; what secret heartburnings, smooth-faced malice, plottings, counterplottings, and laurel-water pharmacy, in all its branches, before the ring of etiquette fairly burst asunder, and the establishment, so to speak, exploded! Yet over all these distressing matters Voltaire has thrown a soft veil of gaiety: he remembers neither Dr. Akakia nor Dr. Akakia’s patron, with any animosity; but merely as actors in the grand farce of life along with him, a new scene of which has now

voltaire 99 commenced, quite displacing the other from the stage. The arrest at Frankfort, indeed, is a sour morsel; but this too he swallows, with an effort. Frederick, as we are given to understand, had these whims by kind; was, indeed, a wonderful scion from such a stock; for what could equal the avarice, malice, and rabid snappishness of old Frederick William, the father? ‘He had a minister at the Hague, named Luicius,’ says the wit: ‘this Luicius was, of all royal ministers extant, the worst paid. The poor man, with a view to warm himself, had a few trees cut down, in the garden of Honslardik, then belonging to the House of Prussia; immediately thereafter he received despatches from the King, his master, keeping back a year of his salary. Luicius, in despair, cut his throat with the only razor he had (avec le seul rasoir qu’il eût): an old lackey came to his assistance, and unfortunately saved his life. At an after period, I myself saw his Excellency at the Hague, and gave him an alms at the gate of that Palace called La Vieille Cour, which belongs to the King of Prussia, and where this unhappy Ambassador had lived twelve years.’

With the Roi-Philosophe himself, Voltaire in a little while recommences correspondence; and to all appearance, proceeds quietly in his office of ‘buckwasher,’ that is, of verse-corrector to his Majesty, as if nothing whatever had happened. Again, what human pen can describe the troubles this unfortunate Philosopher had with his women? A gadding, feather-brained, capricious, oldcoquettish, embittered and embittering set of wantons from the earliest to the last! Widow Denis, for example, that disobedient Niece, whom he rescued from furnished lodgings and spare diet, into pomp and plenty, how did she pester the last stage of his existence, for twenty-four years long! Blind to the peace and roses of Ferney; ever hankering and fretting after Parisian display; not without flirtation, though advanced in life; losing money at play, and purloining wherewith to make it good; scolding his servants, quarrelling with his secretaries, so that the too-indulgent uncle must turn off his beloved Collini, nay almost be run through the body by him, for her sake! The good Wagnière, who succeeded this fiery Italian in the secretaryship, and loved Voltaire with a most creditable affection, cannot, though a simple, humble, and quite philanthropic man, speak of Madame Denis without visible overflowings of gall. He openly accuses her of hastening her uncle’s death by her importunate stratagems to keep him in Paris, where was her heaven. Indeed, it is clear that, his goods and chattels once made sure of, her chief care was that so fiery a patient might die soon enough; or, at best, according to her own confession, ‘how she was to get him buried.’ We have known superannuated grooms, nay effete saddle-horses,

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regarded with more real sympathy in their home, than was the best of uncles by the worst of nieces. Had not this surprising old man retained the sharpest judgement, and the gayest, easiest temper, his last days, and last years, must have been a continued scene of violence and tribulation. Little better, worse in several respects, though at a time when he could better endure it, was the far-famed Marquise du Châtelet. Many a tempestuous day and wakeful night had he with that scientific and too-fascinating shrew. She speculated in mathematics and metaphysics; but was an adept also in far, very far different acquirements. Setting aside its whole criminality, which, indeed, perhaps went for little there, this literary amour wears but a mixed aspect: short sun-gleams, with long tropical tornadoes; touches of guitar-music, soon followed by Lisbon earthquakes. Marmontel, we remember, speaks of knives being used, at least brandished, and for quite other purposes than carving. Madame la Marquise was no saint, in any sense; but rather a Socrates’ spouse, who would keep patience, and the whole philosophy of gaiety, in constant practice. Like Queen Elizabeth, if she had the talents of a man, she had more than the caprices of a woman. We shall take only one item, and that a small one, in this mountain of misery: her strange habits and methods of locomotion. She is perpetually travelling: a peaceful philosopher is lugged over the world, to Cirey, to Lunéville, to that pied à terre in Paris; resistance avails not; here, as in so many other cases, il faut se ranger. Sometimes, precisely on the eve of such a departure, her domestics, exasperated by hunger and ill usage, will strike work, in a body; and a new set has to be collected at an hour’s warning. Then Madame has been known to keep the postilions cracking and sacre-ing at the gate, from dawn till dewy eve, simply because she was playing cards, and the games went against her. But figure a lean and vivid-tempered philosopher starting from Paris at last; under cloud of night; during hard frost; in a huge lumbering coach, or rather waggon, compared with which indeed the generality of modern waggons were a luxurious conveyance. With four starved, and perhaps spavined hacks, he slowly sets forth, ‘under a mountain of bandboxes:’ at his side sits the wandering virago; in front of him, a serving-maid, with additional bandboxes ‘et divers effets de sa maîtresse.’ At the next stage, the postilions have to be beat up; they come out swearing. Cloaks and fur-pelisses avail little against the January-cold; ‘time and hours’ are, once more, the only hope: but, lo, at the tenth mile, this Tyburn-coach breaks down! One many-voiced discordant wail shrieks through the solitude, making night hideous—but in vain; the axle-tree has given way, the vehicle has overset, and

voltaire 101 marchionesses, chambermaids, bandboxes, and philosophers, are weltering in inextricable Chaos. ‘The carriage was in the stage next Nangis, about half-way to that town, when the hind axle-tree broke, and it tumbled on the road, to M. de Voltaire’s side: Madame du Châtelet, and her maid, fell above him, with all the bundles and bandboxes, for these were not tied to the front, but only piled up on both hands of the maid; and so, observing the laws of equilibrium and gravitation of bodies, they rushed towards the corner where M. de Voltaire lay squeezed together. Under so many burdens, which half suffocated him, he kept shouting bitterly (poussait des cris aigus); but it was impossible to change place; all had to remain as it was, till the two lackeys, one of whom was hurt by the fall, could come up, with the postilions, to disencumber the vehicle: they first drew out all the luggage, next the women, then M. de Voltaire. Nothing could be got out except by the top, that is, by the coach-door, which now opened upwards: one of the lackeys and a postilion clambering aloft, and fixing themselves on the body of the vehicle, drew them up, as from a well; seizing the first limb that came to hand, whether arm or leg: and then passed them down to the two stationed below, who set them finally on the ground.’*

What would Dr. Kitchiner, with his Traveller’s Oracle, have said to all this? For there is snow on the ground; and four peasants must be roused from a village half a league off, before that accursed vehicle can so much as be lifted from its beam-ends! Vain it is for Longchamp, far in advance, sheltered in a hospitable though half-dismantled château, to pluck pigeons and be in haste to roast them: they will never, never be eaten to supper, scarcely to breakfast next morning!—Nor is it now only, but several times, that this unhappy axle-tree plays them foul; nay once, beggared by Madame’s gambling, they have not cash to pay for mending it, and the smith, though they are in keenest flight, almost for their lives, will not trust them. We imagine that these are trying things for any philosopher. Of the thousand other more private and perennial grievances; of certain discoveries and explanations, especially, which it still seems surprising that human philosophy could have tolerated, we make no mention; indeed, with regard to the latter, few earthly considerations could tempt a Reviewer of sensibility to mention them in this place. The Marquise du Châtelet, and her husband, have been much wondered at in England: the calm magnanimity with which M. le Marquis conforms to the custom of the country, to the wishes of his helpmate, and leaves her, he himself * Vol. ii. p. 166.

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meanwhile fighting, or at least drilling, for his King, to range over Space, in quest of loves and lovers; his friendly discretion, in this particular; no less so, his blithe benignant gullibility, the instant a contretems de famille renders his countenance needful,—have had all justice done them among us. His lady too is a wonder; offers no mean study to psychologists: she is a fair experiment to try how far that Delicacy, which we reckon innate in females, is only accidental and the product of fashion; how far a woman, not merely immodest, but without the slightest fig-leaf of common decency remaining, with the whole character, in short, of a male debauchee, may still have any moral worth as a woman? We, ourselves, have wondered a little over both these parties; and over the goal to which so strange a ‘progress of society’ might be tending. But still more wonderful, not without a shade of the sublime, has appeared to us the cheerful thraldom of this maltreated philosopher; and with what exhaustless patience, not being wedded, he endured all these forced-marches, whims, irascibilities, delinquencies, and thousandfold unreasons; braving ‘the battle and the breeze,’ on that wild Bay of Biscay, for such a period. Fifteen long years, and was not mad, or a suicide at the end of them! But the like fate, it would seem, though worthy D’Israeli has omitted to enumerate it in his Calamities of Authors, is not unknown in literature. Pope also had his Mrs. Martha Blount; and, in the midst of that warfare with united Duncedom, his daily tale of Egyptian bricks to bake. Let us pity the lot of genius, in this sublunary sphere! Every one knows the earthly termination of Madame la Marquise; and how by a strange, almost satirical Nemesis, she was taken in her own nets, and her worst sin became her final punishment. To no purpose was the unparalleled credulity of M. le Marquis; to no purpose, the amplest toleration, and even helpful knavery of M. de Voltaire: ‘les assiduités de M. de Saint-Lambert,’ and the unimaginable consultations to which they gave rise at Cirey, were frightfully parodied in the end. The last scene was at Lunéville, in the peaceable court of King Stanislaus. ‘Seeing that the aromatic-vinegar did no good, we tried to recover her from the sudden lethargy by rubbing her feet, and striking in the palms of her hands; but it was of no use: she had ceased to be. The maid was sent off to Madame de Boufflers’ apartment, to inform the company that Madame du Châtelet was worse. Instantly they all rose from the supper-table: M. du Châtelet, M. de Voltaire, and the other guests, rushed into the room. So soon as they understood the truth, there was a deep consternation; to tears, to cries, succeeded a mournful silence. The husband was led away, the other individuals went out successively, expressing the keenest sorrow. M. de Voltaire and M. de Saint-Lambert

voltaire 103 remained the last by the bedside, from which they could not be drawn away. At length, the former, absorbed in deep grief, left the room, and with difficulty reached the main door of the Castle, not knowing whither he went. Arrived there, he fell down at the foot of the outer stairs, and near the box of a sentry, where his head came on the pavement. His lackey, who was following, seeing him fall and struggle on the ground, ran forward and tried to lift him. At this moment, M. de Saint-Lambert, retiring by the same way, also arrived; and observing M. de Voltaire in that situation, hastened to assist the lackey. No sooner was M. de Voltaire on his feet, than, opening his eyes, dimmed with tears, and recognizing M. de Saint-Lambert, he said to him, with sobs and the most pathetic accent: “Ah, my friend, it is you that have killed her!” Then, all on a sudden, as if he were starting from a deep sleep, he exclaimed, in a tone of reproach and despair: “Eh! mon Dieu! Monsieur, de quoi vous avisiez-vous de lui faire un enfant?” They parted thereupon, without adding a single word; and retired to their several apartments, overwhelmed and almost annihilated by the excess of their sorrow.’*

Among all threnetical discourses on record, this last, between men overwhelmed and almost annihilated by the excess of their sorrow, has probably an unexampled character. Some days afterwards, the first paroxysm of ‘reproach and despair’ being somewhat assuaged, the sorrowing widower, not the glad legal one, composed this quatrain: L’univers a perdu la sublime Emilie. Elle aima les plaisirs, les arts, la vérité: Les dieux, en lui donnant leur âme et leur génie, N’avaient gardé pour eux que l’immortalité. After which, reflecting perhaps that with this sublime Emilia, so meritoriously singular in loving pleasure, ‘his happiness had been chiefly on paper,’ he, like the bereaved Universe, consoled himself, and went on his way. Woman, it has been sufficiently demonstrated, was given to man as a benefit, and for mutual support; a precious ornament and staff whereupon to lean in many trying situations: but to Voltaire she proved, so unlucky was he in this matter, little else than a broken reed, which only ran into his hand. We confess that looking over the manifold trials of this poor philosopher with the softer, or as he may have reckoned it, the harder sex,—from that Dutchwoman who published his juvenile letters, to the Niece Denis who as good as killed him with racketing,—we see, in this one province, very great scope for almost all * Vol. ii. p. 250.

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the cardinal virtues. And to these internal convulsions add an incessant series of controversies and persecutions, political, religious, literary, from without; and we have a life quite rent asunder, horrent with asperities and chasms, where even a stout traveller might have faultered. Over all which Chamouni-Needles and Staubbach-Falls, the great Persifleur skims along in this his little poetical air-ship, more softly than if he travelled the smoothest of merely prosaic roads. Leaving out of view the worth or worthlessness of such a temper of mind, we are bound, in all seriousness, to say both that it seems to have been Voltaire’s highest conception of moral excellence, and that he has pursued and realized it with no small success. One great praise therefore he deserves—that of unity with himself; that of having an aim, and steadfastly endeavouring after it, nay, as we have found, of attaining it; for his ideal Voltaire seems, to an unusual degree, manifested, made practically apparent, in the real one. There can be no doubt but this attainment of Persifleur, in the wide sense we here give it, was of all others the most admired and sought after in Voltaire’s age and country; nay in our own age and country, we have still innumerable admirers of it, and unwearied seekers after it, on every hand of us: nevertheless we cannot but believe that its acme is past; that the best sense of our generation has already weighed its significance, and found it wanting. Voltaire himself, it seems to us, were he alive at this day, would find other tasks than that of mockery, especially of mockery in that style: it is not by Derision and Denial, but by far deeper, more earnest, diviner means that aught truly great has been effected for mankind; that the fabric of man’s life has been reared, through long centuries, to its present height. If we admit that this chief of Persifleurs had a steady, conscious aim in life, the still higher praise of having had a right or noble aim cannot be conceded him without many limitations, and may, plausibly enough, be altogether denied. At the same time, let it not be forgotten that amid all these blighting influences, Voltaire maintains a certain indestructible humanity of nature; a soul never deaf to the cry of wretchedness; never utterly blind to the light of truth, beauty, goodness. It is even, in some measure, poetically interesting to observe this fine contradiction in him: the heart acting without directions from the head, or perhaps against its directions; the man virtuous, as it were, in spite of himself. For at all events, it will be granted that as a private man his existence was beneficial, not hurtful, to his fellow men: the Calases, the Sirvens, and so many orphans and outcasts whom he cherished and protected, ought to cover a multitude of sins. It was his own sentiment, and to all appearance, a sincere one: J’ai fait un peu de bien; c’est mon meilleur ouvrage.

voltaire 105 Perhaps there are few men with such principles and such temptations as his were that could have led such a life; few that could have done his work, and come through it with cleaner hands. If we call him the greatest of all Persifleurs, let us add that, morally speaking also, he is the best: if he excels all men in universality, sincerity, polished clearness of Mockery, he perhaps combines with it as much worth of heart as, in any man, that habit can admit of. It is now well nigh time that we should quit this part of our subject: nevertheless, in seeking to form some picture of Voltaire’s practical life, and the character outward as well as inward of his appearance in society, our readers will not grudge us a few glances at the last and most striking scene he enacted there. To our view, that final visit to Paris has a strange half-frivolous, half-fateful aspect; there is, as it were, a sort of dramatic justice in this catastrophe, that he who had all his life hungered and thirsted after public favour, should at length die by excess of it; should find the door of his Heaven-on-earth unexpectedly thrown wide open, and enter there, only to be, as he himself said, ‘smothered under roses.’ Had Paris any suitable theogony or theology, as Rome and Athens had, this might almost be reckoned, as those Ancients accounted of death by lightning, a sacred death, a death from the gods; from their many-headed god, Popularity. In the benignant quietude of Ferney, Voltaire had lived long, and as his friends calculated, might still have lived long; but a series of trifling causes lures him to Paris, and in three months he is no more. At all hours of his history, he might have said with Alexander: “O Athenians, what toil do I undergo to please you;” and the last pleasure his Athenians demand of him, is that he would die for them. Considered with reference to the world at large, this journey is farther remarkable. It is the most splendid triumph of that nature recorded in these ages; the loudest and showiest homage ever paid to what we moderns call Literature; to a man that had merely thought, and published his thoughts. Much false tumult, no doubt, there was in it; yet also a certain deeper significance. It is interesting to see how universal and eternal in man is love of wisdom; how the highest and the lowest, how supercilious princes and rude peasants, and all men must alike show honour to Wisdom, or the appearance of Wisdom; nay, properly speaking, can show honour to nothing else. For it is not in the power of all Xerxes’ hosts to bend one thought of our proud heart: these ‘may destroy the case of Anaxarchus, himself they cannot reach:’ only to spiritual worth can the spirit do reverence; only in a soul deeper and better than ours can we see any heavenly mystery, and in humbling ourselves feel ourselves exalted. That the so ebullient enthusiasm of the French was in this case perfectly well directed, we

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cannot undertake to say: yet we rejoice to see and know that such a principle exists perennially in man’s inmost bosom; that there is no heart so sunk and stupified, none so withered and pampered, but the felt presence of a nobler heart will inspire it and lead it captive. Few royal progresses, few Roman triumphs, have equalled this long triumph of Voltaire. On his journey, at Bourg-en-Bresse, ‘he was recognised,’ says Wagnière, ‘while the horses were changing, and in a few moments the whole town crowded about the carriage; so that he was forced to lock himself for some time in a room of the inn.’ The Maître-de-poste ordered his postilion to yoke better horses, and said to him with a broad oath: “Va bon train, crève mes chevaux, je m’en f—; tu mènes M. de Voltaire.” At Dijon, there were persons of distinction that wished even to dress themselves as waiters, that they might serve him at supper, and see him by this stratagem. ‘At the barrier of Paris,’ continues Wagnière, ‘the officers asked if we had nothing with us contrary to the King’s regulations: “On my word, gentlemen, Ma foi, Messieurs,” replied M. de Voltaire, “I believe there is nothing contraband here except myself.” I alighted from the carriage, that the inspector might more readily examine it. One of the guards said to his comrade: C’est pardieu! M. de Voltaire. He plucked at the coat of the person who was searching, and repeated the same words, looking fixedly at me. I could not help laughing; then all gazing with the greatest astonishment mingled with respect, begged M. de Voltaire to pass on whither he pleased.’* Intelligence soon circulated over Paris; scarcely could the arrival of KienLong, or the Grand Lama of Thibet, have excited greater ferment. Poor Longchamp, demitted, or rather dismissed from Voltaire’s service, eight-and-twenty years before, and now, as a retired map-dealer (having resigned in favour of his son) living quietly ‘dans un petit logement à part,’ a fine smooth, garrulous old man,—heard the news next morning in his remote logement, in the Estrapade; and instantly huddled on his clothes, though he had not been out for two days, to go and see what truth was in it. ‘Several persons of my acquaintance whom I met told me that they had heard the same. I went purposely to the Café Procope, where this news formed the subject of conversation among several politicians or men of letters, who talked of it with warmth. To assure myself still farther, I walked thence towards the Quai des Théatins, where he had alighted the night before, and, as was said, taken up his lodging in a mansion near the * Vol. i. p. 121.

voltaire 107 church. Coming out from the Rue de la Seine, I saw afar off, a great number of people gathered on the Quai, not far from the Pont-Royal. Approaching nearer, I observed that this crowd was collected in front of the Marquis de Villette’s Hôtel, at the corner of the Rue de Beaune. I inquired what the matter was. The people answered me that M. de Voltaire was in that house; and they were waiting to see him when he came out. They were not sure, however, whether he would come out that day; for it was natural to think that an old man of eighty-four might need a day or two of rest. From that moment, I no longer doubted the arrival of M. de Voltaire in Paris.’*

By dint of address, Longchamp, in process of time, contrived to see his old master; had an interview of ten minutes; was for falling at his feet; and wept, with sad presentiments, at parting. Ten such minutes were a great matter; for Voltaire had his levees, and his couchees, more crowded than those of any Emperor; princes and peers thronged his antechamber; and when he went abroad his carriage was as the nucleus of a comet, whose train extended over whole districts of the city. He himself, says Wagnière, expressed dissatisfaction at much of this. Nevertheless, there were some plaudits, which, as he confessed, went to his heart. Condorcet mentions that once a person in the crowd, inquiring who this great man was, a poor woman answered, “C’est le sauveur des Calas.” Of a quite different sort was the tribute paid him by a quack, in the Place Louis Quinze, haranguing a mixed multitude on the art of juggling with cards: “Here, gentlemen,” said he, “is a trick I learned at Ferney, from that great man who makes so much noise among you, that famous M. de Voltaire, the master of us all!” In fact, mere gaping curiosity, and even ridicule was abroad, as well as real enthusiasm. The clergy too were recoiling into ominous groups; already some Jesuitic drums ecclesiastic had beat to arms. Figuring the lean, tottering, lonely old man in the midst of all this, how he looks into it, clear and alert, though no longer strong and calm, we feel drawn towards him by some tie of affection, of kindly sympathy. Longchamp says, he appeared ‘extremely worn, though still in the full possession of all his senses, and with a very firm voice.’ The following little sketch, by a hostile journalist of the day, has fixed itself deeply with us:— ‘M. de Voltaire appeared in full dress, on Tuesday, for the first time since his arrival in Paris. He had on a red coat lined with ermine; a large peruke, in the fashion of Louis XIV., black, unpowdered; and in which his withered visage was so buried that you saw only his two eyes shining like carbuncles. His head was surmounted by a square red cap * Vol. ii. p. 353.

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in the form of a crown, which seemed only laid on. He had, in his hand, a small nibbed cane; and the public of Paris, not accustomed to see him in this accoutrement, laughed a good deal. This personage, singular in all, wishes doubtless to have nothing in common with ordinary men.’*

This head,—this wondrous microcosm in the grande perruque à la Louis XIV.,—was so soon to be distenanted of all its cunning gifts; these eyes, shining like carbuncles, were so soon to be closed in long night!—We must now give the coronation ceremony, of which the reader may have heard so much: borrowing from this same sceptical hand, which, however, is vouched for by Wagnière; as, indeed, La Harpe’s more heroical narrative of that occurrence is well known, and hardly differs from the following, except in style:— ‘On Monday, M. de Voltaire, resolving to enjoy the triumph which had been so long promised him, mounted his carriage, that azure-coloured vehicle, bespangled with gold stars, which a wag called the chariot of the empyrean; and so repaired to the Académie Française, which that day had a special meeting. Twenty-two members were present. None of the prelates, abbés, or other ecclesiastics, who belong to it, would attend, or take part in these singular deliberations. The sole exceptions were the Abbés de Boismont and Millot; the one a court rake-hell (roué), with nothing but the guise of his profession; the other a varlet (cuistre), having no favour to look for, either from the Court or the Church. ‘The Académie went out to meet M. de Voltaire: he was led to the Director’s seat, which that office-bearer and the meeting invited him to accept. His portrait had been hung up above it. The company, without drawing lots, as is the custom, proceeded to work, and named him, by acclamation, Director for the April quarter. The old man, once set a-going, was about to talk a great deal; but they told him, that they valued his health too much to hear him,—that they would reduce him to silence. M. d’Alembert accordingly occupied the session, by reading his Eloge de Despréaux, which had already been communicated on a public occasion, and where he had inserted various flattering things for the present visiter. ‘M. de Voltaire then signified a wish to visit the Secretary of the Académie, whose apartments are above. With this gentleman he stayed some time; and at last set out for the Comédie Française. The court of the Louvre, vast as it is, was full of people waiting for him. So soon as his notable vehicle came in sight, the cry arose, Le voilà! The Savoyards, the apple-women, all the rabble of the quarter, had assembled there; and the acclamations, Vive Voltaire! resounded as if they would never end. The Marquis de Villette, who had arrived before, came to hand him out of his carriage, where the Procureur Clos was * Vol. ii. p. 466.

voltaire 109 seated beside him: both these gave him their arms, and could scarcely extricate him from the press. On his entering the playhouse, a crowd of more elegance, and seized with true enthusiasm for genius, surrounded him: the ladies, above all, threw themselves in his way, and stopped it, the better to look at him; some were seen squeezing forward to touch his clothes; some plucking hair from his fur. M. le Duc de Chartres,* not caring to advance too near, showed, though at a distance, no less curiosity than others. ‘The saint, or rather the god, of the evening, was to occupy the box belonging to the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber,† opposite that of the Comte d’Artois. Madame Denis and Madame de Villette were already there; and the pit was in convulsions of joy, awaiting the moment when the poet should appear. There was no end till he placed himself on the front seat, beside the ladies. Then rose a cry: La Couronne! and Brizard, the actor, came and put the garland on his head. “Ah, Heaven! will you kill me then? (Ah, Dieu! vous voulez donc me faire mourir!)” cried M. de Voltaire, weeping with joy, and resisting this honour. He took the crown in his hand, and presented it to Belle-et-bonne:‡ she withstood; and the Prince de Beauvau, seizing the laurel, replaced it on the head of our Sophocles, who could refuse no longer. ‘The piece (Irène) was played, and with more applause than usual, though scarcely with enough to correspond to this triumph of its author. Meanwhile the players were in straits as to what they should do; and during their deliberations the tragedy ended; the curtain fell, and the tumult of the people was extreme, till it rose again, disclosing a show like that of the Centénaire. M. de Voltaire’s bust, which had been placed shortly before in the foyer (green-room) of the Comédie Française, had been brought upon the stage, and elevated on a pedestal; the whole body of comedians stood round it in a semicircle, with palms and garlands in their hands: there was a crown already on the bust. The pealing of musical flourishes, of drums, of trumpets, had announced the ceremony; and Madame Vestris held in her hand a paper, which was soon understood to contain verses, lately composed by the Marquis de Saint-Marc. She recited them with an emphasis proportioned to the extravagance of the scene. They ran as follows:— Aux yeux de Paris enchanté, Reçois en ce jour un hommage, Que confirmera d’âge en âge La sévère postérité! Non, tu n’as pas besoin d’atteindre au noir rivage Pour jouir des honneurs de l’immortalité; * Afterwards Egalité. † He himself, as is perhaps too well known, was one. ‡ The Marquise de Villette, a foster-child of his.

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essays on literature Voltaire, reçois la couronne Que l’on vient de te présenter; Il est beau de la mériter, Quand c’est la France qui la donne!*

‘This was encored: the actress recited it again. Next, each of them went forward and laid his garland round the bust. Mademoiselle Fanier, in a fanatical ecstasy, kissed it, and all the others imitated her. ‘This long ceremony, accompanied with infinite vivats, being over, the curtain again dropped; and when it rose for Nanine, one of M. de Voltaire’s comedies, his bust was seen on the right-hand side of the stage, where it remained during the whole play.

‘M. le Comte d’Artois did not choose to show himself too openly; but being informed, according to his orders, so soon as M. de Voltaire appeared in the theatre, he had gone thither incognito; and it is thought that the old man, once when he went out for a moment, had the honour of a short interview with his Royal Highness.

‘Nanine finished, comes a new hurly-burly,—a new trial for the modesty of our philosopher! He had got into his carriage, but the people would not let him go; they threw themselves on the horses, they kissed them: some young poets even cried to unyoke these animals, and draw the modern Apollo home with their own arms; unhappily there were not enthusiasts enough to volunteer this service, and he at last got leave to depart, not without vivats, which he may have heard on the Pont-Royal, and even in his own house. . . . ‘M. de Voltaire, on reaching home, wept anew; and modestly protested that if he had known the people were to play so many follies, he would not have gone.’

On all these wonderful proceedings we shall leave our readers to their own reflections; remarking only, that this happened on the 30th of March (1778), and that on the 30th of May, about the same hour, the object of such extraordinary adulation was in the article of death; the hearse already prepared to receive his remains, for which even a grave had to be stolen. ‘He expired,’ says Wagnière, ‘about a quarter past eleven at night, with the most perfect tranquillity, after having suffered the cruellest pains, in consequence of those fatal drugs, which his own imprudence, and especially that of the persons who should have looked to it, made him swallow. Ten minutes before his last breath, he took the hand of Morand, his valet-de-chambre, who was watching by him, pressed it, and * As Dryden said of Swift, so may we say: Our cousin Saint-Marc has no turn for poetry.

voltaire 111 said, “Adieu, mon cher Morand, je me meurs, Adieu, my dear Morand, I am gone.” These are the last words uttered by M. de Voltaire.’* We have still to consider this man in his specially intellectual capacity, which, as with every man of letters, is to be regarded as the clearest, and, to all practical * On this sickness of Voltaire, and his death-bed deportment, many foolish books have been written; concerning which it is not necessary to say anything. The conduct of the Parisian clergy on that occasion, seems totally unworthy of their cloth; nor was their reward, so far as concerns these individuals, inappropriate: that of finding themselves once more bilked, once more persiflés by that strange old man, in his last decrepitude, who, in his strength, had wrought them and others so many griefs. Surely the parting agonies of a fellow mortal, when the spirit of our brother, rapt in the whirlwinds and thick ghastly vapours of death, clutches blindly for help, and no help is there, are not the scenes where a wise faith would seek to exult, when it can no longer hope to alleviate! For the rest, to touch farther on those their idle tales of dying horrors, remorse, and the like; to write of such, to believe them, or disbelieve them, or in any wise discuss them, were but a continuation of the same ineptitude. He, who, after the imperturbable exit of so many Cartouches and Thurtells, in every age of the world, can continue to regard the manner of a man’s death as a test of his religious orthodoxy, may boast himself impregnable to merely terrestrial logic. Voltaire had enough of suffering, and of mean enough suffering, to encounter, without any addition from theological despair. His last interview with the clergy, who had been sent for by his friends, that the rites of burial might not be denied him, is thus described by Wagnière, as it has been by all other credible reporters of it:— ‘Two days before that mournful death, M. l’Abbé Mignot, his nephew, went to seek the Curé of Saint-Sulpice and the Abbé Guatier, and brought them into his uncle’s sickroom; who, being informed that the Abbé Guatier was there, “Ah, well!” said he, “give him my compliments and my thanks.” The Abbé spoke some words to him, exhorting him to patience. The Curé of Saint-Sulpice then came forward, having announced himself, and asked of M. de Voltaire, elevating his voice, if he acknowledged the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ? The sick man pushed one of his hands against the Curé’s calotte (coif ), shoving him back, and cried, turning abruptly to the other side, “Let me die in peace (Laissez-moi mourir en paix)!” The Curé seemingly considered his person soiled, and his coif dishonoured, by the touch of a philosopher. He made the sick nurse give him a little brushing, and then went out with the Abbé Guatier.’—vol. i. p. 161.

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intents, the most important aspect of him. Voltaire’s intellectual endowment and acquirement, his talent or genius as a literary man, lies opened to us in a series of Writings, unexampled, as we believe, in two respects: their extent, and their diversity. Perhaps there is no writer, not a mere compiler, but writing from his own invention or elaboration, who has left so many volumes behind him; and if to the merely arithmetical, we add a critical estimate, the singularity is still greater; for these volumes are not written without an appearance of due care and preparation; perhaps there is not one altogether feeble and confused treatise, nay, one feeble and confused sentence, to be found in them. As to variety, again, they range nearly over all human subjects; from Theology down to Domestic Economy; from the Familiar Letter to the Political History; from the Pasquinade to the Epic Poem. Some strange gift, or union of gifts, must have been at work here; for the result is, at least, in the highest degree uncommon, and to be wondered at, if not to be admired. If through all this many-coloured versatility, we try to decipher the essential, distinctive features of Voltaire’s intellect, it seems to us that we find there a counterpart to our theory of his moral character; as, indeed, if that theory was accurate, we must do: for the thinking and the moral nature, distinguished by the necessities of speech, have no such distinction in themselves; but, rightly examined, exhibit in every case the strictest sympathy and correspondence, are, indeed, but different phases of the same indissoluble unity—a living mind. In life, Voltaire was found to be without good claim to the title of philosopher; and now, in literature, and for similar reasons, we find in him the same deficiencies. Here too it is not greatness, but the very extreme of expertness, that we recognize; not strength, so much as agility; not depth, but superficial extent. That truly surprising ability seems rather the unparalleled combination of many common talents, than the exercise of any finer or higher one: for here too the want of earnestness, of intense continuance, is fatal to him. He has the eye of a lynx; sees deeper, at the first glance, than any other man; but no second glance is given. Thus Truth, which, to the philosopher, has from of old been said to live in a well, remains for the most part hidden from him; we may say forever hidden, if we take the highest, and only philosophical species of Truth; for this does not reveal itself to any mortal, without quite another sort of meditation than Voltaire ever seems to have bestowed on it. In fact, his deductions are uniformly of a forensic, argumentative, immediately practical nature; often true, we will admit, so far as they go; but not the whole truth; and false, when taken for the whole. In regard to feeling, it is the same with him: he is, in general, humane, mildly affectionate, not without touches of nobleness; but light, fitful,

voltaire 113 discontinuous; ‘a smart freethinker, all things in an hour.’ He is no Poet and Philosopher, but a popular sweet Singer, and Haranguer; in all senses, and in all styles, a Concionator, which, for the most part, will turn out to be an altogether different character. It is true, in this last province he stands unrivalled; for such an audience, the most fit and perfectly persuasive of all preachers: but in many far higher provinces, he is neither perfect nor unrivalled; has been often surpassed; was surpassed even in his own age and nation. For a decisive, thorough-going, in any measure gigantic, force of thought, he is far inferior to Diderot: with all the liveliness, he has not the soft elegance; with more than the wit, he has but a small portion of the wisdom that belonged to Fontenelle: as in real sensibility, so in the delineation of it, in pathos, loftiness, and earnest eloquence, he cannot, making all fair abatements, and there are many, be compared with Rousseau. Doubtless, an astonishing fertility, quickness, address; an openness also, and universal susceptibility of mind, must have belonged to him. As little can we deny that he manifests an assiduous perseverance, a capability of long continued exertion, strange in so volatile a man; and consummate skill in husbanding and wisely directing his exertion. The very knowledge he had amassed, granting, which is but partly true, that it was superficial, remembered knowledge, might have distinguished him as a mere Dutch commentator. From Newton’s Principia to the Shaster and Vedam, nothing has escaped him: he has glanced into all literatures and all sciences; nay studied in them, for he can speak a rational word on all. It is known, for instance, that he understood Newton when no other man in France understood him: indeed, his countrymen may call Voltaire their discoverer of intellectual England,—a discovery, it is true, rather of the Curtis than of the Columbus sort, yet one which in his day still remained to be made. Nay, from all sides he brings new light into his country: now, for the first time, to the upturned wondering eyes of Frenchmen in general, does it become clear that Thought has actually a kind of existence in other kingdoms; that some glimmerings of civilization had dawned here and there on the human species, prior to the Siècle de Louis Quatorze. Of Voltaire’s acquaintance with History, at least with what he called History, be it civil, religious, or literary; of his innumerable, indescribable collection of facts, gathered from all sources—from European Chronicles and State Papers, from eastern Zends and Jewish Talmuds, we need not remind any reader. It has been objected that his information was often borrowed at second-hand; that he had his plodders and pioneers, whom, as living dictionaries, he skilfully consulted in time of need. This also seems to be partly true, but deducts little from our estimate of him: for the skill so to borrow is even rarer than the power to lend. Voltaire’s knowledge is not a mere show-room

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of curiosities, but truly a museum for purposes of teaching: every object is in its place, and there for its uses; nowhere do we find confusion, or vain display; everywhere intention, instructiveness, and the clearest order. Perhaps it is this very power of Order, of rapid, perspicuous Arrangement, that lies at the root of Voltaire’s best gifts; or rather, we should say, it is that keen, accurate intellectual vision, from which, to a mind of any intensity, Order naturally arises. This clear quick vision, and the methodic arrangement which springs from it, are looked upon as peculiarly French qualities; and Voltaire, at all times, manifests them in a more than French degree. Let him but cast his eye over any subject, in a moment he sees, though indeed only to a short depth, yet with instinctive decision, where the main bearings of it for that short depth lie; what is, or appears to be, its logical coherence; how causes connect themselves with effects; how the whole is to be seized, and in lucid sequence represented to his own or to other minds. In this respect, moreover, it is happy for him that, below the short depth alluded to, his view does not properly grow dim, but altogether terminates: thus there is nothing farther to occasion him misgivings; has he not already sounded into that basis of bottomless Darkness on which all things firmly rest? What lies below is delusion, imagination, some form of Superstition or Folly; which he, nothing doubting, altogether casts away. Accordingly, he is the most intelligible of writers; everywhere transparent at a glance. There is no delineation or disquisition of his, that has not its whole purport written on its forehead; all is precise, all is rightly adjusted; that keen spirit of Order shows itself in the whole, and in every line of the whole. If we say that this power of Arrangement, as applied both to the acquisition and to the communication of ideas, is Voltaire’s most serviceable faculty in all his enterprises, we say nothing singular: for take the word in its largest acceptation, and it comprehends the whole office of Understanding, logically so called; is the means whereby man accomplishes whatever, in the way of outward force, has been made possible for him; conquers all practical obstacles, and rises to be the ‘king of this lower world.’ It is the organ of all that Knowledge which can properly be reckoned synonymous with Power; for hereby man strikes, with wise aim, into the infinite agencies of Nature, and multiplies his own small strength to unlimited degrees. It has been said also that man may rise to be the ‘god of this lower world;’ but that is a far loftier height, not attainable by such power-knowledge, but by quite another sort, for which Voltaire in particular shows hardly any aptitude. In truth, readily as we have recognised his spirit of Method, with its many uses, we are far from ascribing to him any perceptible portion of that greatest

voltaire 115 praise in thinking, or in writing the praise of philosophic, still less of poetic Method, which, especially the latter, must be the fruit of deep feeling as well as of clear vision—of genius as well as talent; and is much more likely to be found in the compositions of a Hooker or a Shakspeare than of a Voltaire. The Method discernible in Voltaire, and this on all subjects whatever, is a purely business Method. The order that arises from it is not Beauty, but, at best, Regularity. His objects do not lie round him in pictorial, not always in scientific grouping; but rather in commodious rows, where each may be seen and come at, like goods in a well kept warehouse. We might say there is not the deep natural symmetry of a forest oak, but the simple artificial symmetry of a parlour chandelier. Compare, for example, the plan of the Henriade to that of our so barbarous Hamlet. The plan of the former is a geometrical diagram by Fermat; that of the latter a cartoon by Raphael. The Henriade, as we see it completed, is a polished, square-built Tuileries; Hamlet is a mysterious, star-paved Valhalla, and dwelling of the gods. Nevertheless, Voltaire’s style of Method is, as we have said, a business one; and for his purposes, more available than any other. It carries him swiftly through his work, and carries his reader swiftly through it; there is a prompt intelligence between the two; the whole meaning is communicated clearly, and comprehended without effort. From this also it may follow, that Voltaire will please the young more than he does the old; that the first perusal of him will please better than the second, if indeed any second be thought necessary. But what merit (and it is considerable) the pleasure and profit of this first perusal presupposes, must be honestly allowed him. Herein it seems to us lies the grand quality in all his performances. These Histories of his, for instance, are felt, in spite of their sparkling rapidity, and knowing air of philosophic insight, to be among the shallowest of all histories; mere beadrolls of exterior occurrences, of battles, edifices, enactments, and other quite superficial phenomena; yet being clear beadrolls, well adapted for memory, and recited in a lively tone, we listen with satisfaction, and learn somewhat; learn much, if we began knowing nothing. Nay sometimes the summary, in its skilful though crowded arrangement, and brilliant well-defined outlines, has almost a poetical as well as a didactic merit. Charles the Twelfth may still pass for a model in that often-attempted species of Biography: the clearest details are given in the fewest words; we have sketches of strange men and strange countries, of wars, adventures, negotiations, in a style which, for graphic brevity, rivals that of Sallust. It is a line-engraving, on a reduced scale, of that Swede and his mad life; without colours, yet not without the fore-shortenings and perspective observances,—nay not altogether without the deeper harmonies which belong to a true Picture. In respect of composition,

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whatever may be said of its accuracy or worth otherwise, we cannot but reckon it greatly the best of Voltaire’s Histories. In his other prose works, in his Novels, and innumerable Essays and fugitive pieces, the same clearness of order, the same rapid precision of view, again forms a distinguishing merit. His Zadigs and Baboucs and Candides, which, considered as products of imagination, perhaps rank higher with foreigners than any of his professedly poetical performances, are instinct with this sort of intellectual life: the sharpest glances, though from an oblique point of sight, into at least the surface of human life, into the old familiar world of business, which truly, from his oblique station, looks oblique enough, and yields store of ridiculous combinations. The Wit, manifested chiefly in these and the like performances, but ever flowing, unless purposely restrained, in boundless abundance, from Voltaire’s mind, has been often and duly celebrated. It lay deep-rooted in his nature; the inevitable produce of such an understanding with such a character, and was from the first likely, as it actually proved in the latter period of his life, to become the main dialect in which he spoke, and even thought. Doing all justice to the inexhaustible readiness, the quick force, the polished acuteness, of Voltaire’s Wit, we may remark, at the same time, that it was nowise the highest species of employment for such a mind as his; that indeed it ranks essentially among the lowest species even of Ridicule. It is at all times mere logical pleasantry; a gayety of the head, not of the heart; there is scarcely a twinkling of Humour in the whole of his numberless sallies. Wit of this sort cannot maintain a demure sedateness; a grave yet infinitely kind aspect, warming the inmost soul with true loving mirth; it has not even the force to laugh outright, but can only sniff and titter. It grounds itself, not on fond sportful sympathy, but on contempt, or at best, on indifference. It stands related to Humour as Prose does to Poetry; of which, in this department at least, Voltaire exhibits no symptom. The most determinedly ludicrous composition of his, the Pucelle, which cannot on other grounds be recommended to any reader, has no higher merit than that of an audacious caricature. True, he is not a buffoon; seldom or never violates the rules, we shall not say of propriety, yet of good breeding: to this negative praise he is entitled. But as for any high claim to positive praise, it cannot be made good. We look in vain, through his whole writings, for one lineament of a Quixote or a Shandy; even of a Hudibras or Battle of the Books. Indeed, it has been more than once observed that Humour is not a national gift with the French, in late times; that since Montaigne’s day it seems to have well nigh vanished from among them.

voltaire 117 Considered in his technical capacity of Poet, Voltaire need not, at present, detain us very long. Here too his excellence is chiefly intellectual, and shown in the way of business-like method. Everything is well calculated for a given end; there is the utmost logical fitness of sentiment, of incident, of general contrivance. Nor is he without an enthusiasm that sometimes resembles inspiration; a clear fellow-feeling for the personages of his scene he always has; with a chameleon susceptibility he takes some hue of every object; if he cannot be that object, he at least plausibly enacts it. Thus we have a result everywhere consistent with itself; a contrivance, not without nice adjustments, and brilliant aspects, which pleases with that old pleasure of ‘difficulties overcome,’ and the visible correspondence of means to end. That the deeper portion of our soul sits silent, unmoved under all this; recognising no universal, everlasting Beauty, but only a modish Elegance, less the work of poetical creation than a process of the toilette, need occasion no surprise. It signifies only that Voltaire was a French poet, and wrote as the French people of that day required and approved. We have long known that French poetry aimed at a different result from ours; that its splendour was what we should call a dead, artificial one; not the manifold soft summer glories of Nature, but a cold splendour, as of polished metal. On the whole, in reading Voltaire’s poetry, that adventure of the Café de Procope should ever be held in mind. He was not without an eye to have looked, had he seen others looking, into the deepest nature of poetry; nor has he failed here and there to cast a glance in that direction: but what preferment could such enterprises earn for him in the Café de Procope? What could it profit his all-precious ‘fame’ to pursue them farther? In the end, he seems to have heartily reconciled himself to use and wont, and striven only to do better what he saw all others doing. Yet his private poetical creed, which could not be a catholic one, was, nevertheless, scarcely so bigoted as might have been looked for. That censure of Shakspeare, which elicited a re-censure in England, perhaps rather deserved a ‘recommendatory epistle,’ all things being considered. He calls Shakspeare ‘a genius full of force and fertility, of nature and sublimity,’ though unhappily ‘without the smallest spark of good taste, or the smallest acquaintance with the rules,’ which, in Voltaire’s dialect, is not so false; Shakspeare having really almost no Parisian bon goût whatever, and walking through ‘the rules,’ so often as he sees good, with the most astonishing tranquillity. After a fair enough account of Hamlet, the best of those ‘farces monstrueuses qu’on appelle tragédies,’ where, however, there are ‘scenes so beautiful, passages so grand and so terrible,’ Voltaire thus proceeds to resolve two great problems:

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‘The first, how so many wonders could accumulate in a single head? for it must be confessed that all the divine Shakspeare’s plays are written in this taste: the second, how men’s minds could have been elevated so as to look at these plays with transport; and how they are still followed after, in a century which has produced Addison’s Cato? ‘Our astonishment at the first wonder will cease, when we understand that Shakspeare took all his tragedies from histories or romances; and that in this case he only turned into verse the romance of Claudius, Gertrude and Hamlet, written in full by Saxo Grammaticus, to whom be the praise. ‘The second part of the problem, that is to say, the pleasure men take in these tragedies, presents a little more difficulty; but here is (en voici) the solution, according to the deep reflections of certain philosophers. ‘The English chairmen, the sailors, hackney-coachmen, shop-porters, butchers, clerks even, are passionately fond of shows: give them cock-fights, bull-baitings, fencingmatches, burials, duels, gibbets, witchcraft, apparitions, they run thither in crowds; nay, there is more than one patrician as curious as the populace. The citizens of London found, in Shakspeare’s tragedies, satisfaction enough for such a turn of mind. The courtiers were obliged to follow the torrent: how can you help admiring what the more sensible part of the town admires? There was nothing better for a hundred and fifty years: the admiration grew with age, and became an idolatry. Some touches of genius, some happy verses full of force and nature, which you remember in spite of yourself, atoned for the remainder, and soon the whole piece succeeded by the help of some beauties of detail.’*

Here truly is a comfortable little theory, which throws light on more than one thing. However, it is couched in mild terms, comparatively speaking. Frederick the Great, for example, thus gives his verdict: ‘To convince yourself of the wretched taste that up to this day prevails in Germany, you have only to visit the public theatres. You will there see, in action, the abominable plays of Shakspeare, translated into our language; and the whole audience fainting with rapture (se pâmer d’aise) in listening to those ridiculous farces, worthy of the savages of Canada. I call them such, because they sin against all the rules of the theatre. One may pardon those mad sallies in Shakspeare, for the birth of the arts is never the point of their maturity. But here, even now, we have a Goetz de Berlichingen, which has just made its appearance on the scene; a detestable imitation of those miserable English pieces; and the pit applauds, and demands with enthusiasm the repetition of these disgusting ineptitudes (de ces dégoûtantes platitudes).† * Œuvres, t. xlvii. p. 300. † De la Littérature Allemande. Berlin, 1780. We quote from the compilation: Goethe in den Zeugnissen der Mitlebenden, s. 124.

voltaire 119 We have not cited these criticisms with a view to impugn them; but simply to ascertain where the critics themselves are standing. This passage of Frederick’s has even a touch of pathos in it; may be regarded as the expiring cry of ‘Goût,’ in that country, who sees himself suddenly beleaguered by strange, appalling, Supernatural Influences, which he mistakes for Lapland witchcraft, or Cagliostro jugglery; which nevertheless swell up round him, irrepressible, higher, ever higher; and so he drowns, grasping his opera-hat, in an ocean of ‘dégoûtantes platitudes.’ On the whole, it would appear that Voltaire’s view of poetry was radically different from ours; that, in fact, of what we should strictly call poetry, he had almost no view whatever. A Tragedy, a Poem, with him is not to be ‘a manifestation of man’s Reason in forms suitable to his Sense;’ but rather a highly complex egg-dance, to be danced before the King, to a given tune, and without breaking a single egg. Nevertheless, let justice be shown to him, and to French poetry at large. This latter is a peculiar growth of our modern ages; has been laboriously cultivated, and is not without its own value. We have to remark also, as a curious fact, that it has been, at one time or other, transplanted into all countries, England, Germany, Spain; but though under the sunbeams of royal protection, it would strike root nowhere. Nay, now it seems falling into the sere and yellow leaf in its own natal soil: the axe has already been seen near its root; and perhaps, in no great lapse of years, this species of poetry may be to the French, what it is to all other nations, a pleasing reminiscence. Yet the elder French loved it with zeal; to them it must have had a true worth: indeed we can understand how, when Life itself consisted so much in Display, these representations of Life may have been the only suitable ones. And now when the nation feels itself called to a more grave and nobler destiny among nations, the want of a new Literature also begins to be felt. As yet, in looking at their too purblind, scrambling controversies of Romanticists and Classicists, we cannot find that our ingenious neighbours have done much more than make a commencement in this enterprise: however a commencement seems to be made; they are in what may be called the eclectic state; trying all things, German, English, Italian, Spanish, with a candour and real love of improvement, which give the best omens of a still higher success. From the peculiar gifts of the French, and their peculiar spiritual position, we may expect, had they once more attained to an original style, many important benefits, and important accessions to the Literature of the World. Meanwhile, in considering and duly estimating what that people has, in past times, accomplished, Voltaire must always be reckoned among their most meritorious Poets. Inferior in what we may call general poetic temperament to Racine; greatly inferior, in some points of it, to Corneille, he has an intellectual

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vivacity, a quickness both of sight and of invention, which belongs to neither of these two. We believe that, among foreign nations, his Tragedies, such works as Zaire and Mahomet, are considerably the most esteemed of this school. However, it is nowise as a Poet, Historian, or Novelist, that Voltaire stands so prominent in Europe; but chiefly as a religious Polemic, as a vehement opponent of the Christian Faith. Viewed in this last character, he may give rise to many grave reflections, only a small portion of which can here be so much as glanced at. We may say, in general, that his style of controversy is of a piece with himself; not a higher, and scarcely a lower style than might have been expected from him. As in a moral point of view, Voltaire nowise wanted a love of truth, yet had withal a still deeper love of his own interest in truth; was, therefore, intrinsically no Philosopher, but a highly-accomplished Trivialist,—so likewise, in an intellectual point of view, he manifests himself ingenious and adroit, rather than noble or comprehensive; fights for truth or victory, not by patient meditation, but by light sarcasm, whereby victory may indeed, for a time, be gained; but little Truth, what can be named Truth, especially in such matters as this, is to be looked for. No one, we suppose, ever arrogated for Voltaire any praise of originality in this discussion: we suppose there is not a single idea, of any moment, relating to the Christian Religion, in all his multifarious writings, that had not been set forth again and again before his enterprises commenced. The labours of a very mixed multitude, from Porphyry down to Shaftesbury, including Hobbeses, Tindals, Tolands, some of them sceptics of a much nobler class, had left little room for merit in this kind: nay, Bayle, his own countryman, had just finished a life spent in preaching scepticism precisely similar, and by methods precisely similar, when Voltaire appeared on the arena. Indeed, scepticism, as we have before observed, was at this period universal among the higher ranks in France, with whom Voltaire chiefly associated. It is only in the merit and demerit of grinding down this grain into food for the people, and inducing so many to eat of it, that Voltaire can claim any singularity. However, we quarrel not with him on this head: there may be cases where the want of originality is even a moral merit. But it is a much more serious ground of offence that he intermeddled in Religion without being himself in any measure Religious; that he entered the Temple and continued there, with a levity, which, in any Temple where men worship, can beseem no brother man; that, in a word, he ardently, and with longcontinued effort, warred against Christianity, without understanding beyond the mere superficies of what Christianity was.

voltaire 121 His polemical procedure in this matter, it appears to us, must now be admitted to have been, on the whole, a shallow one. Through all its manifold forms, and involutions and repetitions, it turns, we believe exclusively, on one point: what Theologians have called the ‘plenary Inspiration of the Scriptures.’ This is the single wall, against which, through long years, and with innumerable battering-rams and catapults and pop-guns, he unweariedly batters. Concede him this, and his ram swings freely, to and fro, through space; there is nothing farther it can even aim at. That the Sacred Books could be aught else than a Bank-of-Faith Bill, for such and such quantities of Enjoyment, payable at sight in the other world, value received; which bill becomes waste paper, the stamp being questioned:—that the Christian Religion could have any deeper foundation than Books, could possibly be written in the purest nature of man, in mysterious, ineffaceable characters, to which Books, and all Revelations, and authentic traditions, were but a subsidiary matter, were but as the light whereby that divine writing was to be read;—nothing of this seems to have, even in the faintest manner, occurred to him. Yet herein, as we believe that the whole world has now begun to discover, lies the real essence of the question; by the negative or affirmative decision of which the Christian Religion, anything that is worth calling by that name, must fall, or endure forever. We believe, also, that the wiser minds of our age have already come to agreement on this question; or rather never were divided regarding it. Christianity, the ‘Worship of Sorrow,’ has been recognized as divine; on far other grounds than ‘Essays on Miracles,’ and by considerations infinitely deeper than would avail in any mere ‘trial by jury.’ He who argues against it, or for it, in this manner, may be regarded as mistaking its nature: the Ithuriel, though to our eyes he wears a body, and the fashion of armour, cannot be wounded with material steel. Our fathers were wiser than we, when they said in deepest earnestness, what we often hear in shallow mockery, that Religion is ‘not of Sense, but of Faith;’ not of Understanding, but of Reason. He who finds himself without the latter, who by all his studying has failed to unfold it in himself, may have studied to great or to small purpose, we say not which; but of the Christian Religion, as of many other things, he has and can have no knowledge. The Christian Doctrine we often hear likened to the Greek Philosophy, and found, on all hands, some measurable way superior to it: but this also seems a mistake. The Christian Doctrine, that doctrine of Humility, in all senses, godlike, and the parent of all godlike virtues, is not superior, or inferior, or equal, to any doctrine of Socrates or Thales; being of a totally different nature; differing from these, as a perfect Ideal Poem does from a correct Computation in Arithmetic.

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He who compares it with such standards may lament that, beyond the mere letter, the purport of this divine Humility has never been disclosed to him; that the loftiest feeling hitherto vouchsafed to mankind is as yet hidden from his eyes. For the rest, the question how Christianity originated is doubtless a high question; resolvable enough, if we view only its surface, which was all that Voltaire saw of it; involved in sacred, silent, unfathomable depths if we investigate its interior meanings; which meanings, indeed, it may be, every new age will develope to itself in a new manner, and with new degrees of light; for the whole truth may be called infinite, and to men’s eye discernible only in parts: but the question itself is nowise the ultimate one in this matter. We understand ourselves to be risking no new assertion, but simply reporting what is already the conviction of the greatest of our age, when we say,—that cheerfully recognising, gratefully appropriating whatever Voltaire has proved, or any other man has proved, or shall prove, the Christian Religion, once here, cannot again pass away; that, in one or the other form, it will endure through all time; that, as in Scripture, so also in the heart of man, is written, ‘the Gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.’ Were the memory of this Faith never so obscured, as, indeed, in all times, the coarse passions and perceptions of the world do all but obliterate it in the hearts of most; yet in every pure soul, in every Poet and Wise Man, it finds a new Missionary, a new Martyr, till the great volume of Universal History is finally closed, and man’s destinies are fulfilled in this earth. ‘It is a height to which the human species were fated and enabled to attain; and from which, having once attained it, they can never retrograde.’ These things, which it were far out of our place to attempt adequately elucidating here, must not be left out of sight, in appreciating Voltaire’s polemical worth. We find no trace of these, or of any the like essential considerations having been present with him, in examining the Christian Religion; nor indeed was it consistent with his general habits that they should be so. Totally destitute of religious Reverence, even of common practical seriousness; by nature or habit, undevout both in heart and head; not only without any Belief, in other than a material sense, but without the possibility of acquiring any, he can be no safe or permanently useful guide in this investigation. We may consider him as having opened the way to future inquirers of a truer spirit; but for his own part, as having engaged in an enterprise, the real nature of which was well nigh unknown to him; and engaged in it with the issue to be anticipated in such a case; producing chiefly confusion, dislocation, destruction, on all hands; so that the good he achieved is still, in these times, found mixed with an alarming

voltaire 123 proportion of evil, from which, indeed, men rationally doubt whether much of it will in any time be separable. We should err widely, too, if in estimating what quantity, altogether overlooking what quality, of intellect Voltaire may have manifested on this occasion, we took the result produced as any measure of the force applied. His task was not one of Affirmation, but of Denial; not a task of erecting and rearing up, which is slow and laborious; but of destroying and overturning, which in most cases is rapid and far easier. The force necessary for him was nowise a great and noble one; but a small, in some respects a mean one, to be nimbly and seasonably put in use. The Ephesian Temple, which it had employed many wise heads and strong arms for a life-time to build, could be un-built by one madman, in a single hour. Of such errors, deficiencies, and positive misdeeds, it appears to us, a just criticism must accuse Voltaire: at the same time, we can nowise join in the condemnatory clamour which so many worthy persons, not without the best intentions, to this day keep up against him. His whole character seems to be plain enough, common enough, had not extraneous influences so perverted our views regarding it: nor, morally speaking, is it a worse character, but considerably a better one, than belongs to the mass of men. Voltaire’s aims in opposing the Christian Religion were unhappily of a mixed nature: yet, after all, very nearly such aims as we have often seen directed against it, and often seen directed in its favour: a little love of finding Truth, with a great love of making Proselytes; which last is in itself a natural, universal feeling; and if honest, is, even in the worst cases, a subject for pity, rather than for hatred. As a light, careless, courteous Man of the World, he offers no hateful aspect; on the contrary, a kindly, gay, rather amiable one: hundreds of men, with half his worth of disposition, die daily, and their little world laments them. It is time that he too should be judged of by his intrinsic, not by his accidental qualities; that justice should be done to him also; for injustice can profit no man and no cause. In fact, Voltaire’s chief merits belong to Nature and himself; his chief faults are of his time and country. In that famous era of the Pompadours and Encyclopédies, he forms the main figure; and was such, we have seen, more by resembling the multitude, than by differing from them. It was a strange age that of Louis XV.; in several points, a novel one in the history of mankind. In regard to its luxury and depravity; to the high culture of all merely practical and material faculties, and the entire torpor of all the purely contemplative and spiritual, this era considerably resembles that of the Roman Emperors. There too was external splendour and internal squalor; the highest completeness in all sensual arts, including among these not cookery and its adjuncts alone, but even

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‘effect-painting’ and ‘effect-writing;’ only the art of virtuous living was a lost one. Instead of Love for Poetry, there was ‘Taste’ for it; refinement in manners, with utmost coarseness in morals: in a word, the strange spectacle of a Social System, embracing large, cultivated portions of the human species, and founded only on Atheism. With the Romans, things went what we should call their natural course: Liberty, public spirit quietly declined into a caput-mortuum; Self-love, Materialism, Baseness even to the disbelief in all possibility of Virtue, stalked more and more imperiously abroad; till the body-politic, long since deprived of its vital circulating fluids, had now become a putrid carcase, and fell in pieces to be the prey of ravenous wolves. Then was there, under these Attilas and Alarics, a world’s-spectacle of destruction and despair, compared with which the often-commemorated ‘horrors of the French Revolution,’ and all Napoleon’s wars, were but the gay jousting of a tournament to the sack of stormed cities. Our European community has escaped the like dire consummation; and by causes, which, as may be hoped, will always secure it from such. Nay, were there no other cause, it may be asserted, that in a common-wealth where the Christian Religion exists, where it once has existed, public and private Virtue, the basis of all Strength, never can become extinct; but in every new age, and even from the deepest decline, there is a chance, and in the course of ages, a certainty of renovation. That the Christian Religion, or any Religion, continued to exist; that some martyr heroism still lived in the heart of Europe to rise against mailed Tyranny when it rode triumphant,—was indeed no merit in the age of Louis XV., but a happy accident which it could not altogether get rid of. For that age too is to be regarded as an experiment, on the great scale, to decide the question, not yet, it would appear, settled to universal satisfaction: With what degree of vigour a political system, grounded on pure Self-interest, never so enlightened, but without a God, or any recognition of the godlike in man, can be expected to flourish; or whether, in such circumstances, a political system can be expected to flourish, or even to subsist at all? It is contended by many that our mere love of personal Pleasure, or Happiness as it is called, acting on every individual, with such clearness as he may easily have, will of itself lead him to respect the rights of others, and wisely employ his own; to fulfil, on a mere principle of economy, all the duties of a good patriot; so that, in what respects the State, or the merely social existence of mankind, Belief, beyond the testimony of the senses, and Virtue, beyond the very common Virtue of loving what is pleasant, and hating what is painful, are to be considered as supererogatory qualifications, as ornamental, not essential. Many there are, on the other hand, who pause

voltaire 125 over this doctrine; cannot discover, in such a universe of conflicting atoms, any principle by which the whole shall cohere: for if every man’s selfishness, infinitely expansive, is to be hemmed in only by the infinitely-expansive selfishness of every other man, it seems as if we should have a world of mutually-repulsive bodies with no centripetal force to bind them together; in which case, it is well known, they would, by and by, diffuse themselves over space, and constitute a remarkable Chaos, but no habitable Solar or Stellar System. If the age of Louis XV. was not made an experimentum crucis in regard to this question, one reason may be that such experiments are too expensive. Nature cannot afford, above once or twice in the thousand years, to destroy a whole world, for purposes of science; but must content herself with destroying one or two kingdoms. The age of Louis XV., so far as it went, seems a highly illustrative experiment. We are to remark also that its operation was clogged by a very considerable disturbing force; by a large remnant, namely, of the old faith in Religion, in the invisible, celestial nature of Virtue, which our French Purifiers, by their utmost efforts of lavation, had not been able to wash away. The men did their best, but no man can do more. Their worst enemy, we imagine, will not accuse them of any undue regard to things unseen and spiritual: far from practising this invisible sort of Virtue, they cannot even believe in its possibility. The high exploits and endurances of old ages were no longer virtues, but ‘passions;’ these antique persons had a taste for being heroes, a certain fancy to die for the truth: the more fools they! With our Philosophes, the only virtue of any civilization was what they call ‘Honour,’ the sanctioning deity of which is that wonderful ‘Force of Public Opinion.’ Concerning which virtue of Honour, we must be permitted to say that she reveals herself too clearly, as the daughter and heiress of our old acquaintance Vanity, who indeed has been known enough, ever since the foundation of the world, at least since the date of that ‘Lucifer, son of the Morning;’ but known chiefly in her proper character of strolling actress, or cast-clothes Abigail; and never till that new era had seen her issue set up as Queen and all-sufficient Dictatress of man’s whole soul, prescribing with nicest precision what, in all practical and all moral emergencies, he was to do and to forbear. Again, with regard to this same Force of Public Opinion, it is a force well known to all of us, respected, valued as of indispensable utility, but nowise recognised as a final or divine force. We might ask what divine, what truly great thing had ever been effected by this force? Was it the Force of Public Opinion that drove Columbus to America; John Kepler, not to fare sumptuously among Rodolph’s Astrologers and Fire-eaters, but to perish of want, discovering the true System of the Stars? Still more ineffectual do we find it as a basis of

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public or private Morals. Nay, taken by itself, it may be called a baseless basis; for without some ulterior sanction, common to all minds; without some belief in the necessary, eternal, or which is the same, in the supramundane, divine nature of Virtue, existing in each individual, what could the moral judgment of a thousand or a thousand thousand individuals avail us? Without some celestial guidance, whencesoever derived, or howsoever named, it appears to us the Force of Public Opinion would, by and by, become an extremely unprofitable one. “Enlighten Self-interest!” cries the Philosophe, “Do but sufficiently enlighten it!” We ourselves have seen enlightened Self-interests, ere now; and truly, for most part, their light was only as that of a horn-lantern, sufficient to guide the bearer himself out of various puddles; but to us and the world, of comparatively small advantage. And figure the human species, like an endless host, seeking its way onwards through undiscovered Time, in black darkness, save that each had his horn-lantern, and the vanguard some few of glass! However we will not dwell on controversial niceties. What we had to remark was that this era, called of Philosophy, was in itself but a poor era; that any little morality it had was chiefly borrowed, and from those very ages which it accounted so barbarous. For this ‘Honour,’ this ‘Force of Public Opinion,’ is not asserted, on any side, to have much renovating, but only a sustaining or preventive power; it cannot create new Virtue, but at best may preserve what is already there. Nay, of the age of Louis XV., we may say that its very Power, its material strength, its knowledge, all that it had, was borrowed. It boasted itself to be an age of illumination; and truly illumination there was of its kind: only, except the illuminated windows, almost nothing to be seen thereby. None of those great Doctrines or Institutions that have ‘made man in all points a man;’ none even of those Discoveries that have the most subjected external Nature to his purposes, were made in that age. What Plough, or Printing-press, what Chivalry, or Christianity; nay, what Steam-engine, or Quakerism, or Trial by Jury, did these Encyclopedists invent for mankind? They invented simply nothing; not one of man’s virtues, not one of man’s powers, is due to them; in all these respects, the age of Louis XV. is among the most barren of recorded ages. Indeed, the whole trade of our Philosophes was directly the opposite of invention: it was not to produce, that they stood there; but to criticise, to quarrel with, to rend in pieces, what had been already produced;—a quite inferior trade; sometimes a useful, but on the whole a mean trade; often the fruit, and always the parent, of meanness, in every mind that permanently follows it. Considering the then position of affairs, it is not singular that the age of Louis XV. should have been what it was: an age without nobleness, without

voltaire 127 high virtues, or high manifestations of talent; an age of shallow clearness, of polish, self-conceit, scepticism, and all forms of Persiflage. As little does it seem surprising, or peculiarly blameable, that Voltaire, the leading man of that age, should have partaken largely of all its qualities. True, his giddy activity took serious effect, the light firebrands which he so carelessly scattered abroad, kindled fearful conflagrations: but in these there has been good as well as evil; nor is it just that, even for the latter, he, a limited mortal, should be charged with more than mortal’s responsibility. After all, that parched, blighted period, and the period of earthquakes and tornadoes which followed it, have now well nigh cleared away: they belong to the Past, and for us and those that come after us, are not without their benefits, and calm historical meaning. ‘The thinking heads of all nations,’ says a deep observer, ‘had in secret come to majority; and, in a mistaken feeling of their vocation, rose the more fiercely against antiquated constraint. The Man of Letters is, by instinct, opposed to a Priesthood of old standing: the literary class and the clerical must wage a war of extermination, when they are divided; for both strive after one place. Such division became more and more perceptible, the nearer we approached the period of European manhood, the epoch of triumphant Learning; and Knowledge and Faith came into more decided contradiction. In the prevailing Faith, as was thought, lay the reason of the universal degradation; and by a more and more searching Knowledge men hoped to remove it. On all hands, the Religious feeling suffered, under manifold attacks against its actual manner of existence, against the Forms in which hitherto it had embodied itself. The result of that modern way of thought was named Philosophy; and in this all was included that opposed itself to the ancient way of thought, especially, therefore, all that opposed itself to Religion. The original personal hatred against the Catholic Faith passed, by degrees, into hatred against the Bible; against the Christian Religion, and at last against Religion altogether. Nay more, this hatred of Religion naturally extended itself over all objects of enthusiasm in general; proscribed Fancy and Feeling, Morality and love of Art, the Future and the Antique; placed man, with an effort, foremost in the series of natural productions; and changed the infinite, creative music of the Universe into the monotonous clatter of a boundless Mill, which, turned by the stream of Chance, and swimming thereon, was a Mill of itself, without Architect and Miller, properly, a genuine perpetuum mobile, a real, self-grinding Mill. ‘One enthusiasm was generously left to poor mankind, and rendered indispensable as a touchstone of the highest culture, for all jobbers in the same: Enthusiasm for this magnanimous Philosophy, and above all, for these its priests and mystagogues. France was so happy as to be the birthplace and dwelling of this new Faith, which had thus,

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from patches of pure knowledge, been pasted together. Low as Poetry ranked in this new Church, there were some poets among them, who for effect’s sake made use of the old ornaments and old lights; but, in so doing, ran a risk of kindling the new world-system by ancient fire. More cunning brethren, however, were at hand to help; and always in season poured cold water on the warming audience. The members of this Church were restlessly employed in clearing Nature, the Earth, the Souls of men, the Sciences, from all Poetry; obliterating every vestige of the Holy; disturbing, by sarcasms, the memory of all lofty occurrences, and lofty men; disrobing the world of all its variegated vesture. * * * Pity that Nature continued so wondrous and incomprehensible, so poetical and infinite, all efforts to modernize her notwithstanding! However, if anywhere an old superstition, of a higher world and the like, came to light, instantly, on all hands, was a springing of rattles; that, if possible, the dangerous spark might be extinguished, by appliances of philosophy and wit: yet Tolerance was the watchword of the cultivated; and in France, above all, synonymous with Philosophy. Highly remarkable is this history of modern Unbelief; the key to all the vast phenomena of recent times. Not till last century, till the latter half of it, does the novelty begin; and in a little while, it expands to an immeasurable bulk and variety: a second Reformation, a more comprehensive, and more specific, was unavoidable; and naturally it first visited that land which was the most modernised, and had the longest lain in an asthenic state, from want of freedom. * * * ‘At the present epoch, however, we stand high enough to look back with a friendly smile on those bygone days; and even in those marvellous follies to discern curious crystallisations of historical matter. Thankfully will we stretch out our hands to those Men of Letters and Philosophes: for this delusion too required to be exhausted, and the scientific side of things to have full value given it. More beauteous and many-coloured stands Poesy, like a leafy India, when contrasted with the cold, dead Spitzbergen of that Closet-Logic. That in the middle of the globe, an India, so warm and lordly, might exist, must also a cold motionless sea, dead cliffs, mist instead of the starry sky, and a long night, make both Poles uninhabitable. The deep meaning of the laws of Mechanism lay heavy on those anchorites in the deserts of Understanding: the charm of the first glimpse into it overpowered them: the Old avenged itself on them; to the first feeling of self-consciousness, they sacrificed, with wondrous devotedness, what was holiest and fairest in the world; and were the first that, in practice, again recognized and preached forth the sacredness of Nature, the infinitude of Art, the independence of Knowledge, the worth of the Practical, and the all-presence of the Spirit of History; and so doing, put an end to a Spectre-dynasty more potent, universal, and terrific than perhaps they themselves were aware of.’*

* Novalis Schriften, i., s. 198.

voltaire 129 How far our readers will accompany Novalis in such high-soaring speculation is not for us to say. Meanwhile, that the better part of them have already, in their own dialect, united with him, and with us, in candid tolerance, in clear acknowledgment, towards French Philosophy, towards this Voltaire and the spiritual period which bears his name, we do not hesitate to believe. Intolerance, animosity, can forward no cause; and least of all, beseems the cause of moral and religious truth. A wise man has well reminded us, that ‘in any controversy, the instant we feel angry, we have already ceased striving for Truth, and begun striving for Ourselves.’ Let no man doubt but Voltaire and his disciples, like all men and all things that live and act in God’s world, will one day be found to have ‘worked together for good.’ Nay that, with all his evil, he has already accomplished good, must be admitted in the soberest calculation. How much do we include in this one little word: He gave the death-stab to modern Superstition! That horrid incubus, which dwelt in darkness, shunning the light, is passing away; with all its racks and poison-chalices, and foul sleeping-draughts, is passing away without return. It was a most weighty service. Does not the cry of “No Popery,” and some vague terror or sham-terror of ‘Smithfield fires,’ still act on certain minds in these very days? He who sees even a little way into the signs of the times, sees well that both the Smithfield fires and the Edinburgh thumbscrews (for these too must be held in remembrance) are things which have long, very long, lain behind us; divided from us by a wall of Centuries, transparent indeed, but more impassable than adamant. For, as we said, Superstition is in its death-lair: the last agonies may endure for decades or for centuries; but it carries the iron in its heart, and will not vex the earth any more. That, with Superstition, Religion is also passing away, seems to us a still more ungrounded fear. Religion cannot pass away. The burning of a little straw may hide the stars of the sky; but the stars are there, and will reappear. On the whole, we must repeat the often-repeated saying, that it is unworthy a religious man to view an irreligious one either with alarm or aversion; or with any other feeling than regret, and hope, and brotherly commiseration. If he seek Truth, is he not our brother, and to be pitied? If he do not seek Truth, is he not still our brother, and to be pitied still more? Old Ludovicus Vives has a story of a clown that killed his ass because it had drunk up the moon, and he thought the world could ill spare that luminary. So he killed his ass, ut lunam redderet. The clown was well-intentioned, but unwise. Let us not imitate him: let us not slay a faithful servant, who has carried us far. He has not drunk the moon; but only the reflection of the moon, in his own poor water-pail, where too, it may be, he was drinking with purposes the most harmless.

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BIOGRAPHY.*

Man’s sociality of nature evinces itself, in spite of all that can be said, with abundant evidence by this one fact, were there no other: the unspeakable delight he takes in Biography. It is written, ‘The proper study of mankind is man;’ to which study, let us candidly admit, he, by true or by false methods, applies himself, nothing loath. ‘Man is perennially interesting to man; nay, if we look strictly to it, there is nothing else interesting.’ How inexpressibly comfortable to know our fellow-creature; to see into him, understand his goings forth, decipher the whole heart of his mystery: nay, not only to see into him, but even to see out of him, to view the world altogether as he views it; so that we can theoretically construe him, and could almost practically personate him; and do now thoroughly discern both what manner of man he is, and what manner of thing he has got to work on and live on! A scientific interest and a poetic one alike inspire us in this matter. A scientific: because every mortal has a Problem of Existence set before him, which, were it only, what for the most it is, the Problem of keeping soul and body together, must be to a certain extent original, unlike every other; and yet, at the same time, so like every other; like our own, therefore; instructive, therefore, since we also are indentured to live. A poetic interest still more: for precisely this same struggle of human Freewill against material Necessity, which every man’s Life, by the mere circumstance that the man continues alive, will more or * The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: including a Tour to the Hebrides: By James Boswell, Esq.—A new Edition, with numerous Additions and Notes: By John Wilson Croker, LL.D. F.R.S. 5 vols. London, 1831.

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less victoriously exhibit,—is that which above all else, or rather inclusive of all else, calls the Sympathy of mortal hearts into action; and whether as acted, or as represented and written of, not only is Poetry, but is the sole Poetry possible. Borne onwards by which two all-embracing interests, may the earnest Lover of Biography expand himself on all sides, and indefinitely enrich himself. Looking with the eyes of every new neighbour, he can discern a new world different for each; feeling with the heart of every neighbour, he lives with every neighbour’s life, even as with his own. Of these millions of living men each individual is a mirror to us: a mirror both scientific and poetic; or, if you will, both natural and magical;—from which one would so gladly draw aside the gauze veil; and, peering therein, discern the image of his own natural face, and the supernatural secrets that prophetically lie under the same! Observe, accordingly, to what extent, in the actual course of things, this business of Biography is practised and relished. Define to thyself, judicious Reader, the real significance of these phenomena, named Gossip, Egotism, Personal Narrative (miraculous or not), Scandal, Raillery, Slander, and such like; the sum-total of which (with some fractional addition of a better ingredient, generally too small to be noticeable) constitutes that other grand phenomenon still called ‘Conversation.’ Do they not mean wholly: Biography and Autobiography? Not only in the common Speech of men; but in all Art too, which is or should be the concentrated and conserved essence of what men can speak and shew, Biography is almost the one thing needful. Even in the highest works of Art our interest, as the critics complain, is too apt to be strongly or even mainly of a Biographic sort. In the Art, we can nowise forget the Artist: while looking on the Transfiguration, while studying the Iliad, we ever strive to figure to ourselves what spirit dwelt in Raphael; what a head was that of Homer, wherein, woven of Elysian light and Tartarean gloom, that old world fashioned itself together, of which these written Greek characters are but a feeble though perennial copy. The Painter and the Singer are present to us; we partially and for the time become the very Painter and the very Singer, while we enjoy the Picture and the Song. Perhaps, too, let the critic say what he will, this is the highest enjoyment, the clearest recognition, we can have of these. Art indeed is Art; yet Man also is Man. Had the Transfiguration been painted without human hand; had it grown merely on the canvass, say by atmospheric influences, as lichen-pictures do on rocks,—it were a grand Picture doubtless; yet nothing like so grand as the Picture, which, on opening our eyes, we everywhere in Heaven and in Earth see painted; and everywhere pass over with indifference,—because the Painter was not a Man. Think of this; much lies in it. The

biography 133 Vatican is great; yet poor to Chimborazo or the Peak of Teneriffe: its dome is but a foolish Big-endian or Little-endian chip of an egg-shell compared with that star-fretted Dome where Arcturus and Orion glance forever; which latter, notwithstanding, who looks at, save perhaps some necessitous star-gazer bent to make Almanacs, some thick-quilted watchman to see what weather it will prove? The Biographic interest is wanting: no Michael Angelo was He who built that ‘Temple of Immensity;’ therefore do we, pitiful Littlenesses as we are, turn rather to wonder and to worship in the little toybox of a Temple built by our like. Still more decisively, still more exclusively does the Biographic interest manifest itself, as we descend into lower regions of spiritual communication; through the whole range of what is called Literature. Of History, for example, the most honoured, if not honourable species of composition, is not the whole purport Biographic? ‘History,’ it has been said, ‘is the essence of innumerable Biographies.’ Such, at least, it should be: whether it is, might admit of question. But, in any case, what hope have we in turning over those old interminable Chronicles, with their garrulities and insipidities; or still worse, in patiently examining those modern Narrations, of the Philosophic kind, where ‘Philosophy, teaching by Experience,’ must sit like owl on housetop, seeing nothing, understanding nothing, uttering only, with solemnity enough, her perpetual most wearisome hoo-hoo:—what hope have we, except the for most part fallacious one of gaining some acquaintance with our fellow-creatures, though dead and vanished, yet dear to us; how they got along in those old days, suffering and doing; to what extent, and under what circumstances, they resisted the Devil and triumphed over him, or struck their colours to him, and were trodden under foot by him; how, in short, the perennial Battle went, which men name Life, which we also in these new days, with indifferent fortune, have to fight, and must bequeath to our sons and grandsons to go on fighting,—till the Enemy one day be quite vanquished and abolished, or else the great Night sink and part the combatants; and thus, either by some Millennium or some new Noah’s Deluge, the Volume of Universal History wind itself up! Other hope, in studying such Books, we have none: and that it is a deceitful hope, who that has tried knows not? A feast of widest Biographic insight is spread for us; we enter full of hungry anticipation: alas! like so many other feasts, which Life invites us to, a mere Ossian’s ‘feast of shells,’—the food and liquor being all emptied out and clean gone, and only the vacant dishes and deceitful emblems thereof left! Your modern Historical Restaurateurs are indeed little better than high-priests of Famine; that keep choicest china dinner-sets, only no dinner to serve therein. Yet such is our

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Biographic appetite, we run trying from shop to shop, with ever new hope; and, unless we could eat the wind, with ever new disappointment. Again, consider the whole class of Fictitious Narratives; from the highest category of epic or dramatic Poetry, in Shakspeare and Homer, down to the lowest of froth Prose, in the Fashionable Novel. What are all these but so many mimic Biographies? Attempts, here by an inspired Speaker, there by an uninspired Babbler, to deliver himself, more or less ineffectually, of the grand secret wherewith all hearts labour oppressed: The significance of Man’s Life;—which deliverance, even as traced in the unfurnished head, and printed at the Minerva Press, finds readers. For, observe, though there is a greatest Fool, as a superlative in every kind; and the most Foolish man in the Earth is now indubitably living and breathing, and did this morning or lately eat breakfast, and is even now digesting the same; and looks out on the world, with his dim horn-eyes, and inwardly forms some unspeakable theory thereof: yet where shall the authentically Existing be personally met with! Can one of us, otherwise than by guess, know that we have got sight of him, have orally communed with him? To take even the narrower sphere of this our English Metropolis, can any one confidently say to himself, that he has conversed with the identical, individual, Stupidest man now extant in London? No one. Deep as we dive in the Profound, there is ever a new depth opens: where the ultimate bottom may lie, through what new scenes of being we must pass before reaching it (except that we know it does lie somewhere, and might by human faculty and opportunity be reached), is altogether a mystery to us. Strange, tantalizing pursuit! We have the fullest assurance, not only that there is a Stupidest of London men actually resident, with bed and board of some kind, in London; but that several persons have been or perhaps are now speaking face to face with him: while for us, chase it as we may, such scientific blessedness will too probably be forever denied!—But the thing we meant to enforce was this comfortable fact, that no known Head was so wooden, but there might be other heads to which it were a genius and Friar Bacon’s Oracle. Of no given Book, not even of a Fashionable Novel, can you predicate with certainty that its vacuity is absolute; that there are not other vacuities which shall partially replenish themselves therefrom, and esteem it a plenum. How knowest thou, may the distressed Novelwright exclaim, that I, here where I sit, am the Foolishest of existing mortals; that this my Long-ear of a Fictitious Biography shall not find one and the other, into whose still longer ears it may be the means, under Providence, of instilling somewhat? We answer, None knows, none can certainly know: therefore, write on, worthy Brother, even as thou canst, even as it has been given thee.

biography 135 Here, however, in regard to ‘Fictitious Biographies,’ and much other matter of like sort, which the greener mind in these days inditeth, we may as well insert some singular sentences on the importance and significance of Reality, as they stand written for us in Professor Gottfried Sauerteig’s Æsthetische Springwürzel: a Work, perhaps, as yet new to most English readers. The Professor and Doctor is not a man whom we can praise without reservation; neither shall we say that his Springwürzel (a sort of magical picklocks, as he affectedly names them) are adequate to ‘start’ every bolt that locks up an æsthetic mystery: nevertheless, in his crabbed, one-sided way, he sometimes hits masses of the truth. We endeavour to translate faithfully, and trust the reader will find it worth serious perusal: ‘The significance, even for poetic purposes,’ says Sauerteig, ‘that lies in Reality, is too apt to escape us; is perhaps only now beginning to be discerned. When we named Rousseau’s Confessions an elegiaco-didactic Poem, we meant more than an empty figure of speech; we meant a historical scientific fact. ‘Fiction, while the feigner of it knows that he is feigning, partakes, more than we suspect, of the nature of lying; and has ever an, in some degree, unsatisfactory character. All Mythologies were once Philosophies; were believed: the Epic Poems of old time, so long as they continued epic, and had any complete impressiveness, were Histories, and understood to be narratives of facts. In so far as Homer employed his gods as mere ornamental fringes, and had not himself, or at least did not expect his hearers to have, a belief that they were real agents in those antique doings; so far did he fail to be genuine; so far was he a partially hollow and false singer; and sang to please only a portion of man’s mind, not the whole thereof. ‘Imagination is, after all, but a poor matter when it must part company with Understanding, and even front it hostilely in flat contradiction. Our mind is divided in twain: there is contest; wherein that which is weaker must needs come to the worse. Now of all feelings, states, principles, call it what you will, in man’s mind, is not Belief the clearest, strongest; against which all others contend in vain? Belief is, indeed, the beginning and first condition of all spiritual Force whatsoever: only in so far as Imagination, were it but momentarily, is believed, can there be any use or meaning in it, any enjoyment of it. And what is momentary Belief ? The enjoyment of a moment. Whereas a perennial Belief were enjoyment perennially, and with the whole united soul. ‘It is thus that I judge of the Supernatural in an Epic Poem; and would say, the instant it has ceased to be authentically supernatural, and become what you call “Machinery;” sweep it out of sight (schaff ’es mir vom Halse)! Of a truth, that same “Machinery,” about which the critics make such hubbub, was well named Machinery; for it is in very deed

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mechanical, nowise inspired or poetical. Neither, for us, is there the smallest æsthetic enjoyment in it; save only in this way: that we believe it to have been believed,—by the Singer or his Hearers; into whose case we now laboriously struggle to transport ourselves; and so, with stinted enough result, catch some reflex of the Reality, which for them was wholly real, and visible face to face. Whenever it has come so far that your “Machinery” is avowedly mechanical and unbelieved,—what is it else, if we dare tell ourselves the truth, but a miserable, meaningless Deception, kept up by old use and wont alone? If the gods of an Iliad are to us no longer authentic Shapes of Terror, heart-stirring, heartappalling, but only vague-glittering Shadows,—what must the dead Pagan gods of an Epigoniad be, the dead-living Pagan-Christian gods of a Lusiad, the concrete-abstract, evangelical-metaphysical gods of a Paradise Lost? Superannuated lumber! Cast raiment, at best; in which some poor mime, strutting and swaggering, may or may not set forth new noble Human Feelings (again a Reality), and so secure, or not secure, our pardon of such hoydenish masking,—for which, in any case, he has a pardon to ask. ‘True enough, none but the earliest Epic Poems can claim this distinction of entire credibility, of Reality: after an Iliad, a Shaster, a Koran, and other the like primitive performances, the rest seem, by this rule of mine, to be altogether excluded from the list. Accordingly, what are all the rest, from Virgil’s Æneid downwards, in comparison?— Frosty, artificial, heterogeneous things; more of gumflowers than of roses; at best, of the two mixed incoherently together: to some of which, indeed, it were hard to deny the title of Poems; yet to no one of which can that title belong in any sense even resembling the old high one it, in those old days, conveyed,—when the epithet “divine” or “sacred,” as applied to the uttered Word of man, was not a vain metaphor, a vain sound, but a real name with meaning. Thus, too, the farther we recede from those early days, when Poetry, as true Poetry is always, was still sacred or divine, and inspired (what ours, in great part, only pretends to be),—the more impossible becomes it to produce any, we say not true Poetry, but tolerable semblance of such; the hollower, in particular, grow all manner of Epics; till at length, as in this generation, the very name of Epic sets men a-yawning, the announcement of a new Epic is received as a public calamity. ‘But what if the impossible being once for all quite discarded, the probable be well adhered to: how stands it with fiction then? Why, then, I would say, the evil is much mended, but nowise completely cured. We have then, in place of the wholly dead modern Epic, the partially living modern Novel; to which latter it is much easier to lend that above-mentioned, so essential “momentary credence” than to the former: indeed, infinitely easier; for the former being flatly incredible, no mortal can for a moment credit it, for a moment enjoy it. Thus, here and there, a Tom Jones, a Meister, a Crusoe, will yield no little solacement to the minds of men; though still immeasurably less than a Reality would, were the significance thereof as impressively unfolded, were the genius that could

biography 137 so unfold it once given us by the kind Heavens. Neither say thou that proper Realities are wanting: for Man’s Life, now as of old, is the genuine work of God; wherever there is a Man, a God also is revealed, and all that is Godlike: a whole epitome of the Infinite, with its meanings, lies enfolded in the Life of every Man. Only, alas, that the Seer to discern this same Godlike, and with fit utterance unfold it for us, is wanting, and may long be wanting! ‘Nay, a question arises on us here, wherein the whole German reading-world will eagerly join: Whether man can any longer be so interested by the spoken Word, as he often was in those primeval days, when, rapt away by its inscrutable power, he pronounced it, in such dialect as he had, to be transcendental (to transcend all measure), to be sacred, prophetic, and the inspiration of a god? For myself, I (ich meines Ortes), by faith or by insight, do heartily understand that the answer to such question will be, Yea! For never that I could in searching find out, has Man been, by Time which devours so much, deprivated of any faculty whatsoever that he in any era was possessed of. To my seeming, the babe born yesterday has all the organs of Body, Soul, and Spirit, and in exactly the same combination and entireness, that the oldest Pelasgic Greek, or Mesopotamian Patriarch, or Father Adam himself could boast of. Ten fingers, one heart with venous and arterial blood therein, still belong to man that is born of woman: when did he lose any of his spiritual Endowments either; above all, his highest spiritual Endowment, that of revealing Poetic Beauty, and of adequately receiving the same? Not the material, not the susceptibility is wanting; only the Poet, or long series of Poets, to work on these. True, alas too true, the Poet is still utterly wanting, or all but utterly: nevertheless have we not centuries enough before us to produce him in? Him and much else!—I, for the present, will but predict that chiefly by working more and more on Reality, and evolving more and more wisely its inexhaustible meanings; and, in brief, speaking forth in fit utterance whatsoever our whole soul believes, and ceasing to speak forth what thing soever our whole soul does not believe,—will this high emprise be accomplished, or approximated to.’

These notable, and not unfounded, though partial and deep-seeing rather than wide-seeing observations on the great import of Reality, considered even as a poetic material, we have inserted the more willingly, because a transient feeling to the same purpose may often have suggested itself to many readers; and, on the whole, it is good that every reader and every writer understand, with all intensity of conviction, what quite infinite worth lies in Truth; how all-pervading, omnipotent, in man’s mind, is the thing we name Belief. For the rest, Herr Sauerteig, though one-sided, on this matter of Reality, seems heartily persuaded, and is not perhaps so ignorant as he looks. It cannot be unknown to

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him, for example, what noise is made about ‘Invention;’ what a supreme rank this faculty is reckoned to hold in the poetic endowment. Great truly is Invention; nevertheless, that is but a poor exercise of it with which Belief is not concerned. ‘An Irishman with whisky in his head,’ as poor Byron said, will invent you, in this kind, till there is enough and to spare. Nay perhaps, if we consider well, the highest exercise of Invention has, in very deed, nothing to do with Fiction; but is an invention of new Truth, what we can call a Revelation; which last does undoubtedly transcend all other poetic efforts, nor can Herr Sauerteig be too loud in its praises. But, on the other hand, whether such effort is still possible for man, Herr Sauerteig and the bulk of the world are probably at issue,—and will probably continue so till that same ‘Revelation’ or new ‘Invention of Reality,’ of the sort he desiderates, shall itself make its appearance. Meanwhile, quitting these airy regions, let any one bethink him how impressive the smallest historical fact may become, as contrasted with the grandest fictitious event; what an incalculable force lies for us in this consideration: The Thing which I here hold imaged in my mind did actually occur; was, in very truth, an element in the system of the All, whereof I too form part; had therefore, and has, through all time, an authentic being; is not a dream, but a reality! We ourselves can remember reading, in Lord Clarendon, with feelings perhaps somehow accidentally opened to it,—certainly with a depth of impression strange to us then and now,—that insignificant-looking passage, where Charles, after the battle of Worcester, glides down, with Squire Careless, from the Royal Oak, at nightfall, being hungry: how, ‘making a shift to get over hedges and ditches, after walking at least eight or nine miles, which were the more grievous to the King by the weight of his boots (for he could not put them off, when he cut off his hair, for want of shoes), before morning they came to a poor cottage, the owner whereof being a Roman Catholic was known to Careless.’ How this poor drudge, being knocked up from his snoring, ‘carried them into a little barn full of hay, which was a better lodging than he had for himself;’ and by and by, not without difficulty, brought his Majesty ‘a piece of bread and a great pot of butter-milk,’ saying candidly that ‘he himself lived by his daily labour, and that what he had brought him was the fare he and his wife had:’ on which nourishing diet his Majesty, ‘staying upon the haymow,’ feeds thankfully for two days; and then departs, under new guidance, having first changed clothes, down to the very shirt and ‘old pair of shoes,’ with his landlord; and so, as worthy Bunyan has it, ‘goes on his way, and sees him no more.’* Singular enough if we will think of it! This then was a genuine flesh-and-blood Rustic of the year 1651: he did actually * History of the Rebellion, iii. 625.

biography 139 swallow bread and butter-milk (not having ale and bacon), and do field-labour; with these hob-nailed ‘shoes’ has sprawled through mud-roads in winter, and, jocund or not, driven his team a-field in summer: he made bargains; had chafferings and higglings, now a sore heart, now a glad one; was born; was a son, was a father;—toiled in many ways, being forced to it, till the strength was all worn out of him; and then—lay down ‘to rest his galled back,’ and sleep there till the long-distant morning!—How comes it, that he alone of all the British rustics who tilled and lived along with him, on whom the blessed sun on that same ‘fifth day of September’ was shining, should have chanced to rise on us; that this poor pair of clouted Shoes, out of the million million hides that have been tanned, and cut, and worn, should still subsist, and hang visibly together? We see him but for a moment; for one moment, the blanket of the Night is rent asunder, so that we behold and see, and then closes over him—forever. So too, in some Boswell’s Life of Johnson, how indelible, and magically bright, does many a little Reality dwell in our remembrance! There is no need that the personages on the scene be a King and Clown; that the scene be the Forest of the Royal Oak, ‘on the borders of Staffordshire:’ need only that the scene lie on this old firm Earth of ours, where we also have so surprisingly arrived; that the personages be men, and seen with the eyes of a man. Foolish enough, how some slight, perhaps mean and even ugly incident, if real, and well presented, will fix itself in a susceptive memory, and lie ennobled there; silvered over with the pale cast of thought, with the pathos which belongs only to the Dead. For the Past is all holy to us; the Dead are all holy, even they that were base and wicked while alive. Their baseness and wickedness was not They, was but the heavy and unmanageable Environment that lay round them, with which they fought unprevailing: they (the ethereal God-given Force that dwelt in them, and was their Self) have now shuffled off that heavy Environment, and are free and pure: their life-long Battle, go how it might, is all ended, with many wounds or with fewer; they have been recalled from it, and the once harsh-jarring battlefield has become a silent awe-inspiring Golgotha, and Gottesacker (Field of God)!—Boswell relates this in itself smallest and poorest of occurrences: ‘As we walked along the Strand to-night, arm in arm, a woman of the town accosted us in the usual enticing manner. “No, no, my girl,” said Johnson; “it won’t do.” He, however, did not treat her with harshness; and we talked of the wretched life of such women.’ Strange power of Reality! Not even this poorest of occurrences, but now, after seventy years are come and gone, has a meaning for us. Do but consider that it is true; that it did in very deed occur! That unhappy Outcast, with all her sins and woes, her lawless desires, too complex mischances, her

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wailings and her riotings, has departed utterly: alas! her siren finery has got all besmutched; ground, generations since, into dust and smoke; of her degraded body, and whole miserable earthly existence, all is away: she is no longer here, but far from us, in the bosom of Eternity,—whence we too came, whither we too are bound! Johnson said, “No, no, my girl; it won’t do;” and then ‘we talked;’—and herewith the wretched one, seen but for the twinkling of an eye, passes on into the utter Darkness. No high Calista, that ever issued from Story-teller’s brain, will impress us more deeply than this meanest of the mean; and for a good reason: That she issued from the Maker of Men. It is well worth the Artist’s while to examine for himself what it is that gives such pitiful incidents their memorableness; his aim likewise is, above all things, to be memorable. Half the effect, we already perceive, depends on the object; on its being real, on its being really seen. The other half will depend on the observer; and the question now is: How are real objects to be so seen; on what quality of observing, or of style in describing, does this so intense pictorial power depend? Often a slight circumstance contributes curiously to the result: some little, and perhaps to appearance accidental, feature is presented; a light-gleam, which instantaneously excites the mind, and urges it to complete the picture, and evolve the meaning thereof for itself. By critics, such light-gleams and their almost magical influence have frequently been noted: but the power to produce such, to select such features as will produce them, is generally treated as a knack, or trick of the trade, a secret for being ‘graphic;’ whereas these magical feats are, in truth, rather inspirations; and the gift of performing them, which acts unconsciously, without forethought, and as if by nature alone, is properly a genius for description. One grand, invaluable secret there is, however, which includes all the rest, and, what is comfortable, lies clearly in every man’s power: To have an open loving heart, and what follows from the possession of such! Truly has it been said, emphatically in these days ought it to be repeated: A loving Heart is the beginning of all Knowledge. This it is that opens the whole mind, quickens every faculty of the intellect to do its fit work, that of knowing; and therefrom, by sure consequence, of vividly uttering forth. Other secret for being ‘graphic’ is there none, worth having: but this is an all-sufficient one. See, for example, what a small Boswell can do! Hereby, indeed, is the whole man made a living mirror, wherein the wonders of this ever-wonderful Universe are, in their true light (which is ever a magical, miraculous one) represented, and reflected back on us. It has been said, ‘the heart sees farther than the head:’ but, indeed, without the seeing heart, there is no true seeing for the head so much as possible; all is

biography 141 mere oversight, hallucination, and vain superficial phantasmagoria, which can permanently profit no one. Here, too, may we not pause for an instant, and make a practical reflection? Considering the multitude of mortals that handle the Pen in these days, and can mostly spell, and write without glaring violations of grammar, the question naturally arises: How is it, then, that no Work proceeds from them, bearing any stamp of authenticity and permanence; of worth for more than one day? Shiploads of Fashionable Novels, Sentimental Rhymes, Tragedies, Farces, Diaries of Travel, Tales by flood and field, are swallowed monthly into the bottomless Pool: still does the Press toil; innumerable Paper-makers, Compositors, Printers’ Devils, Bookbinders, and Hawkers grown hoarse with loud proclaiming, rest not from their labour; and still, in torrents, rushes on the great array of Publications, unpausing, to their final home; and still Oblivion, like the Grave, cries: Give! Give! How is it that of all these countless multitudes, no one can attain to the smallest mark of excellence, or produce aught that shall endure longer than ‘snow-flake on the river,’ or the foam of penny-beer? We answer: Because they are foam; because there is no Reality in them. These Three Thousand men, women, and children, that make up the army of British Authors, do not, if we will well consider it, see anything whatever; consequently have nothing that they can record and utter, only more or fewer things that they can plausibly pretend to record. The Universe, of Man and Nature, is still quite shut up from them; the ‘open secret’ still utterly a secret; because no sympathy with Man or Nature, no love and free simplicity of heart has yet unfolded the same. Nothing but a pitiful Image of their own pitiful Self, with its vanities, and grudgings, and ravenous hunger of all kinds, hangs forever painted in the retina of these unfortunate persons; so that the starry All, with whatsoever it embraces, does but appear as some expanded magic-lantern shadow of that same Image,—and naturally looks pitiful enough. It is vain for these persons to allege that they are naturally without gift, naturally stupid and sightless, and so can attain to no knowledge of anything; therefore, in writing of anything, must needs write falsehoods of it, there being in it no truth for them. Not so, good Friends. The stupidest of you has a certain faculty; were it but that of articulate speech (say, in the Scottish, the Irish, the Cockney dialect, or even in ‘Governess-English’), and of physically discerning what lies under your nose. The stupidest of you would perhaps grudge to be compared in faculty with James Boswell; yet see what he has produced! You do not use your faculty honestly; your heart is shut up; full of greediness, malice, discontent; so your intellectual sense cannot be open. It is vain also to urge

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that James Boswell had opportunities; saw great men and great things, such as you can never hope to look on. What make ye of Parson White in Selborne? He had not only no great men to look on, but not even men; merely sparrows and cock-chafers: yet has he left us a Biography of these; which, under its title Natural History of Selborne, still remains valuable to us; which has copied a little sentence or two faithfully from the Inspired Volume of Nature, and so is itself not without inspiration. Go ye and do likewise. Sweep away utterly all frothiness and falsehood from your heart; struggle unweariedly to acquire, what is possible for every god-created Man, a free, open, humble soul: speak not at all, in any wise, till you have somewhat to speak; care not for the reward of your speaking, but simply and with undivided mind for the truth of your speaking: then be placed in what section of Space and of Time soever, do but open your eyes, and they shall actually see, and bring you real knowledge, wondrous, worthy of belief; and instead of one Boswell and one White, the world will rejoice in a thousand,—stationed on their thousand several watch-towers, to instruct us, by indubitable documents, of whatsoever in our so stupendous World comes to light and is! O, had the Editor of this Magazine but a magic-rod to turn all that not inconsiderable Intellect, which now deluges us with artificial fictitious soap-lather, and mere Lying, into the faithful study of Reality,—what knowledge of great, everlasting Nature, and of Man’s ways and doings therein, would not every year bring us in! Can we but change one single soap-latherer and mountebank Juggler, into a true Thinker and Doer, who even tries honestly to think and do,—great will be our reward. But, to return; or rather from this point to begin our journey! If now, what with Herr Sauerteig’s Springwürzel, what with so much lucubration of our own, it have become apparent how deep, immeasurable is the ‘worth that lies in Reality,’ and farther, how exclusive the interest which man takes in Histories of Man,—may it not seem lamentable, that so few genuinely-good Biographies have yet been accumulated in Literature; that, in the whole world, one cannot find, going strictly to work, above some dozen, or baker’s dozen, and those chiefly of very ancient date? Lamentable; yet, after what we have just seen, accountable. Another question might be asked: How comes it that in England we have simply one good Biography, this Boswell’s Johnson; and of good, indifferent, or even bad attempts at Biography, fewer than any civilised people? Consider the French and Germans, with their Moreris, Bayles, Jördenses, Jöchers, their innumerable Mémoires, and Schilderungen, and Biographies Universelles; not to speak of Rousseaus, Goethes, Schubarts, Jung-Stillings: and then contrast with

biography 143 these our poor Birches and Kippises and Pecks,—the whole breed of whom, moreover, is now extinct! With this question, as the answer might lead us far, and come out unflattering to patriotic sentiment, we shall not intermeddle; but turn rather, with greater pleasure, to the fact, that one excellent Biography is actually English;—and even now lies, in Five new Volumes, at our hand, soliciting a new consideration from us; such as, age after age (the Perennial shewing ever new phases as our position alters), it may long be profitable to bestow on it;—to which task we here, in this position, in this age, gladly address ourselves. First, however, Let the foolish April-fool-day pass by; and our Reader, during these twenty-nine days of uncertain weather that will follow, keep pondering, according to convenience, the purport of Biography in general: then, with the blessed dew of May-day, and in unlimited convenience of space, shall all that we have written on Johnson, and Boswell’s Johnson, and Croker’s Boswell’s Johnson, be faithfully laid before him.

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BOSWELL’S LIFE OF JOHNSON.*

Æsop’s Fly, sitting on the axle of the chariot, has been much laughed at for exclaiming: What a dust I do raise! Yet which of us, in his way, has not sometimes been guilty of the like? Nay, so foolish are men, they often, standing at ease and as spectators on the highway, will volunteer to exclaim of the Fly (not being tempted to it, as he was) exactly to the same purport: What a dust thou dost raise! Smallest of mortals, when mounted aloft by circumstances, come to seem great; smallest of phenomena connected with them are treated as important, and must be sedulously scanned, and commented upon with loud emphasis. That Mr. Croker should undertake to edit Boswell’s Life of Johnson, was a praiseworthy but no miraculous procedure: neither could the accomplishment of such undertaking be, in an epoch like ours, anywise regarded as an event in Universal History; the right or the wrong accomplishment thereof was, in very truth, one of the most insignificant of things. However, it sat in a great environment, on the axle of a high, fast-rolling, parliamentary chariot; and all the world has exclaimed over it, and the author of it: What a dust thou dost raise! List to the Reviews, and ‘Organs of Public Opinion,’ from the National Omnibus upwards: criticisms, vituperative and laudatory, stream from their thousand throats of brass and of leather; here chaunting Io Pæans; there grating harsh thunder, or vehement shrew-mouse squeaklets; till the general ear is filled, and nigh deafened. Boswell’s Book had a noiseless birth, compared with this Edi* The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: including a Tour to the Hebrides: By James Boswell, Esq.—A new Edition, with numerous Additions and Notes: By John Wilson Croker, LL.D. F.R.S. 5 vols. London, 1831.

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tion of Boswell’s Book. On the other hand, consider with what degree of tumult Paradise Lost and the Iliad were ushered in! To swell such clamour, or prolong it beyond the time, seems nowise our vocation here. At most, perhaps, we are bound to inform simple readers, with all possible brevity, what manner of performance and Edition this is; especially, whether, in our poor judgment, it is worth laying out three pounds sterling upon, yea or not. The whole business belongs distinctly to the lower ranks of the trivial class. Let us admit, then, with great readiness, that as Johnson once said, and the Editor repeats, ‘all works which describe manners, require notes in sixty or seventy years, or less;’ that, accordingly, a new Edition of Boswell was desirable; and that Mr. Croker has given one. For this task he had various qualifications: his own voluntary resolution to do it; his high place in society unlocking all manner of archives to him; not less, perhaps, a certain anecdotico-biographic turn of mind, natural or acquired; we mean, a love for the minuter events of History, and talent for investigating these. Let us admit, too, that he has been very diligent; seems to have made inquiries perseveringly, far and near; as well as drawn freely from his own ample stores; and so tells us, to appearance quite accurately, much that he has not found lying on the highways, but has had to seek and dig for. Numerous persons, chiefly of quality, rise to view in these Notes; when and also where they came into this world, received office or promotion, died, and were buried (only what they did, except digest, remaining often too mysterious),—is faithfully enough set down. Whereby all that their various and doubtless widely-scattered Tombstones could have taught us, is here presented, at once, in a bound Book. Thus is an indubitable conquest, though a small one, gained over our great enemy, the all-destroyer Time; and as such shall have welcome. Nay, let us say that the spirit of Diligence, exhibited in this department, seems to attend the Editor honestly throughout: he keeps everywhere a watchful outlook on his Text; reconciling the distant with the present, or at least indicating and regretting their irreconcilability; elucidating, smoothing down; in all ways, exercising, according to ability, a strict editorial superintendence. Any little Latin or even Greek phrase is rendered into English, in general with perfect accuracy; citations are verified, or else corrected. On all hands, moreover, there is a certain spirit of Decency maintained and insisted on: if not good morals, yet good manners, are rigidly inculcated; if not Religion, and a devout Christian heart, yet Orthodoxy, and a cleanly, Shovel-hatted look,—which, as compared with flat Nothing, is something very considerable. Grant too, as no contempt-



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ible triumph of this latter spirit, that though the Editor is known as a decided Politician and Party-man, he has carefully subdued all temptations to transgress in that way: except by quite involuntary indications, and rather as it were the pervading temper of the whole, you could not discover on which side of the Political Warfare he is enlisted and fights. This, as we said, is a great triumph of the Decency-principle: for this, and for these other graces and performances, let the Editor have all praise. Herewith, however, must the praise unfortunately terminate. Diligence, Fidelity, Decency, are good and indispensable: yet, without Faculty, without Light, they will not do the work. Along with that Tombstone-information, perhaps even without much of it, we could have liked to gain some answer, in one way or other, to this wide question: What and how was English Life in Johnson’s time; wherein has ours grown to differ therefrom? In other words: What things have we to forget, what to fancy and remember, before we, from such distance, can put ourselves in Johnson’s place; and so, in the full sense of the term, understand him, his sayings, and his doings? This was indeed specially the problem which a Commentator and Editor had to solve: a complete solution of it should have lain in him, his whole mind should have been filled and prepared with perfect insight into it; then, whether in the way of express Dissertation, of incidental Exposition and Indication, opportunities enough would have occurred of bringing out the same: what was dark in the figure of the Past had thereby been enlightened; Boswell had, not in shew and word only, but in very fact, been made new again, readable to us who are divided from him, even as he was to those close at hand. Of all which very little has been attempted here; accomplished, we should say, next to nothing, or altogether nothing. Excuse, no doubt, is in readiness for such omission; and, indeed, for innumerable other failings;—as where, for example, the Editor will punctually explain what is already sun-clear; and then anon, not without frankness, declare frequently enough that ‘the Editor does not understand,’ that ‘the Editor cannot guess,’—while, for most part, the Reader cannot help both guessing and seeing. Thus, if Johnson say, in one sentence, that ‘English names should not be used in Latin verses;’ and then, in the next sentence, speak blamingly of ‘Carteret being used as a dactyl,’ will the generality of mortals detect any puzzle there? Or again, where poor Boswell writes: ‘I always remember a remark made to me by a Turkish lady, educated in France: “Ma foi, monsieur, notre bonheur depend de la façon que notre sang circule;”’—though the Turkish lady here speaks English-French, where is the call for a Note like this: ‘Mr. Boswell no doubt fancied these words had some meaning, or he would hardly have quoted them; but what that mean-

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ing is the Editor cannot guess’? The Editor is clearly no witch at a riddle.—For these, and all kindred deficiencies, the excuse, as we said, is at hand; but the fact of their existence is not the less certain and regretable. Indeed, it, from a very early stage of the business, becomes afflictively apparent, how much the Editor, so well furnished with all external appliances and means, is from within unfurnished with means for forming to himself any just notion of Johnson, or of Johnson’s Life; and therefore of speaking on that subject with much hope of edifying. Too lightly is it from the first taken for granted that Hunger, the great basis of our life, is also its apex and ultimate perfection; that as ‘Neediness and Greediness and Vainglory’ are the chief qualities of most men, so no man, not even a Johnson, acts or can think of acting on any other principle. Whatsoever, therefore, cannot be referred to the two former categories (Need and Greed), is without scruple ranged under the latter. It is here properly that our Editor becomes burdensome; and, to the weaker sort, even a nuisance. “What good is it,” will such cry, “when we had still some faint shadow of belief that man was better than a selfish Digesting-machine, what good is it to poke in, at every turn, and explain how this and that which we thought noble in old Samuel, was vulgar, base; that for him too there was no reality but in the Stomach; and except Pudding, and the finer species of pudding which is named Praise, life had no pabulum? Why, for instance, when we know that Johnson loved his good Wife, and says expressly that their marriage was ‘a love-match on both sides,’—should two closed lips open to tell us only this: ‘Is it not possible that the obvious advantage of having a woman of experience to superintend an establishment of this kind (the Edial School) may have contributed to a match so disproportionate in point of age—Ed.?’ Or again when, in the Text, the honest cynic speaks freely of his former poverty, and it is known that he once lived on fourpence halfpenny a-day,—need a Commentator advance, and comment thus: ‘When we find Dr. Johnson tell unpleasant truths to, or of, other men, let us recollect that he does not appear to have spared himself, on occasions in which he might be forgiven for doing so?’ Why, in short,” continues the exasperated Reader, “should Notes of this species stand affronting me, when there might have been no Note at all?”—Gentle Reader, we answer, Be not wroth. What other could an honest Commentator do, than give thee the best he had? Such was the picture and theorem he had fashioned for himself of the world and of man’s doings therein: take it, and draw wise inferences from it. If there did exist a Leader of Public Opinion, and Champion of Orthodoxy in the Church of Jesus of Nazareth, who reckoned that man’s glory consisted in not being poor; and that a Sage, and Prophet of his time, must needs blush because the world



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had paid him at that easy rate of fourpence halfpenny per diem,—was not the fact of such existence worth knowing, worth considering? Of a much milder hue, yet to us practically of an all-defacing, and for the present enterprise quite ruinous character,—is another grand fundamental failing; the last we shall feel ourselves obliged to take the pain of specifying here. It is that our Editor has fatally, and almost surprisingly, mistaken the limits of an Editor’s function; and so, instead of working on the margin with his Pen, to elucidate as best might be, strikes boldly into the body of the page with his Scissors, and there clips at discretion! Four Books Mr. C. had by him, wherefrom to gather light for the fifth, which was Boswell’s. What does he do but now, in the placidest manner,—slit the whole five into slips, and sew these together into a sextum quid, exactly at his own convenience; giving Boswell the credit of the whole! By what art-magic, our readers ask, has he united them? By the simplest of all: by Brackets. Never before was the full virtue of the Bracket made manifest. You begin a sentence under Boswell’s guidance, thinking to be carried happily through it by the same: but no; in the middle, perhaps after your semicolon, and some consequent ‘for,’—starts up one of these Bracketligatures, and stitches you in from half a page, to twenty or thirty pages, of a Hawkins, Tyers, Murphy, Piozzi; so that often one must make the old sad reflection, Where we are we know, whither we are going no man knoweth! It is truly said also, There is much between the cup and the lip; but here the case is still sadder: for not till after consideration can you ascertain, now when the cup is at the lip, what liquor it is you are imbibing; whether Boswell’s French wine which you began with, or some Piozzi’s ginger-beer, or Hawkins’s entire, or perhaps some other great Brewer’s penny-swipes or even alegar, which has been surreptitiously substituted instead thereof. A situation almost original; not to be tried a second time! But, in fine, what ideas Mr. Croker entertains of a literary whole and the thing called Book, and how the very Printer’s Devils did not rise in mutiny against such a conglomeration as this, and refuse to print it,—may remain a problem. But now happily our say is said. All faults, the Moralists tell us, are properly shortcomings; crimes themselves are nothing other than a not doing enough; a fighting, but with defective vigour. How much more a mere insufficiency, and this after good efforts, in handicraft practice! Mr. Croker says: ‘The worst that can happen is that all the present Editor has contributed may, if the reader so pleases, be rejected as surplusage.’ It is our pleasant duty to take with hearty welcome what he has given; and render thanks even for what he meant to give. Next and finally, it is our painful duty to declare, aloud if that be necessary, that

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his gift, as weighed against the hard money which the Booksellers demand for giving it you, is (in our judgment) very greatly the lighter. No portion, accordingly, of our small floating capital has been embarked in the business, or shall ever be; indeed, were we in the market for such a thing, there is simply no Edition of Boswell to which this last would seem preferable. And now enough, and more than enough! We have next a word to say of James Boswell. Boswell has already been much commented upon; but rather in the way of censure and vituperation, than of true recognition. He was a man that brought himself much before the world; confessed that he eagerly coveted fame, or if that were not possible, notoriety; of which latter as he gained far more than seemed his due, the public were incited, not only by their natural love of scandal, but by a special ground of envy, to say whatever ill of him could be said. Out of the fifteen millions that then lived, and had bed and board, in the British Islands, this man has provided us a greater pleasure than any other individual, at whose cost we now enjoy ourselves; perhaps has done us a greater service than can be specially attributed to more than two or three: yet, ungrateful that we are, no written or spoken eulogy of James Boswell anywhere exists; his recompense in solid pudding (so far as copyright went) was not excessive; and as for the empty praise, it has altogether been denied him. Men are unwiser than children; they do not know the hand that feeds them. Boswell was a person whose mean or bad qualities lay open to the general eye; visible, palpable to the dullest. His good qualities, again, belonged not to the Time he lived in; were far from common then, indeed, in such a degree, were almost unexampled; not recognisable therefore by every one; nay apt even (so strange had they grown) to be confounded with the very vices they lay contiguous to, and had sprung out of. That he was a wine-bibber and gross liver; gluttonously fond of whatever would yield him a little solacement, were it only of a stomachic character, is undeniable enough. That he was vain, heedless, a babbler; had much of the sycophant, alternating with the braggadocio, curiously spiced too with an all-pervading dash of the coxcomb; that he gloried much when the Tailor, by a court-suit, had made a new man of him; that he appeared at the Shakspeare Jubilee with a riband, imprinted ‘Corsica Boswell,’ round his hat; and in short, if you will, lived no day of his life without doing and saying more than one pretentious ineptitude: all this unhappily is evident as the sun at noon. The very look of Boswell seems to have signified so much. In that cocked nose, cocked partly in triumph over his weaker fellow-creatures, partly to snuff up the smell of coming pleasure, and scent it from afar; in those bag-



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cheeks, hanging like half-filled wine-skins, still able to contain more; in that coarsely protruded shelf-mouth, that fat dewlapped chin: in all this, who sees not sensuality, pretension, boisterous imbecility enough; much that could not have been ornamental in the temper of a great man’s overfed great man (what the Scotch name flunky), though it had been more natural there. The under part of Boswell’s face is of a low, almost brutish character. Unfortunately, on the other hand, what great and genuine good lay in him was nowise so self-evident. That Boswell was a hunter after spiritual Notabilities, that he loved such, and longed, and even crept and crawled to be near them; that he first (in old Touchwood Auchinleck’s phraseology) “took on with Paoli,” and then being off with “the Corsican landlouper,” took on with a schoolmaster, “ane that keeped a schule, and ca’d it an academy:” that he did all this, and could not help doing it, we account a very singular merit. The man, once for all, had an ‘open sense,’ an open loving heart, which so few have: where Excellence existed, he was compelled to acknowledge it; was drawn towards it, and (let the old sulphur-brand of a Laird say what he liked) could not but walk with it,—if not as superior, if not as equal, then as inferior and lackey, better so than not at all. If we reflect now that this love of Excellence had not only such an evil nature to triumph over; but also what an education and social position withstood it and weighed it down, its innate strength, victorious over all these things, may astonish us. Consider what an inward impulse there must have been, how many mountains of impediment hurled aside, before the Scottish Laird could, as humble servant, embrace the knees (the bosom was not permitted him) of the English Dominie! Your Scottish Laird, says an English naturalist of these days, may be defined as the hungriest and vainest of all bipeds yet known. Boswell too was a Tory; of quite peculiarly feudal, genealogical, pragmatical temper; had been nurtured in an atmosphere of Heraldry, at the feet of a very Gamaliel in that kind; within bare walls, adorned only with pedigrees, amid serving-men in threadbare livery; all things teaching him, from birth upwards, to remember, that a Laird was a Laird. Perhaps there was a special vanity in his very blood: old Auchinleck had, if not the gay, tail-spreading, peacock vanity of his son, no little of the slow-stalking, contentious, hissing vanity of the gander; a still more fatal species. Scottish Advocates will yet tell you how the ancient man, having chanced to be the first sheriff appointed (after the abolition of ‘hereditary jurisdictions’) by royal authority, was wont, in dull-snuffling pompous tone, to preface many a deliverance from the bench, with these words: “I, the first King’s Sheriff in Scotland.”

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And now behold the worthy Bozzy, so prepossessed and held back by nature and by art, fly nevertheless like iron to its magnet, whither his better genius called! You may surround the iron and the magnet with what enclosures and encumbrances you please,—with wood, with rubbish, with brass: it matters not, the two feel each other, they struggle restlessly towards each other, they will be together. The iron may be a Scottish squirelet, full of gulosity and ‘gigmanity;’* the magnet an English plebeian, and moving rag-and-dust mountain, coarse, proud, irascible, imperious: nevertheless, behold how they embrace, and inseparably cleave to one another! It is one of the strangest phenomena of the past century, that at a time when the old reverent feeling of Discipleship (such as brought men from far countries, with rich gifts, and prostrate soul, to the feet of the Prophets) had passed utterly away from men’s practical experience, and was no longer surmised to exist (as it does), perennial, indestructible, in man’s inmost heart,—James Boswell should have been the individual, of all others, predestined to recall it, in such singular guise, to the wondering, and, for a long while, laughing, and unrecognising world. It has been commonly said, The man’s vulgar vanity was all that attached him to Johnson; he delighted to be seen near him, to be thought connected with him. Now let it be at once granted that no consideration springing out of vulgar vanity could well be absent from the mind of James Boswell, in this his intercourse with Johnson, or in any considerable transaction of his life. At the same time ask yourself: Whether such vanity, and nothing else, actuated him therein; whether this was the true essence and moving principle of the phenomenon, or not rather its outward vesture, and the accidental environment (and defacement) in which it came to light? The man was, by nature and habit, vain; a sycophant-coxcomb, be it granted: but had there been nothing more than vanity in him, was Samuel Johnson the man of men to whom he must attach himself ? At the date when Johnson was a poor rusty-coated ‘scholar,’ dwelling in Temple-lane, and indeed throughout their whole intercourse afterwards, were there not chancellors and prime ministers enough; graceful gentlemen, the glass of fashion; honour-giving noblemen; dinner-giving rich men; renowned fire-eaters, swordsmen, gownsmen; Quacks and Realities of all hues,—any one of whom bulked much larger in the world’s eye than Johnson ever did? To any one of whom, by half that submissiveness and assiduity, our Bozzy might have recommended himself; and sat there, the envy of surrounding lickspittles; pock* ‘Q. What do you mean by “respectable?”—A. He always kept a gig.’—(Thurtell’s Trial.)—‘Thus,’ it has been said, ‘does society naturally divide itself into four classes: Noblemen, Gentlemen, Gigmen, and Men.’



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eting now solid emolument, swallowing now well-cooked viands and wines of rich vintage; in each case, also, shone on by some glittering reflex of Renown or Notoriety, so as to be the observed of innumerable observers. To no one of whom, however, though otherwise a most diligent solicitor and purveyor, did he so attach himself: such vulgar courtierships were his paid drudgery, or leisureamusement; the worship of Johnson was his grand, ideal, voluntary business. Does not the frothy-hearted yet enthusiastic man, doffing his Advocate’s-wig, regularly take post, and hurry up to London, for the sake of his Sage chiefly; as to a Feast of Tabernacles, the Sabbath of his whole year? The plate-licker and wine-bibber dives into Bolt Court, to sip muddy coffee with a cynical old man, and a sour-tempered blind old woman (feeling the cups, whether they are full, with her finger); and patiently endures contradictions without end; too happy so he may but be allowed to listen, and live. Nay, it does not appear that vulgar vanity could ever have been much flattered by Boswell’s relation to Johnson. Mr. Croker says, Johnson was, to the last, little regarded by the great world; from which, for a vulgar vanity, all honour, as from its fountain, descends. Bozzy, even among Johnson’s friends and special admirers, seems rather to have been laughed at than envied: his officious, whisking, consequential ways, the daily reproofs and rebuffs he underwent, could gain from the world no golden, but only leaden, opinions. His devout Discipleship seemed nothing more than a mean Spanielship, in the general eye. His mighty ‘constellation,’ or sun, round whom he, as satellite, observantly gyrated, was, for the mass of men, but a huge ill-snuffed tallow-light, and he a weak night-moth, circling foolishly, dangerously about it, not knowing what he wanted. If he enjoyed Highland dinners and toasts, as henchman to a new sort of chieftain, Henry Erskine, in the domestic ‘Outer-House,’ could hand him a shilling “for the sight of his Bear.” Doubtless the man was laughed at, and often heard himself laughed at, for his Johnsonism. To be envied is the grand and sole aim of vulgar vanity; to be filled with good things is that of sensuality: for Johnson perhaps no man living envied poor Bozzy; and of good things (except himself paid for them) there was no vestige in that acquaintanceship. Had nothing other or better than vanity and sensuality been there, Johnson and Boswell had never come together, or had soon and finally separated again. In fact, the so copious terrestrial Dross that welters chaotically, as the outer sphere of this man’s character, does but render for us more remarkable, more touching, the celestial spark of goodness, of light, and Reverence for Wisdom, which dwelt in the interior, and could struggle through such encumbrances, and in some degree illuminate and beautify them. There is much lying yet unde-

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veloped in the love of Boswell for Johnson. A cheering proof, in a time which else utterly wanted and still wants such, that living Wisdom is quite infinitely precious to man, is the symbol of the Godlike to him, which even weak eyes may discern; that Loyalty, Discipleship, all that was ever meant by Hero-worship, lives perennially in the human bosom, and waits, even in these dead days, only for occasions to unfold it, and inspire all men with it, and again make the world alive! James Boswell we can regard as a practical witness, or real martyr, to this high, everlasting truth. A wonderful martyr, if you will; and in a time, which made such martyrdom doubly wonderful: yet the time and its martyr perhaps suited each other. For a decrepit, death-sick Era, when Cant had first decisively opened her poison-breathing lips to proclaim that God-worship and Mammon-worship were one and the same, that Life was a Lie, and the Earth Beelzebub’s, which the Supreme Quack should inherit; and so all things were fallen into the yellow leaf, and fast hastening to noisome corruption: for such an Era, perhaps no better Prophet than a parti-coloured Zany-Prophet, concealing, from himself and others, his prophetic significance in such unexpected vestures,—was deserved, or would have been in place. A precious medicine lay hidden in floods of coarsest, most composite treacle: the world swallowed the treacle, for it suited the world’s palate; and now, after half a century, may the medicine also begin to shew itself ! James Boswell belonged, in his corruptible part, to the lowest classes of mankind; a foolish, inflated creature, swimming in an element of self-conceit: but in his corruptible there dwelt an incorruptible, all the more impressive and indubitable for the strange lodging it had taken. Consider, too, with what force, diligence, and vivacity, he has rendered back, all this which, in Johnson’s neighbourhood, his ‘open sense’ had so eagerly and freely taken in. That loose-flowing, careless-looking Work of his is as a picture painted by one of Nature’s own Artists; the best possible resemblance of a Reality; like the very image thereof in a clear mirror. Which indeed it was: let but the mirror be clear, this is the great point; the picture must and will be genuine. How the babbling Bozzy, inspired only by love, and the recognition and vision which love can lend, epitomises nightly the words of Wisdom, the deeds and aspects of Wisdom, and so, by little and little, unconsciously works together for us a whole Johnsoniad; a more free, perfect, sunlit, and spirit-speaking likeness, than for many centuries had been drawn by man of man! Scarcely since the days of Homer has the feat been equalled: indeed, in many senses, this also is a kind of Heroic Poem. The fit Odyssey of our unheroic age was to be written, not sung; of a Thinker, not of a Fighter; and (for want of a Homer) by the first open soul that might offer,—looked such even through the organs of a Boswell.



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We do the man’s intellectual endowment great wrong, if we measure it by its mere logical outcome; though here too, there is not wanting a light ingenuity, a figurativeness, and fanciful sport, with glimpses of insight far deeper than the common. But Boswell’s grand intellectual talent was, as such ever is, an unconscious one, of far higher reach and significance than Logic; and shewed itself in the whole, not in parts. Here again we have that old saying verified, ‘The heart sees farther than the head.’ Thus does poor Bozzy stand out to us as an ill-assorted, glaring mixture of the highest and the lowest. What, indeed, is man’s life generally but a kind of beast-godhood; the god in us triumphing more and more over the beast; striving more and more to subdue it under his feet? Did not the Ancients, in their wise, perennially significant way, figure Nature itself, their sacred All, or Pan, as a portentous commingling of these two discords; as musical, humane, oracular in its upper part, yet ending below in the cloven hairy feet of a goat? The union of melodious, celestial Freewill and Reason, with foul Irrationality and Lust; in which, nevertheless, dwelt a mysterious unspeakable Fear and half-mad panic Awe; as for mortals there well might! And is not man a microcosm, or epitomised mirror of that same Universe; or, rather, is not that Universe even Himself, the reflex of his own fearful and wonderful being, ‘the waste fantasy of his own dream?’ No wonder that man, that each man, and James Boswell like the others, should resemble it! The peculiarity in his case was the unusual defect of amalgamation and subordination: the highest lay side by side with the lowest; not morally combined with it and spiritually transfiguring it; but tumbling in half-mechanical juxtaposition with it, and from time to time, as the mad alternation chanced, irradiating it, or eclipsed by it. The world, as we said, has been but unjust to him; discerning only the outer terrestrial and often sordid mass; without eye, as it generally is, for his inner divine secret: and thus figuring him nowise as a god Pan, but simply of the bestial species, like the cattle on a thousand hills. Nay, sometimes a strange enough hypothesis has been started of him; as if it were in virtue even of these same bad qualities that he did his good work; as if it were the very fact of his being among the worst men in this world that had enabled him to write one of the best books therein! Falser hypothesis, we may venture to say, never rose in human soul. Bad is by its nature negative, and can do nothing; whatsoever enables us to do anything is by its very nature good. Alas, that there should be teachers in Israel, or even learners, to whom this world-ancient fact is still problematical, or even deniable! Boswell wrote a good Book because he had a heart and an eye to discern Wisdom, and an utterance to render it forth; because of his free

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insight, his lively talent, above all, of his Love and childlike Open-mindedness. His sneaking sycophancies, his greediness and forwardness, whatever was bestial and earthy in him, are so many blemishes in his Book, which still disturb us in its clearness; wholly hindrances, not helps. Towards Johnson, however, his feeling was not Sycophancy, which is the lowest, but Reverence, which is the highest of human feelings. None but a reverent man (which so unspeakably few are) could have found his way from Boswell’s environment to Johnson’s: if such worship for real God-made superiors shewed itself also as worship for apparent Tailor-made superiors, even as hollow, interested mouth-worship for such,—the case, in this composite human nature of ours, was not miraculous, the more was the pity! But for ourselves, let every one of us cling to this last article of Faith, and know it as the beginning of all knowledge worth the name: That neither James Boswell’s good Book, nor any other good thing, in any time or in any place, was, is, or can be performed by any man in virtue of his badness, but always and solely in spite thereof. As for the Book itself, questionless the universal favour entertained for it is well merited. In worth as a Book we have rated it beyond any other product of the eighteenth century: all Johnson’s own Writings, laborious and in their kind genuine above most, stand on a quite inferior level to it; already, indeed, they are becoming obsolete for this generation; and for some future generation, may be valuable chiefly as Prolegomena and expository Scholia to this Johnsoniad of Boswell. Which of us but remembers, as one of the sunny spots in his existence, the day when he opened these airy volumes, fascinating him by a true natural-magic! It was as if the curtains of the Past were drawn aside, and we looked mysteriously into a kindred country, where dwelt our Fathers; inexpressibly dear to us, but which had seemed forever hidden from our eyes. For the dead Night had engulfed it; all was gone, vanished as if it had not been. Nevertheless, wondrously given back to us, there once more it lay; all bright, lucid, blooming; a little island of Creation amid the circumambient Void. There it still lies; like a thing stationary, imperishable, over which changeful Time were now accumulating itself in vain, and could not, any longer, harm it, or hide it. If we examine by what charm it is that men are still held to this Life of Johnson, now when so much else has been forgotten, the main part of the answer will perhaps be found in that speculation ‘on the import of Reality,’ communicated to the world, last Month, in this Magazine. The Johnsoniad of Boswell turns on objects that in very deed existed; it is all true. So far other in melodiousness of tone, it vies with the Odyssey or surpasses it, in this one point: to us these read pages, as those chaunted hexameters were to the first Greek hearers, are in the



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fullest, deepest sense, wholly credible. All the wit and wisdom, lying embalmed in Boswell’s Book, plenteous as these are, could not have saved it. Far more scientific instruction (mere excitement and enlightenment of the thinking power) can be found in twenty other works of that time, which make but a quite secondary impression on us. The other works of that time, however, fall under one of two classes: Either they are professedly Didactic; and, in that way, mere Abstractions, Philosophic Diagrams, incapable of interesting us much otherwise than as Euclid’s Elements may do: Or else, with all their vivacity, and pictorial richness of colour, they are Fictions and not Realities. Deep, truly, as Herr Sauerteig urges, is the force of this consideration: The thing here stated is a fact; these figures, that local habitation, are not shadow but substance. In virtue of such advantages, see how a very Boswell may become Poetical! Critics insist much on the Poet that he should communicate an ‘Infinitude’ to his delineation; that by intensity of conception, by that gift of ‘transcendental Thought,’ which is fitly named genius, and inspiration, he should inform the Finite with a certain Infinitude of significance; or as they sometimes say, ennoble the Actual into Idealness. They are right in their precept; they mean rightly. But in cases like this of the Johnsoniad, such is the dark grandeur of that ‘Time-element,’ wherein man’s soul here below lives imprisoned,—the Poet’s task is, as it were, done to his hand: Time itself, which is the outer veil of Eternity, invests, of its own accord, with an authentic, felt ‘infinitude,’ whatsoever it has once embraced in its mysterious folds. Consider all that lies in that one word, Past! What a pathetic, sacred, in every sense poetic, meaning is implied in it; a meaning growing ever the clearer, the farther we recede in Time,—the more of that same Past we have to look through!—On which ground indeed must Sauerteig have built, and not without plausibility, in that strange thesis of his: ‘that History after all is the true Poetry; that Reality if rightly interpreted is grander than Fiction; nay that even in the right interpretation of Reality and History does genuine Poetry consist.’ Thus for Boswell’s Life of Johnson has Time done, is Time still doing, what no ornament of Art or Artifice could have done for it. Rough Samuel and sleek wheedling James were, and are not. Their Life and whole personal Environment has melted into air. The Mitre Tavern still stands in Fleet Street: but where now is its scot-and-lot paying, beef-and-ale loving, cocked-hatted, potbellied Landlord; its rosy-faced, assiduous Landlady, with all her shining brass-pans, waxed tables, well-filled larder-shelves; her cooks, and bootjacks, and errandboys and watery-mouthed hangers-on? Gone! Gone! The becking waiter who, with wreathed smiles, was wont to spread for Samuel and Bozzy their supper

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of the gods, has long since pocketted his last sixpence; and vanished, sixpences and all, like a ghost at cock-crowing. The Bottles they drank out of are all broken, the Chairs they sat on all rotted and burnt; the very Knives and Forks they ate with have rusted to the heart, and become brown oxide of iron, and mingled with the indiscriminate clay. All, all, has vanished; in very deed and truth, like that baseless fabric of Prospero’s air-vision. Of the Mitre Tavern nothing but the bare walls remain there: of London, of England, of the World, nothing but the bare walls remain; and these also decaying (were they of adamant), only slower. The mysterious River of Existence rushes on: a new Billow thereof has arrived, and lashes wildly as ever round the old embankments; but the former Billow with its loud, mad eddyings, where is it?—Where!—Now this Book of Boswell’s, this is precisely a Revocation of the Edict of Destiny; so that Time shall not utterly, not so soon by several centuries, have dominion over us. A little row of Naphtha-lamps, with its line of Naphtha-light, burns clear and holy through the dead Night of the Past: they who were gone are still here; though hidden they are revealed, though dead they yet speak. There it shines, that little miraculously lamp-lit Pathway; shedding its feebler and feebler twilight into the boundless dark Oblivion, for all that our Johnson touched has become illuminated for us: on which miraculous little Pathway we can still travel, and see wonders. It is not speaking with exaggeration, but with strict measured sobriety, to say that this Book of Boswell’s will give us more real insight into the History of England during those days than twenty other Books, falsely entitled ‘Histories,’ which take to themselves that special aim. What good is it to me though innumerable Smolletts and Belshams keep dinning in my ears that a man named George the Third was born and bred up, and a man named George the Second died; that Walpole, and the Pelhams, and Chatham, and Rockingham, and Shelburne, and North, with their Coalition or their Separation Ministries, all ousted one another; and vehemently scrambled for ‘the thing they called the Rudder of Government, but which was in reality the Spigot of Taxation?’ That debates were held, and infinite jarring and jargoning took place; and road-bills and enclosure-bills, and game-bills and India-bills, and Laws which no man can number, which happily few men needed to trouble their heads with beyond the passing moment, were enacted, and printed by the King’s Stationer? That he who sat in Chancery, and rayed out speculation from the Woolsack, was now a man that squinted, now a man that did not squint? To the hungry and thirsty mind all this avails next to nothing. These men and these things, we indeed know, did swim, by strength or by specific-levity, as apples or as horse-dung, on the top of the current: but is it by painfully noting the courses, eddyings, and bobbings



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hither and thither of such drift-articles, that you will unfold to me the nature of the current itself; of that mighty-rolling, loud-roaring, Life-current, bottomless as the foundations of the Universe, mysterious as its Author? The thing I want to see is not Redbook Lists, and Court Calendars, and Parliamentary Registers, but the Life of Man in England: what men did, thought, suffered, enjoyed; the form, especially the spirit, of their terrestrial existence, its outward environment, its inward principle; how and what it was; whence it proceeded, whither it was tending. Mournful, in truth, is it to behold what the business called ‘History,’ in these so enlightened and illuminated times, still continues to be. Can you gather from it, read till your eyes go out, any dimmest shadow of an answer to that great question: How men lived and had their being; were it but economically, as what wages they got, and what they bought with these? Unhappily you cannot. History will throw no light on any such matter. At the point where living memory fails, it is all darkness; Mr. Senior and Mr. Sadler must still debate this simplest of all elements in the condition of the Past: Whether men were better off, in their mere larders and pantries, or were worse off than now! History, as it stands all bound up in gilt volumes, is but a shade more instructive than the wooden volumes of a Backgammon-board. How my Prime Minister was appointed is of less moment to me than How my House Servant was hired. In these days, ten ordinary Histories of Kings and Courtiers were well exchanged against the tenth part of one good History of Booksellers. For example, I would fain know the History of Scotland: who can tell it me? “Robertson,” cry innumerable voices; “Robertson against the world.” I open Robertson; and find there, through long ages too confused for narrative, and fit only to be presented in the way of epitome and distilled essence, a cunning answer and hypothesis, not to this question: By whom, and by what means, when and how, was this fair broad Scotland, with its Arts and Manufactures, Temples, Schools, Institutions, Poetry, Spirit, National Character, created and made arable, verdant, peculiar, great, here as I can see some fair section of it lying, kind and strong (like some Bacchus-tamed Lion), from the Castle-hill of Edinburgh?—but to this other question: How did the King keep himself alive in those old days; and restrain so many Butcher-Barons and ravenous Henchmen from utterly extirpating one another, so that killing went on in some sort of moderation? In the one little Letter of Æneas Sylvius, from old Scotland, there is more of History than in all this.—At length, however, we come to a luminous age, interesting enough; to the age of the Reformation. All Scotland is awakened to a second higher life: the Spirit of the Highest stirs in

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every bosom, agitates every bosom; Scotland is convulsed, fermenting, struggling to body itself forth anew. To the herdsman, among his cattle in remote woods; to the craftsman, in his rude, heath-thatched workshop, among his rude guild-brethren; to the great and to the little, a new light has arisen: in town and hamlet groups are gathered, with eloquent looks, and governed or ungovernable tongues; the great and the little go forth together to do battle for the Lord against the mighty. We ask, with breathless eagerness: How was it; how went it on? Let us understand it, let us see it, and know it!—In reply, is handed us a really graceful, and most dainty little Scandalous Chronicle (as for some Journal of Fashion) of two persons: Mary Stuart, a Beauty, but over lightheaded; and Henry Darnley, a Booby, who had fine legs. How these first courted, billed and cooed, according to nature; then pouted, fretted, grew utterly enraged, and blew one another up with gunpowder: this, and not the History of Scotland, is what we goodnaturedly read. Nay, by other hands, something like a horseload of other Books have been written to prove that it was the Beauty who blew up the Booby, and that it was not she. Who or what it was, the thing once for all being so effectually done, concerns us little. To know Scotland, at that great epoch, were a valuable increase of knowledge: to know poor Darnley, and see him with burning candle, from centre to skin, were no increase of knowledge at all.—Thus is History written. Hence, indeed, comes it that History, which should be ‘the essence of innumerable Biographies,’ will tell us, question it as we like, less than one genuine Biography may do, pleasantly and of its own accord! The time is approaching when History will be attempted on quite other principles; when the Court, the Senate, and Battle-field, receding more and more into the background, the Temple, the Workshop, and Social Hearth, will advance more and more into the foreground; and History will not content itself with shaping some answer to that question: How were men taxed and kept quiet then? but will seek to answer this other infinitely wider and higher question: How and what were men then? Not our Government only, or the ‘House wherein our life was led,’ but the Life itself we led there, will be inquired into. Of which latter it may be found that Government, in any modern sense of the word, is after all but a secondary condition: in the mere sense of Taxation and Keeping quiet, a small, almost a pitiful one.—Meanwhile let us welcome such Boswells, each in his degree, as bring us any genuine contribution, were it never so inadequate, so inconsiderable. An exception was early taken against this Life of Johnson, and all similar enterprises, which we here recommend; and has been transmitted from critic to critic, and repeated in their several dialects, uninterruptedly, ever since: That



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such jottings down of careless conversation are an infringement of social privacy; a crime against our highest Freedom, the Freedom of man’s intercourse with man. To this accusation, which we have read and heard oftener than enough, might it not be well for once to offer the flattest contradiction, and plea of Not at all guilty? Not that conversation is noted down, but that conversation should not deserve noting down, is the evil. Doubtless, if conversation be falsely recorded, then is it simply a Lie; and worthy of being swept, with all despatch, to the Father of Lies. But if, on the other hand, conversation can be authentically recorded, and any one is ready for the task, let him by all means proceed with it; let conversation be kept in remembrance to the latest date possible. Nay should the consciousness that a man may be among us ‘taking notes’ tend, in any measure, to restrict those floods of idle insincere speech, with which the thought of mankind is well nigh drowned,—were it other than the most indubitable benefit? He who speaks honestly cares not, needs not care, though his words be preserved to remotest time: for him who speaks dishonestly, the fittest of all punishments seems to be this same, which the nature of the case provides. The dishonest speaker, not he only who purposely utters falsehoods, but he who does not purposely, and with sincere heart, utter Truth, and Truth alone; who babbles he knows not what, and has clapped no bridle on his tongue, but lets it run racket, ejecting chatter and futility,—is among the most indisputable malefactors omitted, or inserted, in the Criminal Calendar. To him that will well consider it, idle speaking is precisely the beginning of all Hollowness, Halfness, Infidelity (want of Faithfulness); the genial atmosphere in which rank weeds of every kind attain the mastery over noble fruits in man’s life, and utterly choke them out: one of the most crying maladies of these days, and to be testified against, and in all ways to the uttermost withstood. Wise, of a wisdom far beyond our shallow depth, was that old precept: Watch thy tongue; out of it are the issues of Life! ‘Man is properly an incarnated word:’ the word that he speaks is the man himself. Were eyes put into our head, that we might see; or only that we might fancy, and plausibly pretend, we had seen? Was the tongue suspended there, that it might tell truly what we had seen, and make man the soul’s-brother of man; or only that it might utter vain sounds, jargon, soul-confusing, and so divide man, as by enchanted walls of Darkness, from union with man? Thou who wearest that cunning Heaven-made organ, a Tongue, think well of this. Speak not, I passionately entreat thee, till thy thought have silently matured itself, till thou have other than mad and mad-making noises to emit: hold thy tongue (thou hast it a-holding) till some meaning lie behind, to set it wagging. Consider the significance of Silence: it is boundless, never by meditating to be

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exhausted; unspeakably profitable to thee! Cease that chaotic hubbub, wherein thy own soul runs to waste, to confused suicidal dislocation and stupor: out of Silence comes thy strength. ‘Speech is silvern, Silence is golden; Speech is human, Silence is divine.’ Fool! thinkest thou that because no Boswell is there with ass-skin and blacklead to note thy jargon, it therefore dies and is harmless. Nothing dies, nothing can die. No idlest word thou speakest but is a seed cast into Time, and grows through all Eternity! The Recording Angel, consider it well, is no fable, but the truest of truths: the paper tablets thou canst burn; of the ‘iron leaf ’ there is no burning.—Truly, if we can permit God Almighty to note down our conversation, thinking it good enough for Him,—any poor Boswell need not scruple to work his will of it. Leaving now this our English Odyssey, with its Singer and Scholiast, let us come to the Ulysses; that great Samuel Johnson himself, the far-experienced, ‘much-enduring man,’ whose labours and pilgrimage are here sung. A fulllength image of his Existence has been preserved for us: and he, perhaps of all living Englishmen, was the one who best deserved that honour. For if it is true and now almost proverbial, that ‘the Life of the lowest mortal, if faithfully recorded, would be interesting to the highest;’ how much more when the mortal in question was already distinguished in fortune and natural quality, so that his thinkings and doings were not significant of himself only, but of large masses of mankind! ‘There is not a man whom I meet on the streets,’ says one, ‘but I could like, were it otherwise convenient, to know his Biography:’ nevertheless, could an enlightened curiosity be so far gratified, it must be owned the Biography of most ought to be, in an extreme degree, summary. In this world, there is so wonderfully little self-subsistence among men; next to no originality (though never absolutely none): one Life is too servilely the copy of another; and so in whole thousands of them you find little that is properly new; nothing but the old song sung by a new voice, with better or worse execution, here and there an ornamental quaver, and false notes enough: but the fundamental tune is ever the same; and for the words, these, all that they meant stands written generally on the Churchyard-stone: Natus sum; esuriebam, quærebam; nunc repletus requiesco. Mankind sail their Life-voyage in huge fleets, following some single whale-fishing or herring-fishing Commodore: the logbook of each differs not, in essential purport, from that of any other; nay the most have no legible logbook (reflection, observation not being among their talents); keep no reckoning, only keep in sight of the flagship,—and fish. Read the Commodore’s Papers (know his



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Life); and even your lover of that street Biography will have learned the most of what he sought after. Or, the servile imitancy, and yet also a nobler relationship and mysterious union to one another which lies in such imitancy, of Mankind might be illustrated under the different figure, itself nowise original, of a Flock of Sheep. Sheep go in flocks for three reasons: First, because they are of a gregarious temper, and love to be together: Secondly, because of their cowardice; they are afraid to be left alone: Thirdly, because the common run of them are dull of sight, to a proverb, and can have no choice in roads; sheep can in fact see nothing; in a celestial Luminary, and a scoured pewter Tankard, would discern only that both dazzled them, and were of unspeakable glory. How like their fellow-creatures of the human species! Men too, as was from the first maintained here, are gregarious: then surely faint-hearted enough, trembling to be left by themselves: above all, dull-sighted, down to the verge of utter blindness. Thus are we seen ever running in torrents, and mobs, if we run at all; and after what foolish scoured Tankards, mistaking them for Suns! Foolish Turnip-lanterns likewise, to all appearance supernatural, keep whole nations quaking, their hair on end. Neither know we, except by blind habit, where the good pastures lie: solely when the sweet grass is between our teeth, we know it, and chew it; also when grass is bitter and scant, we know it,—and bleat and but: these last two facts we know of a truth, and in very deed.—Thus do Men and Sheep play their parts on this Nether Earth; wandering restlessly in large masses, they know not whither; for most part, each following his neighbour, and his own nose. Nevertheless, not always: look better, you shall find certain that do, in some small degree, know whither. Sheep have their Bell-wether; some ram of the folds, endued with more valour, with clearer vision than other sheep; he leads them through the wolds, by height and hollow, to the woods and water-courses, for covert or for pleasant provender; courageously marching, and if need be, leaping, and with hoof and horn doing battle, in the van: him they courageously, and with assured heart, follow. Touching it is, as every herdsman will inform you, with what chivalrous devotedness these woolly Hosts adhere to their Wether; and rush after him, through good report and through bad report, were it into safe shelters and green thymy nooks, or into asphaltic lakes and the jaws of devouring lions. Ever also must we recall that fact which we owe Jean Paul’s quick eye: ‘If you hold a stick before the Wether, so that he, by necessity, leaps in passing you, and then withdraw your stick, the Flock will nevertheless all leap as he did; and the thousandth sheep shall be found impetuously vaulting over air, as the first did over an otherwise impassable barrier.’ Reader, wouldst

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thou understand Society, ponder well those ovine proceedings; thou wilt find them all curiously significant. Now if sheep always, how much more must men always, have their Chief, their Guide! Man too is by nature quite thoroughly gregarious: nay, ever he struggles to be something more, to be social; not even when Society has become impossible, does that deep-seated tendency and effort forsake him. Man, as if by miraculous magic, imparts his Thoughts, his Mood of mind to man; an unspeakable communion binds all past, present, and future men into one indissoluble whole, almost into one living Individual. Of which high, mysterious Truth, this disposition to imitate, to lead and be led, this impossibility not to imitate, is the most constant, and one of the simplest manifestations. To imitate! which of us all can measure the significance that lies in that one word? By virtue of which the infant Man, born at Woolsthorpe, grows up not to be a hairy Savage, and chewer of Acorns, but an Isaac Newton, and Discoverer of Solar Systems!— Thus both in a celestial and terrestrial sense, are we a Flock, such as there is no other: nay, looking away from the base and ludicrous to the sublime and sacred side of the matter (since in every matter there are two sides), have not we also a Shepherd, ‘if we will but hear his voice?’ Of those stupid multitudes there is no one but has an immortal Soul within him; a reflex, and living image of God’s whole Universe: strangely, from its dim environment, the light of the Highest looks through him;—for which reason, indeed, it is that we claim a brotherhood with him, and so love to know his History, and come into clearer and clearer union with all that he feels, and says, and does. However, the chief thing to be noted was this: Amid those dull millions, who, as a dull flock, roll hither and thither, whithersoever they are led, and seem all sightless and slavish, accomplishing, attempting little save what the animal instinct in its somewhat higher kind might teach, To keep themselves and their young ones alive,—are scattered here and there superior natures, whose eye is not destitute of free vision, nor their heart of free volition. These latter, therefore, examine and determine, not what others do, but what it is right to do; towards which, and which only, will they, with such force as is given them, resolutely endeavour: for if the Machine, living or inanimate, is merely fed, or desires to be fed, and so works; the Person can will, and so do. These are properly our Men, our Great Men; the guides of the dull host,—which follows them as by an irrevocable decree. They are the chosen of the world: they had this rare faculty not only of ‘supposing’ and ‘inclining to think,’ but of knowing and believing; the nature of their being was, that they lived not by Hearsay but by clear Vision; while others hovered and swam along, in the grand Vanity-fair of the World,



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blinded by the mere Shows of things, these saw into the Things themselves, and could walk as men having an eternal loadstar, and with their feet on sure paths. Thus was there a Reality in their existence; something of a perennial character; in virtue of which indeed it is that the memory of them is perennial. Whoso belongs only to his own age, and reverences only its gilt Popinjays or soot-smeared Mumbojumbos, must needs die with it: though he have been crowned seven times in the Capitol, or seventy and seven times, and Rumour have blown his praises to all the four winds, deafening every ear therewith,—it avails not; there was nothing universal, nothing eternal in him; he must fade away, even as the Popinjay-gildings and Scarecrow-apparel, which he could not see through. The great man does, in good truth, belong to his own age; nay more so than any other man; being properly the synopsis and epitome of such age with its interests and influences: but belongs likewise to all ages, otherwise he is not great. What was transitory in him passes away; and an immortal part remains, the significance of which is in strict speech inexhaustible,—as that of every real object is. Aloft, conspicuous, on his enduring basis, he stands there, serene, unaltering; silently addresses to every new generation a new lesson and monition. Well is his Life worth writing, worth interpreting; and ever, in the new dialect of new times, of re-writing and re-interpreting. Of such chosen men was Samuel Johnson: not ranking among the highest, or even the high, yet distinctly admitted into that sacred band; whose existence was no idle Dream, but a Reality which he transacted awake; nowise a Clotheshorse and Patent Digester, but a genuine Man. By nature he was gifted for the noblest of earthly tasks, that of Priesthood, and Guidance of mankind; by destiny, moreover, he was appointed to this task, and did actually, according to strength, fulfil the same: so that always the question, How; in what spirit; under what shape? remains for us to be asked and answered concerning him. For as the highest Gospel was a Biography, so is the Life of every good man still an indubitable Gospel, and preaches to the eye and heart and whole man, so that Devils even must believe and tremble, these gladdest tidings: “Man is heaven-born; not the thrall of Circumstances, of Necessity, but the victorious subduer thereof: behold how he can become the ‘Announcer of himself and of his Freedom;’ and is ever what the Thinker has named him, ‘the Messias of Nature!’”—Yes, Reader, all this that thou hast so often heard about ‘force of circumstances,’ ‘the creature of the time,’ ‘balancing of motives,’ and who knows what melancholy stuff to the like purport, wherein thou, as in a nightmare Dream, sittest paralysed, and hast no force left,—was in very truth, if Johnson and waking men are to be credited, little other than a hag-ridden vision of death-sleep; some half-fact, more fatal

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at times than a whole falsehood. Shake it off; awake; up and be doing, even as it is given thee! The Contradiction which yawns wide enough in every Life, which it is the meaning and task of Life to reconcile, was in Johnson’s wider than in most. Seldom, for any man, has the contrast between the ethereal heavenward side of things, and the dark sordid earthward, been more glaring: whether we look at Nature’s work with him or Fortune’s, from first to last, heterogeneity, as of sunbeams and miry clay, is on all hands manifest. Whereby indeed, only this was declared, That much Life had been given him; many things to triumph over, a great work to do. Happily also he did it; better than the most. Nature had given him a high, keen-visioned, almost poetic soul; yet withal imprisoned it in an inert, unsightly body: he that could never rest had not limbs that would move with him, but only roll and waddle: the inward eye, allpenetrating, all-embracing, must look through bodily windows that were dim, half-blinded; he so loved men, and ‘never once saw the human face divine!’ Not less did he prize the love of men; he was eminently social; the approbation of his fellows was dear to him, ‘valuable,’ as he owned, ‘if from the meanest of human beings:’ yet the first impression he produced on every man was to be one of aversion, almost of disgust. By Nature it was farther ordered that the imperious Johnson should be born poor: the ruler-soul, strong in its native royalty, generous, uncontrollable, like the lion of the woods, was to be housed, then, in such a dwelling-place: of Disfigurement, Disease, and lastly of a Poverty which itself made him the servant of servants. Thus was the born King likewise a born Slave: the divine spirit of Music must awake imprisoned amid dull-croaking universal Discords; the Ariel finds himself encased in the coarse hulls of a Caliban. So is it more or less, we know (and thou, O Reader, knowest and feelest even now), with all men: yet with the fewest men in any such degree as with Johnson. Fortune, moreover, which had so managed his first appearance in the world, lets not her hand lie idle, or turn the other way, but works unweariedly in the same spirit, while he is journeying through the world. What such a mind, stamped of Nature’s noblest metal, though in so ungainly a die, was specially and best of all fitted for, might still be a question. To none of the world’s few Incorporated Guilds could he have adjusted himself without difficulty, without distortion; in none been a Guild-Brother well at ease. Perhaps, if we look to the strictly practical nature of his faculty, to the strength, decision, method that manifests itself in him, we may say that his calling was rather towards Active than Speculative life; that as Statesman (in the higher, now obsolete sense), Lawgiver, Ruler; in short, as Doer of the Work, he had shone even more than as Speaker of the



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Word. His honesty of heart, his courageous temper, the value he set on things outward and material, might have made him a King among Kings. Had the golden age of those new French Prophets, when it shall be: A chacun selon sa capacité; à chaque capacité selon ses œuvres, but arrived! Indeed even in our brazen and Birmingham-lacker age, he himself regretted that he had not become a Lawyer, and risen to be Chancellor, which he might well have done. However, it was otherwise appointed. To no man does Fortune throw open all the kingdoms of this world, and say: It is thine; choose where thou wilt dwell! To the most she opens hardly the smallest cranny or doghutch, and says, not without asperity: There, that is thine while thou canst keep it; nestle thyself there, and bless Heaven! Alas, men must fit themselves into many things: some forty years ago, for instance, the noblest and ablest Man in all the British lands might be seen not swaying the royal sceptre, or the pontiff ’s censer, on the pinnacle of the World, but gauging ale-tubs in the little burgh of Dumfries! Johnson came a little nearer the mark than Burns: but with him too, ‘Strength was mournfully denied its arena;’ he too had to fight Fortune, at strange odds, all his life long. Johnson’s disposition for royalty (had the Fates so ordered it) is well seen in early boyhood. ‘His favourites,’ says Boswell, ‘used to receive very liberal assistance from him; and such was the submission and deference with which he was treated, that three of the boys, of whom Mr. Hector was sometimes one, used to come in the morning as his humble attendants, and carry him to school. One in the middle stooped, while he sat upon his back, and one on each side supported him; and thus was he borne triumphant.’The purfly, sand-blind lubber and blubber, with his open mouth, and face of bruised honeycomb; yet already dominant, imperial, irresistible! Not in the ‘King’s-chair’ (of human arms) as we see, do his three satellites carry him along: rather on the Tyrant’s-saddle, the back of his fellow-creature, must he ride prosperous!—The child is father of the man. He who had seen fifty years into coming Time, would have felt that little spectacle of mischievous schoolboys to be a great one. For us, who look back on it, and what followed it, now from afar, there arise questions enough: How looked these urchins? What jackets and galligaskins had they; felt headgear, or of dogskin leather? What was old Lichfield doing then; what thinking?—and so on, through the whole series of Corporal Trim’s ‘auxiliary verbs.’ A picture of it all fashions itself together;—only unhappily we have no brush, and no fingers. Boyhood is now past; the ferula of Pedagogue waves harmless, in the distance: Samuel has struggled up to uncouth bulk and youthhood, wrestling with Disease and Poverty, all the way; which two continue still his companions. At College we see little of him; yet thus much, that things went not well. A rugged wild-

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man of the desert, awakened to the feeling of himself; proud as the proudest, poor as the poorest; stoically shut up, silently enduring the incurable: what a world of blackest gloom, with sun-gleams, and pale tearful moon-gleams, and flickerings of a celestial and an infernal splendour, was this that now opened for him! But the weather is wintry; and the toes of the man are looking through his shoes. His muddy features grow of a purple and sea-green colour; a flood of black indignation mantling beneath. A truculent, raw-boned figure! Meat he has probably little; hope he has less: his feet, as we said, have come into brotherhood with the cold mire. ‘Shall I be particular,’ inquires Sir John Hawkins, ‘and relate a circumstance of his distress, that cannot be imputed to him as an effect of his own extravagance or irregularity, and consequently reflects no disgrace on his memory? He had scarce any change of raiment, and, in a short time after Corbet left him, but one pair of shoes, and those so old that his feet were seen through them: a gentleman of his college, the father of an eminent clergyman now living, directed a servitor one morning to place a new pair at the door of Johnson’s chamber; who seeing them upon his first going out, so far forgot himself and the spirit which must have actuated his unknown benefactor, that, with all the indignation of an insulted man, he threw them away.’

How exceedingly surprising!—The Rev. Dr. Hall remarks: ‘As far as we can judge from a cursory view of the weekly account in the buttery books, Johnson appears to have lived as well as other commoners and scholars.’ Alas! such ‘cursory view of the buttery books,’ now from the safe distance of a century, in the safe chair of a College Mastership, is one thing; the continual view of the empty or locked buttery itself was quite a different thing. But hear our Knight, how he farther discourses. ‘Johnson,’ quoth Sir John, ‘could not at this early period of his life divest himself of an idea that poverty was disgraceful; and was very severe in his censures of that economy in both our Universities, which exacted at meals the attendance of poor scholars, under the several denominations of Servitors in the one and Sizers in the other: he thought that the scholar’s, like the Christian life, levelled all distinctions of rank and worldly pre-eminence; but in this he was mistaken: civil polity,’ &c. &c.—Too true! It is man’s lot to err. However, Destiny, in all ways, means to prove the mistaken Samuel, and see what stuff is in him. He must leave these butteries of Oxford, Want like an armed man compelling him; retreat into his father’s mean home; and there abandon himself for a season to inaction, disappointment, shame, and nervous melancholy nigh run mad: he is probably the wretchedest man in wide England.



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In all ways, he too must ‘become perfect through suffering.’—High thoughts have visited him; his College Exercises have been praised beyond the walls of College; Pope himself has seen that Translation, and approved of it: Samuel had whispered to himself: I too am ‘one and somewhat.’ False thoughts; that leave only misery behind! The fever-fire of Ambition is too painfully extinguished (but not cured) in the frost-bath of Poverty. Johnson has knocked at the gate, as one having a right; but there was no opening: the world lies all encircled as with brass; nowhere can he find or force the smallest entrance. An ushership at Market Bosworth, and ‘a disagreement between him and Sir Wolstan Dixie, the patron of the school,’ yields him bread of affliction and water of affliction; but so bitter, that unassisted human nature cannot swallow them. Young Sampson will grind no more in the Philistine mill of Bosworth; quits hold of Sir Wolstan, and the ‘domestic chaplaincy, so far at least as to say grace at table,’ and also to be ‘treated with what he represented as intolerable harshness;’ and so, after ‘some months of such complicated misery,’ feeling doubtless that there are worse things in the world than quick death by Famine, ‘relinquishes a situation, which all his life afterwards he recollected with the strongest aversion, and even horror.’ Men like Johnson are properly called the Forlorn Hope of the World: judge whether his hope was forlorn or not, by this Letter to a dull oily Printer, who called himself Sylvanus Urban: ‘Sir,—As you appear no less sensible than your readers, of the defect of your poetical article, you will not be displeased if (in order to the improvement of it) I communicate to you the sentiments of a person who will undertake, on reasonable terms, sometimes to fill a column. ‘His opinion is that the public would,’ &c. &c. ‘If such a correspondence will be agreeable to you, be pleased to inform me in two posts, what the conditions are on which you shall expect it. Your late offer (for a Prize Poem) gives me no reason to distrust your generosity. If you engage in any literary projects besides this paper, I have other designs to impart.’

Reader, the generous person, to whom this Letter goes addressed, is ‘Mr. Edmund Cave, at St. John’s Gate, London;’ the addresser of it is Samuel Johnson, in Birmingham, Warwickshire. Nevertheless, Life rallies in the man; reasserts its right to be lived, even to be enjoyed. ‘Better a small bush,’ say the Scotch, ‘than no shelter:’ Johnson learns to be contented with humble human things; and is there not already an actual realised human Existence, all stirring and living on every hand of

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him? Go thou and do likewise! In Birmingham itself, with his own purchased goose-quill, he can earn ‘five guineas;’ nay, finally, the choicest terrestrial good: a Friend, who will be Wife to him! Johnson’s marriage with the good Widow Porter has been treated with ridicule by many mortals, who apparently had no understanding thereof. That the purblind, seamy-faced Wild-man, stalking lonely, woe-stricken, like some Irish Gallowglass with peeled club, whose speech no man knew, whose look all men both laughed at and shuddered at, should find any brave female heart, to acknowledge, at first sight and hearing of him, “This is the most sensible man I ever met with;” and then, with generous courage, to take him to itself, and say, Be thou mine; be thou warmed here, and thawed to life!—in all this, in the kind Widow’s love and pity for him, in Johnson’s love and gratitude, there is actually no matter for ridicule. Their wedded life, as is the common lot, was made up of drizzle and dry weather; but innocence and worth dwelt in it; and when death had ended it, a certain sacredness: Johnson’s deathless affection for his Tetty was always venerable and noble. However, be this as it might, Johnson is now minded to wed; and will live by the trade of Pedagogy, for by this also may life be kept in. Let the world therefore take notice: ‘At Edial near Lichfield, in Staffordshire, young gentlemen are boarded, and taught the Latin and Greek languages, by Samuel Johnson.’ Had this Edial enterprise prospered, how different might the issue have been! Johnson had lived a life of unnoticed nobleness, or swoln into some amorphous Dr. Parr, of no avail to us; Bozzy would have dwindled into official insignificance, or risen by some other elevation; old Auchinleck had never been afflicted with “ane that keeped a schule,” or obliged to violate hospitality by a “Cromwell do? God, sir, he gart kings ken that there was a lith in their neck!” But the Edial enterprise did not prosper; Destiny had other work appointed for Samuel Johnson; and young gentlemen got board where they could elsewhere find it. This man was to become a Teacher of grown gentlemen, in the most surprising way; a Man of Letters, and Ruler of the British Nation for some time,—not of their bodies merely, but of their minds, not over them, but in them. The career of Literature could not, in Johnson’s day, any more than now, be said to lie along the shores of a Pactolus: whatever else might be gathered there, gold-dust was nowise the chief produce. The world, from the times of Socrates, St. Paul, and far earlier, has always had its Teachers; and always treated them in a peculiar way. A shrewd Townclerk (not of Ephesus), once, in founding a Burgh-Seminary, when the question came, How the Schoolmasters should be maintained? delivered this brief counsel: “D—n them, keep them poor!” Con-



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siderable wisdom may lie in this aphorism. At all events, we see, the world has acted on it long, and indeed improved on it,—putting many a Schoolmaster of its great Burgh-Seminary to a death, which even cost it something. The world, it is true, had for some time been too busy to go out of its way, and put any Author to death; however, the old sentence pronounced against them was found to be pretty sufficient. The first Writers, being Monks, were sworn to a vow of Poverty; the modern Authors had no need to swear to it. This was the epoch when an Otway could still die of hunger: not to speak of your innumerable Scrogginses, whom ‘the Muse found stretched beneath a rug,’ with ‘rusty grate unconscious of a fire,’ stocking-nightcap, sanded floor, and all the other escutcheons of the craft, time out of mind the heirlooms of Authorship. Scroggins, however, seems to have been but an idler; not at all so diligent as worthy Mr. Boyce, whom we might have seen sitting up in bed, with his wearing-apparel of Blanket about him, and a hole slit in the same, that his hand might be at liberty to work in its vocation. The worst was, that too frequently a blackguard recklessness of temper ensued, incapable of turning to account what good the gods even here had provided: your Boyces acted on some stoico-epicurean principle of carpe diem, as men do in bombarded towns, and seasons of raging pestilence;—and so had lost not only their life, and presence of mind, but their status as persons of respectability. The trade of Author was at about one of its lowest ebbs, when Johnson embarked on it. Accordingly we find no mention of Illuminations in the city of London, when this same Ruler of the British Nation arrived in it: no cannon-salvoes are fired; no flourish of drums and trumpets greets his appearance on the scene. He enters quite quietly, with some copper halfpence in his pocket; creeps into lodgings in Exeter Street, Strand; and has a Coronation Pontiff also, of not less peculiar equipment, whom, with all submissiveness, he must wait upon, in his Vatican of St. John’s Gate. This is the dull oily Printer alluded to above. ‘Cave’s temper,’ says our Knight Hawkins, ‘was phlegmatic: though he assumed as the publisher of the Magazine, the name of Sylvanus Urban, he had few of those qualities that constitute urbanity. Judge of his want of them by this question, which he once put to an author: “Mr.——, I hear you have just published a pamphlet, and am told there is a very good paragraph in it, upon the subject of music: did you write that yourself ?” His discernment was also slow; and as he had already at his command some writers of prose and verse, who, in the language of Booksellers, are called good hands, he was the backwarder in making advances, or courting an intimacy with Johnson. Upon the first approach of a stranger, his practice was to continue sitting; a posture in which he was

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ever to be found, and for a few minutes to continue silent: if at any time he was inclined to begin the discourse, it was generally by putting a leaf of the Magazine, then in the press, into the hand of his visitor, and asking his opinion of it. * * * ‘He was so incompetent a judge of Johnson’s abilities, that meaning at one time to dazzle him with the splendour of some of those luminaries in Literature, who favoured him with their correspondence, he told him that if he would, in the evening, be at a certain alehouse in the neighbourhood of Clerkenwell, he might have a chance of seeing Mr. Browne and another or two of those illustrious contributors: Johnson accepted the invitation; and being introduced by Cave, dressed in a loose horseman’s coat, and such a great bushy wig as he constantly wore, to the sight of Mr. Browne, whom he found sitting at the upper end of a long table, in a cloud of tobacco-smoke, had his curiosity gratified.’*

In fact, if we look seriously into the condition of Authorship at that period, we shall find that Johnson had undertaken one of the ruggedest of all possible enterprises; that here as elsewhere Fortune had given him unspeakable Contradictions to reconcile. For a man of Johnson’s stamp, the Problem was twofold: First, not only as the humble but indispensable condition of all else, to keep himself, if so might be, alive; but secondly, to keep himself alive by speaking forth the Truth that was in him, and speaking it truly, that is, in the clearest and fittest utterance the Heavens had enabled him to give it, let the Earth say to this what she liked. Of which twofold Problem if it be hard to solve either member separately, how incalculably more so to solve it, when both are conjoined, and work with endless complication into one another! He that finds himself already kept alive can sometimes (unhappily not always) speak a little truth; he that finds himself able and willing, to all lengths, to speak lies, may, by watching how the wind sits, scrape together a livelihood, sometimes of great splendour: he, again, who finds himself provided with neither endowment, has but a ticklish game to play, and shall have praises if he win it. Let us look a little at both faces of the matter; and see what front they then offered our Adventurer, what front he offered them. At the time of Johnson’s appearance on the field, Literature, in many senses, was in a transitional state; chiefly in this sense, as respects the pecuniary subsistence of its cultivators. It was in the very act of passing from the protection of Patrons into that of the Public; no longer to supply its necessities by laudatory Dedications to the Great, but by judicious Bargains with the Booksellers. This happy change has been much sung and celebrated; many a ‘lord of the lion heart and eagle eye’ looking back with scorn enough on the bygone system * Hawkins, 46-50.



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of Dependency: so that now it were perhaps well to consider, for a moment, what good might also be in it, what gratitude we owe it. That a good was in it, admits not of doubt. Whatsoever has existed has had its value: without some truth and worth lying in it, the thing could not have hung together, and been the organ and sustenance, and method of action, for men that reasoned and were alive. Translate a Falsehood which is wholly false into Practice, the result comes out zero; there is no fruit or issue to be derived from it. That in an age, when a Nobleman was still noble, still with his wealth the protector of worthy and humane things, and still venerated as such, a poor Man of Genius, his brother in nobleness, should, with unfeigned reverence, address him and say: “I have found Wisdom here, and would fain proclaim it abroad; wilt thou, of thy abundance, afford me the means?”—in all this there was no baseness; it was wholly an honest proposal, which a free man might make, and a free man listen to. So might a Tasso, with a Gerusalemme in his hand or in his head, speak to a Duke of Ferrara; so might a Shakspeare to his Southampton; and Continental Artists generally to their rich Protectors,—in some countries, down almost to these days. It was only when the reverence became feigned, that baseness entered into the transaction on both sides; and, indeed, flourished there with rapid luxuriance, till that became disgraceful for a Dryden, which a Shakspeare could once practise without offence. Neither, it is very true, was the new way of Bookseller Mecænasship worthless; which opened itself at this juncture, for the most important of all transporttrades, now when the old way had become too miry and impassable. Remark, moreover, how this second sort of Mecænasship, after carrying us through nearly a century of Literary Time, appears now to have well nigh discharged its function also; and to be working pretty rapidly towards some third method, the exact conditions of which are yet nowise visible. Thus all things have their end; and we should part with them all, not in anger but in peace. The Bookseller System, during its peculiar century, the whole of the eighteenth, did carry us handsomely along; and many good Works it has left us, and many good Men it maintained: if it is now expiring by Puffery, as the Patronage System did by Flattery (for Lying is ever the forerunner of Death, nay is itself Death), let us not forget its benefits; how it nursed Literature through boyhood and school-years, as Patronage had wrapped it in soft swaddling-bands;—till now we see it about to put on the toga virilis, could it but find any such! There is tolerable travelling on the beaten road, run how it may; only on the new road, not yet levelled and paved, and on the old road, all broken into ruts and quagmires, is the travelling bad or impracticable. The difficulty lies always

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in the transition from one method to another. In which state it was that Johnson now found Literature; and out of which, let us also say, he manfully carried it. What remarkable mortal first paid copyright in England we have not ascertained; perhaps for almost a century before, some scarce visible or ponderable pittance of wages had occasionally been yielded by the Seller of Books to the Writer of them: the original Covenant, stipulating to produce Paradise Lost on the one hand, and Five Pounds Sterling on the other, still lies (we have been told), in black-on-white, for inspection and purchase by the curious, at a Bookshop in Chancery Lane. Thus had the matter gone on, in a mixed confused way, for some threescore years;—as ever, in such things, the old system overlaps the new, by some generation or two, and only dies quite out when the new has got a complete organisation, and weather-worthy surface of its own. Among the first Authors, the very first of any significance, who lived by the day’s wages of his craft, and composedly faced the world on that basis, was Samuel Johnson. At the time of Johnson’s appearance, there were still two ways, on which an Author might attempt proceeding: there were the Mecænases proper in the West End of London; and the Mecænases virtual of St. John’s Gate and Paternoster Row. To a considerate man it might seem uncertain which method were the preferable: neither had very high attractions; the Patron’s aid was now well nigh necessarily polluted by sycophancy, before it could come to hand; the Bookseller’s was deformed with greedy stupidity, not to say entire woodenheadedness and disgust (so that an Osborne even required to be knocked down, by an Author of spirit), and could barely keep the thread of life together. The one was the wages of suffering and poverty; the other, unless you gave strict heed to it, the wages of sin. In time, Johnson had opportunity of looking into both methods, and ascertaining what they were; but found, at first trial, that the former would in nowise do for him. Listen, once again, to that far-famed Blast of Doom, proclaiming into the ear of Lord Chesterfield, and, through him, of the listening world, that Patronage should be no more! ‘Seven years, my Lord, have now past, since I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing on my Work* through difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it at last to the verge of publication, without one act of assistance,† one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. * The English Dictionary. † Were time and printer’s space of no value, it were easy to wash away certain foolish soot-stains dropped here as ‘Notes;’ especially two: the one on this word, and on Boswell’s Note to it; the other on the paragraph which follows. Let ‘Ed.’ look a second



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‘The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks. ‘Is not a patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind: but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary and cannot impart it; till I am known and do not want it. I hope, it is no very cynical asperity, not to confess obligations, where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a patron which Providence has enabled me to do for myself. ‘Having carried on my Work thus far with so little obligation to any favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I should conclude it, if less be possible, with less: for I have long been awakened from that dream of hope, in which I once boasted myself with so much exultation, ‘My Lord, your Lordship’s most humble, most obedient servant, ‘Sam. Johnson.’

And thus must the rebellious ‘Sam. Johnson’ turn him to the Bookselling guild, and the wondrous chaos of ‘Author by trade;’ and, though ushered into it only by that dull oily Printer, ‘with loose horseman’s coat, and such a great bushy wig as he constantly wore,’ and only as subaltern to some commanding-officer ‘Browne, sitting amid tobacco-smoke at the head of a long table in the alehouse at Clerkenwell,’—gird himself together for the warfare; having no alternative! Little less contradictory was that other branch of the twofold Problem now set before Johnson: the speaking forth of Truth. Nay, taken by itself, it had in those days become so complex as to puzzle strongest heads, with nothing else imposed on them for solution; and even to turn high heads of that sort into mere hollow vizards, speaking neither truth nor falsehood, nor anything but what the Prompter and Player (ὑποκριτὴσ) put into them. Alas! for poor Johnson, Contradiction abounded; in spirituals and in temporals, within and without. Born with the strongest unconquerable love of just Insight, he must begin to live and learn in a scene where Prejudice flourishes with rank luxuriance. England was all confused enough, sightless and yet restless, take it where you would; but figure the best intellect in England nursed up to manhood in the idol-cavern of a poor Tradesman’s house, in the cathedral city of Lichfield! What is Truth? said time; he will find that Johnson’s sacred regard for Truth is the only thing to be ‘noted,’ in the former case; also, in the latter, that this of ‘Love’s being a native of the rocks’ actually has ‘a meaning.’

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jesting Pilate; What is Truth? might earnest Johnson much more emphatically say. Truth, no longer, like the Phœnix, in rainbow plumage, poured, from her glittering beak, such tones of sweetest melody as took captive every ear: the Phœnix (waxing old) had well nigh ceased her singing, and empty wearisome Cuckoos, and doleful monotonous Owls, innumerable Jays also, and twittering Sparrows on the housetop, pretended they were repeating her. It was wholly a divided age, that of Johnson; Unity existed nowhere, in its Heaven, or in its Earth. Society, through every fibre, was rent asunder: all things, it was then becoming visible, but could not then be understood, were moving onwards, with an impulse received ages before, yet now first with a decisive rapidity, towards that great chaotic gulf, where, whether in the shape of French Revolutions, Reform Bills, or what shape soever, bloody or bloodless, the descent and engulfment assume, we now see them weltering and boiling. Already Cant, as once before hinted, had begun to play its wonderful part, for the hour was come: two ghastly Apparitions, unreal simulacra both, Hypocrisy and Atheism are already, in silence, parting the world. Opinion and Action, which should live together as wedded pair, ‘one flesh,’ more properly as Soul and Body, have commenced their open quarrel, and are suing for a separate maintenance,—as if they could exist separately. To the earnest mind, in any position, firm footing and a life of Truth was becoming daily more difficult: in Johnson’s position, it was more difficult than in almost any other. If, as for a devout nature was inevitable and indispensable, he looked up to Religion, as to the pole-star of his voyage, already there was no fixed pole-star any longer visible; but two stars, a whole constellation of stars, each proclaiming itself as the true. There was the red portentous comet-star of Infidelity; the dim fixedstar, burning ever dimmer, uncertain now whether not an atmospheric meteor, of Orthodoxy: which of these to choose? The keener intellects of Europe had, almost without exception, ranged themselves under the former: for some half century, it had been the general effort of European Speculation to proclaim that Destruction of Falsehood was the only Truth; daily had Denial waxed stronger and stronger, Belief sunk more and more into decay. From our Bolingbrokes and Tolands, the sceptical fever had passed into France, into Scotland; and already it smouldered, far and wide, secretly eating out the heart of England. Bayle had played his part; Voltaire, on a wider theatre, was playing his,—Johnson’s senior by some fifteen years: Hume and Johnson were children almost of the same year.* To this keener order of intellects did Johnson’s indisputably belong: was he to join them? Was he to oppose them? A complicated question: for, alas! the * Johnson, September, 1709; Hume, April, 1711.



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Church itself is no longer, even to him, wholly of true adamant, but of adamant and baked mud conjoined: the zealously Devout must find his Church tottering; and pause amazed to see, instead of inspired Priest, many a swine-feeding Trulliber ministering at her altar. It is not the least curious of the incoherences which Johnson had to reconcile, that, though by nature contemptuous and incredulous, he was, at that time of day, to find his safety and glory in defending, with his whole might, the traditions of the elders. Not less perplexingly intricate, and on both sides hollow or questionable, was the aspect of Politics. Whigs struggling blindly forward, Tories holding blindly back; each with some forecast of a half truth; neither with any forecast of the whole! Admire here this other Contradiction in the life of Johnson: that, though the most ungovernable, and in practice the most independent of men, he must be a Jacobite, and worshipper of the Divine Right. In Politics also there are Irreconcilables enough for him. As, indeed, how could it be otherwise? For when Religion is torn asunder, and the very heart of man’s existence set against itself, then, in all subordinate departments there must needs be hollowness, incoherence. The English Nation had rebelled against a Tyrant; and, by the hands of religious tyrannicides, exacted stern vengeance of him: Democracy had risen iron-sinewed, and ‘like an infant Hercules, strangled serpents in its cradle.’ But as yet none knew the meaning or extent of the phenomenon: Europe was not ripe for it; not to be ripened for it, but by the culture and various experience of another century and a half. And now, when the King-killers were all swept away, and a milder second picture was painted over the canvass of the first, and betitled ‘Glorious Revolution,’ who doubted but the catastrophe was over, the whole business finished, and Democracy gone to its long sleep? Yet was it like a business finished and not finished; a lingering uneasiness dwelt in all minds: the deep-lying, resistless Tendency, which had still to be obeyed, could no longer be recognised; thus was there halfness, insincerity, uncertainty in men’s ways; instead of heroic Puritans and heroic Cavaliers, came now a dawdling set of argumentative Whigs, and a dawdling set of deaf-eared Tories; each halffoolish, each half-false. The Whigs were false and without basis; inasmuch as their whole object was Resistance, Criticism, Demolition,—they knew not why, or towards what issue. In Whiggism, ever since a Charles and his Jeffries had ceased to meddle with it, and to have any Russel or Sidney to meddle with, there could be no divineness of character; not till, in these latter days, it took the figure of a thorough-going, all-defying Radicalism, was there any solid footing for it to stand on. Of the like uncertain, half-hollow nature had Toryism become, in Johnson’s time; preaching forth indeed an everlasting truth, the

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duty of Loyalty; yet now, ever since the final expulsion of the Stuarts, having no Person but only an Office to be loyal to, no living Soul to worship, but only a dead velvet-cushioned Chair. Its attitude, therefore, was stiff-necked refusal to move; as that of Whiggism was clamorous command to move,—let rhyme and reason, on both hands, say to it what they might. The consequence was: Immeasurable floods of contentious jargon, tending nowhither; false conviction; false resistance to conviction; decay (ultimately to become decease) of whatsoever was once understood by the words, Principle, or Honesty of heart; the louder and louder triumph of Halfness and Plausibility over Wholeness and Truth;—at last, this all-overshadowing efflorescence of Quackery, which we now see, with all its deadening and killing fruits, in all its innumerable branches, down to the lowest. How, between these jarring extremes, wherein the rotten lay so inextricably intermingled with the sound, and as yet no eye could see through the ulterior meaning of the matter, was a faithful and true man to adjust himself ? That Johnson, in spite of all drawbacks, adopted the Conservative side; stationed himself as the unyielding opponent of Innovation, resolute to hold fast the form of sound words, could not but increase, in no small measure, the difficulties he had to strive with. We mean, the moral difficulties; for in economical respects, it might be pretty equally balanced; the Tory servant of the Public had perhaps about the same chance of promotion as the Whig: and all the promotion Johnson aimed at was the privilege to live. But, for what, though unavowed, was no less indispensable, for his peace of conscience, and the clear ascertainment and feeling of his Duty as an inhabitant of God’s world, the case was hereby rendered much more complex. To resist Innovation is easy enough on one condition: that you resist Inquiry. This is, and was, the common expedient of your common Conservatives; but it would not do for Johnson: he was a zealous recommender and practiser of Inquiry; once for all, could not, and would not believe, much less speak and act, a Falsehood; the form of sound words, which he held fast, must have a meaning in it. Here lay the difficulty: to behold a portentous mixture of True and False, and feel that he must dwell and fight there; yet to love and defend only the True. How worship, when you cannot and will not be an idolater; yet cannot help discerning that the Symbol of your Divinity has half become idolatrous? This was the question, which Johnson, the man both of clear eye and devout believing heart, must answer,—at peril of his life. The Whig or Sceptic, on the other hand, had a much simpler part to play. To him only the idolatrous side of things, nowise the divine one, lay visible: not worship, therefore, nay in the strict sense not heart-honesty, only at most lip- and hand-honesty, is required of him. What spiritual force is his, he can conscientiously employ in



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the work of cavilling, of pulling down what is False. For the rest, that there is or can be any Truth, of a higher than sensual nature, has not occurred to him. The utmost, therefore, that he as man has to aim at, is Respectability, the suffrages of his fellow-men. Such suffrages he may weigh as well as count; or count only: according as he is a Burke, or a Wilkes. But beyond these there lies nothing divine for him; these attained, all is attained. Thus is his whole world distinct and rounded in; a clear goal is set before him; a firm path, rougher or smoother; at worst a firm region wherein to seek a path: let him gird up his loins, and travel on without misgivings! For the honest Conservative, again, nothing is distinct, nothing rounded in: Respectability can nowise be his highest Godhead; not one aim, but two conflicting aims to be continually reconciled by him, has he to strive after. A difficult position, as we said; which accordingly the most did, even in those days, but half defend,—by the surrender, namely, of their own too cumbersome honesty, or even understanding; after which the completest defence was worth little. Into this difficult position Johnson, nevertheless, threw himself: found it indeed full of difficulties; yet held it out manfully, as an honest-hearted, open-sighted man, while life was in him. Such was that same ‘twofold Problem’ set before Samuel Johnson. Consider all these moral difficulties; and add to them the fearful aggravation, which lay in that other circumstance, that he needed a continual appeal to the Public, must continually produce a certain impression and conviction on the Public; that if he did not, he ceased to have ‘provision for the day that was passing over him,’ he could not any longer live! How a vulgar character, once launched into this wild element; driven onwards by Fear and Famine; without other aim than to clutch what Provender (of Enjoyment in any kind) he could get, always if possible keeping quite clear of the Gallows and Pillory, that is to say, minding heedfully both ‘person’ and ‘character,’—would have floated hither and thither in it; and contrived to eat some three repasts daily, and wear some three suits yearly, and then to depart, and disappear, having consumed his last ration: all this might be worth knowing, but were in itself a trivial knowledge. How a noble man, resolute for the Truth, to whom Shams and Lies were once for all an abomination,—was to act in it: here lay the mystery. By what methods, by what gifts of eye and hand, does a heroic Samuel Johnson, now when cast forth into that waste Chaos of Authorship, maddest of things, a mingled Phlegethon and Fleet-ditch, with its floating lumber, and sea-krakens, and mud-spectres,—shape himself a voyage; of the transient driftwood, and the enduring iron, build him a seaworthy Lifeboat, and sail therein, undrowned, unpolluted, through the roaring ‘mother of dead dogs,’ onwards to an eternal Landmark, and City that hath foundations?

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This high question is even the one answered in Boswell’s Book; which Book we, therefore not so falsely, have named a Heroic Poem; for in it there lies the whole argument of such. Glory to our brave Samuel! He accomplished this wonderful Problem; and now through long generations, we point to him, and say: Here also was a Man; let the world once more have assurance of a Man! Had there been in Johnson, now when afloat on that confusion worse confounded of grandeur and squalor, no light but an earthly outward one, he too must have made shipwreck. With his diseased body, and vehement voracious heart, how easy for him to become a carpe-diem Philosopher, like the rest, and live and die as miserably as any Boyce of that Brotherhood! But happily there was a higher light for him; shining as a lamp to his path; which, in all paths, would teach him to act and walk not as a fool, but as wise, and in those evil days too ‘redeeming the time.’ Under dimmer or clearer manifestations, a Truth had been revealed to him: I also am a Man; even in this unutterable element of Authorship, I may live as beseems a Man! That Wrong is not only different from Right, but that it is, in strict scientific terms, infinitely different; even as the gaining of the whole world set against the losing of one’s own soul, or (as Johnson had it) a Heaven set against a Hell; that in all situations out of the Pit of Tophet, wherein a living Man has stood or can stand, there is actually a Prize of quite infinite value placed within his reach, namely a Duty for him to do: this highest Gospel, which forms the basis and worth of all other Gospels whatsoever, had been revealed to Samuel Johnson; and the man had believed it, and laid it faithfully to heart. Such knowledge of the transcendental, immeasurable character of Duty, we call the basis of all Gospels, the essence of all Religion: he who with his whole soul knows not this, as yet knows nothing, as yet is properly nothing. This, happily for him, Johnson was one of those that knew: under a certain authentic Symbol, it stood forever present to his eyes: a Symbol, indeed, waxing old as doth a garment; yet which had guided forward, as their Banner and celestial Pillar of Fire, innumerable saints and witnesses, the fathers of our modern world; and for him also had still a sacred significance. It does not appear that, at any time, Johnson was what we call irreligious: but in his sorrows and isolation, when hope died away, and only a long vista of suffering and toil lay before him to the end, then first did Religion shine forth in its meek, everlasting clearness; even as the stars do in black night, which, in the daytime and dusk, were hidden by inferior lights. How a true man, in the midst of errors and uncertainties, shall work out for himself a sure Life-truth; and adjusting the transient to the eternal, amid the fragments of ruined Temples build up, with toil and pain, a little Altar



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for himself, and worship there; how Samuel Johnson, in the era of Voltaire, can purify and fortify his soul, and hold real communion with the Highest, ‘in the Church of St. Clement Danes:’ this too stands all unfolded in his Biography, and is among the most touching and memorable things there; a thing to be looked at with pity, admiration, awe. Johnson’s Religion was as the light of life to him; without it, his heart was all sick, dark, and had no guidance left. He is now enlisted, or impressed, into that unspeakable shoeblack-seraph Army of Authors; but can feel hereby that he fights under a celestial flag, and will quit him like a man. The first grand requisite, an assured heart, he therefore has: what his outward equipments and accoutrements are is the next question; an important, though inferior one. His intellectual stock, intrinsically viewed, is perhaps inconsiderable: the furnishings of an English School and English University; good knowledge of the Latin tongue, a more uncertain one of Greek: this is a rather slender stock of Education wherewith to front the world. But then it is to be remembered that his world was England; that such was the culture England commonly supplied and expected. Besides Johnson has been a voracious reader, though a desultory one, and oftenest in strange scholastic, too obsolete Libraries; he has also rubbed shoulders with the press of Actual Life, for some thirty years now: views or hallucinations of innumerable things are weltering to and fro in him. Above all, be his weapons what they may, he has an arm that can wield them. Nature has given him her choicest gift: an open eye and heart. He will look on the world, wheresoever he can catch a glimpse of it, with eager curiosity: to the last, we find this a striking characteristic of him; for all human interests he has a sense; the meanest handicraftsman could interest him, even in extreme age, by speaking of his craft: the ways of men are all interesting to him; any human thing, that he did not know, he wished to know. Reflection, moreover, Meditation, was what he practised incessantly, with or without his will: for the mind of the man was earnest, deep as well as humane. Thus would the world, such fragments of it as he could survey, form itself, or continually tend to form itself, into a coherent Whole; on any and on all phases of which, his vote and voice must be well worth listening to. As a Speaker of the Word, he will speak real words; no idle jargon, or hollow triviality will issue from him. His aim too is clear, attainable, that of working for his wages: let him do this honestly, and all else will follow of its own accord. With such omens, into such a warfare, did Johnson go forth. A rugged, hungry Kerne, or Gallowglass, as we called him: yet indomitable; in whom lay the true spirit of a Soldier. With giant’s force, he toils, since such is his appointment, were it but at hewing of wood and drawing of water for old sedentary

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bushy-wigged Cave; distinguishes himself by mere quantity, if there is to be no other distinction. He can write all things; frosty Latin verses, if these are the saleable commodity; Book-prefaces, Political Philippics, Review Articles, Parliamentary Debates: all things he does rapidly; still more surprising, all things he does thoroughly and well. How he sits there, in his rough-hewn, amorphous bulk, in that upper-room at St. John’s Gate, and trundles off sheet after sheet of those Senate-of-Lilliput Debates, to the clamorous Printer’s Devils waiting for them, with insatiable throat, down stairs; himself perhaps impransus all the while! Admire also the greatness of Literature; how a grain of mustard-seed cast into its Nile-waters, shall settle in the teeming mould, and be found, one day, as a Tree, in whose branches all the fowls of heaven may lodge. Was it not so with these Lilliput Debates? In that small project and act, began the stupendous Fourth Estate; whose wide world-embracing influences what eye can take in; in whose boughs are there not already fowls of strange feather lodged? Such things, and far stranger, were done in that wondrous old Portal, even in latter times. And then figure Samuel dining ‘behind the screen,’ from a trencher covertly handed in to him, at a preconcerted nod from the ‘great bushy wig;’ Samuel too ragged to shew face, yet ‘made a happy man of ’ by hearing his praise spoken. If to Johnson himself, then much more to us, may that St. John’s Gate be a place we can ‘never pass without veneration.’* Poverty, Distress, and as yet Obscurity, are his companions: so poor is he that his Wife must leave him, and seek shelter among other relations; Johnson’s household has accommodation for one inmate only. To all his ever-varying, ever-recurring troubles, moreover, must be added this continual one of ill health, and its concomitant depressiveness: a galling load, which would have crushed most common mortals into desperation, is his appointed ballast and life-burden; he ‘could not remember the day he had passed free from pain.’ Nevertheless, * All Johnson’s places of resort and abode are venerable, and now indeed to the many as well as to the few; for his name has become great; and, as we must often with a kind of sad admiration recognise, there is, even to the rudest man, no greatness so venerable as intellectual, as spiritual greatness; nay properly there is no other venerable at all. For example, what soul-subduing magic, for the very clown or craftsman of our England, lies in the word ‘Scholar!’ “He is a Scholar:” he is a man wiser than we; of a wisdom to us boundless, infinite: who shall speak his worth! Such things, we say, fill us with a certain pathetic admiration of defaced and obstructed yet glorious man; archangel though in ruins,—or rather, though in rubbish, of encumbrances and mud-incrustations, which also are not to be perpetual.



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Life, as we said before, is always Life: a healthy soul, imprison it as you will, in squalid garrets, shabby coat, bodily sickness, or whatever else, will assert its heaven-granted indefeasible Freedom, its right to conquer difficulties, to do work, even to feel gladness. Johnson does not whine over his existence, but manfully makes the most and best of it. ‘He said, a man might live in a garret at eighteen pence a-week; few people would inquire where he lodged; and if they did, it was easy to say, “Sir, I am to be found at such a place.” By spending threepence in a coffee-house, he might be for some hours every day in very good company; he might dine for sixpence, breakfast on bread and milk for a penny, and do without supper. On clean-shirt-day he went abroad, and paid visits.’Think by whom, and of whom this was uttered, and ask then, Whether there is more pathos in it than in a whole circulating-library of Giaours and Harolds, or less pathos? On another occasion, ‘when Dr. Johnson, one day, read his own Satire, in which the life of a scholar is painted with the various obstructions thrown in his way to fortune and to fame, he burst into a passion of tears: Mr. Thrale’s family and Mr. Scott only were present, who, in a jocose way, clapped him on the back, and said, “What’s all this, my dear sir? Why you and I and Hercules, you Nevertheless, in this mad-whirling all-forgetting London, the haunts of the mighty that were, can seldom without a strange difficulty be discovered. Will any man, for instance, tell us which bricks it was in Lincoln’s Inn Buildings, that Ben Jonson’s hand and trowel laid? No man, it is to be feared,—and also grumbled at. With Samuel Johnson may it prove otherwise! A Gentleman of the British Museum is said to have made drawings of all his residences: the blessing of Old Mortality be upon him! We ourselves, not without labour and risk, lately discovered Gough Square, between Fleet Street and Holborn (adjoining both to Bolt Court and Johnson’s Court); and, on the second day of search, the very House there, wherein the English Dictionary was composed. It is the first or corner house on the right hand, as you enter through the arched way from the North-west. The actual occupant, an elderly, well-washed, decent-looking man, invited us to enter; and courteously undertook to be cicerone; though in his memory lay nothing but the foolishest jumble and hallucination. It is a stout old-fashioned, oak-balustraded house: “I have spent many a pound and penny on it since then,” said the worthy Landlord: “here, you see, this Bedroom was the Doctor’s study; that was the garden” (a plot of delved ground somewhat larger than a bed-quilt) “where he walked for exercise; these three garret Bedrooms” (where his three Copyists sat and wrote) “were the place he kept his—Pupils in!” Tempus edax rerum! Yet ferax also: for our friend now added, with a wistful look, which strove to seem merely historical: “I let it all in Lodgings, to respectable gentlemen; by the quarter, or the month; it’s all one to me.”—“To me also,” whispered the Ghost of Samuel, as we went pensively our ways.

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know, were all troubled with melancholy.” He was a very large man, and made out the triumvirate with Johnson and Hercules comically enough.’ These were sweet tears; the sweet victorious remembrance lay in them of toils indeed frightful, yet never flinched from, and now triumphed over. ‘One day it shall delight you also to remember labour done!’—Neither, though Johnson is obscure and poor, need the highest enjoyment of existence, that of heart freely communing with heart, be denied him. Savage and he wander homeless through the streets; without bed, yet not without friendly converse; such another conversation not, it is like, producible in the proudest drawing-room of London. Nor, under the void Night, upon the hard pavement, are their own woes the only topic: nowise; they “will stand by their country,” the two ‘Back-woods-men’ of the Brick Desart! Of all outward evils Obscurity is perhaps in itself the least. To Johnson, as to a healthy-minded man, the fantastic article, sold or given under the title of Fame, had little or no value but its intrinsic one. He prized it as the means of getting him employment and good wages; scarcely as anything more. His light and guidance came from a loftier source; of which, in honest aversion to all hypocrisy or pretentious talk, he spoke not to men; nay, perhaps, being of a healthy mind, had never spoken to himself. We reckon it a striking fact in Johnson’s history, this carelessness of his to Fame. Most authors speak of their ‘Fame’ as if it were a quite priceless matter; the grand ultimatum, and heavenly Constantine’s-Banner they had to follow, and conquer under.—Thy ‘Fame!’ Unhappy mortal, where will it and thou both be in some fifty years? Shakspeare himself has lasted but two hundred; Homer (partly by accident) three thousand: and does not already an Eternity encircle every Me and every Thee? Cease, then, to sit feverishly hatching on that ‘Fame’ of thine; and flapping, and shrieking with fierce hisses, like brood-goose on her last egg, if man shall or dare approach it! Quarrel not with me, hate me not, my Brother: make what thou canst of thy egg, and welcome: God knows, I will not steal it; I believe it to be addle.—Johnson, for his part, was no man to be killed by a review; concerning which matter, it was said by a benevolent person: If any author can be reviewed to death, let it be, with all convenient despatch, done. Johnson thankfully receives any word spoken in his favour; is nowise disobliged by a lampoon, but will look at it, if pointed out to him, and shew how it might have been done better: the lampoon itself is indeed nothing, a soap-bubble that, next moment, will become a drop of sour suds; but in the meanwhile, if it do anything, it keeps him more in the world’s eye, and the next bargain will be all the richer: “Sir, if they should cease to talk of me, I must starve.” Sound heart and understanding head! these fail no man, not even a Man of Letters!



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Obscurity, however, was, in Johnson’s case, whether a light or heavy evil, likely to be no lasting one. He is animated by the spirit of a true workman, resolute to do his work well; and he does his work well; all his work, that of writing, that of living. A man of this stamp is unhappily not so common in the literary or in any other department of the world, that he can continue always unnoticed. By slow degrees, Johnson emerges; looming, at first, huge and dim in the eye of an observant few; at last disclosed, in his real proportions, to the eye of the whole world, and encircled with a ‘light-nimbus’ of glory, so that whoso is not blind must and shall behold him. By slow degrees, we said; for this also is notable; slow but sure: as his fame waxes not by exaggerated clamour of what he seems to be, but by better and better insight of what he is, so it will last and stand wearing, being genuine. Thus indeed is it always, or nearly always, with true fame. The heavenly Luminary rises amid vapours: star-gazers enough must scan it, with critical telescopes; it makes no blazing, the world can either look at it, or forbear looking at it; not till after a time and times, does its celestial eternal nature become indubitable. Pleasant, on the other hand, is the blazing of a Tarbarrel; the crowd dance merrily round it, with loud huzzaing, universal three-timesthree, and, like Homer’s peasants, ‘bless the useful light:’ but unhappily it so soon ends in darkness, foul choking smoke, and is kicked into the gutters, a nameless imbroglio of charred staves, pitch-cinders, and vomissement du Diable! But indeed, from of old, Johnson has enjoyed all or nearly all that Fame can yield any man: the respect, the obedience of those that are about him and inferior to him; of those whose opinion alone can have any forcible impression on him. A little circle gathers round the Wise man; which gradually enlarges as the report thereof spreads, and more can come to see, and to believe; for Wisdom is precious, and of irresistible attraction to all. ‘An inspired-idiot,’ Goldsmith, hangs strangely about him; though, as Hawkins says, ‘he loved not Johnson, but rather envied him for his parts; and once entreated a friend to desist from praising him, “for in doing so,” said he, “you harrow up my very soul!”’ Yet on the whole, there is no evil in the ‘gooseberry-fool;’ but rather much good; of a finer, if of a weaker, sort than Johnson’s; and all the more genuine that he himself could never become conscious of it,—though unhappily never cease attempting to become so: the Author of the genuine Vicar of Wakefield, nill he, will he, must needs fly towards such a mass of genuine Manhood; and Dr. Minor keep gyrating round Dr. Major, alternately attracted and repelled. Then there is the chivalrous Topham Beauclerk, with his sharp wit, and gallant, courtly ways: there is Bennet Langton, an orthodox gentleman, and worthy; though Johnson once laughed, louder almost than mortal, at his last will and testament; and

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‘could not stop his merriment, but continued it all the way till he got without the Temple-gate; then burst into such a fit of laughter that he appeared to be almost in a convulsion; and, in order to support himself, laid hold of one of the posts at the side of the foot-pavement, and sent forth peals so loud that, in the silence of the night, his voice seemed to resound from Temple-bar to Fleet-ditch!’ Lastly comes his solid-thinking, solid-feeding Thrale, the well-beloved man; with Thralia, a bright papilionaceous creature, whom the elephant loved to play with, and wave to and fro upon his trunk. Not to speak of a reverent Bozzy, for what need is there farther?—Or of the spiritual Luminaries, with tongue or pen, who made that age remarkable; or of Highland Lairds drinking, in fierce usquebaugh, “Your health, Toctor Shonson!”—still less of many such as that poor ‘Mr. F. Lewis,’ older in date, of whose birth, death, and whole terrestrial res gestæ, this only, and strange enough this actually, survives: “Sir, he lived in London, and hung loose upon society!” Stat Parvi nominis umbra.— In his fifty-third year, he is beneficed, by the royal bounty, with a Pension of three hundred pounds. Loud clamour is always more or less insane: but probably the insanest of all loud clamours in the eighteenth century, was this that was raised about Johnson’s Pension. Men seem to be led by the noses; but in reality, it is by the ears,—as some ancient slaves were, who had their ears bored; or as some modern quadrupeds may be, whose ears are long. Very falsely was it said, ‘Names do not change Things;’ Names do change Things; nay for most part they are the only substance, which mankind can discern in Things. The whole sum that Johnson, during the remaining twenty-two years of his life, drew from the public funds of England, would have supported some Supreme Priest for about half as many weeks; it amounts very nearly to the revenue of our poorest Church-Overseer for one twelvemonth. Of secular Administrators of Provinces, and Horse-subduers, and Game-destroyers, we shall not so much as speak: but who were the Primates of England, and the Primates of all England, during Johnson’s days? No man has remembered. Again, is the Primate of all England something, or is he nothing? If something, then what but the man who, in the supreme degree, teaches and spiritually edifies, and leads towards Heaven by guiding wisely through the Earth, the living souls that inhabit England? We touch here upon deep matters; which but remotely concern us, and might lead us into still deeper: clear, in the meanwhile, it is that the true Spiritual Edifier and Soul’s-Father of all England was, and till very lately continued to be, the man named Samuel Johnson,—whom this scot-and-lot-paying world cackled reproachfully to see remunerated like a Supervisor of Excise!



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If Destiny had beaten hard on poor Samuel, and did never cease to visit him too roughly, yet the last section of his Life might be pronounced victorious, and on the whole happy. He was not idle; but now no longer goaded on by want; the light which had shone irradiating the dark haunts of Poverty, now illuminates the circles of Wealth, of a certain culture and elegant intelligence; he who had once been admitted to speak with Edmund Cave and Tobacco Browne, now admits a Reynolds and a Burke to speak with him. Loving friends are there; Listeners, even Answerers: the fruit of his long labours lies round him in fair legible Writings, of Philosophy, Eloquence, Morality, Philology; some excellent, all worthy and genuine Works; for which too, a deep, earnest murmur of thanks reaches him from all ends of his Fatherland. Nay there are works of Goodness, of undying Mercy, which even he has possessed the power to do: ‘What I gave I have; what I spent I had!’ Early friends had long sunk into the grave; yet in his soul they ever lived, fresh and clear, with soft pious breathings towards them, not without a still hope of one day meeting them again in purer union. Such was Johnson’s Life: the victorious Battle of a free, true Man. Finally he died the death of the free and true: a dark cloud of Death, solemn, and not untinged with haloes of immortal Hope ‘took him away,’ and our eyes could no longer behold him; but can still behold the trace and impress of his courageous, honest spirit, deep-legible in the World’s Business, wheresoever he walked and was. To estimate the quantity of Work that Johnson performed, how much poorer the World were had it wanted him, can, as in all such cases, never be accurately done; cannot, till after some longer space, be approximately done. All work is as seed sown; it grows and spreads, and sows itself anew, and so, in endless palingenesia, lives and works. To Johnson’s Writings, good and solid, and still profitable as they are, we have already rated his Life and Conversation as superior. By the one and by the other, who shall compute what effects have been produced, and are still, and into deep Time, producing? So much, however, we can already see: It is now some three quarters of a century that Johnson has been the Prophet of the English; the man by whose light the English people, in public and in private, more than by any other man’s, have guided their existence. Higher light than that immediately practical one; higher virtue than an honest Prudence, he could not then communicate; nor perhaps could they have received: such light, such virtue, however, he did communicate. How to thread this labyrinthic Time, the fallen and falling Ruin of Times; to silence vain Scruples, hold firm to the last the fragments of old Belief, and with earnest eye still discern some glimpses of a true path, and go

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forward thereon, ‘in a world where there is much to be done, and little to be known:’ this is what Samuel Johnson, by act and word, taught his Nation, what his Nation received and learned of him, more than of any other. We can view him as the preserver and transmitter of whatsoever was genuine in the spirit of Toryism; which genuine spirit, it is now becoming manifest, must again embody itself in all new forms of Society, be what they may, that are to exist, and have continuance—elsewhere than on Paper. The last in many things, Johnson was the last genuine Tory; the last of Englishmen who, with strong voice, and wholly-believing heart, preached the Doctrine of Standing still; who, without selfishness or slavishness, reverenced the existing Powers, and could assert the privileges of rank, though himself poor, neglected, and plebeian; who had heartdevoutness with a heart-hatred of cant, was orthodox-religious with his eyes open; and in all things and everywhere spoke out in plain English, from a soul wherein jesuitism could find no harbour, and with the front and tone not of a diplomatist but of a man. This last of the Tories was Johnson: not Burke, as is often said; Burke was essentially a Whig, and only, on reaching the verge of the chasm towards which Whiggism from the first was inevitably leading, recoiled; and, like a man vehement rather than earnest, a resplendent far-sighted Rhetorician rather than a deep sure Thinker, recoiled with no measure, convulsively, and damaging what he drove back with him. In a world which exists by the balance of Antagonisms, the respective merit of the Conservator and the Innovator must ever remain debateable. Great, in the meanwhile, and undoubted, for both sides, is the merit of him who in a day of Change, walks wisely, honestly. Johnson’s aim was in itself an impossible one: this of stemming the eternal Flood of Time; of clutching all things, and anchoring them down, and saying, Move not!—how could it, or should it, ever have success? The strongest man can but retard the current partially and for a short hour. Yet even in such shortest retardation, may not an inestimable value lie? If England has escaped the blood-bath of a French Revolution; and may yet, in virtue of this delay and of the experience it has given, work out her deliverance calmly into a new Era, let Samuel Johnson, beyond all contemporary or succeeding men, have the praise for it. We said above that he was appointed to be Ruler of the British Nation for a season: whoso will look beyond the surface, into the heart of the world’s movements, may find that all Pitt Administrations, and Continental Subsidies, and Waterloo victories, rested on the possibility of making England, yet a little while, Toryish, Loyal to the Old; and this again on the anterior reality, that the Wise had found such Loyalty still practicable,



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and recommendable. England had its Hume, as France had its Voltaires and Diderots; but the Johnson was peculiar to us. If we ask now by what endowment it mainly was that Johnson realised such a Life for himself and others; what quality of character the main phenomena of his Life may be most naturally deduced from, and his other qualities most naturally subordinated to, in our conception of him, perhaps the answer were: The quality of Courage, of Valour; that Johnson was a Brave Man. The Courage that can go forth, once and away, to Chalk-Farm, and have itself shot, and snuffed out, with decency, is nowise wholly what we mean here. Such Courage we indeed esteem an exceeding small matter; capable of coexisting with a life full of falsehood, feebleness, poltroonery, and despicability. Nay oftener it is Cowardice rather that produces the result: for consider, Is the Chalk-Farm Pistoleer inspired with any reasonable Belief and Determination; or is he hounded on by haggard indefinable Fear,—how he will be cut at public places, and ‘plucked geese of the neighbourhood’ will wag their tongues at him a plucked goose? If he go then, and be shot without shrieking, or audible uproar, it is well for him: nevertheless there is nothing amazing in it. Courage to manage all this has not perhaps been denied to any man, or to any woman. Thus, do not recruiting sergeants drum through the streets of manufacturing towns, and collect ragged losels enough; every one of whom, if once dressed in red, and trained a little, will receive fire cheerfully for the small sum of one shilling per diem, and have the soul blown out of him at last, with perfect propriety. The Courage that dares only die, is on the whole no sublime affair; necessary indeed, yet universal; pitiful when it begins to parade itself. On this Globe of ours, there are some thirty-six persons that manifest it, seldom with the smallest failure, during every second of time. Nay look at Newgate: do not the offscourings of Creation, when condemned to the gallows, as if they were not men but vermin, walk thither with decency, and even to the scowls and hootings of the whole Universe give their stern goodnight in silence? What is to be undergone only once, we may undergo; what must be, comes almost of its own accord. Considered as Duellist, what a poor figure does the fiercest Irish Whiskerando make, compared with any English Game-cock, such as you may buy for fifteen pence! The Courage we desire and prize is not the Courage to die decently, but to live manfully. This, when by God’s grace it has been given, lies deep in the soul; like genial heat, fosters all other virtues and gifts; without it they could not live. In spite of our innumerable Waterloos and Peterloos, and such campaigning as there has been, this Courage we allude to, and call the only true one, is perhaps

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rarer in these last ages, than it has been in any other since the Saxon Invasion under Hengist. Altogether extinct it can never be among men; otherwise the species Man were no longer for this world: here and there, in all times, under various guises, men are sent hither not only to demonstrate but exhibit it, and testify, as from heart to heart, that it is still possible, still practicable. Johnson, in the eighteenth century, and as Man of Letters, was one of such; and, in good truth, ‘the bravest of the brave.’ What mortal could have more to war with? Yet, as we saw, he yielded not, faltered not; he fought, and even, such was his blessedness, prevailed. Whoso will understand what it is to have a man’s heart, may find that, since the time of John Milton, no braver heart had beat in any English bosom than Samuel Johnson now bore. Observe too that he never called himself brave, never felt himself to be so; the more completely was so. No Giant Despair, no Golgotha-Death-dance or Sorcerer’s-Sabbath of ‘Literary Life in London,’ appals this pilgrim; he works resolutely for deliverance; in still defiance, steps stoutly along. The thing that is given him to do he can make himself do; what is to be endured he can endure in silence. How the great soul of old Samuel, consuming daily his own bitter unalleviable allotment of misery and toil, shews beside the poor flimsy little soul of young Boswell; one day flaunting in the ring of vanity, tarrying by the wine-cup, and crying, Aha, the wine is red; the next day deploring his downpressed, night-shaded, quite poor estate; and thinking it unkind that the whole movement of the Universe should go on, while his digestive-apparatus had stopped! We reckon Johnson’s ‘talent of silence’ to be among his great and too rare gifts. Where there is nothing farther to be done, there shall nothing farther be said: like his own poor blind Welshwoman, he accomplished somewhat, and also ‘endured fifty years of wretchedness with unshaken fortitude.’ How grim was Life to him; a sick Prison-house and Doubting-castle! ‘His great business,’ he would profess, ‘was to escape from himself.’ Yet towards all this he has taken his position and resolution; can dismiss it all ‘with frigid indifference, having little to hope or to fear.’ Friends are stupid and pusillanimous and parsimonious; ‘wearied of his stay, yet offended at his departure:’ it is the manner of the world. ‘By popular delusion,’ remarks he with a gigantic calmness, ‘illiterate writers will rise into renown:’ it is portion of the History of English Literature: a perennial thing, this same popular delusion; and will—alter the character of the Language. Closely connected with this quality of Valour, partly as springing from it, partly as protected by it, are the more recognisable qualities of Truthfulness in word and thought, and Honesty in action. There is a reciprocity of influence here: for as the realising of Truthfulness and Honesty is the Life-light and great aim



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of Valour, so without Valour they cannot, in anywise, be realised. Now, in spite of all practical shortcomings, no one that sees into the significance of Johnson, will say that his prime object was not Truth. In conversation, doubtless, you may observe him, on occasion, fighting as if for victory;—and must pardon these ebulliences of a careless hour, which were not without temptation and provocation. Remark likewise two things: that such prize-arguings were ever on merely superficial debatable questions; and then that they were argued generally by the fair laws of battle, and logic-fence, by one cunning in that same. If their purpose was excusable, their effect was harmless, perhaps beneficial: that of taming noisy mediocrity, and shewing it another side of a debateable matter; to see both sides of which was, for the first time, to see the Truth of it. In his Writings themselves, are errors enough, crabbed prepossessions enough: yet these also of a quite extraneous and accidental nature; nowhere a wilful shutting of the eyes to the Truth. Nay, is there not everywhere a heartfelt discernment, singular, almost admirable, if we consider through what confused conflicting lights and hallucinations it had to be attained, of the highest everlasting Truth, and beginning of all Truths: this namely, that man is ever, and even in the age of Wilkes and Whitefield, a Revelation of God to man; and lives, moves, and has his being in Truth only; is either true, or, in strict speech, is not at all? Quite spotless, on the other hand, is Johnson’s love of Truth, if we look at it as expressed in Practice, as what we have named Honesty of action. ‘Clear your mind of Cant;’ clear it, throw Cant utterly away: such was his emphatic, repeated precept; and did not he himself faithfully conform to it? The Life of this man has been, as it were, turned inside out, and examined with microscopes by friend and foe; yet was there no Lie found in him. His Doings and Writings are not shows but performances: you may weigh them in the balance, and they will stand weight. Not a line, not a sentence is dishonestly done, is other than it pretends to be. Alas! and he wrote not out of inward inspiration, but to earn his wages: and with that grand perennial tide of ‘popular delusion’ flowing by; in whose waters he nevertheless refused to fish, to whose rich oyster-beds the dive was too muddy for him. Observe, again, with what innate hatred of Cant, he takes for himself, and offers to others, the lowest possible view of his business, which he followed with such nobleness. Motive for writing he had none, as he often said, but money; and yet he wrote so. Into the region of Poetic Art he indeed never rose; there was no ideal without him avowing itself in his work: the nobler was that unavowed ideal which lay within him, and commanded saying, Work out thy Artisanship in the spirit of an Artist! They who talk loudest about the dignity of Art, and fancy that they too are Artistic guild-brethren, and of the

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Celestials,—let them consider well what manner of man this was, who felt himself to be only a hired day-labourer. A labourer that was worthy of his hire; that has laboured not as an eye-servant, but as one found faithful! Neither was Johnson in those days perhaps wholly a unique. Time was when, for money, you might have ware; and needed not, in all departments, in that of the Epic Poem, in that of the Blacking Bottle, to rest content with the mere persuasion that you had ware. It was a happier time. But as yet the seventh Apocalyptic Bladder (of Puffery) had not been rent open,—to whirl and grind, as in a West-Indian Tornado, all earthly trades and things into wreck, and dust, and consummation,—and regeneration. Be it quickly, since it must be!— That Mercy can dwell only with Valour, is an old sentiment or proposition; which, in Johnson, again receives confirmation. Few men on record have had a more merciful, tenderly affectionate nature than old Samuel. He was called the Bear; and did indeed too often look, and roar, like one; being forced to it in his own defence: yet within that shaggy exterior of his, there beat a heart warm as a mother’s, soft as a little child’s. Nay generally, his very roaring was but the anger of affection: the rage of a Bear, if you will; but of a Bear bereaved of her whelps. Touch his Religion, glance at the Church of England, or the Divine Right; and he was upon you! These things were his Symbols of all that was good and precious for men; his very Ark of the Covenant: whoso laid hand on them tore asunder his heart of hearts. Not out of hatred to the opponent, but of love to the thing opposed, did Johnson grow cruel, fiercely contradictory: this is an important distinction; never to be forgotten in our censure of his conversational outrages. But observe also with what humanity, what openness of love, he can attach himself to all things: to a blind old woman, to a Doctor Levett, to a Cat ‘Hodge.’ ‘His thoughts in the latter part of his life were frequently employed on his deceased friends; he often muttered these or suchlike sentences: “Poor man! and then he died.”’ How he patiently converts his poor home into a Lazaretto; endures, for long years, the contradiction of the miserable and unreasonable; with him unconnected, save that they had no other to yield them refuge! Generous old man! Worldly possession he has little; yet of this he gives freely; from his own hard-earned shilling, the halfpence for the poor, that ‘waited his coming out,’ are not withheld: the poor ‘waited the coming out’ of one not quite so poor! A Sterne can write sentimentalities on Dead Asses: Johnson has a rough voice; but he finds the wretched Daughter of Vice fallen down in the streets; carries her home, on his own shoulders, and like a good Samaritan, gives help to the help-needing, worthy or unworthy. Ought not Charity, even in that sense, to cover a multitude of Sins? No Penny-a-week Committee-Lady, no manager



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of Soup-Kitchens, dancer at Charity Balls, was this rugged, stern-visaged man: but where, in all England, could there have been found another soul so full of Pity, a hand so heavenlike bounteous as his? The widow’s mite, we know, was greater than all the other gifts. Perhaps it is this divine feeling of Affection, throughout manifested, that principally attracts us towards Johnson. A true brother of men is he; and filial lover of the Earth; who, with little bright spots of Attachment, ‘where lives and works some loved one,’ has beautified ‘this rough solitary Earth into a peopled garden.’ Lichfield, with its mostly dull and limited inhabitants, is to the last one of the sunny islets for him: Salve magna parens! Or read those Letters on his Mother’s death: what a genuine solemn grief and pity lies recorded there; a looking back into the Past, unspeakably mournful, unspeakably tender. And yet calm, sublime; for he must now act, not look: his venerated Mother has been taken from him; but he must now write a Rasselas to defray her funeral! Again, in this little incident, recorded in his Book of Devotion, are not the tones of sacred Sorrow and Greatness deeper than in many a blank-verse Tragedy;—as, indeed, ‘the fifth act of a Tragedy,’ though unrhymed, does ‘lie in every deathbed, were it a peasant’s, and of straw:’ ‘Sunday, October 18, 1767. Yesterday, at about ten in the morning, I took my leave forever of my dear old friend, Catherine Chambers, who came to live with my mother about 1724, and has been but little parted from us since. She buried my father, my brother, and my mother. She is now fifty-eight years old. ‘I desired all to withdraw; then told her that we were to part forever; that as Christians, we should part with prayer; and that I would, if she was willing, say a short prayer beside her. She expressed great desire to hear me; and held up her poor hands as she lay in bed, with great fervour, while I prayed kneeling by her. * * * ‘I then kissed her. She told me that to part was the greatest pain she had ever felt, and that she hoped we should meet again in a better place. I expressed, with swelled eyes, and great emotion of tenderness, the same hopes. We kissed and parted; I humbly hope, to meet again, and to part no more.’

Tears trickling down the granite rock: a soft well of Pity springs within! Still more tragical is this other scene: ‘Johnson mentioned that he could not in general accuse himself of having been an undutiful son. “Once indeed,” said he, “I was disobedient: I refused to attend my father to Uttoxeter market. Pride was the source of that refusal, and the remembrance of it was painful. A few years ago I desired to atone for this fault.”’—But by what method?—What method

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was now possible? Hear it; the words are again given as his own, though here evidently by a less capable reporter: 5

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‘Madam, I beg your pardon for the abruptness of my departure in the morning, but I was compelled to it by conscience. Fifty years ago, Madam, on this day, I committed a breach of filial piety. My father had been in the habit of attending Uttoxeter market, and opening a stall there for the sale of his Books. Confined by indisposition, he desired me, that day, to go and attend the stall in his place. My pride prevented me; I gave my father a refusal.—And now to-day I have been at Uttoxeter; I went into the market, at the time of business, uncovered my head, and stood with it bare, for an hour, on the spot where my father’s stall used to stand. In contrition I stood, and I hope the penance was expiatory.’

Who does not figure to himself this spectacle, amid the ‘rainy weather, and the sneers,’ or wonder, ‘of the bystanders?’ The memory of old Michael Johnson, rising from the far distance; sad-beckoning in the ‘moonlight of memory:’ how he had toiled faithfully hither and thither; patiently among the lowest of the low; been buffetted and beaten down, yet ever risen again, ever tried it anew— And oh! when the wearied old man, as Bookseller, or Hawker, or Tinker, or whatsoever it was that Fate had reduced him to, begged help of thee for one day,—how savage, diabolic, was that mean Vanity, which answered, No! He sleeps now; after life’s fitful fever, he sleeps: but thou, O Merciless, how now wilt thou still the sting of that remembrance?—The picture of Samuel Johnson standing bareheaded in the market there, is one of the grandest and saddest we can paint. Repentance! Repentance! he proclaims, as with passionate sobs: but only to the ear of Heaven, if Heaven will give him audience: the earthly ear, and heart, that should have heard it, are now closed, unresponsive forever. That this so keen-loving, soft-trembling Affectionateness, the inmost essence of his being, must have looked forth, in one form or another, through Johnson’s whole character, practical and intellectual, modifying both, is not to be doubted. Yet through what singular distortions and superstitions, moping melancholies, blind habits, whims about ‘entering with the right foot,’ and ‘touching every post as he walked along;’ and all the other mad chaotic lumber of a brain that, with sun-clear intellect, hovered forever on the verge of insanity,—must that same inmost essence have looked forth; unrecognisable to all but the most observant! Accordingly it was not recognised; Johnson passed not for a fine nature, but for a dull, almost brutal one. Might not, for example, the first-fruit of such a Lovingness, coupled with his quick Insight, have been expected to be a peculiarly courteous demeanour as man among men? In Johnson’s ‘Polite-



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ness,’ which he often, to the wonder of some, asserted to be great, there was indeed somewhat that needed explanation. Nevertheless, if he insisted always on handing lady-visitors to their carriage; though with the certainty of collecting a mob of gazers in Fleet Street,—as might well be, the beau having on, by way of court dress, ‘his rusty brown morning suit, a pair of old shoes for slippers, a little shrivelled wig sticking on the top of his head, and the sleeves of his shirt and the knees of his breeches hanging loose:’—in all this we can see the spirit of true Politeness, only shining through a strange medium. Thus again, in his apartments, at one time, there were unfortunately no chairs. ‘A gentleman who frequently visited him whilst writing his Idlers, constantly found him at his desk, sitting on one with three legs; and on rising from it, he remarked that Johnson never forgot its defect; but would either hold it in his hand, or place it with great composure against some support; taking no notice of its imperfection to his visitor,’—who meanwhile, we suppose, sat upon folios, or in the sartorial fashion. ‘It was remarkable in Johnson,’ continues Miss Reynolds (Renny dear), ‘that no external circumstances ever prompted him to make any apology, or to seem even sensible of their existence. Whether this was the effect of philosophic pride, or of some partial notion of his respecting high breeding, is doubtful.’That it was, for one thing, the effect of genuine Politeness, is nowise doubtful. Not of the Pharisaical Brummellean Politeness, which would suffer crucifixion rather than ask twice for soup: but the noble universal Politeness of a man, that knows the dignity of men, and feels his own; such as may be seen in the patriarchal bearing of an Indian Sachem; such as Johnson himself exhibited, when a sudden chance brought him into dialogue with his King. To us, with our view of the man, it nowise appears ‘strange’ that he should have boasted himself cunning in the laws of Politeness; nor ‘stranger still,’ habitually attentive to practise them. More legibly is this influence of the Loving heart to be traced in his intellectual character. What, indeed, is the beginning of intellect, the first inducement to the exercise thereof, but attraction towards somewhat, affection for it? Thus too, who ever saw, or will see, any true talent, not to speak of genius, the foundation of which is not goodness, love? From Johnson’s strength of Affection, we deduce many of his intellectual peculiarities; especially that threatening array of perversions, known under the name of ‘Johnson’s Prejudices.’ Looking well into the root from which these sprung, we have long ceased to view them with hostility, can pardon and reverently pity them. Consider with what force early-imbibed opinions must have clung to a soul of this Affection. Those evil-famed Prejudices of his, that Jacobitism, Church-of-Englandism, hatred of the Scotch, belief in Witches, and such like, what were they but the ordinary beliefs of well-doing,

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well-meaning provincial Englishmen in that day? First gathered by his Father’s hearth; round the kind ‘country fires’ of native Staffordshire; they grew with his growth and strengthened with his strength: they were hallowed by fondest sacred recollections; to part with them was parting with his heart’s blood. If the man who has no strength of Affection, strength of Belief, have no strength of Prejudice, let him thank Heaven for it, but to himself take small thanks. Melancholy it was, indeed, that the noble Johnson could not work himself loose from these adhesions; that he could only purify them, and wear them with some nobleness. Yet let us understand how they grew out from the very centre of his being: nay, moreover, how they came to cohere in him with what formed the business and worth of his Life, the sum of his whole Spiritual Endeavour. For it is on the same ground that he became throughout an Edifier and Repairer, not, as the others of his make were, a Puller-down; that in an age of universal Scepticism, England was still to produce its Believer. Mark too his candour even here: while a Dr. Adams, with placid surprise, asks, “Have we not evidence enough of the soul’s immortality?” Johnson answers, “I wish for more.” But the truth is, in Prejudice, as in all things, Johnson was the product of England; one of those good yeomen whose limbs were made in England: alas, the last of such Invincibles, their day being now done! His culture is wholly English; that not of a Thinker but of a ‘Scholar:’ his interests are wholly English; he sees and knows nothing but England; he is the John Bull of Spiritual Europe: let him live, love him, as he was and could not but be! Pitiable it is, no doubt, that a Samuel Johnson must confute Hume’s irreligious Philosophy by some ‘story from a Clergyman of the Bishoprick of Durham;’ should see nothing in the great Frederick but ‘Voltaire’s lackey;’ in Voltaire himself but a man acerrimi ingenii, paucarum literarum; in Rousseau but one worthy to be hanged; and in the universal, long-prepared, inevitable Tendency of European Thought but a greensick milkmaid’s crotchet of, for variety’s sake, ‘milking the Bull.’ Our good, dear John! Observe too what it is that he sees in the city of Paris: no feeblest glimpse of those D’Alemberts and Diderots, or of the strange questionable work they did; solely some Benedictine Priests, to talk kitchen-latin with them about Editiones Principes. “Monsheer Nongtongpaw!”—Our dear, foolish John; yet is there a lion’s heart within him!—Pitiable all these things were, we say; yet nowise inexcusable; nay, as basis or as foil to much else that was in Johnson, almost venerable. Ought we not, indeed, to honour England, and English Institutions and Way of Life, that they could still so equip such a man; could furnish him in heart and head to be a Samuel Johnson, and yet to love them, and unyieldingly fight for them? What truth and living vigour must such Institutions once have



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had, when, in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, there was still enough left in them for this! It is worthy of note that, in our little British Isle, the two grand Antagonisms of Europe should have stood embodied, under their very highest concentration, in two men produced simultaneously among ourselves. Samuel Johnson and David Hume, as was observed, were children nearly of the same year: through life they were spectators of the same Life-movement; often inhabitants of the same city. Greater contrast, in all things, between two great men, could not be. Hume, well-born, competently provided for, whole in body and mind, of his own determination forces a way into Literature: Johnson, poor, moonstruck, diseased, forlorn, is forced into it ‘with the bayonet of necessity at his back.’ And what a part did they severally play there! As Johnson became the father of all succeeding Tories; so was Hume the father of all succeeding Whigs, for his own Jacobitism was but an accident, as worthy to be named Prejudice as any of Johnson’s. Again, if Johnson’s culture was exclusively English; Hume’s, in Scotland, became European;—for which reason too we find his influence spread deeply over all quarters of Europe, traceable deeply in all speculation, French, German, as well as domestic; while Johnson’s name, out of England, is hardly anywhere to be met with. In spiritual stature they are almost equal; both great, among the greatest: yet how unlike in likeness! Hume has the widest, methodising, comprehensive eye; Johnson the keenest for perspicacity and minute detail: so had, perhaps chiefly, their education ordered it. Neither of the two rose into Poetry; yet both to some approximation thereof: Hume to something of an Epic clearness and method, as in his delineation of the Commonwealth Wars; Johnson to many a deep Lyric tone of plaintiveness, and impetuous graceful power, scattered over his fugitive compositions. Both, rather to the general surprise, had a certain rugged Humour shining through their earnestness: the indication, indeed, that they were earnest men, and had subdued their wild world into a kind of temporary home, and safe dwelling. Both were, by principle and habit, Stoics: yet Johnson with the greater merit, for he alone had very much to triumph over; farther, he alone ennobled his Stoicism into Devotion. To Johnson Life was as a Prison, to be endured with heroic faith: to Hume it was little more than a foolish Bartholomew-Fair Show-booth, with the foolish crowdings and elbowings of which it was not worth while to quarrel; the whole would break up, and be at liberty, so soon. Both realised the highest task of Manhood, that of living like men; each died not unfitly, in his way: Hume as one, with factitious, half-false gaiety, taking leave of what was itself wholly but a Lie: Johnson as one, with awe-struck, yet resolute and piously expectant heart, taking leave of a Reality,

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to enter a Reality still higher. Johnson had the harder problem of it, from first to last: whether, with some hesitation, we can admit that he was intrinsically the better-gifted,—may remain undecided. These two men now rest; the one in Westminster Abbey here; the other in the Calton Hill Churchyard of Edinburgh. Through Life they did not meet: as contrasts, ‘like in unlike,’ love each other; so might they two have loved, and communed kindly,—had not the terrestrial dross and darkness, that was in them, withstood! One day, their spirits, what Truth was in each, will be found working, living in harmony and free union, even here below. They were the two half-men of their time: whoso should combine the intrepid Candour, and decisive scientific Clearness of Hume, with the Reverence, the Love, and devout Humility of Johnson, were the whole man of a new time. Till such whole man arrive for us, and the distracted time admit of such, might the Heavens but bless poor England with half-men worthy to tie the shoe-latchets of these, resembling these even from afar! Be both attentively regarded, let the true Effort of both prosper;—and for the present, both take our affectionate farewell!

CORN-LAW RHYMES.

1. Corn-Law Rhymes. Third Edition. 8vo. London: 1831. 2. Love; a Poem. By the Author of Corn-Law Rhymes. Third Edition. 8vo. London: 1831. 3. The Village Patriarch; a Poem. By the Author of Corn-Law Rhymes. 12mo. London: 1831. Smelfungus Redivivus, throwing down his critical assaying-balance, some years ago, and taking leave of the Belles-Lettres function, expressed himself in this abrupt way: ‘The end having come, it is fit that we end. Poetry having ceased to be read, or published, or written, how can it continue to be reviewed? With your Lake Schools, and Border-Thief Schools, and Cockney and Satanic Schools, there has been enough to do; and now, all these Schools having burnt or smouldered themselves out, and left nothing but a wide-spread wreck of ashes, dust, and cinders,—or perhaps dying embers, kicked to and fro under the feet of innumerable women and children in the Magazines, and at best blown here and there into transient sputters, with vapour enough, so as to form what you might name a boundless Green-sick, or New-Sentimental, or Sleep-Awake School,—what remains but to adjust ourselves to circumstances? Urge me not,’ continues the able Editor, suddenly changing his figure, ‘with considerations that Poetry, as the inward voice of Life, must be perennial, only dead in one form to become alive in another; that this still abundant deluge of Metre, seeing there must needs be fractions of Poetry floating scattered in it, ought still to be netfished, at all events, surveyed and taken note of: the survey of English Metre, at this epoch, perhaps transcends the human faculties; to hire out the reading of 199

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it, by estimate, at a remunerative rate per page, would, in few Quarters, reduce the cash-box of any extant Review to the verge of insolvency.’ What our distinguished contemporary has said remains said. Far be it from us to censure or counsel any able Editor; to draw aside the Editorial veil, and, officiously prying into his interior mysteries, impugn the laws he walks by! For Editors, as for others, there are times of perplexity, wherein the cunning of the wisest will scantily suffice his own wants, say nothing of his neighbour’s. To us, on our side, meanwhile, it remains clear that Poetry, or were it but Metre, should nowise be altogether neglected. Surely it is the Reviewer’s trade to sit watching, not only the tillage, crop-rotation, marketings, and good or evil husbandry of the Economic Earth, but also the weather-symptoms of the Literary Heaven, on which those former so much depend: if any promising or threatening meteoric phenomenon make its appearance, and he proclaim not tidings thereof, it is at his peril. Farther, be it considered how, in this singular poetic epoch, a small matter constitutes a novelty. If the whole welkin hang overcast in drizzly dinginess, the feeblest light-gleam, or speck of blue, cannot pass unheeded. The Works of this Corn-Law Rhymer we might liken rather to some little fraction of a rainbow: hues of joy and harmony, painted out of troublous tears. No round full bow, indeed; gloriously spanning the Heavens; shone on by the full sun; and, with seven-striped, gold-crimson border (as is in some sort the office of Poetry) dividing Black from Brilliant: not such; alas, still far from it! Yet, in very truth, a little prismatic blush, glowing genuine among the wet clouds; which proceeds, if you will, from a sun cloud-hidden, yet indicates that a sun does shine, and above those vapours, a whole azure vault and celestial firmament stretch serene. Strange as it may seem, it is nevertheless true, that here we have once more got sight of a Book calling itself Poetry, yet which actually is a kind of Book, and no empty pasteboard Case, and simulacrum or ‘ghost-defunct’ of a Book, such as is too often palmed on the world, and handed over Booksellers’ counters, with a demand of real money for it, as if it too were a reality. The speaker here is of that singular class, who have something to say; whereby, though delivering himself in verse, and in these days, he does not deliver himself wholly in jargon, but articulately, and with a certain degree of meaning, that has been believed, and therefore is again believable. To some the wonder and interest will be heightened by another circumstance: that the speaker in question is not school-learned, or even furnished with pecuniary capital; is, indeed, a quite unmonied, russet-coated speaker; nothing



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or little other than a Sheffield worker in brass and iron, who describes himself as ‘one of the lower, little removed above the lowest class.’ Be of what class he may, the man is provided, as we can perceive, with a rational god-created soul; which too has fashioned itself into some clearness, some self-subsistence, and can actually see and know with its own organs; and in rugged substantial English, nay, with tones of poetic melody, utter forth what it has seen. It used to be said that lions do not paint, that poor men do not write; but the case is altering now. Here is a voice coming from the deep Cyclopean forges, where Labour, in real soot and sweat, beats with his thousand hammers ‘the red son of the furnace;’ doing personal battle with Necessity, and her dark brute Powers, to make them reasonable and serviceable; an intelligible voice from the hitherto Mute and Irrational, to tell us at first hand how it is with him, what in very deed is the theorem of the world and of himself, which he, in those dim depths of his, in that wearied head of his, has put together. To which voice, in several respects significant enough, let good ear be given. Here too be it premised, that nowise under the category of ‘Uneducated Poets,’ or in any fashion of dilettante patronage, can our Sheffield friend be produced. His position is unsuitable for that; so is ours. Genius, which the French lady declared to be of no sex, is much more certainly of no rank; neither when ‘the spark of Nature’s fire’ has been imparted, should Education take high airs in her artificial light,—which is too often but phosphorescence and putrescence. In fact, it now begins to be suspected here and there, that this same aristocratic recognition, which looks down with an obliging smile from its throne, of bound Volumes and gold Ingots, and admits that it is wonderfully well for one of the uneducated classes, may be getting out of place. There are unhappy times in the world’s history, when he that is the least educated will chiefly have to say that he is the least perverted; and with the multitude of false eyeglasses, convex, concave, green, even yellow, has not lost the natural use of his eyes. For a generation that reads Cobbett’s Prose, and Burns’s Poetry, it need be no miracle that here also is a man who can handle both pen and hammer like a man. Nevertheless, this serene-highness attitude and temper is so frequent, perhaps it were good to turn the tables for a moment, and see what look it has under that reverse aspect. How were it if we surmised, that for a man gifted with natural vigour, with a man’s character to be developed in him, more especially if in the way of Literature, as Thinker and Writer, it is actually, in these strange days, no special misfortune to be trained up among the Uneducated classes, and not among the Educated; but rather of two misfortunes the smaller?

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For all men doubtless obstructions abound; spiritual growth must be hampered and stunted, and has to struggle through with difficulty, if it do not wholly stop. We may grant too that, for a mediocre character, the continual training and tutoring, from language-masters, dancing-masters, posture-masters of all sorts, hired and volunteer, which a high rank in any time and country assures, there will be produced a certain superiority, or at worst, air of superiority, over the corresponding mediocre character of low rank: thus we perceive, the vulgar Do-nothing, as contrasted with the vulgar Drudge, is in general a much prettier man; with a wider perhaps clearer outlook into the distance; in innumerable superficial matters, however it may be when we go deeper, he has a manifest advantage. But with the man of uncommon character, again, in whom a germ of irrepressible Force has been implanted, and will unfold itself into some sort of freedom,—altogether the reverse may hold. For such germs too, there is, undoubtedly enough, a proper soil where they will grow best, and an improper one where they will grow worst. True also, where there is a will, there is a way; where a genius has been given, a possibility, a certainty of its growing is also given. Yet often it seems as if the injudicious gardening and manuring were worse than none at all; and killed what the inclemencies of blind chance would have spared. We find accordingly that few Fredericks or Napoleons, indeed none since the Great Alexander, who unfortunately drank himself to death too soon for proving what lay in him, were nursed up with an eye to their vocation; mostly with an eye quite the other way, in the midst of isolation and pain, destitution and contradiction. Nay, in our own times, have we not seen two men of genius, a Byron and a Burns: they both, by mandate of Nature, struggle and must struggle towards clear Manhood, stormfully enough, for the space of sixand-thirty years; yet only the gifted Ploughman can partially prevail therein; the gifted Peer must toil, and strive, and shoot out in wild efforts, yet die at last in Boyhood, with the promise of his Manhood still but announcing itself in the distance. Truly, as was once written, ‘it is only the artichoke that will not grow except in gardens: the acorn is cast carelessly abroad into the wilderness, yet on the wild soil it nourishes itself, and rises to be an oak.’ All woodmen, moreover, will tell you that fat manure is the ruin of your oak; likewise that the thinner and wilder your soil, the tougher, more iron-textured is your timber,—though, unhappily, also the smaller. So too with the spirits of men: they become pure from their errors by suffering for them; he who has battled, were it only with Poverty and hard toil, will be found stronger, more expert, than he who could stay at home from the battle, concealed among the Provision-waggons, or even not unwatchfully ‘abiding by the stuff.’ In which sense, an observer, not without



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experience of our time, has said: Had I a man of clearly developed character (clear, sincere within its limits), of insight, courage, and real applicable force of head and of heart, to search for; and not a man of luxuriously distorted character, with haughtiness for courage, and for insight and applicable force, speculation and plausible show of force,—it were rather among the lower than among the higher classes that I should look for him. A hard saying, indeed, seems this same: that he, whose other wants were all beforehand supplied; to whose capabilities no problem was presented except even this, How to cultivate them to best advantage, should attain less real culture than he whose first grand problem and obligation was nowise spiritual culture, but hard labour for his daily bread! Sad enough must the perversion be, where preparations of such magnitude issue in abortion; and so sumptuous an Art with all its appliances can accomplish nothing, not so much as necessitous Nature would of herself have supplied! Nevertheless, so pregnant is Life with evil as with good; to such height in an age rich, plethorically overgrown with means, can means be accumulated in the wrong place, and immeasurably aggravate wrong tendencies, instead of righting them, this sad and strange result may actually turn out to have been realized. But what, after all, is meant by uneducated, in a time when Books have come into the world; come to be household furniture in every habitation of the civilized world? In the poorest cottage are Books; is one Book, wherein for several thousands of years the spirit of man has found light, and nourishment, and an interpreting response to whatever is Deepest in him; wherein still, to this day, for the eye that will look well, the Mystery of Existence reflects itself, if not resolved, yet revealed, and prophetically emblemed; if not to the satisfying of the outward sense, yet to the opening of the inward sense, which is the far grander result. ‘In Books lie the creative Phœnix-ashes of the whole Past.’ All that men have devised, discovered, done, felt or imagined, lies recorded in Books; wherein whoso has learned the mystery of spelling printed letters, may find it, and appropriate it. Nay, what indeed is all this? As if it were by universities and libraries and lecture-rooms, that man’s Education, what we can call Education, were accomplished; solely, or mainly, by instilling the dead letter and record of other men’s Force, that the living Force of a new man were to be awakened, enkindled, and purified into victorious clearness! Foolish Pedant, that sittest there compassionately descanting on the Learning of Shakspeare! Shakspeare had penetrated into innumerable things; far into Nature with her divine Splendours and infernal Terrors, her Ariel Melodies, and mystic mandragora Moans; far into man’s

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workings with Nature, into man’s Art and Artifice: Shakspeare knew (kenned, which in those days still partially meant can-ned) innumerable things; what men are, and what the world is, and how and what men aim at there, from the Dame Quickly of modern Eastcheap to the Cæsar of ancient Rome, over many countries, over many centuries: of all this he had the clearest understanding and constructive comprehension; all this was his Learning and Insight; what now is thine? Insight into none of those things; perhaps, strictly considered, into no thing whatever; solely into thy own sheepskin diplomas, fat academic honours, into vocables and alphabetic letters, and but a little way into these!—The grand result of schooling is a mind with just vision to discern, with free force to do: the grand schoolmaster is Practice. And now, when kenning and can-ning have become two altogether different words; and this, the first principle of human culture, the foundation-stone of all but false imaginary culture, That men must, before every other thing, be trained to do somewhat, has been, for some generations, laid quietly on the shelf, with such result as we see,—consider what advantage those same uneducated Working classes have over the educated Unworking classes, in one particular: herein, namely, that they must work. To work! What incalculable sources of cultivation lie in that process, in that attempt; how it lays hold of the whole man, not of a small theoretical calculating fraction of him, but of the whole practical, doing and daring and enduring man; thereby to awaken dormant faculties, root out old errors, at every step! He that has done nothing has known nothing. Vain is it to sit scheming and plausibly discoursing: up and be doing! If thy knowledge be real, put it forth from thee: grapple with real Nature; try thy theories there, and see how they hold out. Do one thing, for the first time in thy life do a thing; a new light will rise to thee on the doing of all things whatsoever. Truly, a boundless significance lies in work: whereby the humblest craftsman comes to attain much, which is of indispensable use, but which he who is of no craft, were he never so high, runs the risk of missing. Once turn to Practice, Error and Truth will no longer consort together: the result of Error involves you in the squareroot of a negative quantity; try to extract that, to extract any earthly substance or sustenance from that! The honourable Member can discover that ‘there is a reaction,’ and believe it, and wearisomely reason on it, in spite of all men, while he so pleases, for still his wine and his oil will not fail him: but the sooty Brazier, who discovered that brass was green-cheese, has to act on his discovery; finds therefore that, singular as it may seem, brass cannot be masticated for dinner, green-cheese will not beat into fireproof dishes; that such discovery, therefore, has no legs to stand on, and must even be let fall. Now, take this principle of



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difference through the entire lives of two men, and calculate what it will amount to! Necessity, moreover, which we here see as the mother of Accuracy, is well known as the mother of Invention. He who wants everything, must know many things, do many things, to procure even a few: different enough with him, whose indispensable knowledge is this only, that a finger will pull the bell! So that, for all men who live, we may conclude, this Life of Man is a school, wherein the naturally foolish will continue foolish though you bray him in a mortar, but the naturally wise will gather wisdom under every disadvantage. What, meanwhile, must be the condition of an Era, when the highest advantages there become perverted into drawbacks; when, if you take two men of genius, and put the one between the handles of a plough, and mount the other between the painted coronets of a coach-and-four, and bid them both move along, the former shall arrive a Burns, the latter a Byron: two men of talent, and put the one into a Printer’s chapel, full of lampblack, tyrannous usage, hard toil, and the other into Oxford universities, with lexicons and libraries, and hired expositors and sumptuous endowments, the former shall come out a Dr. Franklin, the latter a Dr. Parr!— However, we are not here to write an Essay on Education, or sing misereres over a ‘world in its dotage:’ but simply to say that our Corn-Law Rhymer, educated or uneducated as Nature and Art have made him, asks not the smallest patronage or compassion for his Rhymes, professes not the smallest contrition for them. Nowise in such attitude does he present himself; not supplicatory, deprecatory, but sturdy, defiant, almost menacing. Wherefore, indeed, should he supplicate or deprecate? It is out of the abundance of the heart that he has spoken; praise or blame cannot make it truer or falser than it already is. By the grace of God this man is sufficient for himself; by his skill in metallurgy, can beat out a toilsome but a manful living, go how it may; has arrived too at that singular audacity of believing what he knows, and acting on it, or writing on it, or thinking on it, without leave asked of any one: there shall he stand, and work, with head and with hand, for himself and the world; blown about by no wind of doctrine; frightened at no Reviewer’s shadow; having, in his time, looked substances enough in the face, and remained unfrightened. What is left, therefore, but to take what he brings, and as he brings it? Let us be thankful, were it only for the day of small things. Something it is that we have lived to welcome once more a sweet Singer wearing the likeness of a Man. In humble guise, it is true, and of stature more or less marred in its developement; yet not without a genial robustness, strength and valour built

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on honesty and love; on the whole, a genuine man, with somewhat of the eye and speech and bearing that beseems a man. To whom all other genuine men, how different soever in subordinate particulars, can gladly hold out the right hand of fellowship. The great excellence of our Rhymer, be it understood then, we take to consist even in this, often hinted at already, that he is genuine. Here is an earnest, truth-speaking man; no theorizer, sentimentalizer, but a practical man of work and endeavour, man of sufferance and endurance. The thing that he speaks is not a hearsay, but a thing which he has himself known, and by experience become assured of. He has used his eyes for seeing; uses his tongue for declaring what he has seen. His voice, therefore, among the many noises of our Planet, will deserve its place better than the most; will be well worth some attention. Whom else should we attend to but such? The man who speaks with some half shadow of a Belief, and supposes, and inclines to think; and considers not with undivided soul, what is true, but only what is plausible, and will find audience and recompense; do we not meet him at every street-turning, on all highways and byways; is he not stale, unprofitable, ineffectual, wholly grown a weariness of the flesh? So rare is his opposite in any rank of Literature, or of Life, so very rare, that even in the lowest he is precious. The authentic insight and experience of any human soul, were it but insight and experience in hewing of wood and drawing of water, is real knowledge, a real possession and acquirement, how small soever: palabra, again, were it a supreme pontiff ’s, is wind merely, and nothing, or less than nothing. To a considerable degree, this man, we say, has worked himself loose from cant, and conjectural halfness, idle pretences and hallucinations, into a condition of Sincerity. Wherein perhaps, as above argued, his hard social environment, and fortune to be ‘a workman born,’ which brought so many other retardations with it, may have forwarded and accelerated him. That a man, Workman or Idleman, encompassed, as in these days, with persons in a state of willing or unwilling Insincerity, and necessitated, as man is, to learn whatever he does traditionally learn by imitating these, should nevertheless shake off Insincerity, and struggle out from that dim pestiferous marsh-atmosphere, into a clearer and purer height,—betokens in him a certain Originality; in which rare gift Force of all kinds is presupposed. To our Rhymer, accordingly, as hinted more than once, vision and determination have not been denied: a rugged, homegrown understanding is in him; whereby, in his own way, he has mastered this and that, and looked into various things, in general honestly and to purpose, sometimes deeply, piercingly, and with a Seer’s eye. Strong thoughts are not wanting, beautiful thoughts; strong and beautiful expressions of thought.



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As traceable for instance in this new illustration of an old argument, the mischief of Commercial Restrictions: These, O ye quacks, these are your remedies: Alms for the Rich, a bread-tax for the Poor! Soul-purchased harvests on the indigent moor!— Thus the winged victor of a hundred fights, The warrior Ship, bows low her banner’d head, When through her planks the seaborn reptile bites Its deadly way;—and sinks in ocean’s bed, Vanquish’d by worms. What then? The worms were fed.— Will not God smite thee black, thou whited wall? Thy life is lawless, and thy law a lie, Or Nature is a dream unnatural: Look on the clouds, the streams, the earth, the sky; Lo all is interchange and harmony! Where is the gorgeous pomp which, yester morn, Curtain’d yon Orb, with amber, fold on fold? Behold it in the blue of Rivelin, borne To feed the all-feeding sea! the molten gold Is flowing pale in Loxley’s waters cold, To kindle into beauty tree and flower, And wake to verdant life hill, vale, and plain. Cloud trades with river, and exchange is power: But should the clouds, the streams, the winds disdain Harmonious intercourse, nor dew nor rain Would forest-crown the mountains: airless day Would blast on Kinderscout the heathy glow; No purply green would meeken into grey O’er Don at eve; no sound of river’s flow Disturb the Sepulchre of all below.

Nature and the doings of men have not passed by this man unheeded, like the endless cloud-rack in dull weather; or lightly heeded, like a theatric phantasmagoria: but earnestly enquired into, like a thing of reality; reverently loved and worshipped, as a thing with divine significance in its reality, glimpses of which divineness he has caught and laid to heart. For his vision, as was said, partakes

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of the genuinely Poetical; he is not a Rhymer and Speaker only, but, in some genuine sense, something of a Poet. Farther we must admit him, what indeed is already herein admitted, to be, if clear-sighted, also brave-hearted. A troublous element is his; a Life of painfulness, toil, insecurity, scarcity, yet he fronts it like a man; yields not to it, tames it into some subjection, some order: its wild fearful dinning and tumult, as of a devouring Chaos, becomes a sort of wild war-music for him; wherein too are passages of beauty, of melodious melting softness, of lightness and briskness, even of joy. The stout heart is also a warm and kind one; Affection dwells with Danger, all the holier and the lovelier for such stern environment. A working man is this; yet, as we said, a man: in his sort, a courageous, much-loving, faithfully enduring and endeavouring man. What such a one, so gifted and so placed, shall say to a Time like ours; how he will fashion himself into peace, or war, or armed neutrality, with the world and his fellow men, and work out his course in joy and grief, in victory and defeat, is a question worth asking; which in these three little Volumes partly receives answer. He has turned, as all thinkers up to a very high and rare order in these days must do, into Politics; is a Reformer, at least a stern Complainer, Radical to the core: his poetic melody takes an elegiaco-tragical character; much of him is converted into Hostility, and grim, hardly-suppressed Indignation, such as Right long denied, Hope long deferred, may awaken in the kindliest heart. Not yet as a rebel against anything does he stand; but as a free man, and the spokesman of free men, not far from rebelling against much; with sorrowful appealing dew, yet also with incipient lightning, in his eyes; whom it were not desirable to provoke into rebellion. He says, in Vulcanic dialect, his feelings have been hammered till they are cold-short; so they will no longer bend; ‘they snap, and fly off,’—in the face of the hammerer. Not unnatural, though lamentable! Nevertheless, under all disguises of the Radical, the Poet is still recognisable; a certain music breathes through all dissonances, as the prophecy and ground-tone of returning harmony; the man, as we said, is of a poetical nature. To his Political Philosophy there is perhaps no great importance attachable. He feels, as all men that live must do, the disorganization, and hard-grinding, unequal pressure of the Social Affairs; but sees into it only a very little farther than far inferior men do. The frightful condition of a Time, when public and private Principle, as the word was once understood, having gone out of sight, and Self-interest being left to plot, and struggle, and scramble, as it could and would, Difficulties had accumulated till they were no longer to be borne, and the Spirit that should have fronted and conquered them seemed to have forsaken



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the world;—when the Rich, as the utmost they could resolve on, had ceased to govern, and the Poor, in their fast-accumulating numbers, and ever-widening complexities, had ceased to be able to do without governing; and now the plan of ‘Competition’ and ‘Laissez-faire’ was, on every side, approaching its consummation; and each bound up in the circle of his own wants and perils, stood grimly distrustful of his neighbour, and the distracted Common-weal was a Common-woe, and to all men it became apparent that the end was drawing nigh:—all this black aspect of Ruin and Decay, visible enough, experimentally known to our Sheffield friend, he calls by the name of ‘Corn-Law,’ and expects to be in good part delivered from, were the accursed Bread-tax repealed. In this system of political Doctrine, even as here so emphatically set forth, there is not much of novelty. Radicals we have many; loud enough on this and other grievances; the removal of which is to be the one thing needful. The deep, wide flood of Bitterness, and Hope becoming hopeless, lies acrid, corrosive in every bosom; and flows fiercely enough through any orifice Accident may open: through Law Reform, Legislative Reform, Poor Laws, want of Poor Laws, Tithes, Game Laws, or, as we see here, Corn Laws. Whereby indeed only this becomes clear, that a deep, wide flood of evil does exist and corrode; from which, in all ways, blindly and seeingly, men seek deliverance, and cannot rest till they find it; least of all till they know what part and proportion of it is to be found. But with us foolish sons of Adam this is ever the way; some evil that lies nearest us, be it a chronic sickness, or but a smoky chimney, is ever the acme and sumtotal of all evil; the black hydra that shuts us out from a Promised Land: and so, in poor Mr. Shandy’s fashion, must we ‘shift from trouble to trouble, and from side to side; button up one cause of vexation, and unbutton another.’ Thus for our keen-hearted singer, and sufferer, has the ‘Bread-tax,’ in itself a considerable but no immeasurable smoke-pillar, swoln out to be a worldembracing Darkness, that darkens and suffocates the whole Earth, and has blotted out the heavenly stars. Into the merit of the Corn Laws, which has often been discussed, in fit season, by competent hands, we do not enter here; least of all in the way of argument, in the way of blame, towards one who, if he read such merit with some emphasis ‘on the scantier trenchers of his children,’ may well be pardoned. That the ‘Bread-tax,’ with various other taxes, may ere long be altered and abrogated, and the Corn Trade become as free as the poorest ‘bread-taxed drudge’ could wish it, or the richest ‘satrap bread-tax-fed’ could fear it, seems no extravagant hypothesis: would that the mad Time could, by such simple hellebore-dose, be healed! Alas, for the diseases of a world lying in wickedness, in heart-sickness and atrophy, quite another alcahest is needed;—a

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long, painful course of medicine and regimen, surgery and physic, not yet specified or indicated in the Royal-College Books! But if there is little novelty in our friend’s Political Philosophy, there is some in his political Feeling and Poetry. The peculiarity of this Radical is, that with all his stormful destructiveness, he combines a decided loyalty and faith. If he despise and trample under foot on the one hand, he exalts and reverences on the other: the ‘landed pauper in his coach-and-four’ rolls all the more glaringly, contrasted with the ‘Rockinghams and Savilles’ of the past, with ‘the Lansdowns and Fitzwilliams,’ many a ‘Wentworth’s lord,’ still ‘a blessing’ to the present. This man, indeed, has in him the root of all reverence,—a principle of Religion. He believes in a Godhead, not with the lips only, but apparently with the heart; who, as has been written, and often felt, ‘reveals Himself in Parents, in all true Teachers, and Rulers,’—as in false Teachers and Rulers quite Another may be revealed! Our Rhymer, it would seem, is no Methodist: far enough from it. He makes ‘the Ranter,’ in his hot-headed way, exclaim over The Hundred Popes of England’s Jesuitry;

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and adds, by way of note, in his own person, some still stronger sayings: How ‘this baneful corporation,’ ‘dismal as its Reign of Terror is, and long-armed its Holy Inquisition, must condescend to learn and teach what is useful, or go where all nuisances go.’ As little perhaps is he a Churchman; the ‘Cadi-Dervish’ seems nowise to his mind. Scarcely, however, if at all, does he show aversion to the Church as Church; or, among his many griefs, touch upon Tithes as one. But, in any case, the black colours of Life, even as here painted, and brooded over, do not hide from him that a God is the Author and Sustainer thereof; that God’s world, if made a House of Imprisonment, can also be a House of Prayer; wherein for the weary and heavy-laden, Pity and Hope are not altogether cut away. It is chiefly in virtue of this inward temper of heart, with the clear disposition and adjustment which for all else results therefrom, that our Radical attains to be Poetical; that the harsh groanings, contentions, upbraidings, of one who unhappily has felt constrained to adopt such mode of utterance, become ennobled into something of music. If a land of bondage, this is still his Father’s land, and the bondage endures not forever. As worshipper and believer, the captive can look with seeing eye: the aspect of the Infinite Universe still fills him with an Infinite feeling; his chains, were it but for moments, fall away; he soars free aloft, and the sunny regions of Poesy and Freedom gleam golden afar on the widened horizon. Gleamings, we say, prophetic dawnings from those far regions, spring up for



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him; nay, beams of actual radiance. In his ruggedness, and dim contractedness (rather of place than of organ), he is not without touches of a feeling and vision, which, even in the stricter sense, is to be named poetical. One deeply poetical idea, above all others, seems to have taken hold of him: the idea of Time. As was natural to a poetic soul, with few objects of Art in its environment, and driven inward, rather than invited outward, for occupation. This deep mystery of ever-flowing Time; bringing forth, and as the Ancients wisely fabled, devouring what it has brought forth; rushing on, on, in us, yet above us, all uncontrollable by us; and under it, dimly visible athwart it, the bottomless Eternal;—this is, indeed, what we may call the primary idea of Poetry; the first that introduces itself into the poetic mind. As here: The bee shall seek to settle on his hand, But from the vacant bench haste to the moor, Mourning the last of England’s high-soul’d Poor, And bid the mountains weep for Enoch Wray. And for themselves,—albeit of things that last Unalter’d most; for they shall pass away Like Enoch, though their iron roots seem fast, Bound to the eternal future as the past: The Patriarch died; and they shall be no more! Yes, and the sailless worlds, which navigate The unutterable Deep that hath no shore, Will lose their starry splendour soon or late, Like tapers, quench’d by Him, whose will is fate! Yes, and the Angel of Eternity, Who numbers worlds and writes their names in light, One day, O Earth, will look in vain for thee, And start and stop in his unerring flight, And with his wings of sorrow and affright, Veil his impassion’d brow and heavenly tears!

And not the first idea only, but the greatest, properly the parent of all others. For if it can rise in the remotest ages, in the rudest states of culture, wherever an ‘inspired thinker’ happens to exist, it connects itself still with all great things; with the highest results of new Philosophy, as of primeval Theology; and for the Poet, in particular, is as the life-element wherein alone his conceptions can take poetic form, and the whole world become miraculous and magical.

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essays on literature We are such stuff As Dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a Sleep!

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Figure that, believe that, O Reader; then say whether the Arabian Tales seem wonderful!—‘Rounded with a sleep (mit Schlaf umgeben)!’ says Jean Paul; ‘these three words created whole volumes in me.’ To turn now on our worthy Rhymer, who has brought us so much, and stingily insist on his errors and shortcomings, were no honest procedure. We had the whole poetical encyclopædia to draw upon, and say commodiously, Such and such an item is not here; of which encyclopædia the highest genius can fill but a portion. With much merit, far from common in his time, he is not without something of the faults of his time. We praised him for originality; yet is there a certain remainder of imitation in him; a tang of the Circulating Libraries, as in Sancho’s wine, with its key and thong, there was a tang of iron and leather. To be reminded of Crabbe, with his truthful severity of style, in such a place, we cannot object; but what if there were a slight bravura dash of the fair tuneful Hemans? Still more, what have we to do with Byron, and his fierce vociferous mouthings, whether ‘passionate,’ or not passionate and only theatrical? King Cambyses’ vein is, after all, but a worthless one; no vein for a wise man. Strength, if that be the thing aimed at, does not manifest itself in spasms, but in stout bearing of burdens. Our Author says, ‘It is too bad to exalt into a hero the coxcomb who would have gone into hysterics if a tailor had laughed at him.’ Walk not in his footsteps, then, we say, whether as hero or as singer; repent a little, for example, over somewhat in that fuliginous, blue-flaming, pitch-and-sulphur ‘Dream of Enoch Wray,’ and write the next otherwise. We mean no imitation in a bad palpable sense; only that there is a tone of such occasionally audible; which ought to be removed;—of which, in any case, we make not much. Imitation is a leaning on something foreign; incompleteness of individual developement, defect of free utterance. From the same source, spring most of our Author’s faults; in particular, his worst, which after all is intrinsically a defect of manner. He has little or no Humour. Without Humour of character he cannot well be; but it has not yet got to utterance. Thus, where he has mean things to deal with, he knows not how to deal with them; oftenest deals with them more or less meanly. In his vituperative prose Notes, he seems embarrassed; and but ill hides his embarrassment, under an air of predetermined sarcasm, of knowing briskness, almost of vulgar pertness. He says, he cannot



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help it; he is poor, hard-worked, and ‘soot is soot.’ True, indeed; yet there is no connexion between Poverty and Discourtesy; which latter originates in Dulness alone. Courtesy is the due of Man to Man; not of suit of clothes to suit of clothes. He who could master so many things, and make even Corn-Laws rhyme, we require of him this farther thing,—a bearing worthy of himself, and of the order he belongs to,—the highest and most ancient of all orders, that of Manhood. A pert snappishness is no manner for a brave man; and then the manner so soon influences the matter; a far worse result. Let him speak wise things, and speak them wisely; which latter may be done in many dialects, grave and gay, only in the snappish dialect seldom or never. The truth is, as might have been expected, there is still much lying in him to be developed; the hope of which developement it were rather sad to abandon. Why, for example, should not his view of the world, his knowledge of what is and has been in the world, indefinitely extend itself ? Were he merely the ‘uneducated Poet,’ we should say, he had read largely; as he is not such, we say, Read still more, much more largely. Books enough there are in England, and of quite another weight and worth than that circulating-library sort; may be procured too, may be read, even by a hard-worked man; for what man (either in God’s service or the Devil’s, as himself chooses it) is not hard-worked? But here again, where there is a will there is a way. True, our friend is no longer in his teens; yet still, as would seem, in the vigour of his years: we hope too that his mind is not finally shut in, but of the improveable and enlargeable sort. If Alfieri (also kept busy enough, with horse-breaking and what not) learned Greek after he was fifty, why is the Corn-Law Rhymer too old to learn? However, be in the future what there may, our Rhymer has already done what was much more difficult, and better than reading printed Books;—looked into the great prophetic-manuscript Book of Existence, and read little passages there. Here, for example, is a sentence tolerably spelled: Where toils the Mill by ancient woods embraced, Hark, how the cold steel screams in hissing fire! Blind Enoch sees the Grinder’s wheel no more, Couch’d beneath rocks and forests, that admire Their beauty in the waters, ere they roar Dash’d in white foam the swift circumference o’er. There draws the Grinder his laborious breath; There coughing at his deadly trade he bends: Born to die young, he fears nor man nor death;

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essays on literature Scorning the future, what he earns he spends; Debauch and riot are his bosom friends. * * * * * Behold his failings! Hath he virtues too? He is no Pauper, blackguard though he be: Full well he knows what minds combined can do, Full well maintains his birthright: he is free, And, frown for frown, outstares monopoly. Yet Abraham and Elliot both in vain Bid science on his cheek prolong the bloom: He will not live! He seems in haste to gain The undisturb’d asylum of the tomb, And, old at two-and-thirty, meets his doom!

Or this, ‘of Jem, the rogue avowed,’ Whose trade is Poaching! Honest Jem works not, Begs not, but thrives by plundering beggars here. Wise as a lord, and quite as good a shot, He, like his betters, lives in hate and fear, And feeds on partridge because bread is dear. Sire of six sons apprenticed to the jail, He prowls in arms, the Tory of the night; With them he shares his battles and his ale, With him they feel the majesty of might, No Despot better knows that Power is Right. Mark his unpaidish sneer, his lordly frown; Hark how he calls the beadle and flunky liars; See how magnificently he breaks down His neighbour’s fence, if so his will requires, And how his struttle emulates the squire’s! * * * * * Jem rises with the Moon; but when she sinks, Homeward with sack-like pockets, and quick heels, Hungry as boroughmongering gowl, he slinks. He reads not, writes not, thinks not; scarcely feels; Steals all he gets; serves Hell with all he steals!



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It is rustic, rude existence; barren moors, with the smoke of Forges rising over the waste expanse. Alas, no Arcadia; but the actual dwelling-place of actual toilgrimed sons of Tubalcain: yet are there blossoms and the wild natural fragrance of gorse and broom; yet has the Craftsman pauses in his toil; the Craftsman too has an inheritance in Earth; and even in Heaven. Light! All is not corrupt, for thou art pure, Unchanged and changeless. Though frail man is vile, Thou look’st on him, serene, sublime, secure, Yet, like thy Father, with a pitying smile. Even on this wintry day, as marble cold, Angels might quit their home to visit thee, And match their plumage with thy mantle roll’d Beneath God’s Throne, o’er billows of a sea Whose isles are Worlds, whose bounds Infinity. Why then is Enoch absent from my side? I miss the rustle of his silver hair; A guide no more, I seem to want a guide, While Enoch journeys to the house of prayer; Ah, ne’er came Sabbath-day but he was there! Lo, how, like him, erect and strong, though grey, Yon village tower time-touch’d to God appeals! And hark! the chimes of morning die away: Hark! to the heart the solemn sweetness steals, Like the heart’s voice, unfelt by none who feels That God is Love, that Man is living Dust; Unfelt by none whom ties of brotherhood Link to his kind; by none who puts his trust In nought of Earth that hath survived the flood, Save those mute charities, by which the good Strengthen poor worms, and serve their Maker best. Hail Sabbath! Day of mercy, peace, and rest! Thou o’er loud cities throw’st a noiseless spell, The hammer there, the wheel, the saw molest Pale Thought no more: o’er Trade’s contentious hell Meek Quiet spreads her wings invisible. And when thou com’st, less silent are the fields,

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essays on literature Through whose sweet paths the toil-freed townsman steals. To him the very air a banquet yields. Envious he watches the poised hawk that wheels His flight on chainless winds. Each cloud reveals A paradise of beauty to his eye. His little Boys are with him, seeking flowers, Or chasing the too-venturous gilded fly. So by the daisy’s side he spends the hours, Renewing friendship with the budding bowers: And while might, beauty, good without alloy, Are mirror’d in his children’s happy eyes,— In His great Temple offering thankful joy To Him, the infinitely Great and Wise, With soul attuned to Nature’s harmonies, Serene and cheerful as a sporting child,— His heart refuses to believe that man Could turn into a hell the blooming wild, The blissful country where his childhood ran A race with infant rivers, ere began—

—‘King-humbling’ Bread-tax, ‘blind Misrule,’ and several other crabbed things! And so our Corn-Law Rhymer plays his part. In this wise, does he indite and act his Drama of Life, which for him is all too Domestic-Tragical. It is said, ‘the good actor soon makes us forget the bad theatre, were it but a barn; while, again, nothing renders so apparent the badness of the bad actor as a theatre of peculiar excellence.’ How much more in a theatre and drama such as these of Life itself ! One other item, however, we must note in that ill-decorated Sheffield theatre: the back-scene and bottom-decoration of it all; which is no other than a Workhouse. Alas, the Workhouse is the bourne whither all these actors and workers are bound; whence none that has once passed it returns! A bodeful sound, like the rustle of approaching world-devouring tornadoes, quivers through their whole existence; and the voice of it is, Pauperism! The thanksgiving they offer up to Heaven is, that they are not yet Paupers; the earnest cry of their prayer is, that ‘God would shield them from the bitterness of Parish Pay.’ Mournful enough, that a white European Man must pray wistfully for what the horse he drives is sure of,—That the strain of his whole faculties may not fail to earn him food and lodging. Mournful that a gallant manly spirit, with an



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eye to discern the world, a heart to reverence it, a hand cunning and willing to labour in it, must be haunted with such a fear. The grim end of it all, Beggary! A soul loathing, what true souls ever loathe, Dependence, help from the unworthy to help; yet sucked into the world-whirlpool,—able to do no other: the highest in man’s heart struggling vainly against the lowest in man’s destiny! In good truth, if many a sickly and sulky Byron, or Byronlet, glooming over the woes of existence, and how unworthy God’s Universe is to have so distinguished a resident, could transport himself into the patched coat and sooty apron of a Sheffield Blacksmith, made with as strange faculties and feelings as he, made by God Almighty all one as he was,—it would throw a light on much for him. Meanwhile, is it not frightful as well as mournful to consider how the widespread evil is spreading wider and wider? Most persons, who have had eyes to look with, may have verified, in their own circle, the statement of this Sheffield Eye-witness, and ‘from their own knowledge and observation fearlessly declare that the little master-manufacturer,’ that the working man generally, ‘is in a much worse condition than he was in twenty-five years ago.’ Unhappily, the fact is too plain; the reason and scientific necessity of it is too plain. In this mad state of things, every new man is a new misfortune; every new market a new complexity; the chapter of chances grows ever more incalculable; the hungry gamesters (whose stake is their life) are ever increasing in numbers; the worldmovement rolls on: by what method shall the weak and help-needing, who has none to help him, withstand it? Alas, how many brave hearts, ground to pieces in that unequal battle, have already sunk; in every sinking heart, a Tragedy, less famous than that of the Sons of Atreus; wherein, however, if no ‘kingly house,’ yet a manly house, went to the dust, and a whole manly lineage was swept away! Must it grow worse and worse ’till the last brave heart is broken in England; and this same ‘brave Peasantry’ has become a kennel of wild-howling ravenous Paupers? God be thanked! There is some feeble shadow of hope that the change may have begun while it was yet time. You may lift the pressure from the free man’s shoulders, and bid him go forth rejoicing; but lift the slave’s burden, he will only wallow the more composedly in his sloth: a nation of degraded men cannot be raised up, except by what we rightly name a miracle. Under which point of view also, these little Volumes, indicating such a character in such a place, are not without significance. One faint symptom perhaps that clearness will return, that there is a possibility of its return. It is as if from that Gehenna of Manufacturing Radicalism, from amid its loud roaring and cursing, whereby nothing became feasible, nothing knowable, except this only, that misery and malady existed there, we heard now some manful tone of reason

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and determination, wherein alone can there be profit, or promise of deliverance. In this Corn-Law Rhymer we seem to trace something of the antique spirit; a spirit which had long become invisible among our working as among other classes; which here, perhaps almost for the first time, reveals itself in an altogether modern political vesture. ‘The Pariahs of the Isle of Woe,’ as he passionately names them, are no longer Pariahs if they have become Men. Here is one man of their tribe; in several respects a true man; who has abjured Hypocrisy and Servility, yet not therewith trodden Religion and Loyalty under foot; not without justness of insight, devoutness, peaceable heroism of resolve; who, in all circumstances, even in these strange ones, will be found quitting himself like a man. One such that has found a voice: who knows how many mute but not inactive brethren he may have in his own and in all other ranks? Seven thousand that have not bowed the knee to Baal! These are the men, wheresoever found, who are to stand forth in England’s evil day, on whom the hope of England rests. For it has been often said, and must often be said again, that all Reform except a moral one will prove unavailing. Political Reform, pressingly enough wanted, can indeed root out the weeds (gross deep-fixed lazy dock-weeds, poisonous obscene hemlocks, ineffectual spurry in abundance); but it leaves the ground empty,—ready either for noble fruits, or for new worse tares! And how else is a Moral Reform to be looked for but in this way, that more and more Good Men are, by a bountiful Providence, sent hither to disseminate Goodness; literally to sow it, as in seeds shaken abroad by the living tree? For such, in all ages and places, is the nature of a Good Man; he is ever a mystic creative centre of Goodness; his influence, if we consider it, is not to be measured; for his works do not die, but being of Eternity, are eternal; and in new transformation, and ever-wider diffusion, endure, living and life-giving. Thou who exclaimest over the horrors and baseness of the Time, and how Diogenes would now need two lanterns in daylight, think of this; over the Time thou hast no power; to redeem a World sunk in dishonesty has not been given thee; solely over one man therein thou hast a quite absolute uncontrollable power; him redeem, him make honest; it will be something, it will be much, and thy life and labour not in vain. We have given no epitomized abstract of these little Books, such as is the Reviewer’s wont: we would gladly persuade many a reader, high and low, who takes interest not in rhyme only, but in reason, and the condition of his fellowman, to purchase and peruse them for himself. It is proof of an innate love of worth, and how willingly the Public, did not thousand-voiced Puffery so confuse it, would have to do with substances, and not with deceptive shadows, that these



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Volumes carry ‘Third Edition’ marked on them,—on all of them but the newest, whose fate with the reading world we yet know not; which, however, seems to deserve not worse but better than either of its forerunners. Nay, it appears to us as if in this humble Chaunt of the Village Patriarch might be traced rudiments of a truly great idea; great though all undeveloped. The Rhapsody of ‘Enoch Wray’ is, in its nature, and unconscious tendency, Epic; a whole world lies shadowed in it. What we might call an inarticulate, half-audible Epic! The main figure is a blind aged man; himself a ruin, and encircled with the ruin of a whole Era. Sad and great does that image of a universal Dissolution hover visible as a poetic background. Good old Enoch! He could do so much, was so wise, so valiant. No Ilion had he destroyed; yet somewhat he had built up: where the Mill stands noisy by its cataract, making corn into bread for men, it was Enoch that reared it, and made the rude rocks send it water; where the mountain Torrent now boils in vain, and is mere passing music to the traveller, it was Enoch’s cunning that spanned it with that strong Arch, grim, time-defying. Where Enoch’s hand or mind has been, Disorder has become Order; Chaos has receded some little handbreadth; had to give up some new handbreadth of his ancient realm. Enoch too has seen his followers fall round him (by stress of hardship, and the arrows of the gods), has performed funeral games for them, and raised sandstone memorials, and carved his Abiit ad Plures thereon, with his own hand. The living chronicle and epitome of a whole century; when he departs, a whole century will become dead, historical. Rudiments of an Epic, we say; and of the true Epic of our Time,—were the genius but arrived that could sing it! Not ‘Arms and the Man;’ ‘Tools and the Man,’ that were now our Epic. What indeed are Tools, from the Hammer and Plummet of Enoch Wray to this Pen we now write with, but Arms, wherewith to do battle against Unreason without or within, and smite in pieces not miserable fellow men, but the Arch Enemy that makes us all miserable; henceforth the only legitimate battle! Which Epic, as we granted, is here altogether imperfectly sung; scarcely a few notes thereof brought freely out; nevertheless with indication, with prediction that it will be sung. Such is the purport and merit of the Village Patriarch; it struggles towards a noble utterance, which however it can nowise find. Old Enoch is from the first, speechless, heard of rather than heard or seen; at best, mute, motionless like a stone-pillar of his own carving. Indeed, to find fit utterance for such meaning as lies struggling here is a problem, to which the highest poetic minds may long be content to accomplish only approximate solutions. Meanwhile, our honest Rhymer, with no guide but the instinct of a clear natural

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talent, has created and adjusted somewhat, not without vitality of union; has avoided somewhat, the road to which lay open enough. His Village Patriarch, for example, though of an elegiac strain, is not wholly lachrymose, not without touches of rugged gaiety;—is like Life itself, with tears and toil, with laughter and rude play, such as metallurgic Yorkshire sees it;—in which sense, that wondrous Courtship of the sharp-tempered, oft-widowed Alice Green may pass, questionable, yet with a certain air of soot-stained genuineness. And so has, not a Picture, indeed, yet a sort of genial Study or Cartoon come together for him; and may endure there, after some flary oil-daubings, which we have seen framed with gilding, and hung up in proud galleries, have become rags and rubbish. To one class of readers especially, such Books as these ought to be interesting;—to the highest, that is to say, the richest class. Among our Aristocracy, there are men, we trust there are many men, who feel that they also are workmen, born to toil, ever in their great Taskmaster’s eye, faithfully with heart and head for those that with heart and hand do, under the same great Taskmaster, toil for them;—who have even this noblest and hardest work set before them—To deliver out of that Egyptian bondage to Wretchedness, and Ignorance, and Sin, the hardhanded millions, of whom this hardhanded, earnest witness, and writer, is here representative. To such men his writing will be as a Document, which they will lovingly interpret: what is dark and exasperated and acrid, in their humble Brother, they for themselves will enlighten and sweeten; taking thankfully what is the real purport of his message, and laying it earnestly to heart. Might an instructive relation, and interchange between High and Low, at length ground itself, and more and more perfect itself,—to the unspeakable profit of all parties; for if all parties are to love and help one another, the first step towards this, is that all thoroughly understand one another. To such rich men an authentic message from the hearts of poor men, from the heart of one poor man, will be welcome. To another class of our Aristocracy, again, who unhappily feel rather that they are not workmen; and profess not so much to bear any burden, as to be themselves, with utmost attainable steadiness, and if possible, gracefulness, borne,—such a phenomenon as this of the Sheffield Corn-Law Rhymer, with a Manchester Detrosier, and much else, pointing the same way, will be quite unwelcome; indeed, to the clearer-sighted, astonishing and alarming. It indicates that they find themselves, as Napoleon was wont to say, ‘in a new position;’—a position wonderful enough; of extreme singularity; to which, in the whole course of History, there is perhaps but one case in some measure parallel. The case alluded to stands recorded in the Book of Numbers: the case of Balaam the son of Beor.



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Truly, if we consider it, there are few passages more notable and pregnant in their way, than this of Balaam. The Midianitish Soothsayer (Truth-speaker, or as we should now say, Counsel-giver and Senator) is journeying forth, as he has from of old quite prosperously done, in the way of his vocation; not so much to ‘curse the people of the Lord,’ as to earn for himself a comfortable penny by such means as are possible and expedient; something, it is hoped, midway between cursing and blessing; which shall not, except in case of necessity, be either a curse or a blessing, or indeed be anything so much as a Nothing that will look like a Something and bring wages in. For the man is not dishonest; far from it: still less is he honest; but above all things, he is, has been, and will be, respectable. Did calumny ever dare to fasten itself on the fair fame of Balaam? In his whole walk and conversation, has he not shown consistency enough; ever doing and speaking the thing that was decent; with proper spirit, maintaining his status: so that friend and opponent must often compliment him, and defy the spiteful world to say, Herein art thou a Knave? And now as he jogs along, in official comfort, with brave official retinue, his heart filled with good things, his head with schemes for the Suppression of Vice, and the Cause of civil and religious Liberty all over the world;—consider what a spasm, and life-clutching, ice-taloned pang, must have shot through the brain and pericardium of Balaam, when his Ass not only on the sudden stood stock-still, defying spur and cudgel, but—began to talk, and that in a reasonable manner! Did not his face, elongating, collapse, and tremor occupy his joints? For the thin crust of Respectability has cracked asunder; and a bottomless preternatural Inane yawns under him instead. Farewell, a long farewell to all my greatness! the spirit-stirring Vote, the earpiercing Hear; the big Speech that makes ambition virtue; soft Palm-greasing first of raptures, and Cheers that emulate sphere-music: Balaam’s occupation’s gone!— As for our stout Corn-Law Rhymer, what can we say by way of valediction but this, “Well done; come again, doing better?” Advices enough there were; but all lie included under one,—To keep his eyes open, and do honestly whatsoever his hand shall find to do. We have praised him for sincerity; let him become more and more sincere; casting out all remnants of Hearsay, Imitation, ephemeral Speculation; resolutely ‘clearing his mind of Cant.’ We advised a wider course of reading: would he forgive us if we now suggested the question, Whether Rhyme is the only dialect he can write in; whether Rhyme is, after all, the natural or fittest dialect for him? In good Prose, which differs inconceivably from bad Prose, what may not be written, what may not be read; from a Waverley Novel, to an Arabic Koran, to an English Bible! Rhyme has plain advantages; which, however,

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are often purchased too dear. If the inward Thought can speak itself, instead of sing itself, let it, especially in these quite unmusical days, do the former! In any case, if the inward Thought do not sing itself, that singing of the outward Phrase is a timber-toned, false matter we could well dispense with. Will our Rhymer consider himself, then; and decide for what is actually best. Rhyme, up to this hour, never seems altogether obedient to him; and disobedient Rhyme,—who would ride on it that had once learned walking! He takes amiss that some friends have admonished him to quit Politics: we will not repeat that admonition. Let him, on this as on all other matters, take solemn counsel with his own Socrates’-Demon; such as dwells in every mortal; such as he is a happy mortal who can hear the voice of, follow the behests of, like an unalterable law. At the same time, we could truly wish to see such a mind as his engaged rather in considering what, in his own sphere, could be done, than what, in his own or other spheres, ought to be destroyed; rather in producing or preserving the True, than in mangling and slashing asunder the False. Let him be at ease: the False is already dead, or lives only with a mock life. The deathsentence of the False was of old, from the first beginning of it, written in Heaven; and is now proclaimed in the Earth, and read aloud at all market-crosses; nor are innumerable volunteer tipstaves and headsmen wanting to execute the same: for which needful service men inferior to him may suffice. Why should the heart of the Corn-Law Rhymer be troubled? Spite of ‘Bread-tax,’ he and his brave children, who will emulate their sire, have yet bread; the Workhouse, as we rejoice to fancy, has receded into the safe distance; and is now quite shut out from his poetic pleasure-ground. Why should he afflict himself with devices of ‘Boroughmongering gowls,’ or the rage of the Heathen imagining a vain thing? This matter, which he calls Corn-Law, will not have completed itself, adjusted itself into clearness, for the space of a century or two: nay after twenty centuries, what will there, or can there be for the son of Adam but Work, Work, two hands quite full of Work! Meanwhile, is not the Corn-Law Rhymer already a king, though a belligerent one; king of his own mind and faculty; and what man in the long run is king of more? Not one in the thousand, even among sceptred kings, is king of so much. Be diligent in business, then; fervent in spirit. Above all things, lay aside anger, uncharitableness, hatred, noisy tumult; avoid them, as worse than Pestilence, worse than ‘Bread-tax’ itself: For it well beseemeth kings, all mortals it beseemeth well, To possess their souls in patience, and await what can betide.

DIDEROT.

1. Mémoires, Correspondance, et Ouvrages inédits de Diderot; publiés d’après les manuscrits confiés, en mourant, par l’auteur à Grimm. 4 tom. 8vo. Paris (Paulin, Libraire-Editeur), 1831. 2. Œuvres de Denis Diderot; précédées de Mémoires historiques et philosophiques sur sa Vie et ses Ouvrages, par J. A. Naigeon. 22 tom. 8vo. Paris (Brière), 1821. The Acts of the Christian Apostles, on which, as we may say, the world has, now for eighteen centuries, had its foundation, are written in so small a compass, that they can be read in one little hour. The Acts of the French Philosophes, the importance of which is already fast exhausting itself, lie recorded in whole acres of typography, and would furnish reading for a lifetime. Nor is the stock, as we see, yet anywise complete, or within computable distance of completion. Here are Four quite new Octavos, recording the labours, voyages, victories, amours and indigestions of the Apostle Denis: it is but a year or two since a new contribution on Voltaire came before us; since Jean Jacques had a new Life written for him; and then of those Feuilles de Grimm, what incalculable masses may yet lie dormant in the Petersburg Library, waiting only to be awakened, and let slip!—Reading for a lifetime? Thomas Parr might begin reading in long-clothes, and stop in his last hundred and fiftieth year without having ended. And then, as to when the process of addition will cease, and the Acts and Epistles of the Parisian Church of Antichrist will have completed themselves; except in so far as the quantity of paper written on, or even manufactured, in those days, being finite and not infinite, the business one day or other must cease, and the Antichristian Canon close for the last time,—we yet know nothing. 223

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Meanwhile, let us nowise be understood as lamenting this stupendous copiousness, but rather as viewing it historically with patience, and indeed with satisfaction. Memoirs, so long as they are true, how stupid soever, can hardly be accumulated in excess. The stupider they are, let them simply be the sooner cast into the oven: if true, they will always instruct more or less, were it only in the way of confirmation and repetition; and, what is of vast moment, they do not mis-instruct. Day after day, looking at the high destinies which yet await Literature, which Literature will ere long address herself with more decisiveness than ever to fulfil, it grows clearer to us that the proper task of Literature lies in the domain of Belief; within which ‘Poetic Fiction,’ as it is charitably named, will have to take a quite new figure, if allowed a settlement there. Whereby were it not reasonable to prophesy that this exceeding great multitude of Novel-writers, and such like, must, in a new generation, gradually do one of two things: either retire into nurseries, and work for children, minors and semi-fatuous persons of both sexes; or else, what were far better, sweep their Novel-fabric into the dust-cart, and betake them, with such faculty as they have, to understand and record what is true,—of which, surely, there is, and will forever be, a whole Infinitude unknown to us, of infinite importance to us! Poetry, it will more and more come to be understood, is nothing but higher Knowledge; and the only genuine Romance (for grown persons) Reality. The Thinker is the Poet, the Seer: let him who sees write down according to his gift of sight; if deep and with inspired vision, then creatively, poetically; if common, and with only uninspired, every-day vision, let him at least be faithful in this, and write Memoirs. On us, still so near at hand, that Eighteenth Century in Paris, presenting itself nowise as portion of the magic web of Universal History, but only as the confused and ravelled mass of threads and thrums, ycleped Memoirs, in process of being woven into such,—imposes a rather complex relation. Of which, however, as of all such, the leading rules may happily be comprised in this very plain one, prescribed by Nature herself: to search in them, so far as they seem worthy, for whatsoever can help us forward on our own path, were it in the shape of intellectual instruction, of moral edification, nay of mere solacement and amusement. The Bourbons, indeed, took a shorter method (the like of which has been often recommended elsewhere): they shut up and hid the graves of the Philosophes, hoping that their lives and writings might likewise thereby go out of sight, and out of mind; and thus the whole business would be, so to speak, suppressed. Foolish Bourbons! These things were not done in a corner, but on high places, before the anxious eyes of all mankind: hidden they can in nowise be: to conquer them, to resist them, our first indispensable

diderot 225 preliminary is to see and comprehend them. To us, indeed, as their immediate successors, the right comprehension of them is of prime necessity; for, sent of God or of the Devil, they have plainly enough gone before us, and left us such and such a world: it is on ground of their tillage, with the stubble of their harvest standing on it, that we now have to plough. Before all things then, let us understand what ground it is; what manner of men and husbandmen these were. For which reason, be all authentic Philosophe-Memoirs welcome, each in its kind! For which reason, let us now, without the smallest reluctance, penetrate into this wondrous Gospel according to Denis Diderot, and expatiate there, to see whether it will yield us aught. In any phenomenon, one of the most important moments is the end. Now this epoch of the Eighteenth or Philosophe-century was properly the End; the End of a Social System, which for above a thousand years had been building itself together, and, after that, had begun, for some centuries (as human things all do), to moulder down. The mouldering down of a Social System is no cheerful business either to form part of, or to look at: however, at length, in the course of it, there comes a time when the mouldering changes into a rushing; active hands drive in their wedges, set to their crowbars; there is a comfortable appearance of work going on. Instead of here and there a stone falling out, here and there a handful of dust, whole masses tumble down, whole clouds and whirlwinds of dust: torches too are applied, and the rotten easily takes fire: so what with flame-whirlwind, what with dust-whirlwind, and the crash of falling towers, the concern grows eminently interesting; and our assiduous craftsmen can encourage one another with Vivats, and cries of Speed the work. Add to this, that of all labourers, no one can see such rapid extensive fruit of his labour as the Destroyer can and does: it will not seem unreasonable that, measuring from effect to cause, he should esteem his labour as the best and greatest; and a Voltaire, for example, be by his guild-brethren and apprentices confidently accounted ‘not only the greatest man of this age, but of all past ages, and perhaps the greatest that Nature could produce.’ Worthy old Nature! She goes on producing whatsoever is needful in each season of her course; and produces, with perfect composure, that Encyclopedist opinion, that she can produce no more. Such a torch-and-crowbar period, of quick rushing down and conflagration, was this of the Siècle de Louis Quinze; when the Social System having all fallen into rottenness, rain-holes and noisome decay, the shivering natives resolved to cheer their dull abode by the questionable step of setting it on fire. Questionable we call their manner of procedure; the thing itself, as all men may now see, was

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inevitable; one way or other, whether by prior burning or milder methods, the old house must needs be new-built. We behold the business of pulling down, or at least of assorting the rubbish, still go resolutely on, all over Europe: here and there some traces of new foundation, of new building up, may now also, to the eye of Hope, disclose themselves. To get acquainted with Denis Diderot and his Life were to see the significant epitome of all this, as it works on the thinking and acting soul of a man, fashions for him a singular element of existence, gives himself therein a peculiar hue and figure. Unhappily, after all that has been written, the matter still is not luminous: to us strangers, much in that foreign economy, and method of working and living, remains obscure; much in the man himself, and his inward nature and structure. But, indeed, it is several years since the present Reviewer gave up the idea of what could be called understanding any Man whatever, even himself. Every Man, within that inconsiderable figure of his, contains a whole Spirit-kingdom and Reflex of the All; and, though to the eye but some six standard feet in size, reaches downwards and upwards, unsurveyable, fading into the regions of Immensity and of Eternity. Life everywhere, as woven on that stupendous ever-marvellous ‘Loom of Time,’ may be said to fashion itself of a woof of light indeed, yet on a warp of mystic darkness: only He that created it can understand it. As to this Diderot, had we once got so far that we could, in the faintest degree, personate him; take upon ourselves his character and his environment of circumstances, and act his Life over again, in that small PrivateTheatre of ours (under our own Hat), with moderate illusiveness and histrionic effect,—that were what, in conformity with common speech, we should name understanding him, and could be abundantly content with. In his manner of appearance before the world, Diderot has been, perhaps to an extreme degree, unfortunate. His literary productions were invariably dashed off in hottest haste, and left generally, on the waste of Accident, with an ostrich-like indifference. He had to live, in France, in the sour days of a Journal de Trevoux; of a suspicious, decaying Sorbonne. He was too poor to set foreign presses, at Kehl or elsewhere, in motion; too headlong and quick of temper to seek help from those that could: thus must he, if his pen was not to lie idle, write much of which there was no publishing. His Papers accordingly are found flying about, like Sibyl’s leaves, in all corners of the world: for many years no tolerable Collection of his Writings was attempted; to this day there is none that in any sense can be called perfect. Two spurious, surreptitious Amsterdam Editions, ‘or rather formless, blundering Agglomerations,’ were all that the world saw during his life. Diderot did not hear of these for several years, and then only, it

diderot 227 is said, ‘with peals of laughter,’ and no other practical step whatever. Of the four that have since been printed (or reprinted, for Naigeon’s, of 1798, is the great original), no one so much as pretends either to be complete, or selected on any system. Brière’s, the latest, of which alone we have much personal knowledge, is a well-printed book, perhaps better worth buying than any of the others; yet without arrangement, without coherence, purport; often lamentably in need of commentary; on the whole, in reference to the wants and specialities of this time, as good as unedited. Brière seems, indeed, to have hired some person, or thing, to play the part of Editor; or rather more things than one, for they sign themselves Editors in the plural number; and from time to time, throughout the work, some asterisk attracts us to the bottom of the leaf, and to some printed matter subscribed ‘Edits.’: but unhappily the journey is for most part in vain; in the course of a volume or two, we learn too well that nothing is to be gained there; that the Note, whatever it professedly treat of, will, in strict logical speech, mean only as much as to say: ‘Reader! thou perceivest that we Editors, to the number of at least two, are alive, and if we had any information would impart it to thee.—Edits.’ For the rest, these ‘Edits.’ are polite people; and, with this uncertainty (as to their being persons or things) clearly before them, continue, to all appearance, in moderately good spirits. One service they, or Brière for them (if, indeed, Brière is not himself they, as we sometimes surmise), have accomplished for us: sought out and printed the long-looked-for, long-lost Life of Diderot by Naigeon. The lovers of biography had for years sorrowed over this concealed Manuscript, with a wistfulness from which hope had nigh fled. A certain Naigeon, the beloved disciple of Diderot, had (if his own word, in his own editorial Preface, was to be credited) written a Life of him; and, alas! whither was it now vanished? Surely all that was dark in Denis the Fatalist had there been illuminated; nay, was there not, probably, a glorious ‘Light-Street’ carried through that whole Literary Eighteenth Century; and Diderot, long belauded as ‘the most encyclopedical head that perhaps ever existed,’ was now to show himself as such, in—the new Practical Encyclopædia, philosophic, economic, speculative, digestive, of Life, in three score and ten Years, or Volumes? Diderot too was known as the vividest, noblest talker of his time: considering all that Boswell, with his slender opportunities, had made of Johnson, what was there we had not a right to expect! By Brière’s endeavour, as we said, the concealed Manuscript of Naigeon now lies, as published Volume, on this desk. Alas! a written life, too like many an acted life, where hope is one thing, fulfilment quite another! Perhaps, indeed, of all biographies ever put together by the hand of man, this of Naigeon’s is the most

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uninteresting. Foolish Naigeon! We wanted to see and know how it stood with the bodily man, the clothed, boarded, bedded, working and warfaring Denis Diderot, in that Paris of his; how he looked and lived, what he did, what he said: had the foolish Biographer so much as told us what colour his stockings were! Of all this, beyond a date or two, not a syllable, not a hint; nothing but a dull, sulky, snuffling, droning, interminable lecture on Atheistic Philosophy; how Diderot came upon Atheism, how he taught it, how true it is, how inexpressibly important. Singular enough, the zeal of the devil’s house hath eaten Naigeon up. A man of coarse, mechanical, perhaps intrinsically rather feeble intellect; and then, with the vehemence of some pulpit-drumming ‘Gowkthrapple,’ or ‘precious Mr. Jabesh Rentowel,’—only that his kirk is of the other complexion! Yet must he too see himself in a wholly backsliding world, where much theism and other scandal still rules; and many times Gowkthrapple Naigeon be tempted to weep by the streams of Babel. Withal, however, he is wooden; thoroughly mechanical, as if Vaucanson himself had made him; and that singularly tempers his fury.—Let the reader, finally, admire the bounteous produce of this Earth, and how one element bears nothing but the other matches it: here have we not the truest odium theologicum, working quite demonologically, in a worshipper of the Everlasting Nothing! So much for Naigeon; what we looked for from him, and what we have got. Must Diderot then be given up to oblivion, or remembered not as Man, but merely as Philosophic-Atheistic Logic-Mill? Did not Diderot live, as well as think? An Amateur reporter in some of the Biographical Dictionaries, declares that he heard him talk one day, in nightgown and slippers, for the space of two hours, concerning earth, sea and air, with a fulgorous impetuosity almost beyond human, rising from height to height, and at length finish the climax by ‘dashing his nightcap against the wall.’ Most readers will admit this to be biography; we, alas, must say, it comprises nearly all about the Man Diderot that hitherto would abide with us. Here, however, comes ‘Paulin, Publishing-Bookseller,’ with a quite new contribution: a long series of Letters, extending over fifteen years; unhappily only love-letters, and from a married sexagenarian; yet still letters from his own hand. Amid these insipid floods of tendresse, sensibilité, and so forth, vapid, like longdecanted small-beer, many a curious biographic trait comes to light; indeed, we can hereby see more of the individual Diderot, and his environment, and method of procedure there, than by all the other books that have yet been published of him. Forgetting or conquering the species of nausea that such a business, on the first announcement of it, may occasion, and in many of the details of it cannot

diderot 229 but confirm, the biographic reader will find this well worth looking into. Nay, is it not something, of itself, to see that Spectacle of the Philosophe in Love, or, at least, zealously endeavouring to fancy himself so? For scientific purposes a considerable tedium, of ‘noble sentiment,’ and even worse things, can be undergone. How the most encyclopedical head that perhaps ever existed, now on the borders of his grand climacteric, and already provided with wife and child, comports himself in that trying circumstance of preternuptial (and, indeed, at such age, and with so many ‘indigestions,’ almost preternatural) devotion to the queens of this earth, may, by the curious in science, who have nerves for it, be here seen. There is besides a lively Memoir of him by Mademoiselle Diderot, though too brief, and not very true-looking. Finally, in one large Volume, his Dream of d’Alembert, greatly regretted and commented upon by Naigeon; which we could have done without. For its bulk, that little Memoir by Mademoiselle is the best of the whole. Unfortunately, indeed, as hinted, Mademoiselle, resolute of all things to be piquante, writes, or rather thinks, in a smart, antithetic manner, nowise the fittest for clearness or credibility: without suspicion of voluntary falsehood, there is no appearance that this is a camera-lucida picture, or a portrait drawn by legitimate rules of art. Such resolution to be piquant is the besetting sin of innumerable persons of both sexes, and wofully mars any use there might otherwise be in their writing or their speaking. It is, or was, the fault specially imputed to the French: in a woman and Frenchwoman, who besides has much to tell us, it must even be borne with. And now, from these diverse scattered materials, let us try how coherent a figure of Denis Diderot, and his earthly Pilgrimage and Performance, we can piece together. In the ancient Town of Langres, in the month of October, 1713, it begins. Fancy Langres, aloft on its hill-top, amid Roman ruins, nigh the sources of the Saone and of the Marne, with its coarse substantial houses, and fifteen thousand inhabitants, mostly engaged in knife-grinding; and one of the quickest, clearest, most volatile and susceptive little figures of that century, just landed in the World there. In this French Sheffield, Diderot’s Father was a Cutler, master of his craft; a much-respected and respect-worthy man; one of those ancient craftsmen (now, alas! nearly departed from the earth, and sought, with little effect, by idyllists, among the ‘Scottish peasantry,’ and elsewhere) who, in the school of practice, have learned not only skill of hand, but the far harder skill of head and of heart; whose whole knowledge and virtue, being by necessity a knowledge and virtue to do somewhat, is true, and has stood trial: humble modern patriarchs, brave, wise, simple; of worth rude, but unperverted, like genuine unwrought silver, native

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from the mine! Diderot loved his father, as he well might, and regrets on several occasions that he was painted in holiday clothes, and not in the workday costume of his trade, ‘with apron and grinder’s-wheel, and spectacles pushed up,’—even as he lived and laboured, and honestly made good for himself the small section of the Universe he pretended to occupy. A man of strictest veracity and integrity was this ancient master; of great insight and patient discretion, so that he was often chosen as umpire and adviser; of great humanity, so that one day crowds of poor were to ‘follow him with tears to his long home.’ An outspoken Langres neighbour gratified the now fatherless Philosopher with this saying—‘Ah, Monsieur Diderot, you are a famous man, but you will never be your father’s equal.’ Truly, of all the wonderful illustrious persons that come to view in the biographic part of these six-and-twenty Volumes, it is a question whether this old Langres Cutler is not the worthiest; to us no other suggests himself whose worth can be admitted, without lamentable pollutions and defacements to be deducted from it. The Mother also was a loving-hearted, just woman: so Diderot might account himself well-born; and it is a credit to the man that he always, were it in the circle of kings and empresses, gratefully did so. The Jesuits were his schoolmasters: at the age of twelve the encyclopedical head was ‘tonsured.’ He was quick in seizing, strong in remembering and arranging; otherwise flighty enough; fond of sport, and from time to time getting into trouble. One grand event, significant of all this, he has himself commemorated: his Daughter records it in these terms. ‘He had chanced to have a quarrel with his comrades: it had been serious enough to bring on him a sentence of exclusion from college on some day of public examination and distribution of prizes. The idea of passing this important time at home, and grieving his parents, was intolerable: he proceeded to the college-gate; the porter refused him admittance; he presses in while some crowd is entering, and sets off running at full speed; the porter gets at him with a sort of pike he carried, and wounds him in the side: the boy will not be driven back; arrives, takes the place that belonged to him: prizes of all sorts, for composition, for memory, for poetry, he obtains them all. No doubt he had deserved them; since even the resolution to punish him could not withstand the sense of justice in his superiors. Several volumes, a number of garlands had fallen to his lot; being too weak to carry them all, he put the garlands round his neck, and, with his arms full of books, returned home. His mother was at the door; and saw him coming through the public square in this equipment, and surrounded by his schoolfellows: one should be a mother to conceive what she must have felt. He was feasted, he was caressed: but next

diderot 231 Sunday, in dressing him for church, a considerable wound was found on him, of which he had not so much as thought of complaining.’ ‘One of the sweetest moments of my life,’ writes Diderot himself, of this same business, with a slight variation, ‘was more than thirty years ago, and I remember it like yesterday, when my Father saw me coming home from the college, with my arms full of prizes that I had carried off, and my shoulders with the garlands they had given me, which, being too big for my brow, had let my head slip through them. Noticing me at a distance, he threw down his work, hastened to the door to meet me, and could not help weeping. It is a fine sight, a true man and rigorous falling to weep!’

Mademoiselle, in her quick-sparkling way, informs us, nevertheless, that the school-victor, getting tired of pedagogic admonitions and inflictions, whereof there were many, said ‘one morning’ to his father, ‘that he meant to give up school!’—“Thou hadst rather be a cutler, then?”—“With all my heart.”—They handed him an apron, and he placed himself beside his father. He spoiled whatever he laid hands on, penknives, whittles, blades of all kinds. It went on for four or five days; at the end of which he rose, proceeded to his room, got his books there, and returned to college,—and having, it would appear, in this simple manner sown his college wild-oats, never stirred from it again. To the Reverend Fathers, it seemed that Denis would make an excellent Jesuit; wherefore they set about coaxing and courting, with intent to crimp him. Here, in some minds, a certain comfortable reflection on the diabolic cunning and assiduity of these Holy Fathers, now happily all dissolved and expelled, will suggest itself. Along with which may another melancholy reflection no less be in place: namely, that these Devil-serving Jesuits should have shown a skill and zeal in their teaching vocation, such as no Heaven-serving body, of what complexion soever, anywhere on our earth now exhibits. To decipher the talent of a young vague Capability, who must one day be a man and a Reality; to take him by the hand, and train him to a spiritual trade, and set him up in it, with tools, shop, and good-will, were doing him in most cases an unspeakable service,—on this one proviso, it is true, that the trade be a just and honest one; in which proviso surely there should lie no hindrance to such service, but rather a help. Nay, could many a poor Dermody, Hazlitt, Heron, Derrick, and such like, have been trained to be a good Jesuit, were it greatly worse than to have lived painfully as a bad Nothing-at-all? But indeed, as was said, the Jesuits are dissolved; and Corporations of all sorts have perished (from corpulence); and now, instead of the seven corporate selfish spirits, we have the four-and-twenty millions of discorporate selfish; and the rule, Man, mind thyself, makes a jumble

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and a scramble, and crushing press (with dead-pressed figures, and dismembered limbs enough); into whose dark chaotic depths (for human Life is ever unfathomable) one shudders to look. Loneliest of all, weakest and worst-bested, in that world-scramble, is the extraordinary figure known in these times as Man of Letters! It appears to be indubitable that this state of matters will alter and improve itself,—in a century or two. But to return: ‘The Jesuits,’ thus sparkles Mademoiselle, ‘employed the temptation, which is always so seductive, of travelling and of liberty; they persuaded the youth to quit his home, and set forth with a Jesuit, to whom he was attached. Denis had a friend, a cousin of his own age; he entrusted his secret to him, wishing that he should accompany them. But the cousin, a tamer and discreeter personage, discovered the whole project to the father; the day of departure, the hour, all was betrayed. My grandfather kept the strictest silence; but before going to sleep he carried off the keys of the street-door; and at midnight, hearing his son descend, he presented himself before him, with the question, “Whither bound, at such an hour?” “To Paris,” replied the young man, “where I am to join the Jesuits.”—“That will not be to-night; but your desires shall be fulfilled: let us in the first place go to sleep.” ‘Next morning his father engaged two places in the public conveyance, and carried him to Paris, to the College d’Harcourt. He settled the terms of his little establishment, and bade his son good-b’ye. But the worthy man loved his child too well to leave him without being quite satisfied about his situation: he had the constancy to stay a fortnight longer, killing the time, and dying of tedium, in an inn, without seeing the sole object he was delaying for. At the end, he proceeded to the College; and my father has often told me that this proof of tenderness would have made him go to the end of the world, if the old man had required it. “Friend,” said he, “I am come to know if your health keeps good; if you are content with your superiors, with your diet, with others and with yourself. If you are not well, if you are not happy, we will go back again to your mother. If you like better to remain here, I have but to speak a word with you, to embrace you and give you my blessing.” The youth assured him that he was perfectly content, that he liked his new abode very much. My grandfather then took leave of him, and went to the Principal, to know if he was satisfied with his pupil.’

On which side also the answer proving favourable, the worthy father returned home. Denis saw little more of him; never again residing under his roof, though for many years, and to the last, a proper intercourse was kept up; not, as appears, without a visit or two on the son’s part, and certainly with the most unwearied, prudent superintendence and assistance on the father’s. Indeed, it was a worthy family, that of the Diderots; and a fair degree of natural affection

diderot 233 must be numbered among the virtues of our Philosophe. Those scenes about rural Langres, and the old homely way of life there, as delineated fictitiously in the Entretien d’un Père avec ses Enfans, and now more fully, as matter of fact, in this just-published Correspondance, are of a most innocent, cheerful, peacefully-secluded character; more pleasing, we might almost say more poetical, than could elsewhere be gathered out of Diderot’s whole Writings. Denis was the eldest of the family, and much looked up to, with all his short-comings: there was a Brother, who became a clergyman; and a truehearted, sharpwitted Sister, who remained unmarried, and at times tried to live in partnership with this latter,—rather unsuccessfully. The Clergyman being a conscientious, even straight-laced man, and Denis such as we know, they had, naturally enough, their own difficulties to keep on brotherly terms; and indeed, at length, abandoned the task as hopeless. The Abbé stood rigorous by his Breviary, from time to time addressing solemn monitions to the lost Philosophe, who also went on his way. He is somewhat snarled at by the Denisian side of the house for this; but surely without ground: it was his virtue rather; at lowest his destiny. The true Priest who could, or should, look peaceably on an Encyclopédie is yet perhaps waited for in the world; and of all false things, is not a false Priest the falsest? Meanwhile Denis, at the College d’Harcourt, learns additional Greek and Mathematics, and quite loses taste for the Jesuit career. Mad pranks enough he played, we doubt not; followed by reprimands. He made several friends, however; got intimate with the Abbé Bernis, Poet at that time; afterwards Cardinal. ‘They used to dine together, for six sous a-piece, at the neighbouring Traiteur’s; and I have often heard him vaunt the gaiety of these repasts.’ ‘His studies being finished,’ continues Mademoiselle, ‘his father wrote to M. Clement de Ris, a Procureur at Paris, and his countryman, to take him as boarder, that he might study Jurisprudence and the Laws. He continued here two years; but the business of actes and inventaires had few charms for him. All the time he could steal from the officedesk was employed in prosecuting Latin and Greek, in which he thought himself still imperfect; Mathematics, which he to the last continued passionately fond of; Italian, English, &c. In the end he gave himself up so completely to his taste for letters, that M. Clement thought it right to inform his father how ill the youth was employing his time. My grandfather then expressly commissioned M. Clement to urge and constrain him to make choice of some profession, and once for all to become Doctor, Procureur, or Advocate. My father begged time to think of it; time was given. At the end of several months these proposals were again laid before him: he answered that the profession of Doctor did not please him, for he could not think of killing any body; that the Procu-

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reur business was too difficult to execute with delicacy; that he would willingly choose the profession of Advocate, were it not that he felt an invincible repugnance to occupy himself all his life with other people’s business. “But,” said M. Clement, “what will you be then?”—“On my word, nothing, nothing whatever (Ma foi, rien, mais rien du tout). I love study; I am very happy, very content, and want nothing else.”’

Here clearly is a youth of spirit, determined to take the world on the broadside, and eat thereof, and be filled. His decided turn, like that of so many others, is for the trade of sovereign prince, in one shape or other; unhappily, however, the capital and outfit to set it up is wanting. Under which circumstances, nothing remains but to instruct M. Clement de Ris that no board-wages will henceforth be paid, and the young sovereign may, at his earliest convenience, be turned out of doors. What Denis, perched aloft in his own hired attic, may have thought of it now, does not appear. The good old Father, in stopping his allowance, had reasonably enough insisted on one of two things: either that he should betake him to some intelligible method of existence, wherein all help should be furnished him; or else return home within the week. Neither of which could Denis think of doing. A similar demand continued to be reiterated for the next ten years, but always with the like none-effect. King Denis, in his furnished attic, with or without money to pay for it, was now living and reigning, like other kings, ‘by the grace of God;’ and could nowise resolve to abdicate. A sanguineous, vehement, volatile mortal; young, and in so wide an earth, it seemed to him next to impossible but he must find gold-mines there. He lived, while victual was to be got, taking no thought for the morrow. He had books, he had merry company, a whole piping and dancing Paris round him; he could teach Mathematics, he could turn himself so many ways; nay, might not he become a Mathematician one day; a glorified Savant, and strike the stars with his sublime head! Meanwhile he is like to be overtaken by one of the sharpest human calamities, ‘cleanness of teeth.’ ‘One Shrove Tuesday morning, he rises, gropes in his pocket; he has not wherewith to dine; will not trouble his friends, who have not invited him. This day, which in childhood he had so often passed in the middle of relations who adored him, becomes sadder by remembrance: he cannot work; he hopes to dissipate his melancholy by a walk; goes to the Invalides, to the Courts, to the Bibliothèque du Roi, to the Jardin des Plantes. You may drive away tedium; but you cannot give hunger the slip. He returns to his quarters; on entering he feels unwell; the landlady gives him a little toast and wine; he goes to bed. “That day,” he has often said to me, “I swore that, if ever I came to have anything,

diderot 235 I would never in my life refuse a poor man help, never condemn my fellow-creature to a day as painful.”’

That Diderot, during all this period, escaped starvation, is plain enough by the result; but how he specially accomplished that, and the other business of living, remains mostly left to conjecture. Mademoiselle, confined at any rate within narrow limits, continues as usual too intent on sparkling; is brillante and pétillante, rather than lucent and illuminating. How inferior, for seeing with, is your brightest train of fireworks to the humblest farthing candle! Who Diderot’s companions, friends, enemies, patrons were, what his way of life was, what the Paris he lived in and from his garret looked down on was, we learn only in hints, dislocated, enigmatic. It is in general to be impressed on us, that young Denis, as a sort of spiritual swashbuckler, who went about conquering Destiny, in light rapier-fence, by way of amusement; or at lowest, in reverses, gracefully insulting her with mock reverences,—lived and acted like no other man; all which being freely admitted, we ask, with small increase of knowledge, How he did act then? He gave lessons in Mathematics, we find; but with the princeliest indifference as to payment: ‘was his scholar lively, and prompt of conception, he sat by him teaching all day; did he chance on a blockhead, he returned not back. They paid him in books, in moveables, in linen, in money, or not at all; it was quite the same.’ Farther, he made Sermons, to order; as the Devil is said to quote Scripture: a Missionary bespoke half-a-dozen of him (of Denis, that is) for the Portuguese Colonies, and paid for them very handsomely at fifty crowns each. Once, a family Tutorship came in his way, with tolerable appointments, but likewise with incessant duties: at the end of three months, he waits upon the house-father with this abrupt communication: “I am come, Monsieur, to request you to seek a new tutor; I cannot remain with you any longer.”—“But, Monsieur Diderot, what is your grievance? Have you too little salary? I will double it. Are you ill-lodged? Choose your apartment. Is your table ill-served? Order your own dinner. All will be cheap to parting with you.”—“Monsieur, look at me: a citron is not so yellow as my face. I am making men of your children; but every day I am becoming a child with them. I feel a hundred times too rich and too well off in your house; yet I must leave it: the object of my wishes is not to live better, but to keep from dying.” Mademoiselle grants that, if sometimes ‘drunk with gaiety,’ he was often enough plunged in bitterness; but then a Newtonian problem, a fine thought, or any small godsend of that sort, would instantly cheer him again. The ‘gold mines’ had not yet come to light. Meanwhile, between him and starvation, we

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can still discern Langres covertly stretching out its hand. Of any Langres man, coming in his way, Denis frankly borrows; and the good old Father refuses not to pay. The Mother is still kinder, at least softer: she sends him direct help, as she can; not by the post, but by a serving-maid, who travelled these sixty leagues on foot; delivered him a small sum from his mother; and, without mentioning it, added all her own savings thereto. This Samaritan journey she performed three times. ‘I saw her some years ago,’ adds Mademoiselle, ‘she spoke of my father with tears; her whole desire was to see him again: sixty years’ service had impaired neither her sense nor her sensibility.’ It is granted also that his company was ‘sometimes good, sometimes indifferent, not to say bad.’ Indeed, putting all things together, we can easily fancy that the last sort was the preponderating. It seems probable that Denis, during these ten years of probation, walked chiefly in the subterranean shades of Rascaldom; now swilling from full Circe-goblets, now snuffing with haggard expectancy the hungry wind; always ‘sorely flamed on from the neighbouring hell.’ In some of his fictitious writings, a most intimate acquaintance with the nether-world of Polissons, Escrocs, Filles de Joie, Maroufles, Maquerelles, and their ways of doing, comes to light: among other things (as may be seen in Jacques le Fataliste, and elsewhere), a singular theoretic expertness in what is technically named ‘raising the wind;’ which miracle, indeed Denis himself is expressly (in this Mémoire) found once performing, and in a style to require legal cognizance, had not the worthy Father ‘sneered at the dupe, and paid.’ The dupe here was a proselytising Abbé, whom the dog glozed with professions of life-weariness and turning monk; which all evaporated, once the money was in his hands. On other occasions, it might turn out otherwise, and the gudgeonfisher hook some shark of prey. Literature, except in the way of Sermons for the Portuguese Colonies, or other the like small private dealings, had not yet opened her hospitable bosom to him. Epistles, precatory and amatory, for such as had more cash than grammar, he may have written; Catalogues also, Indexes, Advertisements, and, in these latter cases, even seen himself in print. But now he ventures forward, with bolder step, towards the interior mysteries, and begins producing Translations from the English. Literature, it is true, was then, as now, the universal free-hospital and Refuge for the Destitute, where all mortals, of what colour and kind soever, had liberty to live, or at least to die: nevertheless, for an enterprising man, its resources at that time were comparatively limited. Newspapers were few; Reporting existed not, still less the inferior branches, with their fixed rate per line: Packwood and Warren, much more Panckoucke and Colburn, as yet slum-

diderot 237 bered (the last century of their slumber) in the womb of Chaos; Fragmentary Panegyric-literature had not yet come into being, therefore could not be paid for. Talent wanted a free staple and workshop, where wages might be certain; and too often, like virtue, was praised and left starving. Lest the reader overrate the munificence of the literary cornucopia in France at this epoch, let us lead him into a small historical scene, that he may see with his own eyes. Diderot is the historian; the date too is many years later, when times, if anything, were mended: ‘I had given a poor devil a manuscript to copy. The time he had promised it at having expired, and my man not appearing, I grow uneasy; set off to hunt him out. I find him in a hole the size of my hand, almost without daylight, not the wretchedest tatter of serge to cover his walls; two straw-bottom chairs, a flock-bed, the coverlet chiselled with worms, without curtains; a trunk in a corner of the chimney, rags of all sorts hooked above it; a little white-iron lamp, with a bottle for pediment to it; on a deal shelf, a dozen of excellent books. I chatted with him three-quarters of an hour. My gentleman was naked as a worm’ (nu comme un ver: it was August); ‘lean, dingy, dry, yet serene, complaining of nothing, eating his junk of bread with appetite, and from time to time caressing his beloved, who reclined on that miserable truckle, taking up two-thirds of the room. If I had not known that happiness resides in the soul, my Epictetus of the Rue Hyacinthe might have taught it me.’

Notwithstanding all which, Denis, now in his twenty-ninth year, sees himself necessitated to fall desperately, and over head and ears, in love. It was a virtuous, pure attachment; his first of that sort, probably also his last. Readers who would see the business poetically delineated, and what talent Diderot had for such delineations, may read this Scene in the once-noted Drama of the Père de Famille. It is known that he drew from the life; and with few embellishments, which too, except in the French Theatre, do not beautify. Act I.—Scene VII. Saint-Albin. Father, you shall know all. Alas! how else can I move you?—The first time I ever saw her was at church. She was on her knees at the foot of the altar, beside an aged woman, whom I took for her mother. Ah father! what modesty, what charms! . . . . Her image followed me by day, haunted me by night, left me rest nowhere. I lost my cheerfulness, my health, my peace. I could not live without seeking to find her. . . . . She has changed me; I am no longer what I was. From the first moment, all shameful desires fade away from my soul; respect and admiration succeed them. Without rebuke

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or restraint on her part, perhaps before she had raised her eyes on me, I became timid; more so from day to day; and soon I felt as little free to attempt her virtue as her life. The Father. And who are these women? How do they live? Saint-Albin. Ah! if you knew it, unhappy as they are! Imagine that their toil begins before day, and often they have to continue it through the night. The mother spins on the wheel: hard, coarse cloth is between the soft small fingers of Sophie, and wounds them.* Her eyes, the brightest eyes in this world, are worn at the light of a lamp. She lives in a garret, within four bare walls; a wooden table, a couple of chairs, a truckle-bed, that is their furniture. O Heavens, when ye fashioned such a creature, was this the lot ye destined her! The Father. And how got you access? Speak me truth. Saint-Albin. It is incredible what obstacles I had, what I surmounted. Though now lodged there, under the same roof, I at first did not seek to see them: if we met on the stairs, coming up, going down, I saluted them respectfully. At night, when I came home (for all day I was supposed to be at my work), I would go knock gently at their door; ask them for the little services usual among neighbours,—as water, fire, light. By degrees they grew accustomed to me; rather took to me. I offered to serve them in little things; for instance, they disliked going out at night; I fetched and carried for them.’

The real truth here is, “I ordered a set of shirts from them; said I was a Churchlicenciate just bound for the Seminary of St. Nicolas,—and, above all, had the tongue of the old serpent.” But to skip much, and finish: ‘Yesterday I came as usual: Sophie was alone; she was sitting with her elbows on the table, her head leant on her hand; her work had fallen at her feet. I entered without her hearing me: she sighed. Tears escaped from between her fingers, and ran along her arms. For some time, of late, I had seen her sad. Why was she weeping? What was it that grieved her? Want it could no longer be; her labour and my attentions provided against that. Threatened by the only misfortune terrible to me, I did not hesitate: I threw myself at her knees. What was her surprise; Sophie, said I, you weep; what ails you? Do not hide your trouble from me: speak to me; oh, speak to me! She spoke not. Her tears continued flowing. Her eyes, where calmness no longer dwelt, but tears and anxiety, bent towards me, then turned away, then turned to me again. She said only, Poor Sergi! unhappy Sophie!—I had laid my face on her knees; I was wetting her apron with my tears.’

* The real trade appears to have been a ‘sempstress one in laces and linens;’ the poverty is somewhat exaggerated: otherwise the shadow may be faithful enough.

diderot 239 In a word, there is nothing for it but marriage. Old Diderot, joyous as he was to see his Son once more, started back in indignation and derision from such a proposal; and young Diderot had to return to Paris, and be forbid the beloved house, and fall sick, and come to the point of death, before the fair one’s scruples could be subdued. However, she sent to get news of him; ‘learnt that his room was a perfect dog-kennel, that he lay without nourishment, without attendance, wasted, sad: thereupon she took her resolution; mounted to him, promised to be his wife; and mother and daughter now became his nurses. So soon as he recovered, they went to Saint-Pierre, and were married at midnight (1744).’ It only remains to add, that if the Sophie whom he had wedded fell much short of this Sophie whom he delineates, the fault was less in her qualities than in his own unstable fancy: as in youth she was ‘tall, beautiful, pious, and wise,’ so through a long life she seems to have approved herself a woman of courage, discretion, faithful affection; far too good a wife for such a husband. ‘My father was of too jealous a character to let my mother continue a traffic, which obliged her to receive strangers and treat with them: he begged her therefore to give up that business; she was very loth to consent; poverty did not alarm her on her own account, but her mother was old, unlikely to remain with her long, and the fear of not being able to provide for all her wants was afflicting: nevertheless, persuading herself that this sacrifice was for her husband’s happiness, she made it. A charwoman looked in daily, to sweep their little lodging, and fetch provisions for the day; my mother managed all the rest. Often when my father dined or supped out, she would dine or sup on bread; and took a great pleasure in the thought that, next day, she could double her little ordinary for him. Coffee was too considerable a luxury for a household of this sort: but she could not think of his wanting it, and every day gave him six sous to go and have his cup, at the Café de la Régence, and see the chess-playing there. ‘It was now that he translated the History of Greece in three volumes’ (by the English Stanyan); ‘he sold it for a hundred crowns. This sum brought a sort of supply into the house. * * * ‘My mother had been brought to bed of a daughter: she was now big a second time. In spite of her precautions, solitary life, and the pains she had taken to pass off her husband as her brother, his family, in the seclusion of their province, learnt that he was living with two women. Directly the birth, the morals, the character of my mother became objects of the blackest calumny. He foresaw that discussions by letter would be endless: he found it simpler to put his wife into the stage-coach, and send her to his parents. She had just been delivered of a son; he announced this event to his father, and the departure of my mother. “She set out yesterday,” said he; “she will be with you in three days. You will say

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to her what shall please you, and send her back when you are tired of her.” Singular as this sort of explanation was, they determined, in any case, on sending my father’s sister to receive her. Their first welcome was more than cold: the evening grew less painful to her; but next morning betimes she went in to her father-in-law; treated him as if he had been her own father; her respect and her caresses charmed the good, sensible old man. Coming down stairs, she began working; refused nothing that could please a family whom she was not afraid of, and wished to be loved by. Her conduct was the only excuse she gave for her husband’s choice: her appearance had prepossessed them in her favour; her simplicity, her piety, her talents for household economy secured her their tenderness; they promised her that my father’s disinheritment should be revoked. They kept her three months; and sent her back loaded with whatever they could think would be useful or agreeable to her.’

All this is beautiful, told with a graceful simplicity; the beautiful, real-ideal prose-idyl of a Literary Life: but, alas, in the music of your prose-idyl there lurks ever an accursed dissonance (or the players make one); where men are, there will be mischief. ‘This journey,’ writes Mademoiselle, ‘cost my mother many tears.’ What will the reader say when he finds that Monsieur Diderot has, in the interim, taken up with a certain Madame de Puisieux; and welcomes his brave Wife (worthy to have been a true man’s) with a heart and bosom henceforth estranged from her! Madame Diderot ‘made two journeys to Langres, and both were fatal to her peace.’ This affair of the Puisieux, for whom he despicably enough not only burned, but toiled and made money, kept him busy for some ten years; till at length, finding that she played false, he gave her up; and minor miscellaneous flirtations seem to have succeeded. But, returning from her second journey, the much-enduring House-mother finds him in meridian glory with one Voland, the un-maiden Daughter of a ‘Financier’s Widow;’ to whom we owe this present preternuptial Correspondence; to whom indeed he mainly devoted himself for the rest of his life,—‘parting his time between his study and her;’ to his own Wife and household giving little save the trouble of cooking for him, and of painfully, with repressed or irrepressible discontent, keeping up some appearance of terms with him. Alas! alas! and his Puisieux seems to have been a hollow Mercenary (to whose scandalous soul he reckons obscenest of Books fit nutriment); and the Voland an elderly Spinster, with cœur sensible, cœur honnête, ame tendre et bonne! And then those old dinings on bread; the six sous spared for his cup of coffee! Foolish Diderot, scarcely pardonable Diderot! A hard saying is this, yet a true one: Scoundrelism signifies injustice, and should be left to scoundrels alone. For thy wronged Wife, whom thou hadst

diderot 241 sworn far other things to, ever in her afflictions (here so hostilely scanned and written of ), a true sympathy will awaken; and sorrow that the patient, or even impatient, endurances of such a woman should be matter of speculation and self-gratulation to such another. But looking out of doors now, from an indifferently-guided Household, which must have fallen shamefully in pieces, had not a wife been wiser and stronger than her husband,—we find the Philosophe making distinct way with the Bibliopolic world; and likely, in the end, to pick up a kind of living there. The Stanyan’s History of Greece; the other English-translated, nameless Medical Dictionary, are dropped by all editors as worthless: a like fate might, with little damage, have overtaken the Essai sur le Mérite et la Vertu, rendered or redacted out of Shaftesbury’s Characteristics. In which redaction, with its Notes, of anxious Orthodoxy, and bottomless Falsehood looking through it, we individually have found nothing, save a confirmation of the old twice-repeated experience, That in Shaftesbury’s famed Book there lay, if any meaning, a meaning of such long-windedness, circumvolution and lubricity, that, like an eel, it must forever slip through our fingers, and leave us alone among the gravel. One reason may partly be, that Shaftesbury was not only a Sceptic but an Amateur Sceptic; which sort a darker, more earnest, have long since swallowed and abolished. The meaning of a delicate, perfumed, gentlemanly individual standing there, in that war of Titans (hill meeting hill with all its woods), and putting out hand to it—with a pair of tweezers? However, our Denis has now emerged from the intermediate Hades of Translatorship into the Heaven of perfected Authorship; empties his commonplace book of Pensées Philosophiques (it is said in the space of four days); writes his Metaphysico-Baconian phantasmagories on the Interprétation de la Nature (an endless business to ‘interpret’); and casts the money-produce of both into the lap of his Scarlet-woman Puisieux. Then forthwith, for the same object, in a shameful fortnight, puts together the beastliest of all past, present, or future dull Novels; a difficult feat, unhappily not an impossible one. If any mortal creature, even a Reviewer, be again compelled to glance into that Book, let him bathe himself in running water, put on change of raiment, and be unclean until the even. As yet the Metaphysico-Atheistic Lettre sur les Sourds et Muets, and Lettre sur les Aveugles, which brings glory and a three months’ lodging in the Castle of Vincennes, are at years distance in the back-ground. But already by his gilded tongue, growing repute, and sanguine projecting temper, he has persuaded Booksellers to pay off the Abbé Gua, with his lean Version of Chambers’s Dictionary of Arts, and convert it into an Encyclopédie, with himself and

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D’Alembert for Editors; and is henceforth (from the year of grace 1751) a duly dis-indentured Man of Letters, an indisputable and more and more conspicuous member of that surprising guild. Literature, ever since its appearance in our European world, especially since it emerged out of Cloisters into the open Market-place, and endeavoured to make itself room, and gain a subsistence there, has offered the strangest phases, and consciously or unconsciously done the strangest work. Wonderful Ark of the Deluge, where so much that is precious, nay priceless to mankind, floats carelessly onwards through the Chaos of distracted Times,—if so be it may one day find an Ararat to rest on, and see the waters abate! The History of Literature, especially for the last two centuries, is our proper Church History; the other Church, during that time, having more and more decayed from its old functions and influence, and ceased to have a history. And now, to look only at the outside of the matter, think of the Tassos and older or later Racines, struggling to raise their office from its pristine abasement of court-jester; and teach and elevate the World, in conjunction with that other quite heteroclite task of solacing and glorifying some Pullus Jovis, in plush cloak and other gilt or golden kingtackle, that they in the interim might live thereby! Consider the Shakspeares and Molières, plying a like trade, but on a double material; glad of any royal or noble patronage, but eliciting, as their surer stay, some fractional contribution from the thick-skinned, many-pocketed million. Saumaises, now bully-fighting ‘for a hundred gold Jacobuses,’ now closeted with Queen Christinas, who blow the fire with their own queenly mouth, to make a pedant’s breakfast; anon cast forth (being scouted and confuted), and dying of heartbreak, coupled with henpeck. Then the Laws of Copyright, the Quarrels of Authors, the Calamities of Authors; the Heynes dining on boiled peasecods, the Jean Pauls on water; the Johnsons bedded and boarded on fourpence-halfpenny a-day. Lastly, the unutterable confusion worse confounded of our present Periodical existence; when, among other phenomena, a young Fourth Estate (whom all the three elder may try if they can hold) is seen sprawling and staggering tumultuously through the world; as yet but a huge, raw-boned lean calf; fast growing, however, to be a Pharaoh’s lean-cow,—of whom let the fat-kine beware! All this of the mere exterior, or dwelling-place of Literature, not yet glancing at the internal, at the Doctrines emitted or striven after, will the future Eusebius and Mosheim have to record; and (in some small degree) explain to us what it means. Unfathomable is its meaning: Life, mankind’s Life, ever from its unfathomable fountains, rolls wondrous on, another though the same; in Literature too, the seeing eye will distinguish Apostles of the Gentiles, Proto- and Deutero-martyrs; still less

diderot 243 will the Simon Magus, or Apollonius with the golden thigh be wanting. But all now is on an infinitely wider scale; the elements of it all swim far-scattered, and still only striving towards union;—whereby, indeed, it happens that to the most, under this new figure, they are unrecognisable. French Literature, in Diderot’s time, presents itself in a certain state of culmination, where causes long prepared are rapidly becoming effects; and was doubtless in one of its more notable epochs. Under the Economic aspect, in France, as in England, this was the Age of Booksellers; when, as a Dodsley and Miller could risk capital in an English Dictionary, a Lebreton and Briasson could become purveyors and commissariat officers for a French Encyclopédie. The world forever loves Knowledge, and would part with its last sixpence in payment thereof: this your Dodsleys and Lebretons well saw; moreover they could act on it, for as yet Puffery was not. Alas, offences must come; Puffery from the first was inevitable: woe to them, nevertheless, by whom it did come! Meanwhile, as we said, it slept in Chaos; the Word of man and tradesman was still partially credible to man. Booksellers were therefore a possible, were even a necessary class of mortals, though a strangely anomalous one; had they kept from lying, or lied with any sort of moderation, the anomaly might have lasted still longer. For the present, they managed in Paris as elsewhere: the Timberheaded could perceive that for Thought the world would give money; farther, by mere shopkeeper cunning, that true Thought, as in the end sure to be recognised, and by nature infinitely more durable, was better to deal in than false; farther, by credible tradition of public consent, that such and such had the talent of furnishing true Thought (say rather truer, as the more correct word): on this hint the Timber-headed spake and bargained. Nay, let us say he bargained, and worked, for most part, with industrious assiduity, with patience, suitable prudence; nay, sometimes with touches of generosity and magnanimity, beautifully irradiating the circumambient mass of greed and dulness. For the rest, the two high contracting parties roughed it out as they could; so that if Booksellers, in their back parlour Valhalla, drank wine out of the sculls of Authors (as they were fabled to do), Authors, in the front-apartments, from time to time, gave them a Rowland for their Oliver: a Johnson can knock his Osborne on the head, like any other Bull of Bashan; a Diderot commands his corpulent Panckouke to “leave the room and go to the devil: allez au diable, sortez de chez moi!” Under the internal or Doctrinal aspect, again, French Literature, we can see, knew far better what it was about than English. That fable, indeed, first set afloat by some Trevoux Journalist of the period, and which has floated foolishly enough into every European ear since then, of there being an Association

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specially organized for the destruction of government, religion, society, civility (not to speak of tithes, rents, life and property), all over the world; which hell-serving Association met at the Baron d’Holbach’s, there had its blue-light sederunts, and published Transactions legible to all,—was and remains nothing but a fable. Minute-books, president’s hammer, ballot-box, punch-bowl of such Pandemonium have not been produced to the world. The sect of Philosophes existed at Paris, but as other sects do; held together by loosest, informal, unrecognised ties; within which every one, no doubt, followed his own natural objects, of proselytism, of glory, of getting a livelihood. Meanwhile, whether in constituted association or not, French Philosophy resided in the persons of the French Philosophes; and, as a mighty deep-struggling Force, was at work there. Deep-struggling, irrepressible; the subterranean fire which long heaved unquietly, and shook all things with an ominous motion, was here, we can say, forming itself a decided spiracle;—which, by and by, as French Revolution, became that volcano-crater, world-famous, world-appalling, world-maddening, as yet very far from closed! Fontenelle said, he wished he could live sixty years longer, and see what that universal infidelity, depravity, and dissolution of all ties would turn to. In three-score years, Fontenelle might have seen strange things; but not the end of the phenomenon perhaps in three hundred. Why France became such a volcano-crater, what specialties there were in the French national character, and political, moral, intellectual condition, by virtue whereof French Philosophy there and not elsewhere, then and not sooner or later, evolved itself,—is an inquiry that has been often put, and cheerfully answered; the true answer of which might lead us far. Still deeper than this Whence were the question of Whither;—with which, also, we intermeddle not here. Enough for us to understand that there verily a Scene of Universal History is being enacted, a little living time-picture in the bosom of eternity;—and, with the feeling due in that case, to ask not so much Why it is, as What it is. Leaving priorities and posteriorities aside, and cause-and-effect to adjust itself elsewhere, conceive so many vivid spirits thrown together into the Europe, into the Paris of that day, and see how they demean themselves, what they work out and attain there. As the mystical enjoyment of an object goes infinitely farther than the intellectual, and we can look at a picture with delight and profit after all that we can be taught about it is grown poor and wearisome; so here, and by far stronger reason, these light Letters of Diderot to the Voland, again unveiling and showing Parisian Life, are worth more to us than many a heavy tome laboriously struggling to explain it. True, we have seen the picture, that same Parisian life-picture, ten times already; but we can look at it an eleventh time; nay this, as we said, is

diderot 245 not a canvas-picture, but a life-picture, of whose significance there is no end for us. Grudge not the elderly Spinster her existence, then; say not she has lived in vain. For what of History there is, in this preternuptial Correspondence, should we not endeavour to forgive and forget all else, the sensibilité itself ? The curtain which had fallen for almost a century is again drawn up; the scene is alive and busy. Figures grown historical are here seen face to face, and again live before us. A strange theatre that of French Philosophism; a strange dramatic corps! Such another corps for brilliancy and levity, for gifts and vices, and all manner of sparkling inconsistencies, the world is not like to see again. There is Patriarch Voltaire, of all Frenchmen the most French; he whom the French had, as it were, long waited for, ‘to produce at once, in a single life, all that French genius most prized and most excelled in;’ of him and his wondrous ways, as of one known, we need say little. Instant enough to ‘crush the Abomination, écraser l’Infame,’ he has prosecuted his Jesuit-hunt over many lands and many centuries, in many ways, with an alacrity that has made him dangerous, and endangered him: he now sits at Ferney, withdrawn from the active toils of the chace; cheers on his hunting-dogs mostly from afar: Diderot, a beagle of the first vehemence, he has rather to restrain. That all extant and possible Theology be abolished, will not content the fell Denis, as surely it might have done; the Patriarch must address him a friendly admonition on his Atheism, and make him eat it again. D’Alembert too we may consider as one known; of all the Philosophe fraternity, him who in speech and conduct agrees best with our English notions; an independent, patient, prudent man; of great faculty, especially of great clearness and method; famous in Mathematics; no less so, to the wonder of some, in the intellectual provinces of Literature. A foolish wonder; as if the Thinker could think only on one thing, and not on any thing he had a call towards. D’Alembert’s Mélanges, as the impress of a genuine spirit, in peculiar position and probation, have still instruction for us, both of head and heart. The man lives retired here, in questionable seclusion with his Espinasse; incurs the suspicion of apostacy, because in the Encyclopédie he saw no Evangel and celestial Revelation, but only a huge Folio Dictionary; and would not venture life and limb on it, without a ‘consideration.’ Sad was it to Diderot to see his fellow-voyager make for port, and disregard signals, when the sea-krakens rose round him! They did not quarrel; were always friendly when they met, but latterly met only at the rate of ‘once in the two years.’ D’Alembert died when Diderot was on his deathbed: “My friend,” said the latter to the news-bringer, “a great light is gone out.” Hovering in the distance, with woe-struck, minatory air, stern-beckoning, comes Rousseau. Poor Jean Jacques! Alternately deified, and cast to the dogs; a

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deep-minded, high-minded, even noble, yet wofully misarranged mortal, with all misformations of Nature intensated to the verge of madness by unfavourable Fortune. A lonely man; his life a long soliloquy! The wandering Tiresias of the time;—in whom, however, did lie prophetic meaning, such as none of the others offer. Whereby indeed it might partly be that the world went to such extremes about him; that, long after his departure, we have seen one whole nation worship him, and a Burke, in the name of another, class him with the offscourings of the earth. His true character, with its lofty aspirings and poor performings; and how the spirit of the man worked so wildly, like celestial fire in a thick dark element of chaos, and shot forth ethereal radiance, all-piercing lightning, yet could not illuminate, was quenched and did not conquer: this, with what lies in it, may now be pretty accurately appreciated. Let his history teach all whom it concerns, to ‘harden themselves against the ills which Mother Nature will try them with;’ to seek within their own soul what the world must forever deny them; and say composedly to the Prince of the Power of this lower Earth and Air: Go thou thy way; I go mine! Rousseau and Diderot were early friends: who has forgotten how Jean Jacques walked to the Castle of Vincennes, where Denis (for heretical Metaphysics, and irreverence to the Strumpetocracy) languishes in durance; and devised his first Literary Paradox on the road thither? Their Quarrel, which, as a fashionable hero of the time complains, occupied all Paris, is likewise famous enough. The reader recollects that heroical epistle of Diderot to Grimm on that occasion, and the sentence: ‘Oh, my friend, let us continue virtuous, for the state of those who have ceased to be so makes me shudder.’ But is the reader aware what the fault of him ‘who had ceased to be so’ was? A series of ravelments and squabbling grudges, ‘which,’ says Mademoiselle with much simplicity, ‘the Devil himself could not understand.’ Alas, the Devil well understood it, and Tyrant Grimm too did, who had the ear of Diderot, and poured into it his own unjust, almost abominable spleen. Clean paper need not be soiled with a foul story, where the main actor is only ‘Tyran le Blanc;’ enough to know that the continually virtuous Tyrant found Diderot ‘extremely impressionable;’ so poor Jean Jacques must go his ways (with both the scath and the scorn), and among his many woes bear this also. Diderot is not blameable; pitiable rather; for who would be a pipe, which not Fortune only, but any Sycophant may play tunes on? Of this same Tyrant Grimm, desiring to speak peaceably, we shall say little. The man himself is less remarkable than his fortune. Changed times indeed, since the thread-bare German Bursch quitted Ratisbon, with the sound of catcalls in his ears, the condemned ‘Tragedy, Banise,’ in his pocket; and fled south-

diderot 247 ward, on a thin travelling-tutorship;—since Rousseau met you, Herr Grimm, ‘a young man described as seeking a situation, and whose appearance indicated the pressing necessity he was in of soon finding one!’ Of a truth, you have flourished since then, Herr Grimm: his introductions of you to Diderot, to Holbach, to the black-locked D’Epinay, where not only you are wormed in, but he is wormed out, have turned to somewhat; the Thread-bare has become well-napped, and got ruffles and jewel-rings, and walks abroad in sword and bag-wig, and lackers his brass countenance with rouge, and so (as Tyran le Blanc) recommends himself to the fair; and writes Parisian Philosophe-gossip to the Hyperborean Kings, and his ‘Grimm’s Leaves,’ copied ‘to the number of twenty,’ are bread of life to many; and cringes here, and domineers there; and lives at his ease in the Creation, in an effective tendresse with the D’Epinay, husband or custom of the country not objecting!—Poor Börne, the new German Flying-Sansculotte, feels his mouth water, at Paris, over these flesh-pots of Grimm; reflecting with what heart he too could write ‘Leaves,’ and be fed thereby. Börne, my friend, those days are done! While Northern Courts were a ‘Lunar Versailles,’ it was well to have an Uriel stationed in their Sun there; but of all spots in this Universe (hardly excepting Tophet) Paris now is the one we at court could best dispense with news from: never more, in these centuries, will a Grimm be missioned thither; never a ‘Leaf of Börne’ be blown court-wards by any wind. As for the Grimm, we can see that he was a man made to rise in the world: a fair, even handsome outfit of talent, wholly marketable; skill in music, and the like, encyclopedical readiness in all ephemera; saloon-wit, a trenchant, unhesitating head; above all, a heart ever in the right place,—in the market-place, namely, and marked ‘for sale to the highest bidder.’ Really a methodical, adroit, managing man. By ‘hero-worship,’ and the cunning appliance of alternate sweet and sullen, he has brought Diderot to be his patient milk-cow, whom he can milk an Essay from, a Volume from, when he lists. Victorious Grimm! He even escaped those same ‘horrors of the French Revolution’ (with loss of his ruffles); and was seen at the Court of Gotha, sleek and well to live, within the memory of man. The world has heard of M. le Chevalier de Saint-Lambert; considerable in Literature, in Love and War. He is here again, singing the frostiest Pastorals; happily, however, only in the distance, and the jingle of his wires soon dies away. Of another Chevalier, worthy Jaucourt, be the name mentioned, and little more: he digs unweariedly, mole-wise, in the Encyclopedic field, catching what he can, and shuns the light. Then there is Helvetius, the well-fed Farmer-general, enlivening his sybaritic life with metaphysic paradoxes. His revelations, De l’Homme and De l’Esprit breathe the freest Philosophe-spirit, with Philanthropy

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and Sensibility enough: the greater is our astonishment to find him here so ardent a Preserver of the Game: 5

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‘This Madame de Nocé,’ writes Diderot, treating of the Bourbonne Hot-springs, ‘is a neighbour of Helvetius. She told us, the Philosopher was the unhappiest man in the world on his estates. He is surrounded there by neighbours and peasants who detest him. They break the windows of his mansion, plunder his grounds by night, cut his trees, throw down his walls, tear up his spiked paling. He dare not go to shoot a hare, without a train of people to guard him. You will ask me, how it has come to pass? By a boundless zeal for his game. M. Fagon, his predecessor, used to guard the grounds with two keepers and two guns. Helvetius has twenty-four, and cannot do it. These men have a small premium for every poacher they can catch; and there is no sort of mischief they will not cause to get more and more of these. Besides, they are themselves so many hired poachers. Again, the border of his woods was inhabited by a set of poor people, who had got huts there; he has caused all the huts to be swept away. It is these, and such acts of repeated tyranny, that have raised him enemies of all kinds; and the more insolent, says Madame de Nocé, as they have discovered that the worthy Philosopher is a coward. I would not have his fine estate of Voré as a present, had I to live there in these perpetual alarms. What profits he draws from that mode of management I know not: but he is alone there; he is hated,—he is in fear. Ah! how much wiser was our lady Geoffrin, when speaking of a lawsuit that tormented her, she said to me, “Get done with my lawsuit; they want money? I have it. Give them money. What better use can I make of my money than to buy peace with it?” In Helvetius’s place, I would have said, “They kill me a few hares and rabbits, let them be doing. These poor creatures have no shelter but my forest, let them stay there.” I should have reasoned like M. Fagon, and been adored like him.’

Alas! are not Helvetius’s preserves, at this hour, all broken up, and lying desecrated? Neither can the others, in what latitude and longitude soever, remain eternally impregnable. But if a Rome was once saved by geese, need we wonder that an England is lost by partridges? We are sons of Eve, who bartered Paradise for an apple. But to return to Paris and its Philosophe Church-militant. Here is a Marmontel, an active subaltern thereof, who fights in a small way, through the Mercure; and, in rose-pink romance-pictures, strives to celebrate the ‘moral sublime.’ An Abbé Morellet, busy with the Corn Laws, walks in at intervals, stooping, shrunk together, ‘as if to get nearer himself, pour être plus près de lui-même.’ The rogue Galiani alternates between Naples and Paris; Galiani, by good luck, has ‘forever settled the question of the Corn Laws;’ an idle fellow otherwise; a spiri-

diderot 249 tual Lazzarone; full of frolics, wanton quips, anti-jesuit gesta, and wild Italian humour; the sight of his swart, sharp face is the signal for Laughter,—in which, indeed, the Man himself has unhappily evaporated, leaving no result behind him. Of the Baron d’Holbach thus much may be said, that both at Paris and at Grandval he gives good dinners. His two or three score volumes of Atheistic Philosophism, which he published (at his own expense), may now be forgotten, and even forgiven. A purse open and deep, a heart kindly-disposed, quiet, sociable, or even friendly; these, with excellent wines, gain him a literary elevation, which no thinking faculty he had could have pretended to. An easy, laconic gentleman; of grave politeness; apt to lose temper at play; yet, on the whole, good-humoured, eupeptic and eupractic: there may he live and let live. Nor is heaven’s last gift to man wanting here; the natural sovereignty of women. Your Châtelets, Epinays, Espinasses, Geoffrins, Deffands, will play their part too; there shall, in all senses, be not only Philosophers, but Philosophesses. Strange enough is the figure these women make: good souls, it was a strange world for them. What with metaphysics and flirtation, system of nature, fashion of dress-caps, vanity, curiosity, jealousy, atheism, rheumatism, traités, bouts-rimés, noble-sentiments and rouge-pots,—the vehement female intellect sees itself sailing on a chaos, where a wiser might have wavered, if not foundered. For the rest (as an accurate observer has remarked), they become a sort of Lady-Presidents in that society; attain great influence; and, imparting as well as receiving, communicate to all that is done or said somewhat of their own peculiar tone. In a world so wide and multifarious, this little band of Philosophes, acting and speaking as they did, had a most various reception to expect; votes divided to the uttermost. The mass of mankind, busy enough with their own work, of course heeded them only when forced to do it; these, meanwhile, form the great neutral element, in which the battle has to fight itself; the two hosts, according to their several success, to recruit themselves. Of the Higher Classes, it appears, the small proportion not wholly occupied in eating and dressing, and therefore open to such a question, are in their favour,—strange as to us it may seem; the spectacle of a Church pulled down is, in stagnant times, amusing; nor do the generality, on either side, yet see whither ulteriorly it is tending. The Reading World, which was then more than now the intelligent, inquiring world, reads eagerly (as it will ever do) whatsoever skilful, sprightly, reasonable-looking word is written for it; enjoying, appropriating the same; perhaps without fixed judgment, or deep care of any kind. Careful enough, fixed enough, on the

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other hand, is the Jesuit Brotherhood; in these days sick unto death; but only the bitterer and angrier for that. Dangerous are the death-convulsions of an expiring Sorbonne, ever and anon filling Paris with agitation: it behoves your Philosophe to walk warily, and, in many a critical circumstance, to weep with the one cheek, and smile with the other. Nor is Literature itself wholly Philosophe: apart from the Jesuit regulars, in their Trevoux Journals, Sermons, Episcopal Charges, and other camps or casemates, a considerable Guerrilla, or Reviewer force (consisting, as usual, of smugglers, unemployed destitute persons, deserters who have been refused promotion, and other the like broken characters) has organized itself, and maintains a harassing bush-warfare: of these the chieftain is Fréron, once in tolerable repute with the world, had he not, carrying too high a head, struck his foot on stones, and stumbled. By the continual depreciating of talent grown at length undeniable, he has sunk low enough: Voltaire, in the Ecossaise, can bring him on the stage, and have him killed by laughter, under the name, sufficiently recognisable, of Wasp (in French, Frelon). Another Empecedor, still more hateful, is Palissot, who has written and got acted a Comedy of Les Philosophes, at which the Parisians, spite of its dulness, have also laughed. To laugh at us, the so meritorious us! Heard mankind ever the like? For poor Palissot, had he fallen into Philosophe hands, serious bodily tar-and-feathering might have been apprehended: as it was, they do what the pen, with its gall and copperas, can; invoke Heaven and Earth to witness the treatment of divine Philosophy;—with which view, in particular, friend Diderot seems to have composed his Rameau’s Nephew, wherein Palissot and others of his kidney are (figuratively speaking) mauled and mangled, and left not in dog’s likeness. So divided was the world, Literary, Courtly, Miscellaneous, on this matter: it was a confused anomalous time. Among its more notable anomalies may be reckoned the relations of French Philosophism to Foreign Crowned Heads. In Prussia there is a Philosophe King; in Russia a Philosophe Empress: the whole North swarms with kinglets and queenlets of the like temper. Nay, as we have seen, they entertain their special ambassador in Philosophedom, their lion’s-provider to furnish spiritual Philosophe-provender; and pay him well. The great Frederick, the great Catherine are as nursing-father and nursing-mother to this new Church of Antichrist; in all straits, ready with money, honourable royal asylum, help of every sort,—which, however, except in the money-shape, the wiser of our Philosophes are shy of receiving. Voltaire had tried it in the asylum-shape, and found it unsuitable; D’Alembert and Diderot decline repeating the experiment. What miracles are wrought by the arch-magician Time! Could these Fredericks,

diderot 251 Catherines, Josephs, have looked forward some three-score years; and beheld the Holy Alliance in conference at Laybach! But so goes the world: kings are not seraphic doctors, with gift of prescience, but only men, with common eyesight, participating in the influences of their generation; kings too, like all mortals, have a certain love of knowledge; still more infallibly, a certain desire of applause; a certain delight in mortifying one another. Thus what is persecuted here finds refuge there; and ever, one way or other, the New works itself out full-formed from under the Old; nay the Old, as in this instance, sits sedulously hatching a cockatrice that will one day devour it. No less anomalous, confused and contradictory is the relation of the Philosophes to their own Government. How, indeed, could it be otherwise, their relation to Society being still so undecided; and the Government, which might have endeavoured to adjust and preside over this, being itself in a state of anomaly, death-lethargy, and doting decrepitude? The true conduct and position for a French Sovereign towards French Literature, in that century, might have been, though perhaps of all things the most important, one of the most difficult to discover and accomplish. What chance was there that a thick-blooded Louis Quinze, from his Parc aux Cerfs, should discover it, should have the faintest inkling of it? His ‘peaceable soul’ was quite otherwise employed: Minister after Minister must consult his own several insight, his own whim, above all his own ease; and so the whole business, now when we look on it, comes out one of the most botched, piebald, inconsistent, lamentable and even ludicrous objects in the history of State-craft. Alas, necessity has no law: the statesman, without light, perhaps even without eyes, whom Destiny nevertheless constrains to ‘govern’ his nation, in a time of World-Downfal, what shall he do, but if so may be, collect the taxes, prevent, in some degree, murder and arson; and for the rest, wriggle hither and thither, return upon his steps, clout up old rents and open new,—and, on the whole, eat his victuals, and let the Devil govern it? Of the pass to which Statesmanship had come in respect of Philosophism, let this one fact be evidence instead of a thousand. M. de Malesherbes writes to warn Diderot that next day he will give orders to have all his papers seized.—Impossible! answers Diderot: juste ciel! how shall I sort them, where shall I hide them, within four-and-twenty hours?—Send them to me, answers M. de Malesherbes! Thither accordingly they go, under lock and seal; and the hungry catchpoles find nothing but empty drawers. The Encyclopédie was set forth first ‘with approbation and Privilège du Roi;’ next, it was stopped by Authority; next, the public murmuring, suffered to proceed; then again, positively for the last time, stopped,—and, no whit the

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less, printed, and written, and circulated, under thin disguises, some hundred and fifty printers working at it with open doors, all Paris knowing of it, only Authority winking hard. Choiseul, in his resolute way, had now shut the eyes of Authority, and kept them shut. Finally, to crown the whole matter, a copy of the prohibited Book lies in the King’s private library; and owes favour, and a withdrawal of the prohibition, to the foolishest accident: ‘One of Louis Fifteenth’s domestics told me,’ says Voltaire, ‘that once, the King his master supping, in private circle (en petite compagnie), at Trianon, the conversation turned first on the chace, and from this on gunpowder. Some one said that the best powder was made of sulphur, saltpetre and charcoal, in equal parts. The Duc de la Vallière, with better knowledge, maintained that for good powder there must be one part of sulphur, one of charcoal, with five of saltpetre, well filtered, well evaporated, well crystallized. ‘“It is pleasant,” said the Duc de Nivernois, “that we who daily amuse ourselves with killing partridges in the Park of Versailles, and sometimes with killing men, or getting ourselves killed, on the frontiers, should not know what that same work of killing is done with.” ‘“Alas! we are in the like case with all things in this world,” answered Madame de Pompadour; “I know not what the rouge I put upon my cheeks is made of; you would bring me to a nonplus if you asked how the silk hose I wear are manufactured.” “’Tis a pity,” said the Duc de la Vallière, “that his Majesty confiscated our Dictionnaires Encyclopédiques, which cost us our hundred pistoles; we should soon find the decision of all our questions there.” The King justified the act of confiscation; he had been informed that these twenty-one folio volumes, to be found lying on all ladies’ toilettes, were the most pernicious things in the world for the kingdom of France; he had resolved to look for himself if this were true, before suffering the book to circulate. Towards the end of the repast, he sends three of his valets to bring him a copy; they enter, struggling under seven volumes each. The article powder is turned up; the Duc de la Vallière is found to be right: and soon Madame de Pompadour learns the difference between the old rouge d’Espagne with which the ladies of Madrid coloured their cheeks, and the rouge des dames of Paris. She finds that the Greek and Roman ladies painted with a purple extracted from the murex, and that consequently our scarlet is the purple of the ancients; and that there is more purple in the rouge d’Espagne, and more cochineal in that of France. She learns how stockings are woven; the stocking-frame described there fills her with amazement. “Ah, what a glorious book!” cried she. “Sire, did you confiscate this magazine of all useful things, that you might have it wholly to yourself, then, and be the one learned man in your kingdom?” Each threw himself on the volumes, like the daughters of Lycomedes on the jewels of Ulysses; each found forthwith whatever he was seeking. Some who had

diderot 253 lawsuits were surprised to see the decision of them there. The King reads there all the rights of his crown. “Well, in truth” (mais vraiment), said he, “I know not why they said so much ill of the book.” “Ah, Sire,” said the Duc de Nivernois, “does not your Majesty see,” &c. &c.’

In such a confused world, under such unheard of circumstances, must friend Diderot ply his editorial labours. No sinecure is it! Penetrating into all subjects and sciences; waiting and rummaging in all libraries, laboratories; nay, for many years, fearlessly diving into all manner of workshops, unscrewing stocking looms, and even working thereon (that the department of Arts and Trades might be perfect); then seeking out contributors, and flattering them, quickening their laziness, getting payment for them; quarrelling with Bookseller and Printer; bearing all miscalculations, misfortunes, misdoings of so many fallible men (for there all at last lands) on his single back: surely this was enough, without having farther to do battle with the beagles of Office, perilously withstand them, expensively sop them, toilsomely elude them! Nevertheless, he perseveres, and will not but persevere;—less, perhaps, with the deliberate courage of a Man, who has compared result and outlay, than with the passionate obstinacy of a Woman who, having made up her mind, will shrink at no ladder of ropes, but ride with her lover, though all the four Elements gainsay it. At every new concussion from the Powers, he roars; say rather, shrieks, for there is a female shrillness in it; proclaiming, Murder! Robbery! Rape! invoking men and angels; meanwhile proceeds unweariedly with the printing. It is a hostile building up, not of the Holy Temple at Jerusalem, but of the Unholy one at Paris: thus must Diderot, like Ezra, come to strange extremities; and every workman works with his trowel in one hand, in the other his weapon of war; that so, in spite of all Tiglaths, the work go on, and the topstone of it be brought out with shouting. Shouting! Ah! what faint broken quaver is that in the shout; as of a man that shouted with the throat only, and inwardly was bowed down with dispiritment! It is Diderot’s faint broken quaver; he is sick and heavy of soul. Scandalous enough: the Goth, Lebreton, loving, as he says, his head better even than his profit, has for years gone privily at dead of night, to the finished Encyclopedic proof-sheets, and there, with nefarious pen, scratched out whatever to him seemed dangerous; filling up the gap as he could, or merely letting it fill itself up! Heaven and Earth! Not only are the finer Philosophe sallies mostly cut out,—but hereby has the work become a sunken, hitching, ungainly mass, little better than a monstrosity. Goth! Hun! sacrilegious Attila of the book-trade! Oh, surely for this treason the hottest of Dante’s Purgatory were too temper-

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ate. Infamous art thou, Lebreton, to all ages,—that read the Encyclopédie; and Philosophes not yet in swaddling-clothes shall gnash their teeth over thee, and spit upon thy memory.—Lebreton pockets both the abuse and the cash, and sleeps sound in a whole skin. The able Editor could never be said to get entirely the better of it while he lived. Now, however, it is time that, quitting generalities, we go in this fine autumn weather, to Holbach’s at Grandval, where the hardworked, but unwearied Encyclopedist, with plenty of ink and writing paper, is sure to be. Ever in the Holbach household, his arrival is a holiday; if a quarrel spring up, it is only because he will not come, or too soon goes away. A man of social talent, with such a tongue as Diderot’s, in a mansion where the only want to be guarded against was that of wit, could not be other than welcome. He composes Articles there, and walks, and dines, and plays cards, and talks; languishingly waits letters from his Voland, copiously writes to her. It is in these copious love-despatches that the whole matter is so graphically painted: we have an Asmodeus’ view of the interior life there, and live it over again with him. The Baroness in red silk, tempered with snow-white gauze, is beauty and grace itself; her old Mother is a perfect romp of fifteen, or younger; the house is lively with company: the Baron, as we said, speaks little, but to the purpose; is seen sometimes with his pipe, in dressing gown and red slippers; otherwise the best of landlords. Remarkable figures drop in: generals disabled at Quebec; fashionable gentlemen rusticating in the neighbourhood; Abbés, such as Galiani, Raynal, Morellet; perhaps Grimm and his Epinay; other Philosophes and Philosophesses. Guests too of less dignity, acting rather as butts than as bowmen; for it is the part of every one either to have wit, or to be the cause of having it. Among these latter, omitting many, there is one whom, for country’s sake, we must particularize; an ancient personage, named Hoop (Hope), whom they call Père Hoop; by birth a Scotchman. Hoop seems to be a sort of fixture at Grandval, not bowman, therefore butt; and is shot at for his lodging. A most shrivelled, wind-dried, dyspeptic, chill-shivering individual; Professor of Life-weariness; sits dozing there,—dozes there, however, with one eye open. He submits to be called Mummy, without a shrug; cowers over the fire, at the warmest corner. Yet is there a certain sardonic subacidity in Père Hoop; when he slowly unlocks his leathern jaw, we hear him with a sort of pleasure. Hoop has been in various countries and situations; in that croaking metallic voice of his, can tell a distinct story. Diderot apprehended he would one day hang himself: if so, what Museum now holds his remains? The Parent Hoops, it would seem, still dwelt in the city of Edinburgh; he, the second son, as Bourdeaux Merchant, having helped them

diderot 255 thither, out of some proud Manor-house no longer weather-tight. Can any ancient person of that city give us trace of such a man? It must be inquired into. One only of Father Hoop’s reminiscences we shall report, as the highest instance on record of a national virtue: At the battle of Prestonpans, a kinsman of Hoop’s, a gentleman with gold rings on his fingers, stands fighting and fencing for life with a rough Highlander; the Highlander, by some clever stroke, whisks the jewelled hand clear off, and then—picks it up from the ground, sticks it in his sporran for future leisure, and fights on! The force of Vertue* could no farther go. It cannot be uninteresting to the general reader to learn, that in the last days of October, in the year of grace 1770, Denis Diderot over-ate himself (as he was in the habit of doing), at Grandval; and had an obstinate ‘indigestion of bread.’ He writes to Grimm that it is the worst of all indigestions: to his fair Voland that it lay more than fifteen hours on his stomach, with a weight like to crush the life out of him; would neither remonter nor descendre; nor indeed stir a hairsbreadth for warm water, de quelque côté que je la (the warm water) prisse.

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Clysterium donare, Ensuita purgare! Such things, we grieve to say, are of frequent occurrence: the Holbachian table is all too plenteous; there are cooks too, we know, who boast of their diabolic ability to cause the patient, by successive intensations of their art, to eat with new and ever new appetite, till he explode on the spot. Diderot writes to his fair one, that his clothes will hardly button, that he is thus ‘stuffed,’ and thus; and so indigestion succeeds indigestion. Such Narratives fill the heart of sensibility with amazement; nor to the woes that chequer this imperfect, cacogastric state of existence, is the tear wanting. The society at Grandval cannot be accounted very dull: nevertheless let no man regretfully compare it with any neighbourhood he may have drawn by lot, in the present day; or even with any no-neighbourhood, if that be his affliction. The gaiety at Grandval was of the kind that could not last. Were it not that some Belief is left in Mankind, how could the sport of emitting Unbelief continue? On which ground, indeed, Swift, in his masterly argument ‘Against abolishing the Christian Religion,’ urges, not without pathos, that innumerable men of wit, enjoying a comfortable status by virtue of jokes on the Catechism, would hereby be left without pabulum, the staff of life cut away from their hand. The * Virtus (properly manliness, the chief duty of man) meant, in old Rome, power of fighting; means, in modern Rome, Connoisseurship; in Scotland, Thrift.—Ed.

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Holbachs were blind to this consideration; and joked away, as if it would last forever. So too with regard to Obscene Talk: where were the merit of a riotous Mother-in-law, saying and doing, in public, these never-imagined scandals, had not a cunningly-devised fable of Modesty been set afloat; were there not some remnants of Modesty still extant among the unphilosophic classes? The Samoeids (according to Travellers) have few double meanings; among stall cattle the witty effect of such is lost altogether. Be advised, then, foolish old woman! ‘Burn not thy bed’; the light of it will soon go out, and then?—Apart from the common household topics, which the ‘daily household epochs’ bring with them everywhere, two main elements, we regret to say, come to light in the conversation at Grandval; these, with a spicing of Noble-sentiment, are, unfortunately, Blasphemy and Bawdry. Whereby at this distance, the whole matter grows to look poor, and effete; and we can honestly rejoice that it all has been, and need not be again. But now, hastening back to Paris, friend Diderot finds proof-sheets enough on his desk, and notes, and invitations, and applications from distressed men of letters; nevertheless runs over, in the first place, to seek news from the Voland; will then see what is to be done. He writes much; talks and visits much: besides the Savans, Artists, spiritual Notabilities, domestic or migratory, of the period, he has a liberal allowance of unnotable Associates; especially a whole bevy of young or oldish, mostly rather spiteful Women; in whose gossip he is perfect. We hear the rustling of their silks, the clack of their pretty tongues, tittle-tattle ‘like their pattens when they walk;’ and the sound of it, fresh as yesterday, through this long vista of Time, has become significant, almost prophetic. Life could not hang heavy on Diderot’s hands: he is a vivid, open, all-embracing creature; could have found occupation anywhere; has occupation here forced on him, enough and to spare. ‘He had much to do, and did much of his own,’ says Mademoiselle; ‘yet three-fourths of his life were employed in helping whosoever had need of his purse, of his talents, of his management: his study, for the five and twenty years I knew it, was like a well-frequented shop, where, as one customer went, another came.’ He could not find in his heart to refuse any one. He has reconciled Brothers, sought out Tutorages, settled Lawsuits; solicited Pensions; advised, and refreshed hungry Authors, instructed ignorant ones: he has written advertisements for incipient helpless Grocers; he once wrote the dedication (to a pious Duc d’Orléans) of a lampoon against himself,—and so raised some five and twenty gold louis, for the famishing lampooner. For all these things, let not the light Diderot want his reward with us! Other reward, except from himself, he got none; but often the reverse; as in his little Drama, La Pièce et le Prologue,

diderot 257 may be seen humorously and good-humoredly set forth under his own hand. Indeed, his clients, by a vast majority, were of the scoundrel species; in any case, Denis knew well, that to expect gratitude, is to deserve ingratitude.—‘Rivière well contented’ (hear Mademoiselle) ‘now thanks my father, both for his services and his advices; sits chatting another quarter of an hour, and then takes leave; my father shows him down. As they are on the stairs, Rivière stops, turns round, and asks: “M. Diderot, are you acquainted with Natural History?”—“Why a little, I know an aloe from a sago; a pigeon from a colibri.”—“Do you know the history of the Formicaleo?”—“No”—“It is a little insect of great industry: it digs a hole in the ground like a reversed funnel; covers the top with fine light sand; entices foolish insects to it; takes them, sucks them, then says to them: M. Diderot, I have the honour to wish you good day.” My father stood laughing like to split at this adventure.’ Thus, amid labour and recreation; questionable Literature, unquestionable Loves; eating and digesting, better or worse; in gladness and vexation of spirit, in laughter ending in sighs, does Diderot pass his days. He has been hard toiled, but then well flattered, and is nothing of a hypochondriac. What little service renown can do him, may now be considered as done: he is in the centre of the literature, science, art, of his nation; not numbered among the Academical Forty, yet in his heterodox heart, entitled to be almost proud of the exclusion; successful in Criticism, successful in Philosophism, nay, highest of sublunary glories, successful in the Theatre; vanity may whisper, if she please, that, excepting the unattainable Voltaire alone, he is the first of Frenchmen. High heads are in correspondence with him the low-born; from Catherine the Empress to Philidor the Chess-player, he is in honoured relation with all manner of men; with scientific Buffons, Eulers, D’Alemberts; with artistic Falconnets, Vanloos, Riccobonis, Garricks. He was ambitious of being a Philosophe; and now the whole fast-growing sect of Philosophes look up to him as their head and mystagogue. To Denis Diderot, when he stept out of the Langres Diligence at the College d’Harcourt; or afterwards, when he walked in the subterranean shades of Rascaldom, with uneasy steps over the burning marle, a much smaller destiny would have seemed desirable. Within doors, again, matters stand rather disjointed, as surely they might well do: however, Madame Diderot is always true and assiduous; if one Daughter talk enthusiastically, and at length (though her father has written the Religieuse) die mad in a convent, the other, a quick, intelligent, graceful girl, is waxing into womanhood, and takes after the father’s Philosophism, leaving the mother’s Piety far enough aside. To which elements of mixed good and evil from without, add this so incalculably favourable one

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from within, that of all literary men Diderot is the least a self-listener; none of your puzzling, repenting, forecasting, earnest-bilious temperaments, but sanguineous-lymphatic every fibre of him, living lightly from hand to mouth, in a world mostly painted rose-colour. The Encyclopédie, after nigh thirty years of endeavour, to which only the Siege of Troy may offer some faint parallel, is finished. Scattered Compositions of all sorts, printed or manuscript, making many Volumes, lie also finished; the Philosophe has reaped no golden harvest from them. He is getting old; can live out of debt, but is still poor. Thinking to settle his daughter in marriage, he must resolve to sell his Library; money is not otherwise to be raised. Here, however, the Northern Cleopatra steps imperially forward; purchases his Library for its full value; gives him a handsome pension, as librarian to keep it for her; and pays him moreover fifty years thereof by advance in ready money. This we call imperial (in a world so necessitous as ours), though the whole munificence did not, we find, cost above three thousand pounds; a trifle to the Empress of all the Russias. In fact, it is about the sum your first-rate king eats, as board-wages, in one day; who, however, has seldom sufficient; not to speak of charitable overplus. In admiration of his Empress, the vivid Philosophe is now louder than ever; he even breaks forth into rather husky singing. Who shall blame him? The Northern Cleopatra (whom, in any case, he must regard with other eyes than we) has stretched out a generous, helping hand to him, where otherwise there was no help, but only hindrance and injury: all men will, and should, more or less, obey the proverb, to praise the fair as their own market goes in it. One of the last great scenes in Diderot’s Life, is his personal visit to this Benefactress. There is but one Letter from him with Petersburgh for date, and that of ominous brevity. The Philosophe was of open, unheedful, free-and-easy disposition; Prince and Polisson were singularly alike to him; it was ‘hail fellow well met,’ with every Son of Adam, be his clothes of one stuff or the other. Such a man could be no court-sycophant, was ill calculated to succeed at court. We can imagine that the Neva-colic, and the character of the Neva-water, was not the only thing hurtful to his nerves there. For King Denis, who had dictated such wonderful anti-regalities in the Abbé Raynal’s History;* and himself, in a * “But who dare stand for this?” would Diderot exclaim. “I will, I!” eagerly responded the Abbé. “Do but proceed.” (A la Mémoire de Diderot, by De Meister).—Was the following one of the passages? ‘Happily these perverse instructors’ of Kings ‘are chastised, sooner or later, by the ingratitude and contempt of their pupils. Happily, these pupils too, miserable in the bosom of grandeur, are tormented all their life by a deep ennui, which they cannot banish

diderot 259 moment of sibylism, emitted that surprising announcement, surpassing all yet uttered or utterable in the Tyrtæan way, how Ses mains (the freeman’s) ourderaient les entrailles du prêtre, Au défaut d’un cordon, pour étrangler les rois;

for such a one, the climate of the Neva must have had something oppressive in it. The entrailles du prêtre were, indeed, much at his service here, could he get clutch of them; but only for musical philosophe fiddle-strings; nowise for a cordon! Nevertheless, Cleopatra is an uncommon woman (or rather an uncommon man), and can put up with many things; and, in a gentle, skilful way, make the crooked straight. As her Philosophe presents himself in common apparel, she sends him a splendid court-suit; and as he can now enter in a civilized manner, she sees him often, confers with him largely: by happy accident, Grimm too at length arrives; and the winter passes without accident. Returning home in triumph, he can express himself contented, charmed with his reception; has mineral specimens, and all manner of hyperborean memorials for friends; unheard-of-things to tell; how he crossed the bottomless, half-thawed Dwina, with the water boiling up round his wheels, the ice bending like leather, yet crackling like mere ice,—and shuddered, and got through safe; how he was carried, coach and all, into the ferry-boat at Mittau, on thirty wild men’s backs, who floundered in the mud, and nigh broke his shoulder-blade; how he investigated Holland, and had conversed with Empresses, and High Mightinesses, and principalities and powers, and so seen, and conquered, for his own spiritual behoof, several of the Seven Wonders. But, alas! his health is broken; old age is knocking at the gate, like an importunate creditor, who has warrant for entering. The radiant, lightly-bounding soul is now getting all dim, and stiff, and heavy with sleep: Diderot too must adjust himself, for the hour draws nigh. These last years he passes retired and private, not idle or miserable. Philosophy or Philosophism has nowise lost its charm; whatsoever so much as calls itself Philosopher can interest him. Thus from their palaces. Happily, the religious prejudices, which have been planted in their souls, return on them to affright them. Happily, the mournful silence of their people teaches them, from time to time, the deep hatred that is borne them. Happily, they are too cowardly to despise that hatred. Happily (heureusement), after a life which no mortal, not even the meanest of their subjects, would accept, if he knew all its wretchedness, they find black inquietude, terror and despair, seated on the pillow of their death-bed (les noires inquiétudes, la terreur et le désespoir assis au chevet de leur lit de mort).’—Surely, ‘kings have poor times of it, to be run foul of by the like of thee!’

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poor Seneca, on occasion of some new Version of his Works, having come before the public, and been roughly dealt with, Diderot, with a long, last, concentrated effort, writes his Vie de Sénèque; struggling to make the hollow solid. Which, alas! after all his tinkering, still sounds hollow; and notable Seneca, so wistfully desirous to stand well with Truth, and yet not ill with Nero, is and remains only our perhaps niceliest-proportioned Half-and-half, the plausiblest Plausible on record; no great man, no true man, no man at all; yet how much lovelier than such,—as the mild-spoken, tolerating, charity-sermoning, immaculate Bishop Dogbolt, to some rude, self-helping, sharp-tongued Apostle Paul! Under which view, indeed, Seneca (though surely erroneously, for the origin of the thing was different) has been called, in this generation, ‘the father of all such as wear shovel-hats.’ The Vie de Sénèque, as we said, was Diderot’s last effort. It remains only to be added of him that he too died; a lingering but quiet death, which took place on the 30th of July, 1784. He once quotes from Montaigne the following, as Sceptic’s viaticum: ‘I plunge stupidly, head foremost, into this dumb Deep, which swallows me, and chokes me, in a moment,—full of insipidity and indolence. Death, which is but a quarter of an hour’s suffering, without consequence and without injury, does not require peculiar precepts.’ It was Diderot’s allotment to die with all due ‘stupidity:’ he was leaning on his elbows; had eaten an apricot two minutes before, and answered his wife’s remonstrances with: “Mais quelle diable de mal veux-tu que cela me fasse? (How the deuce can that hurt me?)” She spoke again, and he answered not. His House, which the curious will visit when they go to Paris, was in the Rue Taranne, at the intersection thereof with the Rue Saint-Benoît. The dust that was once his Body went to mingle with the common earth, in the church of Saint-Roch; his Life, the wondrous manifold Force that was in him, that was He,—returned to Eternity, and is there, and continues there! Two things, as we saw, are celebrated of Diderot. First, that he had the most encyclopedical head ever seen in this world: second, that he talked as never man talked;—properly, as never man his admirers had heard, or as no man living in Paris then. That is to say, his was at once the widest, fertilest, and readiest of minds. With regard to the Encyclopedical Head, suppose it to mean that he was of such vivacity as to admit, and look upon with interest, almost all things which the circle of Existence could offer him; in which sense, this exaggerated laudation, of Encyclopedism is not without its fraction of meaning. Of extraordinary open-

diderot 261 ness and compass we must grant the mind of Diderot to be; of a susceptibility, quick activity; even naturally of a depth, and, in its practical realized shape, of a universality, which bring it into kindred with the highest order of minds. On all forms of this wondrous Creation he can look with loving wonder; whatsoever thing stands there, has some brotherhood with him, some beauty and meaning for him. Neither is the faculty to see and interpret wanting; as, indeed, this faculty to see is inseparable from that other faculty to look, from that true wish to look; moreover (under another figure), Intellect is not a tool, but a hand that can handle any tool. Nay, in Diderot we may discern a far deeper universality than that shown, or showable, in Lebreton’s Encyclopédie; namely, a poetical; for, in slight gleams, this too manifests itself. A universality less of the head than of the character; such, we say, is traceable in this man, at lowest the power to have acquired such. Your true Encyclopedical is the Homer, the Shakspeare; every genuine Poet is a living, embodied, real Encyclopædia,—in more or fewer volumes; were his experience, his insight of details, never so limited, the whole world lies imaged as a whole within him; whosoever has not seized the whole cannot yet speak truly (much less can he speak musically, which is harmoniously, concordantly) of any part, but will perpetually need new guidance, rectification. The fit use of such a man is as hodman; not feeling the plan of the edifice, let him carry stones to it; if he build the smallest stone, it is likeliest to be wrong, and cannot continue there. But the truth is, as regards Diderot, this saying of the encyclopedical head comes mainly from his having edited a Bookseller’s Encyclopædia, and can afford us little direction. Looking into the man, and omitting his trade, we find him by nature gifted in a high degree with openness and versatility, yet nowise in the highest degree; alas, in a quite other degree than that. Nay, if it be meant farther that in practice, as a writer and thinker, he has taken in the Appearances of Life and the World, and images them back with such freedom, clearness, fidelity, as we have not many times witnessed elsewhere, as we have not various times seen infinitely surpassed elsewhere,—this same encyclopedical praise must altogether be denied him. Diderot’s habitual world, we must on the contrary say, is a half-world, distorted into looking like a whole; it is properly a poor, fractional, insignificant world; partial, inaccurate, perverted from end to end. Alas, it was the destiny of the man to live as a Polemic; to be born also in the morning tide and first splendour of the Mechanical Era; not to know, with the smallest assurance or continuance, that in the Universe, other than a mechanical meaning could exist; which force of destiny acting on him through his whole course, we have obtained what now stands before us: no Seer, but

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only possibilities of a Seer, transient irradiations of a Seer looking through the organs of a Philosophe. These two considerations, which indeed are properly but one (for a thinker, especially of French birth, in the Mechanical Era, could not be other than a Polemic), must never for a moment be left out of view in judging the works of Diderot. It is a great truth, one side of a great truth, that the Man makes the Circumstances, and spiritually as well as economically, is the artificer of his own fortune. But there is another side of the same truth, that the man’s circumstances are the element he is appointed to live and work in; that he by necessity takes his complexion, vesture, embodyment, from these, and is, in all practical manifestations, modified by them almost without limit; so that in another no less genuine sense, it can be said Circumstances make the Man. Now, if it continually behoves us to insist on the former truth towards ourselves, it equally behoves us to bear in mind the latter when we judge of other men. The most gifted soul, appearing in France in the Eighteenth Century, can as little embody himself in the intellectual vesture of an Athenian Plato, as in the grammatical one; his thoughts can no more be Greek, than his language can. He thinks of the things belonging to the French eighteenth century, and in the dialect he has learned there; in the light, and under the conditions prescribed there. Thus, as the most original, resolute, and self-directing of all the Moderns has written: ‘Let a man be but born ten years sooner, or ten years later, his whole aspect and performance shall be different.’ Grant, doubtless, that a certain perennial Spirit, true for all times and all countries, can and must look through the thinking of certain men, be it in what dialect soever: understand, meanwhile, that strictly this holds only of the highest order of men, and cannot be exacted of inferior orders; among whom, if the most sedulous, loving inspection disclose any, even secondary symptoms of such a Spirit, it ought to seem enough. Let us remember well that the high-gifted, high-striving Diderot was born in the point of Time and of Space, when of all uses he could turn himself to, of all dialects speak in, this of Polemical Philosophism, and no other, seemed the most promising and fittest. Let us remember too that no earnest Man, in any Time, ever spoke what was wholly meaningless; that, in all human convictions, much more in all human practices, there was a true side, a fraction of truth; which fraction is precisely the thing we want to extract from them, if we want anything at all to do with them. Such palliative considerations (which, for the rest, concern not Diderot, now departed, and indifferent to them, but only ourselves, who could wish to see him, and not to mis-see him) are essential, we say, through our whole survey of his Opinions and Proceedings, generally so alien to our own; but most of all

diderot 263 in reference to his head Opinion, properly the source of all the rest, and more shocking, even horrible, to us than all the rest: we mean his Atheism. David Hume, dining once in company where Diderot was, remarked that he did not think there were any Atheists. “Count us,” said a certain Monsieur——: they were eighteen. “Well,” said the Monsieur——, “it is pretty fair if you have fished out fifteen at the first cast; and three others who know not what to think of it.” In fact, the case was common: your Philosophe of the first water had grown to reckon Atheism a necessary accomplishment. Gowkthrapple Naigeon, as we saw, had made himself very perfect therein. Diderot was an Atheist, then; stranger still, a proselytising Atheist, who esteemed the creed worth earnest reiterated preaching, and enforcement with all vigour! The unhappy man had ‘sailed through the Universe of Worlds and found no Maker thereof; had descended to the abysses where Being no longer casts its shadow, and felt only the rain-drops trickle down; and seen only the gleaming rainbow of Creation, which originated from no Sun; and heard only the everlasting storm which no one governs; and looked upwards for the Divine Eye, and beheld only the black, bottomless, glaring Death’s Eye-socket:’ such, with all his wide voyagings, was the philosophic fortune he had realized. Sad enough, horrible enough: yet instead of shrieking over it, or howling and Ernulphus’-cursing over it, let us, as the more profitable method, keep our composure, and inquire a little, What possibly it may mean? The whole phenomenon, as seems to us, will explain itself from the fact above insisted on, that Diderot was a Polemic of decided character, in the Mechanical Age. With great expenditure of words and froth, in arguments as waste, wild-weltering, delirious-dismal as the chaos they would demonstrate; which arguments one now knows not whether to laugh at or to weep at, and almost does both,—have Diderot and his sect perhaps made this apparent to all who examine it: That in the French System of Thought (called also the Scotch, and still familiar enough everywhere, which for want of a better title we have named the Mechanical), there is no room for a Divinity; that to him, for whom intellect, or the power of knowing and believing is still synonymous with logic, or the mere power of arranging and communicating, there is absolutely no proof discoverable of a Divinity; and such a man has nothing for it but either, if he be of half spirit as is the frequent case, to trim despicably all his days between two opinions; or else, if he be of whole spirit, to anchor himself on the rock or quagmire of Atheism,— and farther, should he see fit, proclaim to others that there is good riding there. So much may Diderot have demonstrated: a conclusion at which we nowise turn pale. Was it much to know that Metaphysical Speculation, by nature, whirls

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round in endless Mahlstroms, both ‘creating and swallowing—itself ?’ For so wonderful a self-swallowing product of the Spirit of the Time, could any result to arrive at be fitter than this of the Eternal No? We thank Heaven that the result is finally arrived at; and so now we can look out for something other and farther. But above all things, proof of a God? A probable God! The smallest of Finites struggling to prove to itself, that is to say if we will consider it, to picture out and arrange as diagram, and include within itself, the Highest Infinite; in which, by hypothesis, it lives, and moves, and has its being! This, we conjecture, will one day seem a much more miraculous miracle than that negative result it has arrived at,—or any other result a still absurder chance might have led it to. He who, in some singular Time of the World’s History, were reduced to wander about, in stooping posture, with painfully constructed sulphur-match and farthing rushlight (as Gowkthrapple Naigeon), or smoky tar-link (as Denis Diderot), searching for the Sun, and did not find it: were he wonderful and his failure; or the singular Time, and its having put him on that search? Two small consequences, then, we fancy, may have followed, or be following, from poor Diderot’s Atheism. First, that all speculations of the sort we call Natural Theology, endeavouring to prove the beginning of all Belief by some Belief earlier than the beginning, are barren, ineffectual, impossible; and may, so soon as otherwise it is profitable, be abandoned. Of final causes man, by the nature of the case, can prove nothing; knows them, if he know anything of them, not by glimmering flint-sparks of Logic, but by an infinitely higher light of Intuition; never long, by Heaven’s mercy, wholly eclipsed in the human soul; and (under the name of Faith, as regards this matter) familiar to us now, historically or in conscious possession, for upwards of four thousand years. To all open men it will indeed always be a favourite contemplation, that of watching the ways of Being, how animate adjusts itself to inanimate, rational to irrational; and this, that we name Nature, is not a desolate phantasm of a chaos, but a wondrous existence and reality. If, moreover, in those same ‘marks of design,’ as he has called them, the contemplative man find new evidence of a designing Maker, be it well for him: meanwhile, surely one would think, the still clearer evidence lay nearer home,—in the contemplative man’s own head that seeks after such! In which point of view our extant Natural Theologies, as our innumerable Evidences of the Christian Religion, and such like, may, in reference to the strange season they appear in, have a certain value, and be worth printing and reprinting: only let us understand for whom, and how, they are valuable; and be nowise wroth with the poor Atheist, whom they have not convinced, and could not, and should not convince.

diderot 265 The second consequence seems to be that this whole current hypothesis of the Universe being ‘a Machine,’ and then of an Architect, who constructed it, sitting as it were apart, and guiding it, and seeing it go,—may turn out an inanity and nonentity; not much longer tenable: with which result likewise we shall, in the quietest manner, reconcile ourselves. ‘Think ye,’ says Goethe, ‘that God made the Universe, and then let it run round his finger (am Finger laufen liesse)?’ On the whole, that Metaphysical hurlyburly, of our poor, jarring, self-listening Time, ought at length to compose itself: that seeking for a God there, and not here; everywhere outwardly in physical Nature, and not inwardly in our own Soul, where alone He is to be found by us,—begins to get wearisome. Above all, that ‘faint possible Theism,’ which now forms our common English creed, cannot be too soon swept out of the world. What is the nature of that individual, who with hysterical violence theoretically asserts a God, perhaps a revealed Symbol and Worship of God; and for the rest, in thought, word, and conduct, meet with him where you will, is found living as if his theory were some polite figure of speech, and his theoretical God a mere distant Simulacrum, with whom he, for his part, had nothing farther to do? Fool! The Eternal is no Simulacrum; God is not only There, but Here, or nowhere, in that life-breath of thine, in that act and thought of thine,—and thou wert wise to look to it. If there is no God, as the fool hath said in his heart, then live on with thy decencies, and lip-homages, and inward greed, and falsehood, and all the hollow cunningly-devised halfness that recommends thee to the Mammon of this world: if there is a God, we say, look to it! But in either case, what art thou? The Atheist is false; yet is there, as we see, a fraction of truth in him; he is true compared with thee; thou, unhappy mortal, livest wholly in a lie, art wholly a lie. So that Diderot’s Atheism comes, if not to much, yet to something: we learn this from it, and from what it stands connected with, and may represent for us, That the Mechanical System of Thought is, in its essence, Atheistic; that whosoever will admit no organ of truth but logic, and nothing to exist but what can be argued of, must even content himself with this sad result, as the only solid one he can arrive at; and, so with the best grace he can, ‘of the æther make a gas, of God a force, of the second world a coffin;’ of man an aimless nondescript, ‘little better than a kind of vermin.’ If Diderot, by bringing matters to this parting of the roads, have enabled or helped us to strike into the truer and better road, let him have our thanks for it. As to what remains, be pity our only feeling; was not his creed miserable enough; nay, moreover, did not he bear its miserableness, so to speak, in our stead, so that it need now be no longer borne by any one?

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In this same, for him unavoidable circumstance, of the age he lived in, and the system of thought universal then, will be found the key to Diderot’s whole spiritual character and procedure; the excuse for much in him that to us is false and perverted. Beyond the meagre ‘rush-light of closet-logic,’ Diderot recognized no guidance. That ‘the Highest cannot be spoken of in words,’ was a truth he had not dreamt of. Whatsoever thing he cannot debate of, we might almost say measure and weigh, and carry off with him to be eaten and enjoyed, is simply not there for him. He dwelt all his days in the ‘thin rind of the Conscious;’ the deep fathomless domain of the Unconscious, whereon the other rests, and has its meaning, was not, under any shape, surmised by him. Thus must the Sanctuary of Man’s Soul stand perennially shut against this man; where his hand ceased to grope, the World ended: within such strait conditions had he to live and labour. And naturally to distort and dislocate, more or less, all things he laboured on: for whosoever, in one way or another, recognizes not that ‘Divine Idea of the World, which lies at the bottom of Appearances,’ can rightly interpret no Appearance; and whatsoever spiritual thing he does, must do it partially, do it falsely. Mournful enough, accordingly, is the account which Diderot has given himself of Man’s Existence; on the duties, relations, possessions whereof he had been a sedulous thinker. In every conclusion we have this fact of his Mechanical culture. Coupled too with another fact, honourable to him: that he stuck not at half measures; but resolutely drove on to the result, and held by it. So that we cannot call him a Sceptic; he has merited the more decisive name of Denier. He may be said to have denied that there was any the smallest Sacredness in Man, or in the Universe; and to have both speculated and lived on this singular footing. We behold in him the notable extreme of a man guiding himself with the least spiritual Belief that thinking man perhaps ever had. Religion, in all recognizable shapes and senses, he has done what man can do to clear out of him. He believes that pleasure is pleasant; that a lie is unbelievable; and there his credo terminates; nay there, what perhaps makes his case almost unique, his very fancy seems to fall silent. For a consequent man, all possible spiritual perversions are included under that grossest one of ‘proselytising Atheism;’ the rest, of what kind and degree soever, cannot any longer astonish us. Diderot has them of all kinds and degrees: indeed, we might say, the French Philosophe (take him at his word, for inwardly much that was foreign adhered to him, do what he could) has emitted a Scheme of the World, to which all that Oriental Mullah, Bonze, or Talapoin have done in that kind is poor and feeble. Omitting his whole unparalleled Cosmogonies

diderot 267 and Physiologies; coming to his much milder Tables of the Moral Law, we shall glance here but at one minor external item, the relation between man and man; and at only one branch of this, and with all slightness, the relation of covenants; for example, the most important of these, Marriage. Diderot has convinced himself, and, indeed, as above became plain enough, acts on the conviction, that Marriage, contract it, solemnize it in what way you will, involves a solecism which reduces the amount of it to simple zero. It is a suicidal covenant; annuls itself in the very forming. ‘Thou makest a vow,’ says he, twice or thrice, as if the argument were a clencher, ‘thou makest a vow of eternal constancy under a rock, which is even then crumbling away.’True, O Denis! the rock crumbles away; all things are changing; man changes faster than most of them. That, in the meanwhile, an Unchangeable lies under all this, and looks forth, solemn and benign, through the whole destiny and workings of man, is another truth; which no Mechanical Philosophe, in the dust of his logic-mill, can be expected to grind out for himself. Man changes, and will change: the question then arises, Is it wise in him to tumble forth, in headlong obedience to this love of change; is it so much as possible for him? Among the dualisms of man’s wholly dualistic nature, this we might fancy was an observable one: that along with his unceasing tendency to change, there is a no less ineradicable tendency to persevere. Were man only here to change, let him, far from marrying, cease even to hedge in fields, and plough them; before the autumn season, he may have lost the whim of reaping them. Let him return to the nomadic state, and set his house on wheels; nay there too a certain restraint must curb his love of change, or his cattle will perish by incessant driving, without grazing in the intervals. O Denis, what things thou babblest in thy sleep! How, in this world of perpetual flux, shall man secure himself the smallest foundation, except hereby alone: that he take pre-assurance of his Fate; that in this and the other high act of his life, his Will, with all solemnity, abdicate its right to change; voluntarily become involuntary, and say once for all, Be there then no farther dubitation on it! Nay, the poor unheroic craftsman; that very stocking-weaver, on whose loom thou now as amateur weavest: must not even he do as much,—when he signed his apprentice-indentures? The fool! who had such a relish in himself for all things, for kingship and emperorship; yet made a vow (under penalty of death by hunger) of eternal constancy to stocking-weaving. Yet otherwise, were no thriving craftsmen possible; only botchers, bunglers, transitory nondescripts; unfed, mostly gallows-feeding. But, on the whole, what feeling it was in the ancient devout deep soul, which of Marriage made a Sacrament: this, of all things

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in the world, is what Denis will think of for æons, without discovering. Unless, perhaps, it were to increase the vestry-fees? Indeed, it must be granted, nothing yet seen or dreamt of can surpass the liberality of friend Denis as magister morum; nay, often our poor Philosophe feels called on, in an age of such Spartan rigour, to step forth into the public Stews, and emit his inspiriting Macte virtute! there. Whither let the curious in such matters follow him: we, having work elsewhere, wish him ‘good journey,’—or rather ‘safe return.’ Of Diderot’s indelicacy and indecency there is for us but little to say. Diderot is not what we call indelicate and indecent; he is utterly unclean, scandalous, shameless, sansculottic-samoeidic. To declare with lyric fury that this is wrong; or with historic calmness, that a pig of sensibility would go distracted did you accuse him of it, may, especially in countries where ‘indecent exposure’ is cognizable at police-offices, be considered superfluous. The only question is one in Natural History: Whence comes it? What may a man, not otherwise without elevation of mind, of kindly character, of immense professed philanthropy, and doubtless of extraordinary insight, mean thereby? To us it is but another illustration of the fearless, all-for-logic, thoroughly consistent, Mechanical Thinker. It coheres well enough with Diderot’s theory of man; that there is nothing of sacred either in man or around man; and that chimeras are chimerical. How shall he for whom nothing, that cannot be jargoned of in debating-clubs, exists, have any faintest forecast of the depth, significance, divineness of Silence; of the sacredness of ‘Secrets known to all?’ Nevertheless, Nature is great; and Denis was among her nobler productions. To a soul of his sort something like what we call Conscience could nowise be wanting: the feeling of Moral Relation; of the Infinite character thereof, as the essence and soul of all else that can be felt or known, must needs assert itself in him. Yet how assert itself ? An Infinitude to one in whose whole Synopsis of the Universe, no Infinite stands marked? Wonderful enough is Diderot’s method; and yet not wonderful, for we see it, and have always seen it, daily. Since there is nothing sacred in the Universe, whence this sacredness of what you call Virtue? Whence or how comes it that you, Denis Diderot, must not do a wrong thing; could not, without some qualm, speak, for example, one Lie, to gain Mahomet’s Paradise with all its houris? There is no resource for it, but to get into that interminable ravelment of Reward and Approval, virtue being its own reward; and assert louder and louder,—contrary to the stern experience of all men, from the Divine Man, expiring with agony of bloody sweat on the accursed tree, down to us two, O reader (if we have ever done one Duty)—that Virtue is synonymous with Pleasure. Alas! was Paul, an apostle of the Gentiles,

diderot 269 virtuous; and was virtue its own reward, when his approving conscience told him that he was ‘the chief of sinners,’ and if bounded to this life alone, ‘of all men the most miserable?’ Or has that same so sublime Virtue, at bottom, little to do with Pleasure, if with far other things? Are Eudoxia, and Eusebeia, and Euthanasia, and all the rest of them, of small account to Eubosia and Eupepsia; and the pains of any moderately-paced Career of Vice, Denis himself being judge, as a drop in the bucket to the ‘Career of Indigestions?’That is what Denis never in this world will grant. But what then will he do? One of two things: admit, with Grimm, that there are ‘two justices,’—which may be called by many handsome names, but properly are nothing but the pleasant justice, and the unpleasant; whereof only the former is binding! Herein, however, Nature has been unkind to Denis; he is not a literary court-toad-eater; but a free, genial, even poetic creature. There remains, therefore, nothing but the second expedient; to ‘assert louder and louder;’ in other words, to become a Philosophe-Sentimentalist. Most wearisome, accordingly, is the perpetual clatter kept up here about vertu, honnêteté, grandeur, sensibilité, ames-nobles; how unspeakably good it is to be virtuous, how pleasant, how sublime:—In the Devil and his grandmother’s name, be virtuous; and let us have an end of it! In such sort (we will nevertheless joyfully recognize) does great Nature in spite of all contradictions, declare her royalty, her divineness; and, for the poor Mechanical Philosophe, has prepared, since the substance is hidden from him, a shadow wherewith he can be cheered. In fine, to our ill-starred Mechanical Philosophe-Sentimentalist, with his loud preaching and rather poor performing, shall we not, in various respects, ‘thankfully stretch out the hand?’ In all ways ‘it was necessary that the logical side of things should likewise be made available.’ On the whole, wondrous higher developments of much, of Morality among the rest, are visible in the course of the world’s doings, at this day. A plausible prediction were that the Ascetic System is not to regain its exclusive dominancy. Ever, indeed, must Self-denial, ‘Annihilation of Self,’ be the beginning of all moral action: meanwhile, he that looks well, may discern filaments of a nobler System, wherein this lies included as one harmonious element. Who knows, for example, what new unfoldings and complex adjustments await us, before the true relation of moral Greatness to moral Correctness, and their proportional value, can be established? How, again, is perfect tolerance for the Wrong to co-exist with ever-present conviction that Right stands related to it, as a God does to a Devil,—an Infinite to an opposite Infinite? How, in a word, through what tumultuous vicissitudes, after how many false partial efforts, deepening the confusion, shall it, at length, be

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made manifest, and kept continually manifest, to the hearts of men, that the Good is not properly the highest, but the Beautiful; that the true Beautiful (differing from the false, as Heaven does from Vauxhall) comprehends in it the Good?—In some future century, it may be found that Denis Diderot, acting and professing, in wholeness and with full conviction, what the immense multitude act in halfness and without conviction,—has, though by strange inverse methods, forwarded the result. It was long ago written, the Omnipotent ‘maketh the wrath of the wicked,’ the folly of the foolish ‘to praise Him.’ In any case, Diderot acted it, and not we; Diderot bears it, and not we: peace be with Diderot! The other branch of his renown is excellence as a Talker. Or, in wider view, think his admirers, his philosophy was not more surpassing than his delivery thereof. What his philosophy amounts to we have been examining: but now, that in this other conversational province he was eminent, is easily believed. A frank, ever-hoping, social character; a mind full of knowledge, full of fervour; of great compass, of great depth, ever on the alert: such a man could not have other than a ‘mouth of gold.’ It is still plain, whatsoever thing imaged itself before him, was imaged in the most lucent clearness; was rendered back, with light labour, in corresponding clearness. Whether, at the same time, Diderot’s conversation, relatively so superior, deserved the intrinsic character of supreme, may admit of question. The worth of words spoken depends, after all, on the wisdom that resides in them; and in Diderot’s words there was often too little of this. Vivacity, far-darting brilliancy, keenness of theoretic vision, paradoxical ingenuity, gaiety, even touches of humour; all this must have been here: whosoever had preferred sincerity, earnestness, depth of practical rather than theoretic insight, with not less of impetuosity, of clearness and sureness, with humour, emphasis, or such other melody or rhythm as that utterance demanded,—must have come over to London; and, with forbearant submissiveness, listened to our Johnson. Had we the stronger man, then? Be it rather, as in that Duel of Cœur-de-Lion with the light, nimble, yet also invincible Saladin, that each nation had the strength which most befitted it. Closely connected with this power of conversation, is Diderot’s facility of composition. A talent much celebrated; numerous really surprising proofs whereof are on record: how he wrote long works within the week; sometimes within almost the four-and-twenty hours. Unhappily, enough still remains to make such feats credible. Most of Diderot’s Works bear the clearest traces of extemporaneousness; stans pede in uno! They are much liker printed talk, than the concentrated well-considered utterance, which, from a man of that weight,

diderot 271 we expect to see set in types. It is said, ‘he wrote good pages but could not write a good book.’ Substitute did not for could not; and there is truth in the saying. Clearness, as has been observed, comprehensibility at a glance, is the character of whatever Diderot wrote: a clearness which, in visual objects, rises into the region of the Artistic, and resembles that of Richardson or Defoe. Yet, grant that he makes his meaning clear, what is the nature of that meaning itself ? Alas, for most part, only a hasty, flimsy, superficial meaning, with gleams of a deeper vision peering through. More or less of Disorder reigns in all Works that Diderot wrote; not order, but the plausible appearance of such: the true heart of the matter is not found; ‘he skips deftly along the radii, and skips over the centre, and misses it.’ Thus may Diderot’s admired Universality and admired Facility have both turned to disadvantage for him. We speak not of his reception by the world: this indeed is the ‘age of specialties;’ yet, owing to other causes, Diderot the Encyclopedist had success enough. But, what is of far more importance, his inward growth was marred: the strong tree shot not up in any one noble stem, bearing boughs, and fruit, and shade all round; but spread out horizontally, after a very moderate height, into innumerable branches, not useless, yet of quite secondary use. Diderot could have been an Artist; and he was little better than an Encyclopedic Artisan. No smatterer indeed; a faithful artisan; of really universal equipment, in his sort: he did the work of many men; yet nothing, or little, which many could not have done. Accordingly, his Literary Works, now lying finished some fifty years, have already, to the most surprising degree, shrunk in importance. Perhaps no man so much talked of is so little known; to the great majority he is no longer a Reality, but a Hearsay. Such, indeed, partly is the natural fate of Works Polemical, which almost all Diderot’s are. The Polemic annihilates his opponent; but in so doing annihilates himself too, and both are swept away to make room for something other and farther. Add to this, the slight-textured transitory character of Diderot’s style; and the fact is well enough explained. Meanwhile, let him to whom it applies, consider it; him among whose gifts it was to rise into the Perennial, and who dwelt rather low down in the Ephemeral, and ephemerally fought and scrambled there! Diderot the Great has contracted into Diderot the easily-measurable: so must it be with others of the like. In how many sentences can the net-product of all that tumultuous Atheism, printed over many volumes, be comprised! Nay, the whole Encyclopédie, that world’s wonder of the eighteenth century, the Belus’ Tower of an age of refined Illumination, what has it become! Alas! no stone-tower, that will stand there

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as our strength and defence through all times; but, at best, a wooden Helepolis (City-taker), wherein stationed, the Philosophus Policaster has burnt and battered down many an old ruinous Sorbonne; and which now, when that work is pretty well over, may, in turn, be taken asunder, and used as firewood. The famed Encyclopedical Tree itself has proved an artificial one, and borne no fruit. We mean that, in its nature, it is mechanical only; one of those attempts to parcel out the invisible mystical Soul of Man, with its infinitude of phases and character, into shop-lists of what are called ‘faculties,’ ‘motives,’ and such like; which attempts may indeed be made with all degrees of insight, from that of a Doctor Spurzheim to that of Denis Diderot, or Jeremy Bentham; and prove useful for a day, but for a day only. Nevertheless it were false to regard Diderot as a Mechanist and nothing more; as one working and grinding blindly in the mill of mechanical Logic, joyful with his lot there, and unconscious of any other. Call him one rather who contributed to deliver us therefrom: both by his manful whole spirit as a Mechanist, which drove all things to their ultimatum and crisis; and even by a dim-struggling faculty, which virtually aimed beyond this. Diderot, we said, was gifted by Nature for an Artist: strangely flashing through his mechanical encumbrances, are rays of thought, which belong to the Poet, to the Prophet; which, in other environment, could have revealed the deepest to us. Not to seek far, consider this one little sentence, which he makes the last of the dying Sanderson: ‘Le temps, la matière et l’espace ne sont peut-être qu’un point (Time, Matter and Space are perhaps but a point)!’ So too, in Art, both as a speaker and a doer, he is to be reckoned as one of those who pressed forward irresistibly out of the artificial barren sphere of that time, into a truer genial one. His Dramas, the Fils Naturel, the Père de Famille have indeed ceased to live; yet is the attempt towards great things visible in them; the attempt remains to us, and seeks otherwise, and has found, and is finding, fulfilment. Not less in his Salons ( Judgments of Art-Exhibitions), written hastily for Grimm, and by ill chance, on artists of quite secondary character, do we find the freest recognition of whatever excellence there is; nay, an impetuous endeavour, not critically but even creatively, towards something more excellent. Indeed, what with their unrivalled clearness, painting the picture over again for us, so that we too see it, and can judge it; what with their sunny fervour, inventiveness, real artistic genius, which wants nothing but a hand, they are, with some few exceptions in the German tongue, the only Pictorial Criticisms we know of worth reading. Here too, as by his own practice in the Dramatic branch of art, Diderot stands forth as the main originator, almost the sole one

diderot 273 in his own country, of that many-sided struggle towards what is called Nature, and copying of Nature and faithfulness to Nature; a deep indispensable truth, subversive of the old error; yet under that figure, only a half-truth, for Art too is Art, as surely as Nature is Nature; which struggle, meanwhile, either as half-truth or working itself into a whole truth, may be seen, in countries that have any Art, still forming the tendency of all artistic endeavour. In which sense, Diderot’s Essay on Painting has been judged worth translation by the greatest modern Judge of Art, and greatest modern Artist, in the highest kind of Art; and may be read anew, with argumentative commentary and exposition, in Goethe’s Works. Nay, let us grant, with pleasure, that for Diderot himself the realms of Art were not wholly unvisited; that he too, so heavily imprisoned, stole Promethean fire. Among these multitudinous, most miscellaneous Writings of his, in great part a manufactured farrago of Philosophism no longer saleable, and now looking melancholy enough,—are two that we can almost call Poems; that have something perennially poetic in them: Jacques le Fataliste; in a still higher degree, the Neveu de Rameau. The occasional blueness of both; even that darkest indigo in some parts of the former, shall not altogether affright us. As it were, a loose straggling sunbeam flies here over Man’s Existence in France, now nigh a century behind us: ‘from the height of luxurious elegance to the depths of shamelessness’; all is here. Slack, careless seems the combination of the picture; wriggling, disjointed, like a bundle of flails; yet strangely united in the painter’s inward unconscious feeling. Wearisomely crackling wit gets silent; a grim, taciturn, dare-devil, almost Hogarthian humour, rises in the background. Like this there is nothing that we know of in the whole range of French Literature: La Fontaine is shallow in comparison; the La Bruyère wit-species not to be named. It resembles Don Quixote, rather; of somewhat similar stature; yet of complexion altogether different; through the one looks a sunny Elysium, through the other a sulphurous Erebus: both hold of the Infinite. This Jacques, perhaps, was not quite so hastily put together: yet there too haste is manifest: the Author finishes it off, not by working out the figures and movements, but by dashing his brush against the canvas; a manœuvre which in this case has not succeeded. The Rameau’s Nephew, which is the shorter, is also the better; may pass for decidedly the best of all Diderot’s Compositions. It looks like a Sibylline utterance from a heart all in fusion: no ephemeral thing (for it was written as a Satire on Palissot) was ever more perennially treated. Strangely enough too, it lay some fifty years, in German and Russian Libraries; came out first in the masterly version of Goethe, in 1805; and only (after a deceptive re-translation by a M. Saur, a courageous mystifier otherwise) reached the Paris public in 1821,—when perhaps all, for

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whom, and against whom it was written, were no more!—It is a farce-tragedy; and its fate has corresponded to its purport. One day it must also be translated into English; but will require to be done by head; the common steam-machinery will not properly suffice for it. We here (con la bocca dolce) take leave of Diderot in his intellectual aspect, as Artist and Thinker: a richly endowed, unfavourably situated nature; whose effort, much marred, yet not without fidelity of aim, can triumph, on rare occasions; is perhaps nowhere utterly fruitless. In the moral aspect, as Man, he makes a somewhat similar figure; as indeed, in all men, in him especially, the Opinion and the Practice stand closely united; and as a wise man has remarked, ‘the speculative principles are often but a supplement (or excuse) to the practical manner of life.’ In conduct, Diderot can nowise seem admirable to us; yet neither inexcusable; on the whole, not at all quite worthless. Lavater traced in his physiognomy ‘something timorous;’ which reading his friends admitted to be a correct one. Diderot, in truth, is no hero: the earnest soul, wayfaring and warfaring in the complexities of a World like to overwhelm him, yet wherein he by Heaven’s grace will keep faithfully warfaring, prevailing or not, can derive small solacement from this light, fluctuating, not to say flimsy existence of Diderot: no Gospel in that kind has he left us. The man, in fact, with all his high gifts, had rather a female character. Susceptible, sensitive, living by impulses, which at best he had fashioned into some show of principles; with vehemence enough, with even a female uncontroulableness; with little of manful steadfastness, considerateness, invincibility. Thus, too, we find him living mostly in the society of women, or of men who, like women, flattered him, and made life easy for him; recoiling with horror from an earnest Jean Jacques, who understood not the science of walking in a vain show; but imagined, poor man, that truth was there as a thing to be told, as a thing to be acted. We call Diderot, then, not a coward; yet not in any sense a brave man. Neither towards himself, nor towards others, was he brave. All the virtues, says M. de Meister, which require not ‘a great suite (sequency) of ideas’ were his: all that do require such a suite were not his. In other words, what duties were easy for him he did: happily Nature had rendered several easy. His spiritual aim, moreover, seemed not so much to be enforcement, exposition of Duty, as discovery of a Duty-made-easy. Natural enough that he should strike into that province of sentiment, cœur-noble, and so forth. Alas, to declare that the beauty of virtue is beautiful, costs comparatively little: to win it, and wear it, is quite another enterprize,—wherein the loud braggart, we know, is not the likeliest to succeed. On

diderot 275 the whole, peace be with sentiment, for that also lies behind us!—For the rest, as hinted, what duties were difficult our Diderot left undone. How should he, the cœur sensible, front such a monster as Pain? And now, since misgivings cannot fail in that course, what is to be done but fill up all asperities with floods of Sensibilité, and so voyage more or less smoothly along? Est-il bon? Est-il méchant? is his own account of himself. At all events, he was no voluntary hypocrite; that great praise can be given him. And thus with Mechanical Philosophism, and passion vive; working, flirting; ‘with more of softness than of true affection, sometimes with the malice and rage of a child, but on the whole an inexhaustible fund of goodnatured simplicity,’ has he come down to us, for better or worse: and what can we do but receive him? If now we and our reader, reinterpreting for our present want, that Life and Performance of Diderot, have brought it clearer before us, be the hour spent thereon, were it even more wearisome, no profitless one! Have we not striven to unite our own brief present moment more and more compactly with the Past and with the Future; have we not done what lay at our hand towards reducing that same Memoirism of the Eighteenth Century into History, and ‘weaving’ a thread or two thereof nearer to the condition of a web? But finally, if we rise with this matter, as we should try to do with all matters, into the proper region of Universal History, and look on it with the eye not of this time, or of that time, but of Time at large, perhaps the prediction might stand here, that intrinsically, essentially little lies in it; that one day when the net-result of our European way of life comes to be summed up, this whole as yet so boundless concern of French Philosophism will dwindle into the thinnest of fractions, or vanish into nonentity! Alas, while the rude History and Thoughts of those same ‘Juifs misérables,’ the barbaric War-song of a Deborah and Barak, the rapt prophetic Utterance of an unkempt Isaiah, last now, with deepest significance, say only these three thousand years,—what has the thriceresplendent Encyclopédie shrivelled into, within these three score! This is a fact which, explain it, express it, in what way he will, your Encyclopedist should actually consider. Those were tones caught from the sacred Melody of the All, and have harmony and meaning forever; these of his are but outer discords, and their jangling dies away without result. ‘The special, sole and deepest theme of the World’s and Man’s History,’ says the Thinker of our time, ‘whereto all other themes are subordinated, remains the Conflict of Unbelief and Belief. All epochs wherein belief prevails, under what form it may, are splendid, heartelevating, fruitful for contemporaries and posterity. All epochs, on the contrary,

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wherein Unbelief, under what form soever, maintains its sorry victory, should they even for a moment glitter with a sham splendour, vanish from the eyes of posterity; because no one chooses to burden himself with study of the unfruitful.’ 5

SIR WALTER SCOTT.

Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Baronet. Vol. i.—vi. Edinburgh, 1837. American Cooper asserts, in one of his books, that there is ‘an instinctive tendency in men to look at any man who has become distinguished.’ True, surely; as all observation and survey of mankind, from China to Peru, from Nebuchadnezzar to Old Hickory, will testify! Why do men crowd towards the improved-drop at Newgate, eager to catch a sight? The man about to be hanged is in a distinguished situation. Men crowd to such extent, that Greenacre’s is not the only life choked out there. Again, ask of these leathern vehicles, cabriolets, neat-flies, with blue men and women in them, that scour all thoroughfares, Whither so fast? To see dear Mrs. Rigmarole, the distinguished female; great Mr. Rigmarole, the distinguished male! Or, consider that crowning phenomenon, and summary of modern civilization, a soirée of lions. Glittering are the rooms, well-lighted, thronged; bright flows their undulatory flood of blonde gowns and dress-coats, a soft smile dwelling on all faces; for behold there also flow the lions, hovering distinguished: oracles of the age, of one sort or another. Oracles really pleasant to see; whom it is worth while to go and see: look at them, but inquire not of them, depart rather and be thankful. For your lion-soirée admits not of speech; there lies the specialty of it. A meeting together of human creatures; and yet (so high has civilization gone) the primary aim of human meeting, that soul might in some articulate utterance unfold itself to soul, can be dispensed with in it. Utterance there is not; nay, there is a certain grinning play of tongue-fence, and make-believe of utterance, considerably worse than none. For which reason it has been suggested, with an eye to sincerity and silence in such lion-soirées, 277

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Might not each lion be, for example, ticketed, as wine-decanters are? Let him carry, slung round him, in such ornamental manner as seemed good, his silver label with name engraved; you lift his label, and read it, with what farther ocular survey you find useful, and speech is not needed at all. O Fenimore Cooper, it is most true there is ‘an instinctive tendency in men to look at any man that has become distinguished;’ and, moreover, an instinctive desire in men to become distinguished and be looked at! For the rest, we will call it a most valuable tendency this; indispensable to mankind. Without it where were star-and-garter, and significance of rank; where were all ambition, money-getting, respectability of gig or no gig; and, in a word, the main impetus by which society moves, the main force by which it hangs together? A tendency, we say, of manifold results; of manifold origin, not ridiculous only, but sublime;—which some incline to deduce from the mere gregarious purblind nature of man, prompting him to run, ‘as dim-eyed animals do, towards any glittering object, were it but a scoured tankard, and mistake it for a solar luminary,’ or even, ‘sheep-like, to run and crowd because many have already run!’ It is, indeed, curious to consider how men do make the gods that themselves worship. For the most famed man, round whom all the world now rapturously huzzahs and venerates as if his like were not, is the same man whom all the world was wont to jostle into the kennels; not a changed man, but in every fibre of him the same man. Foolish world, what went ye out to see? A tankard scoured bright; and do there not lie, of the self-same pewter, whole barrowfuls of tankards, though by worse fortune all still in the dim state? And yet, at bottom, it is not merely our gregarious sheep-like quality, but something better, and indeed best: what has been called ‘the perpetual fact of hero-worship;’ our inborn sincere love of great men! Not the gilt farthing, for its own sake, do even fools covet; but the gold guinea which they mistake it for. Veneration of great men is perennial in the nature of man; this, in all times, especially in these, is one of the blessedest facts predicable of him. In all times, even in these seemingly so disobedient times, ‘it remains a blessed fact, so cunningly has Nature ordered it, that whatsoever man ought to obey he cannot but obey. Show the dullest clodpole, show the haughtiest featherhead, that a soul higher than himself is actually here; were his knees stiffened into brass, he must down and worship.’ So it has been written; and may be cited and repeated till known to all. Understand it well, this of ‘hero-worship’ was the primary creed, and has intrinsically been the secondary and ternary and will be the ultimate and final creed of mankind; indestructible, changing in shape, but in essence unchangeable; whereon polities, religions, loyalties, and all highest human interests have



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been and can be built, as on a rock that will endure while man endures. Such is hero-worship; so much lies in that our inborn sincere love of great men!—In favour of which unspeakable benefits of the reality, what can we do but cheerfully pardon the multiplex ineptitudes of the semblance,—cheerfully wish even lion-soirées, with labels for their lions or without that improvement, all manner of prosperity? Let hero-worship flourish, say we; and the more and more assiduous chase after gilt farthings while guineas are not yet forthcoming. Herein, at lowest, is proof that guineas exist; that they are believed to exist, and valued. Find great men if you can; if you cannot, still quit not the search; in defect of great men, let there be noted men, in such number, to such degree of intensity as the public appetite can tolerate. Whether Sir Walter Scott was a great man, is still a question with some; but there can be no question with any one that he was a most noted and even notable man. In this generation there was no literary man with such a popularity in any country; there have only been a few with such, taking in all generations and all countries. Nay, it is farther to be admitted that Sir Walter Scott’s popularity was of a select sort rather; not a popularity of the populace. His admirers were at one time almost all the intelligent of civilized countries; and to the last, included and do still include a great portion of that sort. Such fortune he had, and has continued to maintain for a space of some twenty or thirty years. So long the observed of all observers; a great man, or only a considerable man; here surely, if ever, is a singularly circumstanced, is a ‘distinguished’ man! In regard to whom, therefore, the ‘instinctive tendency’ on other men’s part cannot be wanting. Let men look, where the world has already so long looked. And now, while the new, earnestly expected Life ‘by his Son-in-law and literary executor’ again summons the whole world’s attention round him, probably for the last time it will ever be so summoned; and men are in some sort taking leave of a notability, and about to go their way, and commit him to his fortune on the flood of things,—why should not this Periodical Publication likewise publish its thought about him? Readers of miscellaneous aspect, of unknown quantity and quality, are waiting to hear it done. With small inward vocation, but cheerfully obedient to destiny and necessity, the present reviewer will follow a multitude; to do evil or to do no evil, will depend not on the multitude but on himself. One thing he did decidedly wish; at least to wait till the Work were finished: for the Six promised Volumes, as the world knows, have flowed over into a Seventh, which will not for some weeks yet see the light. But the editorial powers, wearied with waiting, have become peremptory; and declare that, finished or not finished, they will

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have their hands washed of it at this opening of the year. Perhaps it is best. The physiognomy of Scott will not be much altered for us by that Seventh Volume; the prior Six have altered it but little;—as, indeed, a man who has written some two hundred volumes of his own, and lived for thirty years amid the universal speech of friends, must have already left some likeness of himself. Be it as the peremptory editorial powers require. First, therefore, a word on the Life itself. Mr. Lockhart’s known powers justify strict requisition in his case. Our verdict in general would be, that he has accomplished the work he schemed for himself in a creditable workmanlike manner. It is true, his notion of what the work was does not seem to have been very elevated. To picture forth the life of Scott according to any rules of art or composition, so that a reader, on adequately examining it, might say to himself, “There is Scott, there is the physiognomy and meaning of Scott’s appearance and transit on this earth; such was he by nature, so did the world act on him, so he on the world, with such result and significance for himself and us:” this was by no manner of means Mr. Lockhart’s plan. A plan which, it is rashly said, should preside over every biography! It might have been fulfilled with all degrees of perfection from that of the Odyssey down to Thomas Ellwood or lower. For there is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed. It is a plan one would prefer, did it otherwise suit; which it does not, in these days. Seven volumes sell so much dearer than one; are so much easier to write than one. The Odyssey, for instance, what were the value of the Odyssey, sold per sheet? One paper of Pickwick; or say, the inconsiderable fraction of one. This, in commercial algebra, were the equation: Odyssey equal to Pickwick divided by an unknown integer. There is a great discovery still to be made in Literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write. Nay, in sober truth, is not this actually the rule in all writing; and, moreover, in all conduct and acting? Not what stands above ground, but what lies unseen under it, as the root and subterrene element it sprang from and emblemed forth, determines the value. Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time. Paradoxical does it seem? Wo for the age, wo for the man, quack-ridden, bespeeched, bespouted, blown about like barren Sahara, to whom this world-old truth were altogether strange!—Such we say is the rule, acted on or not, recognised or not; and he who departs from it, what can he do but spread himself into breadth and length, into superficiality and saleability; and, except as filigree, become comparatively useless? One thinks, had but the



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hogshead of thin wash, which sours in a week ready for the kennels, been distilled, been concentrated! Our dear Fenimore Cooper, whom we started with, might, in that way, have given us one Natty Leatherstocking, one melodious synopsis of Man and Nature in the West (for it lay in him to do it), almost as a Saint-Pierre did for the Islands of the East; and the hundred Incoherences, cobbled hastily together by order of Colburn and Company, had slumbered in Chaos, as all incoherences ought if possible to do. Verily this same genius of diffuse-writing, of diffuse-acting, is a Moloch; and souls pass through the fire to him more than enough. Surely, if ever discovery was valuable and needful, it were that above indicated, of paying by the work not visibly done!—Which needful discovery we will give the whole projecting, railwaying, knowledge-diffusing, march-ofintellect and otherwise promotive and locomotive societies in the Old and New World, any required length of centuries to make. Once made, such discovery once made, we too will fling cap into the air, and shout “Io Pæan! the Devil is conquered;”—and, in the meanwhile study to think it nothing miraculous that seven biographical volumes are given where one had been better; and that several other things happen, very much as they from of old were known to do, and are like to continue doing. Mr. Lockhart’s aim, we take it, was not that of producing any such highflown work of art as we hint at; or indeed to do much other than to print, intelligibly bound together by order of time, and by some requisite intercalary exposition, all such letters, documents, and notices about Scott as he found lying suitable, and as it seemed likely the world would undertake to read. His Work, accordingly, is not so much a composition, as what we may call a compilation well done. Neither is this a task of no difficulty; this too is a task that may be performed with extremely various degrees of talent: from the Life and Correspondence of Hannah More, for instance, up to this Life of Scott, there is a wide range indeed! Let us take the Seven Volumes, and be thankful that they are genuine in their kind. Nay, as to that of their being seven and not one, it is right to say that the public so required it. To have done other would have shown little policy in an author. Had Mr. Lockhart laboriously compressed himself, and, instead of well-done compilation, brought out the well-done composition in one volume instead of seven, which not many men in England are better qualified to do, there can be no doubt but his readers for the time had been immeasurably fewer. If the praise of magnanimity be denied him, that of prudence must be conceded, which perhaps he values more. The truth is, the work, done in this manner too, was good to have: Scott’s Biography, if uncomposed, lies printed and indestructible here, in the elementary

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state, and can at any time be composed, if necessary, by whosoever has a call to that. As it is, as it was meant to be, we repeat, the work is vigorously done. Sagacity, decision, candour, diligence, good manners, good sense: these qualities are throughout observable. The dates, calculations, statements, we suppose to be all accurate; much laborious inquiry, some of it impossible for another man, has been gone into, the results of which are imparted with due brevity. Scott’s letters, not interesting generally, yet never absolutely without interest, are copiously given; copiously, but with selection; the answers to them still more select. Narrative, delineation, and at length personal reminiscences, occasionally of much merit, of a certain rough force, sincerity and picturesqueness, duly intervene. The scattered members of Scott’s Life do lie here, and could be disentangled. In a word, this compilation is the work of a manful, clear-seeing, conclusive man, and has been executed with the faculty and combination of faculties the public had a right to expect from the name attached to it. One thing we hear greatly blamed in Mr. Lockhart: that he has been too communicative, indiscreet, and has recorded much that ought to have lain suppressed. Persons are mentioned, and circumstances, not always of an ornamental sort. It would appear there is far less reticence than was looked for! Various persons, name and surname, have ‘received pain:’ nay, the very Hero of the Biography is rendered unheroic; unornamental facts of him, and of those he had to do with, being set forth in plain English: hence ‘personality,’ ‘indiscretion,’ or worse, ‘sanctities of private life,’ &c. &c. How delicate, decent is English Biography, bless its mealy mouth! A Damocles’ sword of Respectability hangs forever over the poor English Life-writer (as it does over poor English Life in general), and reduces him to the verge of paralysis. Thus it has been said, ‘there are no English lives worth reading except those of Players, who by the nature of the case have bidden Respectability good-day.’ The English biographer has long felt that if in writing his Man’s Biography, he wrote down anything that could by possibility offend any man, he had written wrong. The plain consequence was that, properly speaking, no biography whatever could be produced. The poor biographer, having the fear not of God before his eyes, was obliged to retire as it were into vacuum; and write in the most melancholy, straitened manner, with only vacuum for a result. Vain that he wrote, and that we kept reading volume on volume: there was no biography, but some vague ghost of a biography, white, stainless; without feature or substance; vacuum, as we say, and wind and shadow,—which indeed the material of it was. No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence. His life is a battle, in



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so far as it is an entity at all. The very oyster, we suppose, comes in collision with oysters: undoubtedly enough it does come in collision with Necessity and Difficulty; and helps itself through, not as a perfect ideal oyster, but as an imperfect real one. Some kind of remorse must be known to the oyster; certain hatreds, certain pusillanimities. But as for man, his conflict is continual with the spirit of contradiction, that is without and within; with the evil spirit (or call it with the weak, most necessitous, pitiable spirit), that is in others and in himself. His walk, like all walking (say the mechanicians), is a series of falls. To paint man’s life is to represent these things. Let them be represented, fitly, with dignity and measure; but above all, let them be represented. No tragedy of Hamlet, with the part of Hamlet omitted by particular desire! No ghost of a Biography, let the Damocles’ sword of Respectability (which after all is but a pasteboard one) threaten as it will! One hopes that the public taste is much mended in this matter; that vacuum-biographies, with a good many other vacuities related to them, are withdrawn or withdrawing into vacuum. Probably it was Mr. Lockhart’s feeling of what the great public would approve that led him, open-eyed, into this offence against the small criticizing public: we joyfully accept the omen. Perhaps then, of all the praises copiously bestowed on his Work, there is none in reality so creditable to him as this same censure, which has also been pretty copious. It is a censure better than a good many praises. He is found guilty of having said this and that, calculated not to be entirely pleasant to this man and that; in other words, calculated to give him and the thing he worked in a living set of features, not leave him vague, in the white beatified ghostcondition. Several men, as we hear, cry out, “See, there is something written not entirely pleasant to me!” Good friend, it is pity; but who can help it? They that will crowd about bonfires may, sometimes very fairly, get their beards singed; it is the price they pay for such illumination: natural twilight is safe and free to all. For our part, we hope all manner of biographies that are written in England will henceforth be written so. If it is fit that they be written otherwise, then it is still fitter that they be not written at all: to produce not things but ghosts of things can never be the duty of man. The biographer has this problem set before him: to delineate a likeness of the earthly pilgrimage of a man. He will compute well what profit is in it, and what disprofit; under which latter head this of offending any of his fellow-creatures will surely not be forgotten. Nay, this may so swell the disprofit side of his account, that many an enterprise of biography, otherwise promising, shall require to be renounced. But once taken up, the rule before all rules is to do it, not to do the ghost of it. In speaking of the man and men he has to deal with, he will of course keep all his charities about

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him; but all his eyes open. Far be it from him to set down aught untrue; nay, not to abstain from, and leave in oblivion, much that is true. But having found a thing or things essential for his subject, and well computed the for and against, he will in very deed set down such thing or things, nothing doubting,—having, we may say, the fear of God before his eyes, and no other fear whatever. Censure the biographer’s prudence; dissent from the computation he made, or agree with it; be all malice of his, be all falsehood, nay, be all offensive avoidable inaccuracy, condemned and consumed; but know that by this plan only, executed as was possible, could the biographer hope to make a biography; and blame him not that he did what it had been the worst fault not to do. As to the accuracy or error of these statements about the Ballantynes and other persons aggrieved, which are questions much mooted at present in some places, we know nothing at all. If they are inaccurate, let them be corrected; if the inaccuracy was avoidable, let the author bear rebuke and punishment for it. We can only say, these things carry no look of inaccuracy on the face of them; neither is anywhere the smallest trace of ill-will or unjust feeling discernible. Decidedly the probabilities are, and till better evidence arise, the fair conclusion is, that this matter stands very much as it ought to do. Let the clatter of censure, therefore, propagate itself as far as it can. For Mr. Lockhart it virtually amounts to this very considerable praise, that, standing full in the face of the public, he has set at nought, and been among the first to do it, a public piece of cant; one of the commonest we have, and closely allied to many others of the fellest sort, as smooth as it looks. The other censure, of Scott being made unheroic, springs from the same stem; and is, perhaps, a still more wonderful flower of it. Your true hero must have no features, but be white, stainless, an impersonal ghost-hero! But connected with this, there is a hypothesis now current, due probably to some man of name, for its own force would not carry it far: That Mr. Lockhart at heart has a dislike to Scott, and has done his best in an underhand treacherous manner to dishero him! Such hypothesis is actually current: he that has ears may hear it now and then. On which astonishing hypothesis, if a word must be said, it can only be an apology for silence,—“That there are things at which one stands struck silent, as at first sight of the Infinite.” For if Mr. Lockhart is fairly chargeable with any radical defect, if on any side his insight entirely fails him, it seems even to be in this, that Scott is altogether lovely to him; that Scott’s greatness spreads out for him on all hands beyond reach of eye; that his very faults become beautiful, his vulgar worldlinesses are solid prudences, proprieties; and of his worth there is no measure. Does not the patient Biographer dwell on his Abbots, Pirates, and



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hasty theatrical scene-paintings; affectionately analyzing them, as if they were Raphael-pictures, time-defying Hamlets, Othellos? The Novel-manufactory, with its 15,000l. a-year, is sacred to him as creation of a genius, which carries the noble victor up to Heaven. Scott is to Lockhart the unparalleled of the time; an object spreading out before him like a sea without shore. Of that astonishing hypothesis, let expressive silence be the only answer. And so in sum, with regard to Lockhart’s Life of Scott, readers that believe in us shall read it with the feeling that a man of talent, decision, and insight wrote it; wrote it in seven volumes, not in one, because the public would pay for it better in that state; but wrote it with courage, with frankness, sincerity; on the whole, in a very readable, recommendable manner, as things go. Whosoever needs it can purchase it, or purchase the loan of it, with assurance more than usual that he has ware for his money. And now enough of the written Life; we will glance a little at the man and his acted life. Into the question whether Scott was a great man or not, we do not propose to enter deeply. It is, as too usual, a question about words. There can be no doubt but many men have been named and printed great who were vastly smaller than he; as little doubt moreover that of the specially good a very large portion, according to any genuine standard of man’s worth, were worthless in comparison to him. He for whom Scott is great may most innocently name him so; may with advantage admire his great qualities, and ought with sincere heart to emulate them. At the same time, it is good that there be a certain degree of precision in our epithets. It is good to understand, for one thing, that no popularity, and open-mouthed wonder of all the world, continued even for a long series of years, can make a man great. Such popularity is a remarkable fortune; indicates a great adaptation of the man to his element of circumstances; but may or may not indicate anything great in the man. To our imagination, as above hinted, there is a certain apotheosis in it; but in the reality no apotheosis at all. Popularity is as a blaze of illumination, or alas, of conflagration kindled round a man; showing what is in him; not putting the smallest item more into him; often abstracting much from him; conflagrating the poor man himself into ashes and caput mortuum! And then, by the nature of it, such popularity is transient; your ‘series of years,’ quite unexpectedly, sometimes almost on a sudden, terminates! For the stupidity of men, especially of men congregated in masses round any object, is extreme. What illuminations and conflagrations have kindled themselves, as if new heavenly suns had risen, which proved only to be tar-barrels, and terrestrial locks of straw! Profane Princesses cried out,

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“One God, one Farinelli?”—and whither now have they and Farinelli danced? In Literature too, there have been seen popularities greater even than Scott’s, and nothing perennial in the interior of them. Lope de Vega, whom all the world swore by, and made a proverb of; who could make an acceptable five-act tragedy in almost as many hours; the greatest of all popularities past or present, and perhaps one of the greatest men that ever ranked among popularities: Lope himself, so radiant, far-shining, has not proved to be a sun or star of the firmament; but is as good as lost and gone out, or plays at best, in the eyes of some few, as a vague aurora-borealis, and brilliant ineffectuality. The great man of Spain sat obscure at the time, all dark and poor, a maimed soldier; writing his Don Quixote in prison. And Lope’s fate withal was sad, his popularity perhaps a curse to him; for in this man there was something ethereal too, a divine particle traceable in few other popular men; and such far shining diffusion of himself, though all the world swore by it, would do nothing for the true life of him even while he lived: he had to creep into a convent, into a monk’s cowl, and learn, with infinite sorrow, that his blessedness had lain elsewhere; that when a man’s life feels itself to be sick and an error, no voting of by-standers can make it well and a truth again. Or coming down to our own times, was not August Kotzebue popular? Kotzebue, not so many years since, saw himself, if rumour and hand-clapping could be credited, the greatest man going; saw visibly his Thoughts, dressed out in plush and pasteboard, permeating and perambulating civilized Europe; the most iron visages weeping with him, in all theatres from Cadiz to Kamtchatka; his own ‘astonishing genius,’ meanwhile producing two tragedies or so per month: he on the whole blazed high enough; he too has gone out into Night and Orcus, and already is not.—We will omit this of popularity altogether, and account it as making simply nothing towards Scott’s greatness or non-greatness, as an accident, not a quality. Shorn of this falsifying nimbus, and reduced to his own natural dimensions, there remains the reality, Walter Scott, and what we can find in him: to be accounted great, or not great, according to the dialects of men. Friends to precision of epithet will probably deny his title to the name ‘great.’ It seems to us there goes other stuff to the making of great men than can be detected here. One knows not what idea worthy of the name of great, what purpose, instinct or tendency that could be called great, Scott ever was inspired with. His life was worldly; his ambitions were worldly. There is nothing spiritual in him; all is economical, material, of the earth earthy. A love of picturesque, of beautiful, vigorous and graceful things; a genuine love, yet not more genuine than has dwelt in hundreds of men named minor poets: this is the highest quality to be



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discerned in him. His power of representing these things too, his poetic power, like his moral power, was a genius in extenso, as we may say, not in intenso. In action, in speculation, broad as he was, he rose nowhere high; productive without measure as to quantity, in quality he for the most part transcended but a little way the region of commonplace. It has been said, ‘no man has written as many volumes with so few sentences that can be quoted.’ Winged words were not his vocation; nothing urged him that way: the great Mystery of Existence was not great to him; did not drive him into rocky solitudes to wrestle with it for an answer, to be answered or to perish. He had nothing of the martyr; into no ‘dark region to slay monsters for us,’ did he, either led or driven, venture down: his conquests were for his own behoof mainly, conquests over common market labour, and reckonable in good metallic coin of the realm. The thing he had faith in, except power, power of what sort soever, and even of the rudest sort, would be difficult to point out. One sees not that he believed in anything: nay, he did not even disbelieve; but quietly acquiesced, and made himself at home in a world of conventionalities: the false, the semi-false, and the true were alike true in this, that they were there, and had power in their hands more or less. It was well to feel so; and yet not well! We find it written, ‘Wo to them that are at ease in Zion;’ but surely it is a double wo to them that are at ease in Babel, in Domdaniel. On the other hand he wrote many volumes, amusing many thousands of men. Shall we call this great? It seems to us there dwells and struggles another sort of spirit in the inward parts of great men! Brother Ringletub, the missionary, inquired of Ram-Dass, a Hindoo mangod, who had set up for godhood lately, What he meant to do, then, with the sins of mankind? To which Ram-Dass at once answered, he had fire enough in his belly to burn up all the sins in the world. Ram-Dass was right so far, and had a spice of sense in him; for surely it is the test of every divine man this same, and without it he is not divine or great,—that he have fire in him to burn up somewhat of the sins of the world, of the miseries and errors of the world: why else is he there? Far be it from us to say that a great man must needs, with benevolence prepense, become a ‘friend of humanity;’ nay, that such professional self-conscious friends of humanity are not the fatallest kind of persons to be met with in our day. All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught. And yet a great man without such fire in him, burning dim or developed as a divine behest in his heart of hearts, never resting till it be fulfilled, were a solecism in Nature. A great man is ever, as the Transcendentalists speak, possessed with an idea. Napoleon himself, not the superfinest of great men, and ballasted sufficiently with prudences and egoisms, had nevertheless, as is clear enough,

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an idea to start with: the idea that Democracy was the Cause of Man, the right and infinite Cause. Accordingly he made himself ‘the armed Soldier of Democracy;’ and did vindicate it in a rather great manner. Nay, to the very last, he had a kind of idea, that, namely, of ‘La carrière ouverte aux talens, The tools to him that can handle them;’ really one of the best ideas yet promulgated on that matter, or rather the one true central idea, towards which all the others, if they tend anywhither, must tend. Unhappily it was in the military province only that Napoleon could realize this idea of his, being forced to fight for himself the while: before he got it tried to any extent in the civil province of things, his head by much victory grew light (no head can stand more than its quantity); and he lost head, as they say, and became a selfish ambitionist and quack, and was hurled out, leaving his idea to be realized, in the civil province of things, by others! Thus was Napoleon; thus are all great men: children of the idea; or, in Ram-Dass’s phraseology, furnished with fire to burn up the miseries of men. Conscious or unconscious, latent or unfolded, there is small vestige of any such fire being extant in the inner-man of Scott. Yet, on the other hand, the surliest critic must allow that Scott was a genuine man, which itself is a great matter. No affectation, fantasticality or distortion, dwelt in him; no shadow of cant. Nay withal, was he not a right brave and strong man, according to his kind? What a load of toil, what a measure of felicity, he quietly bore along with him; with what quiet strength he both worked on this earth, and enjoyed in it; invincible to evil fortune and to good! A most composed invincible man; in difficulty and distress, knowing no discouragement, Samsonlike, carrying off on his strong Samson-shoulders the gates that would imprison him; in danger and menace, laughing at the whisper of fear. And then, with such a sunny current of true humour and humanity, a free joyful sympathy with so many things; what of fire he had, all lying so beautifully latent, as radical latent heat, as fruitful internal warmth of life; a most robust, healthy man! The truth is, our best definition of Scott were perhaps even this, that he was, if no great man, then something much pleasanter to be, a robust, thoroughly healthy, and withal, very prosperous and victorious man. An eminently well-conditioned man, healthy in body, healthy in soul; we will call him one of the healthiest of men. Neither is this a small matter: health is a great matter, both to the possessor of it and to others. On the whole, that humorist in the Moral Essay was not so far out, who determined on honouring health only; and so instead of humbling himself to the highborn, to the rich and well-dressed, insisted on doffing hat to the healthy: coronetted carriages with pale faces in them passed by as failures miserable and lamentable; trucks with ruddy-cheeked strength dragging at them



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were greeted as successful and venerable. For does not health mean harmony, the synonym of all that is true, justly-ordered, good; is it not, in some sense, the net-total, as shown by experiment, of whatever worth is in us? The healthy man is a most meritorious product of Nature, so far as he goes. A healthy body is good; but a soul in right health,—it is the thing beyond all others to be prayed for; the blessedest thing this earth receives of Heaven. Without artificial medicament of philosophy, or tight-lacing of creeds (always very questionable), the healthy soul discerns what is good, and adheres to it, and retains it; discerns what is bad, and spontaneously casts it off. An instinct from Nature herself, like that which guides the wild animals of the forest to their food, shows him what he shall do, what he shall abstain from. The false and foreign will not adhere to him; cant and all fantastic, diseased incrustations are impossible—as Walker the Original, in such eminence of health was he for his part, could not, by much abstinence from soap and water, attain to a dirty face! This thing thou canst work with and profit by, this thing is substantial and worthy; that other thing thou canst not work with, it is trivial and inapt: so speaks unerringly the inward monition of the man’s whole nature. No need of logic to prove the most argumentative absurdity absurd; as Goethe says of himself, ‘all this ran down from me like water from a man in wax-cloth dress.’ Blessed is the healthy nature; it is the coherent, sweetly co-operative, not incoherent, self-distractive, self-destructive one! In the harmonious adjustment and play of all the faculties, the just balance of oneself gives a just feeling towards all men and all things. Glad light from within radiates outwards, and enlightens and embellishes. Now all this can be predicated of Walter Scott, and of no British literary man that we remember in these days, to any such extent,—if it be not perhaps of one, the most opposite imaginable to Scott, but his equal in this quality and what holds of it: William Cobbett! Nay, there are other similarities, widely different as they two look; nor be the comparison disparaging to Scott: for Cobbett also, as the pattern John Bull of his century, strong as the rhinoceros, and with singular humanities and genialities shining through his thick skin, is a most brave phenomenon. So bounteous was Nature to us; in the sickliest of recorded ages, when British Literature lay all puking and sprawling in Werterism, Byronism, and other Sentimentalism, tearful or spasmodic (fruit of internal wind), Nature was kind enough to send us two healthy Men, of whom she might still say, not without pride, “These also were made in England; such limbs do I still make there!” It is one of the cheerfullest sights, let the question of its greatness be settled as you will. A healthy nature may or may not be great; but there is no great nature that is not healthy.

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Or, on the whole, might we not say, Scott, in the new vesture of the nineteenth century, was intrinsically very much the old fighting Borderer of prior centuries; the kind of man Nature did of old make in that birthland of his? In the saddle, with the foray-spear, he would have acquitted himself as he did at the desk with his pen. One fancies how, in stout Beardie of Harden’s time, he could have played Beardie’s part; and been the stalwart buff-belted terræ filius he in this late time could only delight to draw. The same stout self-help was in him; the same oak and triple brass round his heart. He too could have fought at Redswire, cracking crowns with the fiercest, if that had been the task; could have harried cattle in Tynedale, repaying injury with compound interest; a right sufficient captain of men. A man without qualms or fantasticalities; a hard-headed, sound-hearted man, of joyous robust temper, looking to the main chance, and fighting direct thitherward: valde stalwartus homo!—How much in that case had slumbered in him, and passed away without sign. But indeed, who knows how much slumbers in many men. Perhaps our greatest poets are the mute Miltons; the vocal are those whom by happy accident we lay hold of, one here, one there, as it chances, and make vocal. It is even a question whether, had not want, discomfort, and distress-warrants been busy at Stratford-on-Avon, Shakspeare himself had not lived killing calves or combing wool! Had the Edial Boarding-school turned out well, we had never heard of Samuel Johnson; Samuel Johnson had been a fat schoolmaster and dogmatic gerundgrinder, and never known that he was more. Nature is rich: those two eggs thou art eating carelessly to breakfast, could they not have been hatched into a pair of fowls, and have covered the whole world with poultry? But it was not harrying of cattle in Tynedale, or cracking of crowns at Redswire, that this stout Border chief was appointed to perform. Far other work. To be the song-singer and pleasant tale-teller to Britain and Europe, in the beginning of the artificial nineteenth century; here, and not there, lay his business. Beardie of Harden would have found it very amazing. How he shapes himself to this new element; how he helps himself along in it, makes it too do for him, lives sound and victorious in it, and leads over the marches such a spoil as all the cattle-droves the Hardens ever took were poor in comparison to: this is the history of the life and achievements of our Sir Walter Scott, Baronet;—whereat we are now to glance for a little! It is a thing remarkable; a thing substantial; of joyful, victorious sort; not unworthy to be glanced at. Withal, however, a glance here and there will suffice. Our limits are narrow; the thing, were it never so victorious, is not of the sublime sort, nor extremely edifying; there is nothing



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in it to censure vehemently, nor love vehemently: there is more to wonder at than admire; and the whole secret is not an abstruse one. Till towards the age of thirty, Scott’s life has nothing in it decisively pointing towards Literature, or indeed towards distinction of any kind; he is wedded, settled, and has gone through all his preliminary steps, without symptom of renown as yet. It is the life of every other Edinburgh youth of his station and time. Fortunate we must name it, in many ways. Parents in easy or wealthy circumstances, yet unincumbered with the cares and perversions of aristocracy: nothing eminent in place, in faculty, or culture, yet nothing deficient; all around is methodic regulation, prudence, prosperity, kind-heartedness; an element of warmth and light, of affection, industry, and burgherly comfort, heightened into elegance; in which the young heart can wholesomely grow. A vigorous health seems to have been given by Nature; yet, as if Nature had said withal, “Let it be a health to express itself by mind, not by body,” a lameness is added in childhood; the brave little boy, instead of romping and bickering, must learn to think; or at lowest, what is a great matter, to sit still. No rackets and trundling-hoops for this young Walter; but ballads, history-books, and a world of legendary stuff, which his mother and those near him are copiously able to furnish. Disease, which is but superficial, and issues in outward lameness, does not cloud the young existence; rather forwards it towards the expansion it is fitted for. The miserable disease had been one of the internal nobler parts, marring the general organization; under which no Walter Scott could have been forwarded, or with all his other endowments could have been producible or possible. ‘Nature gives healthy children much; how much! Wise education is a wise unfolding of this; often it unfolds itself better of its own accord.’ Add one other circumstance: the place where; namely, Presbyterian Scotland. The influences of this are felt incessantly, they stream in at every pore. ‘There is a country accent,’ says La Rochefoucault, ‘not in speech only, but in thought, conduct, character, and manner of existing, which never forsakes a man.’ Scott, we believe, was all his days an Episcopalian Dissenter in Scotland; but that makes little to the matter. Nobody who knows Scotland and Scott can doubt but Presbyterianism too had a vast share in the forming of him. A country where the entire people is, or even once has been, laid hold of, filled to the heart with an infinite religious idea, has ‘made a step from which it cannot retrograde.’Thought, conscience, the sense that man is denizen of a Universe, creature of an Eternity, has penetrated to the remotest cottage, to the simplest heart. Beautiful and awful, the feeling of a Heavenly Behest, of Duty god-commanded, overcanopies all

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life. There is an inspiration in such a people; one may say in a more special sense, ‘the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding.’ Honour to all the brave and true; everlasting honour to brave old Knox, one of the truest of the true! That in the moment while he and his cause, amid civil broils, in convulsion and confusion, were still but struggling for life, he sent the schoolmaster forth to all corners, and said, “Let the people be taught:” this is but one, and indeed an inevitable and comparatively inconsiderable item in his great message to men. His message, in its true compass, was, “Let men know that they are men; created by God, responsible to God; who work in any meanest moment of time what will last through eternity.” It is verily a great message. Not ploughing and hammering machines, not patent digesters (never so ornamental) to digest the produce of these; no, in no wise; born slaves neither of their fellow-men, nor of their own appetites; but men! This great message Knox did deliver, with a man’s voice and strength; and found a people to believe him. Of such an achievement, we say, were it to be made once only, the results are immense. Thought, in such a country, may change its form, but cannot go out; the country has attained majority; thought, and a certain spiritual manhood, ready for all work that man can do, endures there. It may take many forms: the form of hard-fisted, money-getting industry, as in the vulgar Scotchman, in the vulgar New Englander; but as compact developed force and alertness of faculty, it is still there; it may utter itself, one day, as the colossal Scepticism of a Hume (beneficent this too, though painful, wrestling, Titan-like, through doubt and inquiry towards new belief ); and again, some better day, it may utter itself as the inspired Melody of a Burns: in a word, it is there, and continues to manifest itself, in the Voice and the Work of a Nation of hardy, endeavouring, considering men, with whatever that may bear in it, or unfold from it. The Scotch national character originates in many circumstances; first of all, in the Saxon stuff there was to work on; but next, and beyond all else except that, in the Presbyterian Gospel of John Knox. It seems a good national character; and, on some sides, not so good. Let Scott thank John Knox, for he owed him much, little as he dreamed of debt in that quarter! No Scotchman of his time was more entirely Scotch than Walter Scott; the good and the not so good, which all Scotchmen inherit, ran through every fibre of him. Scott’s childhood, school-days, college-days, are pleasant to read of, though they differ not from those of others in his place and time. The memory of him may probably enough last till this record of them become far more curious than it now is. “So lived an Edinburgh Writer to the Signet’s son in the end of the eighteenth century,” may some future Scotch novelist say to himself in the



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end of the twenty-first! The following little fragment of infancy is all we can extract. It is from an Autobiography which he had begun, which one cannot but regret he did not finish. Scott’s best qualities never shone out more freely than when he went upon anecdote and reminiscence. Such a master of narrative and of himself could have done personal narrative well. Here, if anywhere, his knowledge was complete, and all his humour and good-humour had free scope: ‘An odd incident is worth recording. It seems my mother had sent a maid to take charge of me, at this farm of Sandy-Knowe, that I might be no inconvenience to the family. But the damsel sent on that important mission had left her heart behind her, in the keeping of some wild fellow, it is likely, who had done and said more to her than he was like to make good. She became extremely desirous to return to Edinburgh; and, as my mother made a point of her remaining where she was, she contracted a sort of hatred at poor me, as the cause of her being detained at Sandy-Knowe. This rose, I suppose, to a sort of delirious affection, for she confessed to old Alison Wilson, the housekeeper, that she had carried me up to the craigs under a strong temptation of the Devil to cut my throat with her scissors, and bury me in the moss. Alison instantly took possession of my person, and took care that her confidant should not be subject to any farther temptation, at least so far as I was concerned. She was dismissed, of course, and I have heard afterwards became a lunatic. ‘It is here, at Sandy-Knowe, in the residence of my paternal grandfather, already mentioned, that I have the first consciousness of existence; and I recollect distinctly that my situation and appearance were a little whimsical. Among the odd remedies recurred to to aid my lameness, some one had recommended that so often as a sheep was killed for the use of the family, I should be stripped, and swathed up in the skin warm as it was flayed from the carcass of the animal. In this Tartar-like habiliment I well remember lying upon the floor of the little parlour in the farm-house, while my grandfather, a venerable old man with white hair, used every excitement to make me try to crawl. I also distinctly remember the late Sir George M’Dougal of Mackerstown, father of the present Sir Henry Hay M’Dougal, joining in the attempt. He was, God knows how, a relation of ours; and I still recollect him in his old-fashioned military habit (he had been Colonel of the Greys), with a small cocked-hat deeply laced, an embroidered scarlet waistcoat, and a light-coloured coat, with milk-white locks tied in a military fashion, kneeling on the ground before me, and dragging his watch along the carpet to induce me to follow it. The benevolent old soldier and the infant wrapped in his sheep-skin, would have afforded an odd group to uninterested spectators. This must have happened about my third year (1774), for Sir George M’Dougal and my grandfather both died shortly after that period.’* * Vol. i. pp. 15-17.

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We will glance next into the ‘Liddesdale raids.’ Scott has grown up to be a brisk-hearted jovial young man and Advocate: in vacation time he makes excursions to the Highlands, to the Border Cheviots and Northumberland; rides free and far, on his stout galloway, through bog and brake, over the dim moory Debateable Land,—over Flodden and other fields and places, where, though he yet knew it not, his work lay. No land, however dim and moory, but either has had or will have its poet, and so become not unknown in song. Liddesdale, which was once as prosaic as most dales, having now attained illustration, let us glance thitherward: Liddesdale too is on this ancient Earth of ours under this eternal Sky; and gives and takes, in the most incalculable manner, with the Universe at large! Scott’s experiences there are rather of the rustic Arcadian sort; the element of whisky not wanting. We should premise that here and there a feature has perhaps been aggravated for effect’s sake: ‘During seven successive years,’ writes Mr. Lockhart (for the Autobiography has long since left us), ‘Scott made a raid, as he called it, into Liddesdale with Mr. Shortreed, sheriff-substitute of Roxburgh, for his guide; exploring every rivulet to its source, and every ruined peel from foundation to battlement. At this time no wheeled carriage had ever been seen in the district;—the first indeed was a gig, driven by Scott himself for a part of his way, when on the last of these seven excursions. There was no inn nor publichouse of any kind in the whole valley; the travellers passed from the shepherd’s hut to the minister’s manse, and again from the cheerful hospitality of the manse to the rough and jolly welcome of the homestead; gathering, wherever they went, songs and tunes, and occasionally more tangible relics of antiquity;—even such a “routh of auld knicknackets” as Burns ascribes to Captain Grose. To these rambles Scott owed much of the materials of his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border; and not less of that intimate acquaintance with the living manners of these unsophisticated regions, which constitutes the chief charm of one of the most charming of his prose works. But how soon he had any definite object before him in his researches seems very doubtful. “He was makin’ himsell a’ the time,” said Mr. Shortreed; “but he didna ken may be what he was about till years had passed; at first he thought o’ little I daresay but the queerness and the fun.” ‘“In those days,” says the memorandum before me, “advocates were not so plenty, at least about Liddesdale;” and the worthy sheriff-substitute goes on to describe the sort of bustle, not unmixed with alarm, produced at the first farm-house they visited (Willie Elliot’s, of Millburnholm), when the honest man was informed of the quality of one of his guests. When they dismounted, accordingly, he received Mr. Scott with great ceremony, and insisted upon himself leading his horse to the stable. Shortreed accompanied Willie however, and the latter, after taking a deliberate peep at Scott, “out by the edge



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of the door-cheek,” whispered, “weel Robin, deil hae me if I’se be a bit feared for him now; he’s just a chield like oursels, I think.” Half a dozen dogs of all degrees had already gathered round the advocate, and his way of returning their compliments had set Willie Elliot at once at his ease. ‘According to Mr. Shortreed, this good man of Millburnholm was the great original of Dandie Dinmont.’ * * * ‘They dined at Millburnholm; and, after having lingered over Willie Elliot’s punch-bowl until, in Mr. Shortreed’s phrase, they were “half-glowrin,” mounted their steeds again, and proceeded to Dr. Elliot’s at Cleughhead, where (“for,” says my memorandum, “folk were na very nice in those days”) the two travellers slept in one and the same bed,—as indeed seems to have been the case with them throughout most of their excursions in this primitive district. Dr. Elliot, a clergyman, had already a large MS. collection of the ballads Scott was in quest of.’ * * * ‘Next morning they seem to have ridden a long way for the express purpose of visiting one “auld Thomas o’ Tuzzilehope,” another Elliot, I suppose, who was celebrated for his skill on the Border pipe, and in particular for being in possession of the real lilt* of Dick o’ the Cow. Before starting, that is, at six o’clock, the ballad hunters had, “just to lay the stomach, a devilled duck or twae, and some London porter.” Auld Thomas found them, nevertheless, well disposed for “breakfast” on their arrival at Tuzzilehope; and this being over, he delighted them with one of the most hideous and unearthly of all the specimens of “riding-music;” and, moreover, with considerable libations of whisky-punch, manufactured in a certain wooden vessel, resembling a very small milk-pail, which he called “wisdom,” because it “made” only a few spoonfuls of spirits,—though he had the art of replenishing it so adroitly, that it had been celebrated for fifty years as more fatal to sobriety than any bowl in the parish. Having done due honour to “wisdom,” they again mounted, and proceeded over moss and moor to some other equally hospitable master of the pipe. “Ah me,” says Shortreed, “sic an endless fund o’ humour and drollery as he then had wi’ him! Never ten yards but we were either laughing or roaring and singing. Wherever we stopped, how brawlie he suited himsell to everybody! He aye did as the lave did; never made himsell the great man or took ony airs in the company. I’ve seen him in a’ moods in these jaunts, grave and gay, daft and serious, sober and drunk (this however, even in our wildest rambles, was rare); but, drunk or sober, he was aye the gentleman. He lookit excessively heavy and stupid when he was fou, but he was never out o’ gude humour.”’

These are questionable doings, questionably narrated; but what shall we say of the following, wherein the element of whisky plays an extremely prominent part? We will say that it is questionable, and not exemplary, whisky mounting * Loud tune: German, lallen.

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clearly beyond its level; that indeed charity hopes and conjectures, here may be some aggravating of features for effect’s sake! 5

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‘On reaching, one evening, some Charlieshope or other (I forget the name) among those wildernesses, they found a kindly reception as usual; but, to their agreeable surprise, after some days of hard living, a measured and orderly hospitality as respected liquor. Soon after supper, at which a bottle of elderberry wine alone had been produced, a young student of divinity, who happened to be in the house, was called upon to take the “big ha’ Bible,” in the good old fashion of “Burns’s Saturday Night;” and some progress had been already made in the service, when the good man of the farm, whose “tendency,” as Mr. Mitchell says, “was soporific,” scandalized his wife and the dominie by starting suddenly from his knees, and, rubbing his eyes, with a stentorian exclamation of “By——, here’s the keg at last!” and in tumbled, as he spoke the word, a couple of sturdy herdsmen, whom, on hearing a day before of the advocate’s approaching visit, he had despatched to a certain smuggler’s haunt, at some considerable distance, in quest of a supply of run brandy from the Solway Frith. The pious exercise of the household was hopelessly interrupted. With a thousand apologies for his hitherto shabby entertainment, this jolly Elliot or Armstrong had the welcome keg mounted on the table without a moment’s delay, and gentle and simple, not forgetting the dominie, continued carousing about it until daylight streamed in upon the party. Sir Walter Scott seldom failed, when I saw him in company with his Liddesdale companion, to mimic, with infinite humour, the sudden outburst of his old host on hearing the clatter of horses’ feet, which he knew to indicate the arrival of the keg; the consternation of the dame; and the rueful despair with which the young clergyman closed the book.’*

From which Liddesdale raids, which we here, like the young clergyman, close not without a certain rueful despair, let the reader draw what nourishment he can. They evince satisfactorily, though in a rude manner, that in those days young advocates, and Scott, like the rest of them, were alive and alert,—whisky sometimes preponderating. But let us now fancy that the jovial young Advocate has pleaded his first cause; has served in yeomanry drills; been wedded, been promoted Sheriff, without romance in either case; dabbling a little the while, under guidance of Monk Lewis, in translations from the German, in translation of Goethe’s Götz with the Iron Hand;—and we have arrived at the threshold of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and the opening of a new century. Hitherto, therefore, there has been made out, by Nature and Circumstance working together, nothing unusually remarkable, yet still something very valu* Vol. i. pp. 195-199.



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able: a stout effectual man of thirty, full of broad sagacity and good humour, with faculties in him fit for any burden of business, hospitality, and duty, legal or civic;—with what other faculties in him no one could yet say. As indeed who, after lifelong inspection, can say what is in any man? The uttered part of a man’s life, let us always repeat, bears to the unuttered, unconscious part a small unknown proportion; he himself never knows it, much less do others. Give him room, give him impulse: he reaches down to the Infinite with that so straitly-imprisoned soul of his; and can do miracles if need be! It is one of the comfortablest truths that great men abound, though in the unknown state. Nay, as above hinted, our greatest, being also by nature our quietest, are perhaps those that remain unknown! Philosopher Fichte took comfort in this belief, when from all pulpits and editorial desks, and publications, periodical and stationary, he could hear nothing but the infinite chattering and twittering of commonplace become ambitious; and in the infinite stir of motion nowhither, and of din which should have been silence, all seemed churned into one tempestuous yeasty froth, and the stern Fichte almost desired ‘taxes on knowledge’ to allay it a little;—he comforted himself, we say, by the unshaken belief that Thought did still exist in Germany; that thinking men, each in his own corner, were verily doing their work, though in a silent latent manner.* Walter Scott, as a latent Walter, had never amused all men for a score of years in the course of centuries and eternities, or gained and lost several hundred thousand pounds sterling by Literature; but he might have been a happy, and by no means a useless,—nay, who knows at bottom whether not a still usefuller Walter! However, that was not his fortune. The Genius of a rather singular age,—an age at once destitute of faith and terrified at scepticism, with little knowledge of its whereabout, with many sorrows to bear or front, and on the whole with a life to lead in these new circumstances,—had said to himself: What man shall be the temporary comforter, or were it but the spiritual comfit-maker, of this my poor singular age, to solace its dead tedium and manifold sorrows a little? So had the Genius said, looking over all the world, what man? and found him walking the dusty Outer Parliament-house of Edinburgh, with his advocate-gown on his back; and exclaimed, That is he! The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border proved to be a well, from which flowed one of the broadest rivers. Metrical Romances (which in due time pass into Prose Romances); the old life of men resuscitated for us: it is a mighty word! Not as dead tradition, but as a palpable presence, the past stood before us. There they were, the rugged old fighting men; in their doughty simplicity and strength, * Fichte, Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrten.

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with their heartiness, their healthiness, their stout self-help, in their iron basnets, leather jerkins, jackboots, in their quaintness of manner and costume; there as they looked and lived! It was like a new-discovered continent in Literature; for the new century, a bright El Dorado,—or else some fat beatific land of Cockaigne, and Paradise of Donothings. To the opening nineteenth century, in its languor and paralysis, nothing could have been welcomer. Most unexpected, most refreshing, and exhilarating: behold our new El Dorado; our fat beatific Lubberland, where one can enjoy and do nothing! It was the time for such a new Literature; and this Walter Scott was the man for it. The Lays, the Marmions, the Ladyes and Lords of Lake and Isles, followed in thick succession, with everwidening profit and praise. How many thousands of guineas were paid down for each new Lay; how many thousands of copies (fifty, and more sometimes) were printed off then and subsequently; what complimenting, reviewing, renown and apotheosis there was: all is recorded in these Seven Volumes, which will be valuable in literary statistics. It is a history, brilliant, remarkable; the outlines of which are known to all. The reader shall recal it, or conceive it. No blaze in his fancy is like to mount higher than the reality did. At this middle period of his life, therefore, Scott, enriched with copyrights, with new official incomes and promotions, rich in money, rich in repute, presents himself as a man in the full career of success. ‘Health, wealth, and wit to guide them’ (as his vernacular Proverb says), all these three are his. The field is open for him, and victory there; his own faculty, his own self, unshackled, victoriously unfolds itself,—the highest blessedness that can befall a man. Wide circle of friends, personal loving admirers; warmth of domestic joys, vouchsafed to all that can trueheartedly nestle down among them; light of radiance and renown given only to a few: who would not call Scott happy? But the happiest circumstance of all is, as we said above, that Scott had in himself a right healthy soul, rendering him little dependent on outward circumstances. Things showed themselves to him not in distortion or borrowed light or gloom, but as they were. Endeavour lay in him and endurance, in due measure; and clear vision of what was to be endeavoured after. Were one to preach a Sermon on Health, as really were worth doing, Scott ought to be the text. Theories are demonstrably true in the way of logic; and then in the way of practice, they prove true or else not true: but here is the grand experiment, Do they turn out well? What boots it that a man’s creed is the wisest, that his system of principles is the superfinest, if, when set to work, the life of him does nothing but jar, and fret itself into holes? They are untrue in that, were it in nothing else, these principles of his; openly convicted of untruth;—fit only, shall we say, to be rejected as counterfeits, and flung to



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the dogs? We say not that; but we do say that ill-health, of body or of mind, is defeat, is battle (in a good or in a bad cause) with bad success; that health alone is victory. Let all men, if they can manage it, contrive to be healthy! He who in what cause soever sinks into pain and disease, let him take thought of it; let him know well that it is not good he has arrived at yet, but surely evil,—may, or may not be, on the way towards good. Scott’s healthiness showed itself decisively in all things, and nowhere more decisively than in this: the way in which he took his fame; the estimate he from the first formed of fame. Money will buy money’s worth; but the thing men call fame, what is it? A gaudy emblazonry, not good for much,—except indeed as it too may turn to money. To Scott it was a profitable pleasing superfluity, no necessary of life. Not necessary, now or ever! Seemingly without much effort, but taught by Nature, and the instinct which instructs the sound heart what is good for it and what is not, he felt that he could always do without this same emblazonry of reputation; that he ought to put no trust in it; but be ready at any time to see it pass away from him, and to hold on his way as before. It is incalculable, as we conjecture, what evil he escaped in this manner; what perversions, irritations, mean agonies without a name, he lived wholly apart from, knew nothing of. Happily before fame arrived, he had reached the mature age at which all this was easier for him. What a strange Nemesis lurks in the felicities of men! In thy mouth it shall be sweet as honey, in thy belly it shall be bitter as gall! Some weakly-organized individual, we will say at the age of five-and-twenty, whose main or whole talent rests on some prurient susceptivity, and nothing under it but shallowness and vacuum, is clutched hold of by the general imagination, is whirled aloft to the giddy height; and taught to believe the divine-seeming message that he is a great man: such individual seems the luckiest of men; and, alas, is he not the unluckiest? Swallow not the Circe-draught, O weakly-organized individual; it is fell poison; it will dry up the fountains of thy whole existence, and all will grow withered and parched; thou shalt be wretched under the sun! Is there, for example, a sadder book than that Life of Byron, by Moore? To omit mere prurient susceptivities that rest on vacuum, look at poor Byron, who really had much substance in him. Sitting there in his self-exile, with a proud heart striving to persuade itself that it despises the entire created Universe; and far off, in foggy Babylon, let any pitifullest whipster draw pen on him, your proud Byron writhes in torture,—as if the pitiful whipster were a magician, or his pen a galvanic wire stuck into the Byron’s spinal marrow! Lamentable, despicable,— one had rather be a kitten and cry mew! O, son of Adam, great or little, according as thou art loveable those thou livest with will love thee. Those thou livest not

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with, is it of moment that they have the alphabetic letters of thy name engraved on their memory with some signpost likeness of thee (as like as I to Hercules) appended to them? It is not of moment; in sober truth, not of any moment at all! And yet, behold, there is no soul now whom thou canst love freely,—from one soul only art thou always sure of reverence enough; in presence of no soul is it rightly well with thee! How is thy world become desert; and thou, for the sake of a little babblement of tongues, art poor, bankrupt, insolvent not in purse, but in heart and mind. ‘The Golden Calf of self-love,’ says Jean Paul, ‘has grown into a burning Phalaris’ Bull, to consume its owner and worshipper.’ Ambition, the desire of shining and outshining, was the beginning of Sin in this world. The man of letters who founds upon his fame, does he not thereby alone declare himself a follower of Lucifer (named Satan, the Enemy), and member of the Satanic school?— — It was in this poetic period that Scott formed his connexion with the Ballantynes; and embarked, though under cover, largely in trade. To those who regard him in the heroic light, and will have Vates to signify Prophet as well as Poet, this portion of his biography seems somewhat incongruous. Viewed as it stood in the reality, as he was and as it was, the enterprise, since it proved so unfortunate, may be called lamentable, but cannot be called unnatural. The practical Scott, looking towards practical issues in all things, could not but find hard cash one of the most practical. If, by any means, cash could be honestly produced, were it by writing poems, were it by printing them, why not? Great things might be done ultimately; great difficulties were at once got rid of,—manifold higgling of booksellers, and contradiction of sinners hereby fell away. A printing and bookselling speculation was not so alien for a maker of books. Voltaire, who indeed got no copyrights, made much money by the war-commissariat, in his time; we believe, by the victualling branch of it. Saint George himself, they say, was a dealer in bacon in Cappadocia. A thrifty man will help himself towards his object by such steps as lead to it. Station in society, solid power over the good things of this world, was Scott’s avowed object; towards which the precept of precepts is that of Iago: Put money in thy purse. Here indeed it is to be remarked, that perhaps no literary man of any generation has less value than Scott for the immaterial part of his mission in any sense: not only for the fantasy called fame, with the fantastic miseries attendant thereon; but also for the spiritual purport of his work, whether it tended hitherward or thitherward, or had any tendency whatever; and indeed for all purports and results of his working, except such, we may say, as offered themselves to the eye, and could in one sense or the other be handled, looked at, and



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buttoned into the breeches-pocket. Somewhat too little of a fantast, this Vates of ours! But so it was: in this nineteenth century, our highest literary man, who immeasurably beyond all others commanded the world’s ear, had, as it were, no message whatever to deliver to the world; wished not the world to elevate itself, to amend itself, to do this or to do that, except simply pay him for the books he kept writing. Very remarkable; fittest, perhaps, for an age fallen languid, destitute of faith, and terrified at scepticism? Or, perhaps, for quite another sort of age, an age all in peaceable triumphant motion? Be this as it may, surely since Shakspeare’s time there has been no great speaker so unconscious of an aim in speaking as Walter Scott. Equally unconscious these two utterances; equally the sincere complete product of the minds they came from: and now if they were equally deep? Or, if the one was living fire, and the other was futile phosphorescence and mere resinous firework? It will depend on the relative worth of the minds; for both were equally spontaneous, both equally expressed themselves unincumbered by an ulterior aim. Beyond drawing audiences to the Globe Theatre, Shakspeare contemplated no result in those plays of his. Yet they have had results! Utter with free heart what thy own daemon gives thee: if fire from heaven, it shall be well; if resinous firework, it shall be—as well as it could be, or better than otherwise!—The candid judge will, in general, require that a speaker, in so extremely serious a Universe as this of ours, have something to speak about. In the heart of the speaker there ought to be some kind of gospel-tidings burning till it be uttered; otherwise it were better for him that he altogether held his peace. A gospel somewhat more decisive than this of Scott’s,—except to an age altogether languid, without either scepticism or faith! These things the candid judge will demand of literary men; yet withal will recognize the great worth there is in Scott’s honesty if in nothing more, in his being the thing he was with such entire good faith. Here is a something not a nothing. If no skyborn messenger, heaven looking through his eyes; then neither is it a chimera with its systems, crotchets, cants, fanaticisms, and ‘last infirmity of noble minds,’—full of misery, unrest, and ill-will; but a substantial, peaceable, terrestrial man. Far as the Earth is under the Heaven does Scott stand below the former sort of character; but high as the cheerful flowery Earth is above waste Tartarus does he stand above the latter. Let him live in his own fashion, and do honour to him in that. It were late in the day to write criticisms on those Metrical Romances: at the same time, we may remark, the great popularity they had seems natural enough. In the first place, there was the indisputable impress of worth, of genuine human force, in them. This which lies in some degree, or is thought

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to lie, at the bottom of all popularity, did, to an unusual degree, disclose itself in these rhymed romances of Scott’s. Pictures were actually painted and presented; human emotions conceived and sympathized with. Considering what wretched Della-Cruscan and other vamping-up of old worn-out tatters was the staple article then, it may be granted that Scott’s excellence was superior and supreme. When a Hayley was the main singer, a Scott might well be hailed with warm welcome. Consider whether the Loves of the Plants, and even the Loves of the Triangles, could be worth the loves and hates of men and women! Scott was as preferable to what he displaced, as the substance is to the wearisomely repeated shadow of a substance. But, in the second place, we may say that the kind of worth which Scott manifested was fitted especially for the then temper of men. We have called it an age fallen into spiritual languor, destitute of belief, yet terrified at scepticism; reduced to live a stinted half-life, under strange new circumstances. Now vigorous whole-life, this was what of all things these delineations offered. The reader was carried back to rough strong times, wherein those maladies of ours had not yet arisen. Brawny fighters, all cased in buff and iron, their hearts too sheathed in oak and triple brass, caprioled their huge war-horses, shook their death-doing spears; and went forth in the most determined manner, nothing doubting. The reader sighed, yet not without a reflex solacement: “O, that I too had lived in those times, had never known these logic-cobwebs, this doubt, this sickliness; and been and felt myself alive among men alive!” Add lastly, that, in this new-found poetic world there was no call for effort on the reader’s part; what excellence they had, exhibited itself at a glance. It was for the reader, not an El Dorado only, but a beatific land of Cockaigne and Paradise of Donothings! The reader, what the vast majority of readers so long to do, was allowed to lie down at his ease, and be ministered to. What the Turkish bath-keeper is said to aim at with his frictions, and shampooings, and fomentings, more or less effectually, that the patient in total idleness may have the delights of activity,—was here to a considerable extent realized. The languid imagination fell back into its rest; an artist was there who could supply it with high-painted scenes, with sequences of stirring action, and whisper to it, Be at ease, and let thy tepid element be comfortable to thee. ‘The rude man,’ says a critic, ‘requires only to see something going on. The man of more refinement must be made to feel. The man of complete refinement must be made to reflect.’ We named the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border the fountain from which flowed this great river of Metrical Romances; but according to some they can be traced to a still higher obscurer spring: to Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand; of which, as we have seen, Scott in his earlier days executed



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a translation. Dated a good many years ago, the following words in a criticism on Goethe are found written; which probably are still new to most readers of this Review: ‘The works just mentioned, Götz and Werter, though noble specimens of youthful talent, are still not so much distinguished by their intrinsic merits as by their splendid fortune. It would be difficult to name two books which have exercised a deeper influence on the subsequent literature of Europe than these two performances of a young author; his first fruits, the produce of his twenty-fourth year. Werter appeared to seize the hearts of men in all quarters of the world, and to utter for them the word which they had long been waiting to hear. As usually happens too, this same word once uttered was soon abundantly repeated; spoken in all dialects, and chaunted through all the notes of the gamut, till the sound of it had grown a weariness rather than a pleasure. Sceptical sentimentality, view-hunting, love, friendship, suicide, and desperation, became the staple literary ware: and though the epidemic, after a long course of years, subsided in Germany, it re-appeared with various modifications in other countries; and everywhere abundant traces of its good and its bad effects are still to be discerned. The fortune of Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, though less sudden, was by no means less exalted. In his own country, Götz, though he now stands solitary and childless, became the parent of an innumerable progeny of chivalry plays, feudal delineations, and poetico-antiquarian performances; which, though long ago deceased, made noise enough in their day and generation: and with ourselves his influence has been perhaps still more remarkable. Sir Walter Scott’s first literary enterprise was a translation of Götz von Berlichingen: and if genius could be communicated like instruction, we might call this work of Goethe’s the prime cause of Marmion and the Lady of the Lake, with all that has since followed from the same creative hand. Truly a grain of seed that has lighted in the right soil! For, if not firmer and fairer, it has grown to be taller and broader than any other tree; and all the nations of the earth are still yearly gathering of its fruit.’

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How far Götz von Berlichingen actually affected Scott’s literary destination, and whether without it the rhymed romances, and then the prose romances of the Author of Waverley, would not have followed as they did, must remain a very obscure question; obscure, and not important. Of the fact, however, there is no doubt, that these two tendencies, which may be named Götzism and Werterism, of the former of which Scott was representative with us, have made, and are still in some quarters making, the tour of all Europe. In Germany too there was this affectionate half-regretful looking back into the Past; Germany had its buff-belted watch-tower period in literature, and had even got done with it,

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before Scott began. Then as to Werterism, had not we English our Byron and his genus? No form of Werterism in any other country had half the potency: as our Scott carried Chivalry Literature to the ends of the world, so did our Byron Werterism. France, busy with its Revolution and its Napoleon, had little leisure at the moment for Götzism or Werterism; but it has had them both since, in a shape of its own: witness the whole ‘Literature of Desperation’ in our own days, the beggarliest form of Werterism yet seen, probably its expiring final form: witness also, at the other extremity of the scale, a nobly-gifted Chateaubriand, Götz and Werter, both in one.—Curious: how all Europe is but like a set of parishes of the same country; participant of the self-same influences, ever since the Crusades, and earlier;—and these glorious wars of ours are but like parish-brawls, which begin in mutual ignorance, intoxication and boastful speech; which end in broken windows, damage, waste, and bloody noses; and which one hopes the general good sense is now in the way towards putting down, in some measure! But leaving this to be as it can, what it concerned us here to remark, was that British Werterism, in the shape of those Byron Poems, so potent and poignant, produced on the languid appetite of men a mighty effect. This too was a ‘class of feelings deeply important to modern minds; feelings which arise from passion incapable of being converted into action, which belong to an age as indolent, cultivated, and unbelieving as our own!’ The ‘languid age without either faith or scepticism’ turned towards Byronism with an interest altogether peculiar: here, if no cure for its miserable paralysis and languor, was at least an indignant statement of the misery; an indignant Ernulphus’ curse read over it,—which all men felt to be something. Half-regretful lookings into the Past gave place, in many quarters to Ernulphus’ cursings of the Present. Scott was among the first to perceive that the day of Metrical Chivalry Romances was declining. He had held the sovereignty for some half-score of years, a comparatively long lease of it; and now the time seemed come for dethronement, for abdication; an unpleasant business; which however he held himself ready, as a brave man will, to transact with composure and in silence. After all, Poetry was not his staff of life; Poetry had already yielded him much money; this at least it would not take back from him. Busy always with editing, with compiling, with multiplex official, commercial business, and solid interests, he beheld the coming change with unmoved eye. Resignation he was prepared to exhibit in this matter;—and now behold there proved to be no need of resignation. Let the Metrical Romance become a Prose one; shake off its rhyme-fetters, and try a wider sweep! In the spring of 1814 appeared Waverley; an event memorable in the annals of British Lit-



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erature; in the annals of British Bookselling thrice and four times memorable. Byron sang, but Scott narrated; and when the song had sung itself out through all variations onwards to the Don Juan one, Scott was still found narrating, and carrying the whole world along with him. All bygone popularity of chivalry lays was swallowed up in a far greater. What ‘series’ followed out of Waverley, and how and with what result, is known to all men; was witnessed and watched with a kind of rapt astonishment by all. Hardly any literary reputation ever rose so high in our Island; no reputation at all ever spread so wide. Walter Scott became Sir Walter Scott, Baronet, of Abbotsford; on whom Fortune seemed to pour her whole cornucopia of wealth, honour, and worldly good; the favourite of Princes and of Peasants, and all intermediate men. His ‘Waverley series,’ swift-following one on the other apparently without end, was the universal reading, looked for like an annual harvest, by all ranks in all European countries. A curious circumstance superadded itself, that the author though known was unknown. From the first, most people suspected, and soon after the first, few intelligent persons much doubted, that the Author of Waverley was Walter Scott. Yet a certain mystery was still kept up; rather piquant to the public; doubtless very pleasant to the author, who saw it all; who probably had not to listen, as other hapless individuals often had, to this or the other long-drawn ‘clear proof at last,’ that the author was not Walter Scott, but a certain astonishing Mr. Soand-so;—one of the standing miseries of human life in that time. But for the privileged Author, it was like a king travelling incognito. All men know that he is a high king, chivalrous Gustaf or Kaiser Joseph; but he mingles in their meetings without cumber of etiquette or lonesome ceremony, as Chevalier du Nord, or Count of Lorraine: he has none of the weariness of royalty, and yet all the praise, and the satisfaction of hearing it with his own ears. In a word, the Waverley Novels circulated and reigned triumphant; to the general imagination the ‘Author of Waverley’ was like some living mythological personage, and ranked among the chief wonders of the world. How a man lived and demeaned himself in such unwonted circumstances is worth seeing. We would gladly quote from Scott’s correspondence of this period; but that does not much illustrate the matter. His letters, as above stated, are never without interest, yet also seldom or never very interesting. They are full of cheerfulness, of wit, and ingenuity; but they do not treat of aught intimate; without impeaching their sincerity, what is called sincerity, one may say they do not, in any case whatever, proceed from the innermost parts of the mind. Conventional forms, due consideration of your own and your correspondent’s pretensions and vanities, are at no moment left out of view. The epistolary

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stream runs on, lucid, free, glad-flowing; but always, as it were, parallel to the real substance of the matter, never coincident with it. One feels it hollowish under foot. Letters they are of a most humane man of the world, even exemplary in that kind; but with the man of the world always visible in them;—as indeed it was little in Scott’s way to speak perhaps even with himself in any other fashion. We select rather some glimpses of him from Mr. Lockhart’s record. The first is of dining with Royalty or Prince-Regentship itself; an almost official matter: ‘On hearing from Mr. Croker, then Secretary to the Admiralty, that Scott was to be in town by the middle of March (1815), the Prince said, “Let me know when he comes, and I’ll get up a snug little dinner that will suit him;” and after he had been presented and graciously received at the levee, he was invited to dinner accordingly, through his excellent friend Mr. Adam (now Lord Chief Commissioner of the Jury Court in Scotland), who at that time held a confidential office in the royal household. The Regent had consulted with Mr. Adam also as to the composition of the party. “Let us have,” said he, “just a few friends of his own, and the more Scotch the better;” and both the Commissioner and Mr. Croker assure me that the party was the most interesting and agreeable one in their recollection. It comprised, I believe, the Duke of York, the Duke of Gordon (then Marquis of Huntly), the Marquis of Hertford (then Lord Yarmouth), the Earl of Fife, and Scott’s early friend, Lord Melville. “The Prince and Scott,” says Mr. Croker, “were the two most brilliant story-tellers, in their several ways, that I have ever happened to meet; they were both aware of their forte, and both exerted themselves that evening with delightful effect. On going home, I really could not decide which of them had shone the most (!) The Regent was enchanted with Scott, as Scott with him; and on all his subsequent visits to London, he was a frequent guest at the royal table.” The Lord Chief Commissioner remembers that the Prince was particularly delighted with the poet’s anecdotes of the old Scotch judges and lawyers, which his Royal Highness sometimes capped by ludicrous traits of certain ermined sages of his own acquaintance. Scott told, among others, a story, which he was fond of telling, of his old friend the Lord Justice-Clerk Braxfield; and the commentary of his Royal Highness on hearing it amused Scott, who often mentioned it afterwards. The anecdote is this:—Braxfield, whenever he went on a particular circuit, was in the habit of visiting a gentleman of good fortune in the neighbourhood of one of the assize towns, and staying at least one night, which, being both of them ardent chess-players, they usually concluded with their favourite game. One Spring circuit the battle was not decided at daybreak; so the Justice-Clerk said,—“Weel, Donald, I must e’en come back this gate, and let the game lie ower for the present;” and back he came in October, but not to his old friend’s hospitable house; for that gentleman had in the interim been apprehended on a capital charge (of forgery), and his name stood on the



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Porteous Roll, or list of those who were about to be tried under his former guest’s auspices. The laird was indicted and tried accordingly, and the jury returned a verdict of guilty. Braxfield forthwith put on his cocked hat (which answers to the black cap in England), and pronounced the sentence of the law in the usual terms: “To be hanged by the neck until you be dead; and may the Lord have mercy upon your unhappy soul!” Having concluded this awful formula in his most sonorous cadence, Braxfield, dismounting his formidable beaver, gave a familiar nod to his unfortunate acquaintance, and said to him in a sort of chuckling whisper, “And now Donald, my man, I think I’ve checkmated you for ance.” The Regent laughed heartily at this specimen of Macqueen’s brutal humour; and “I’faith, Walter,” said he, “this old big-wig seems to have taken things as coolly as my tyrannical self. Don’t you remember Tom Moore’s description of me at breakfast, “‘The table spread with tea and toast, Death-warrants and the Morning Post?’” ‘Towards midnight the Prince called for “a bumper with all the honours to the Author of Waverley;” and looked significantly, as he was charging his own glass, to Scott. Scott seemed somewhat puzzled for a moment; but instantly recovering himself, and filling his glass to the brim, said, “Your Royal Highness looks as if you thought I had some claim to the honours of this toast. I have no such pretensions, but shall take good care that the real Simon Pure hears of the high compliment that has now been paid him.” He then drank off his claret; and joined with a stentorian voice in the cheering, which the Prince himself timed. But before the company could resume their seats his Royal Highness exclaimed, “Another of the same, if you please, to the Author of Marmion,—and now, Walter, my man, I have checkmated you for ance.” The second bumper was followed by cheers still more prolonged: and Scott then rose, and returned thanks in a short address, which struck the Lord Chief Commissioner as “alike grave and graceful.” This story has been circulated in a very perverted shape.’ * * * ‘Before he left town he again dined at Carlton House, when the party was a still smaller one than before, and the merriment if possible still more free. That nothing might be wanting, the Prince sang several capital songs.’*

Or take, at a very great interval in many senses, this glimpse of another dinner, altogether unofficially and much better described. It is James Ballantyne the printer and publisher’s dinner, in Saint John Street, Canongate, Edinburgh, on the birtheve of a Waverley Novel:

* Vol. iii. pp. 340-343.

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‘The feast was, to use one of James’s own favourite epithets, gorgeous; an aldermanic display of turtle and venison, with the suitable accompaniments of iced punch, potent ale, and generous Madeira. When the cloth was drawn, the burly preses arose, with all he could muster of the port of John Kemble, and spouted with a sonorous voice the formula of Macbeth— “Fill full! I drink to the general joy of the whole table!”

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This was followed by “the King, God bless him!” and second came, “Gentlemen, there is another toast which never has been nor shall be omitted in this house of mine: I give you the health of Mr. Walter Scott, with three times three!” All honour having been done to this health, and Scott having briefly thanked the company, with some expressions of warm affection to their host, Mrs. Ballantyne retired;—the bottles passed round twice or thrice in the usual way; and then James rose once more, every vein on his brow distended: his eyes solemnly fixed on vacancy, to propose, not as before in his stentorian key, but “with ’bated breath,” in the sort of whisper by which a stage conspirator thrills the gallery, “Gentlemen, a bumper to the immortal Author of Waverley!”—The uproar of cheering, in which Scott made a fashion of joining, was succeeded by deep silence; and then Ballantyne proceeded, “In his Lord Burleigh look, serene and serious, A something of imposing and mysterious”—

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to lament the obscurity in which his illustrious but too modest correspondent still chose to conceal himself from the plaudits of the world; to thank the company for the manner in which the nominis umbra had been received; and to assure them that the Author of “Waverley” would, when informed of the circumstance, feel highly gratified, “the proudest hour of his life,” &c. &c. The cool, demure fun of Scott’s features during all this mummery was perfect; and Erskine’s attempt at a gay nonchalance was still more ludicrously meritorious. Aldiborontiphoscophornio, however, bursting as he was, knew too well to allow the new Novel to be made the subject of discussion. Its name was announced, and success to it crowned another cup; but after that, no more of Jedediah. To cut the thread, he rolled out unbidden some one of his many theatrical songs, in a style that would have done no dishonour to almost any orchestra, The Maid of Lodi, or perhaps The Bay of Biscay, oh!—or The sweet little cherub that sits up aloft. Other toasts followed, interspersed with ditties from other performers; old George Thomson, the friend of Burns, was ready, for one, with The Moorland Wedding, or Willie brew’d a peck o’ maut;—and so



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it went on, until Scott and Erskine, with any clerical or very staid personage that had chanced to be admitted, saw fit to withdraw. Then the scene was changed. The claret and olives made way for broiled bones and a mighty bowl of punch; and when a few glasses of the hot beverage had restored his powers, James opened ore rotundo on the merits of the forthcoming romance. “One chapter,—one chapter only!” was the cry. After “Nay, by’r lady, nay!” and a few more coy shifts, the proof-sheets were at length produced, and James, with many a prefatory hem, read aloud what he considered as the most striking dialogue they contained. ‘The first I heard so read was the interview between Jeanie Deans, the Duke of Argyle, and Queen Caroline, in Richmond Park; and, notwithstanding some spice of the pompous tricks to which he was addicted, I must say he did the inimitable scene great justice. At all events, the effect it produced was deep and memorable; and no wonder that the exulting typographer’s one bumper more to Jedediah Cleishbotham preceded his parting stave, which was uniformly The Last Words of Marmion, executed certainly with no contemptible rivalry of Braham.’*

Over at Abbotsford, things wear a still more prosperous aspect. Scott is building there, by the pleasant banks of the Tweed; he has bought and is buying land there; fast as the new gold comes in for a new Waverley Novel, or even faster, it changes itself into moory acres, into stone and hewn or planted wood: ‘About the middle of February’ (1820), says Mr. Lockhart, ‘it having been ere that time arranged that I should marry his eldest daughter in the course of the spring, I accompanied him and part of his family on one of those flying visits to Abbotsford, with which he often indulged himself on a Saturday during term. Upon such occasions, Scott appeared at the usual hour in Court; but wearing, instead of the official suit of black, his country morning-dress, green jacket, and so forth, under the clerk’s gown.’—‘At noon, when the Court broke up, Peter Mathieson was sure to be in attendance in the Parliament Close; and, five minutes after, the gown had been tossed off; and Scott, rubbing his hands for glee, was under weigh for Tweedside. As we proceeded,’ &c. ‘Next morning there appeared at breakfast John Ballantyne, who had at this time a shooting or hunting-box a few miles off, in the vale of the Leader, and with him Mr. Constable, his guest; and it being a fine clear day, as soon as Scott had read the church service and one of Jeremy Taylor’s sermons, we all sallied out before noon on a perambulation of his upland territories; Maida (the hound) and the rest of the favourites accompanying our march. At starting we were joined by the constant henchman, Tom Purdie,—and I may save myself the trouble of any attempt to describe his appearance, for his master has given * Vol. iv. p. 166-168.

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us an inimitably true one in introducing a certain personage of his “Redgauntlet:”—“He was perhaps sixty years old; yet his brow was not much furrowed, and his jet-black hair was only grizzled, not whitened, by the advance of age. All his motions spoke strength unabated; and, though rather under-sized, he had very broad shoulders, was square made, thin-flanked, and apparently combined in his frame muscular strength and activity; the last somewhat impaired perhaps by years, but the first remaining in full vigour. A hard and harsh countenance; eyes far sunk under projecting eyebrows, which were grizzled like his hair; a wide mouth, furnished from ear to ear with a range of unimpaired teeth of uncommon whiteness, and a size and breadth which might have become the jaws of an ogre, completed this delightful portrait.” Equip this figure in Scott’s cast-off green jacket, white hat, and drab trousers; and imagine that years of kind treatment, comfort, and the honest consequence of a confidential grieve,* had softened away much of the hardness and harshness originally impressed on the visage by anxious penury, and the sinister habits of a black-fisher;—and the Tom Purdie of 1820 stands before us. ‘We were all delighted to see how completely Scott had recovered his bodily vigour; and none more so than Constable, who, as he puffed and panted after him, up one ravine and down another, often stopped to wipe his forehead, and remarked, that “it was not every author who should lead him such a dance.” But Purdie’s face shone with rapture as he observed how severely the swag-bellied bookseller’s activity was tasked. Scott exclaimed exultingly, though, perhaps, for the tenth time, “This will be a glorious spring for our trees, Tom!”—“You may say that, Sheriff,” quoth Tom,—and then lingering a moment for Constable,—“My certy,” he added, scratching his head, “and I think it will be a grand season for our buiks, too.” But indeed Tom always talked of our buiks as if they had been as regular products of the soil as our aits and our birks. Having threaded first the Hexilcleugh and then the Rhymer’s Glen, we arrived at Huntly Burn, where the hospitality of the kind Weird Sisters, as Scott called the Miss Fergusons, reanimated our exhausted bibliopoles, and gave them courage to extend their walk a little farther down the same famous brook. Here there was a small cottage in a very sequestered situation’ (named Chiefswood), ‘by making some little additions to which Scott thought it might be converted into a suitable summer residence for his daughter and future son-in-law.’ * * ‘As we walked homeward, Scott being a little fatigued, laid his left hand on Tom’s shoulder, and leaned heavily for support, chatting to his Sunday pony, as he called the affectionate fellow, just as freely as with the rest of the party; and Tom put in his word shrewdly and manfully, and grinned and grunted whenever the joke chanced to be within his apprehension. It was easy to see that his heart swelled within him from the moment the Sheriff got his collar in his gripe.’† * Overseer: German, graf. † Vol. iv. p. 349-353.



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That Abbotsford became infested to a great degree with tourists, wonderhunters, and all that fatal species of people, may be supposed. Solitary Ettrick saw itself populous; all paths were beaten with the feet and hoofs of an endless miscellany of pilgrims. As many as ‘sixteen parties’ have arrived at Abbotsford in one day; male and female; peers, Socinian preachers, whatsoever was distinguished, whatsoever had love of distinction in it! Mr. Lockhart thinks there was no literary shrine ever so bepilgrimed, except Ferney in Voltaire’s time, who, however, was not half so accessible. A fatal species! These are what Schiller calls ‘the flesh-flies;’ buzzing swarms of blue-bottles, who never fail where any taint of human glory or other corruptibility is in the wind. So has Nature decreed. Scott’s healthiness, bodily and mental, his massive solidity of character, nowhere showed itself more decisively than in his manner of encountering this part of his fate. That his blue-bottles were blue, and of the usual tone and quality, may be judged. Hear Captain Basil Hall (in a very compressed state): ‘We arrived in good time, and found several other guests at dinner. The public rooms are lighted with oil gas, in a style of extraordinary splendour. The,’ &c.—‘Had I a hundred pens, each of which at the same time should separately write down an anecdote, I could not hope to record one-half of those which our host, to use Spenser’s expression, “welled out alway.”’—‘Entertained us all the way with an endless string of anecdotes;’— ‘came like a stream of poetry from his lips;’—‘path muddy and scarcely passable, yet I do not remember ever to have seen any place so interesting as the skill of this mighty magician had rendered this narrow ravine.’—‘Impossible to touch on any theme but straightway he has an anecdote to fit it.’—‘Thus we strolled along, borne, as it were, on the stream of song and story.’—‘In the evening we had a great feast indeed. Sir Walter asked us if we had ever read Christabel.’—‘Interspersed with these various readings, were some hundreds of stories, some quaint, some pathetical.’—‘At breakfast to-day we had, as usual, some 150 stories: God knows how they came in.’—‘In any man so gifted; so qualified to take the loftiest, proudest line at the head of the literature, the taste, the imagination of the whole world!’—‘For instance, he never sits at any particular place at table, but takes,’ &c. &c.*

Among such worshippers, arriving in ‘sixteen parties a-day,’ an ordinary man might have grown buoyant; have felt the god, begun to nod, and seemed to shake the spheres. A slightly splenetic man, possessed of Scott’s sense, would have swept his premises clear of them: Let no blue-bottle approach here, to disturb a man in his work,—under pain of sugared squash (called quassia) and * Vol. v. p. 375-402.

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king’s-yellow! The good Sir Walter, like a quiet brave man, did neither. He let the matter take its course; enjoyed what was enjoyable in it; endured what could not well be helped; persisted meanwhile in writing his daily portion of romance-copy, in preserving his composure of heart;—in a word, accommodated himself to this loud-buzzing environment, and made it serve him, as he would have done (perhaps with more ease) to a silent, poor, and solitary one. No doubt it affected him too, and in the lamentablest way fevered his internal life,—though he kept it well down; but it affected him less than it would have done almost any other man. For his guests were not all of the blue-bottle sort; far from that. Mr. Lockhart shall furnish us with the brightest aspect a British Ferney ever yielded, or is like to yield: and therewith we will quit Abbotsford and the dominant and culminant period of Scott’s life: ‘It was a clear, bright September morning, with a sharpness in the air that doubled the animating influence of the sunshine; and all was in readiness for a grand coursing match on Newark hill. The only guest who had chalked out other sport for himself was the stanchest of anglers, Mr. Rose; but he too was there on his shelty, armed with his salmon-rod and landing-net, and attended by his Hinves, and Charlie Purdie, a brother of Tom, in those days the most celebrated fisherman of the district. This little group of Waltonians, bound for Lord Somerville’s preserve, remained lounging about, to witness the start of the main cavalcade. Sir Walter, mounted on Sibyl, was marshalling the order of procession with a huge hunting-whip; and among a dozen frolicsome youths and maidens, who seemed disposed to laugh at all discipline, appeared, each on horseback, each as eager as the youngest sportsman in the troop, Sir Humphry Davy, Dr. Wollaston, and the patriarch of Scottish belles-lettres, Henry Mackenzie. The Man of Feeling, however, was persuaded with some difficulty to resign his steed for the present to his faithful negro follower, and to join Lady Scott in the sociable, until we should reach the ground of our battue. Laidlaw, on a long-tailed wiry Highlander yclept Hoddin Grey, which carried him nimbly and stoutly, although his feet almost touched the ground as he sat, was the adjutant. But the most picturesque figure was the illustrious inventor of the safety-lamp. He had come for his favourite sport of angling, and had been practising it successfully with Rose, his travelling companion, for two or three days preceding this; but he had not prepared for coursing fields, or had left Charlie Purdie’s troop for Sir Walter’s on a sudden thought; and his fisherman’s costume, a brown hat with flexible brim, surrounded with line upon line of catgut, and innumerable fly-hooks—jackboots worthy of a Dutch smuggler, and a fustian surtout dabbled with the blood of salmon, made a fine contrast with the smart jackets, white-cord breeches, and well-polished jockey-boots of the less distinguished cavaliers about him. Dr. Wollaston was in black, and with his



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noble serene dignity of countenance might have passed for a sporting archbishop. Mr. Mackenzie, at this time in the seventy-sixth year of his age, with a white hat turned up with green, green spectacles, green jacket, and long brown leathern gaiters buttoned upon his nether anatomy, wore a dog-whistle round his neck, and had, all over, the air of as resolute a devotee as the gay captain of Huntly Burn. Tom Purdie and his subalterns had preceded us by a few hours, with all the greyhounds that could be collected at Abbotsford, Darnick, and Melrose; but the giant Maida had remained as his master’s orderly, and now gambolled about Sibyl Grey, barking for mere joy like a spaniel puppy. ‘The order of march had been all settled, and the sociable was just getting under weigh, when the Lady Anne broke from the line, screaming with laughter, and exclaimed, “Papa, papa, I knew you could never think of going without your pet.” Scott looked round, and I rather think there was a blush as well as a smile upon his face, when he perceived a little black pig frisking about his pony, and evidently a self-elected addition to the party of the day. He tried to look stern, and cracked his whip at the creature, but was in a moment obliged to join in the general cheers. Poor piggy soon found a strap round its neck, and was dragged into the background: Scott watching the retreat, repeated with mock pathos the first verse of an old pastoral song:— “What will I do gin my hoggie die? My joy, my pride, my hoggie! My only beast, I had nae mae, And wow but I was vogie!” —the cheers were redoubled, and the squadron moved on. ‘This pig had taken, nobody could tell how, a most sentimental attachment to Scott, and was constantly urging its pretensions to be admitted a regular member of his tail along with the greyhounds and terriers; but indeed I remember him suffering another summer under the same sort of pertinacity on the part of an affectionate hen. I leave the explanation for philosophers; but such were the facts. I have too much respect for the vulgarly calumniated donkey to name him in the same category of pets with the pig and the hen; but a year or two after this time, my wife used to drive a couple of these animals in a little garden-chair, and whenever her father appeared at the door of our cottage, we were sure to see Hannah More and Lady Morgan (as Anne Scott had wickedly christened them) trotting from their pasture, to lay their noses over the paling, and, as Washington Irving says of the old white-haired hedger with the Parisian snuff-box, “to have a pleasant crack wi’ the laird.”’* * Vol. v. p. 7-10. On this subject let us report an anecdote furnished by a correspondent of our own, whose accuracy we can depend on:—‘I myself was acquainted with a little Blenheim

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‘There’ at Chiefswood ‘my wife and I spent this summer and autumn of 1821,—the first of several seasons which will ever dwell on my memory as the happiest of my life. We were near enough Abbotsford to partake as often as we liked of its brilliant and constantly-varying society; yet could do so without being exposed to the worry and exhaustion of spirit which the daily reception of new comers entailed upon all the famcocker, one of the smallest, beautifullest, and wisest of lap-dogs, or dogs, which, though Sir Walter knew it not, was very singular in its behaviour towards him. Shandy, so hight this remarkable cocker, was extremely shy of strangers: promenading on Princes street, which in fine weather used to be crowded in those days, he seemed to live in perpetual fear of being stolen; if any one but looked at him admiringly, he would draw back with angry timidity, and crouch towards his own lady-mistress. One day a tall, irregular, busylooking man came halting by; the little dog ran towards him, began fawning, frisking, licking at his feet: it was Sir Walter Scott! Had Shandy been the most extensive reader of Reviews, he could not have done better. Every time he saw Sir Walter afterwards, which was some three or four times in the course of visiting Edinburgh, he repeated his demonstrations, ran leaping, frisking, licking the Author of “Waverley’s” feet. The good Sir Walter endured it with good humour; looked down at the little wise face, at the silky shag-coat of snow-white and chesnut-brown; smiled, and avoided hitting him as they went on,—till a new division of streets or some other obstacle put an end to the interview. In fact, he was a strange little fellow this Shandy. He has been known to sit for hours looking out at the summer moon, with the saddest wistfullest expression of countenance; altogether like a Werterean Poet. He would have been a Poet, I dare say, if he could have found a publisher. But his moral tact was the most amazing. Without reason shown, without word spoken or act done, he took his likings and dislikings; unalterable; really almost unerring. His chief aversion, I should say, was to the genus quack, above all to the genus acrid-quack; these, though never so clear-starched, bland-smiling and beneficent, he absolutely would have no trade with. Their very sugar-cake was unavailing. He said with emphasis, as clearly as barking could say it: “Acrid-quack, avaunt!” Would to Heaven many a prime minister and high person in authority had such an invaluable talent! On the whole, there is more in this universe than our philosophy has dreamt of. A dog’s instinct is a voice of Nature too; and farther, it has never babbled itself away in idle jargon and hypothesis, but always adhered to the practical, and grown in silence by continual communion with fact. We do the animals injustice. Their body resembles our body, Buffon says; with its four limbs, with its spinal marrow, main organs in the head, and so forth: but have they not a kind of soul, equally the rude draught and imperfect imitation of ours? It is a strange, an almost solemn and pathetic thing to see an intelligence imprisoned in that dumb rude form; struggling to express itself out of that;—even as we do out of our imprisonment; and succeed very imperfectly!’



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ily except Sir Walter himself. But, in truth, even he was not always proof against the annoyances connected with such a style of open house-keeping. Even his temper sank sometimes under the solemn applauses of learned dulness, the vapid raptures of painted and perriwigged dowagers, the horseleech avidity with which underbred foreigners urged their questions, and the pompous simpers of condescending magnates. When sore beset at home in this way, he would every now and then discover that he had some very particular business to attend to on an outlying part of his estate; and, craving the indulgence of his guests overnight, appear at the cabin in the glen before its inhabitants were astir in the morning. The clatter of Sibyl Grey’s hoofs, the yelping of Mustard and Spice, and his own joyous shout of reveillée under our windows, were the signal that he had burst his toils, and meant for that day to “take his ease in his inn.” On descending, he was to be found seated with all his dogs and ours about him, under a spreading ash that overshadowed half the bank between the cottage and the brook, pointing the edge of his woodman’s-axe, and listening to Tom Purdie’s lecture touching the plantation that most needed thinning. After breakfast he would take possession of a dressing-room up stairs, and write a chapter of The Pirate; and then, having made up and despatched his packet for Mr. Ballantyne, away to join Purdie wherever the foresters were at work, and sometimes to labour among them as strenuously as John Swanston,—until it was time either to rejoin his own party at Abbotsford, or the quiet circle of the cottage. When his guests were few and friendly, he often made them come over and meet him at Chiefswood in a body towards evening; and surely he never appeared to more amiable advantage than when helping his young people with their little arrangements upon such occasions. He was ready with all sorts of devices to supply the wants of a narrow establishment; he used to delight particularly in sinking the wine in a well under the brae ere he went out, and hauling up the basket just before dinner was announced; this primitive device being, he said, what he had always practised when a young housekeeper, and in his opinion far superior in its results to any application of ice: and in the same spirit, whenever the weather was sufficiently genial, he voted for dining out of doors altogether, which at once got rid of the inconvenience of very small rooms, and made it natural and easy for the gentlemen to help the ladies, so that the paucity of servants went for nothing.’*

Surely all this is very beautiful; like a picture of Boccaccio: the ideal of a country life in our time. Why could it not last? Income was not wanting: Scott’s official permanent income was amply adequate to meet the expense of all that was valuable in it; nay, of all that was not harassing, senseless, and despicable. Scott had some 2,000l. a year without writing books at all. Why should he manufacture and not create, to make more money; and rear mass on mass for * Vol. v. pp. 123, 124.

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a dwelling to himself, till the pile toppled, sank crashing, and buried him in its ruins, when he had a safe pleasant dwelling ready of its own accord? Alas, Scott, with all his health, was infected; sick of the fearfullest malady, that of Ambition! To such length had the King’s baronetcy, the world’s favour, and ‘sixteen parties a day,’ brought it with him. So the inane racket must be kept up, and rise ever higher. So masons labour, ditchers delve; and there is endless, altogether deplorable correspondence about marble-slabs for tables, wainscotting of rooms, curtains and the trimmings of curtains, orange-coloured or fawn-coloured: Walter Scott, one of the gifted of the world, whom his admirers called the most gifted, must kill himself that he may be a country gentleman, the founder of a race of Scotch lairds. It is one of the strangest, most tragical histories ever enacted under this sun. So poor a passion can lead so strong a man into such mad extremes. Surely, were not man a fool always, one might say there was something eminently distracted in this, end as it would, of a Walter Scott writing daily with the ardour of a steam-engine, that he might make 15,000l. a year, and buy upholstery with it. To cover the walls of a stone house in Selkirkshire with nicknacks, ancient armour, and genealogical shields, what can we name it but a being bit with delirium of a kind? That tract after tract of moorland in the shire of Selkirk should be joined together on parchment and by ring-fence, and named after one’s name,—why, it is a shabby small-type edition of your vulgar Napoleons, Alexanders, and conquering heroes, not counted venerable by any teacher of men!— ‘The whole world was not half so wide To Alexander when he cried Because he had but one to subdue, As was a narrow paltry tub to Diogenes; who ne’er was said, For aught that ever I could read, To whine, put finger i’ the eye and sob, Because he had ne’er another tub!’

Not he! And if, ‘looked at from the Moon, which itself is far from Infinitude,’ Napoleon’s dominions were as small as mine, what, by any chance of possibility, could Abbotsford landed-property ever have become? As the Arabs say, there is a black speck, were it no bigger than a bean’s eye, in every soul; which, once set it a-working, will overcloud the whole man into darkness and quasi-madness, and hurry him balefully into Night!



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With respect to the literary character of these Waverley Novels, so extraordinary in their commercial character, there remains, after so much reviewing, good and bad, little that it were profitable at present to say. The great fact about them is, that they were faster written and better paid for than any other books in the world. It must be granted, moreover, that they have a worth far surpassing what is usual in such cases; nay, that if Literature had no task but that of harmlessly amusing indolent, languid men, here was the very perfection of Literature; that a man, here more emphatically than ever elsewhere, might fling himself back, exclaiming, “Be mine to lie on this sofa, and read everlasting Novels of Walter Scott!” The composition, slight as it often is, usually hangs together in some measure, and is a composition. There is a free flow of narrative, of incident and sentiment; an easy master-like coherence throughout, as if it were the free dash of a master’s hand, ‘round as the O of Giotto.’* It is the perfection of extemporaneous writing. Farthermore, surely he were a blind critic who did not recognise here a certain genial sunshiny freshness and picturesqueness; paintings both of scenery and figures, very graceful, brilliant, occasionally full of grace and glowing brightness blended in the softest composure; in fact, a deep sincere love of the beautiful in Nature and Man, and the readiest faculty of expressing this by imagination and by word. No fresher paintings of Nature can be found than Scott’s; hardly anywhere a wider sympathy with man. From Davie Deans up to Richard Cœur-de-Lion; from Meg Merrilies to Die Vernon and Queen Elizabeth! It is the utterance of a man of open soul; of a brave, large, free-seeing man, who has a true brotherhood with all men. In joyous picturesqueness and fellow-feeling, freedom of eye and heart; or to say it in a word, in general healthiness of mind, these Novels prove Scott to have been amongst the foremost writers. Neither in the higher and highest excellence, of drawing character, is he at any time altogether deficient; though at no time can we call him, in the best sense, successful. His Bailie Jarvies, Dinmonts, Dalgettys (for their name is legion) do look and talk like what they give themselves out for; they are, if not created and * ‘Venne a Firenze’ (il cortigiano del Papa), ‘e andato una mattina in bottega di Giotto, che lavorava, gli chiese un poco di disegno per mandarlo a sua Santità. Giotto, che garbatissimo era, prese un foglio, ed in quello con un pennello tinto di rosso, fermato il braccio al fianco per farne compasso, e girato la mano fece un tondo sì pari di sesto e di profilo, che fu a vederlo una maraviglia. Ciò fatto ghignando disse al cortigiano, Eccovi il disegno.’ . . . . ‘Onde il Papa, e molti cortigiani intendenti conobbero perciò, quanto Giotto avanzasse d’eccelenza tutti gli altri pittori del suo tempo. Divolgatasi poi questa cosa, ne nacque il proverbio, che ancora è in uso dirsi a gli uomini di grossa pasta: Tu sei più tondo, che l’ O di Giotto.’—Vasari, Vite (Roma, 1759), i. 46.

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made poetically alive, yet deceptively enacted as a good player might do them. What more is wanted then? For the reader lying on a sofa, nothing more; yet for another sort of reader, much. It were a long chapter to unfold the difference in drawing a character between a Scott and a Shakspeare, a Goethe! Yet it is a difference literally immense; they are of different species; the value of the one is not to be counted in the coin of the other. We might say in a short word, which means a long matter, that your Shakspeare fashions his characters from the heart outwards; your Scott fashions them from the skin inwards, never getting near the heart of them! The one set become living men and women; the other amount to little more than mechanical cases, deceptively painted automatons. Compare Fenella with Goethe’s Mignon, which it was once said, Scott had ‘done Goethe the honour’ to borrow. He has borrowed what he could of Mignon. The small stature, the climbing talent, the trickiness, the mechanical case, as we say, he has borrowed; but the soul of Mignon is left behind. Fenella is an unfavourable specimen for Scott; but it illustrates, in the aggravated state, what is traceable in all the characters he drew. To the same purport indeed we are to say that these famed books are altogether addressed to the every-day mind; that for any other mind, there is next to no nourishment in them. Opinions, emotions, principles, doubts, beliefs, beyond what the intelligent country gentleman can carry along with him, are not to be found. It is orderly, customary, it is prudent, decent; nothing more. One would say, it lay not in Scott to give much more: getting out of the ordinary range, and attempting the heroic, which is but seldom the case, he falls almost at once into the rose-pink sentimental,—descries the Minerva Press from afar, and hastily quits that course; for none better than he knew it to lead nowhither. On the whole, contrasting Waverley, which was carefully written, with most of its followers, which were written extempore, one may regret the extempore method. Something very perfect in its kind might have come from Scott; nor was it a low kind: nay, who knows how high, with studious self-concentration, he might have gone; what wealth Nature had implanted in him, which his circumstances, most unkind while seeming to be kindest, had never impelled him to unfold? But after all, in the loudest blaring and trumpetting of popularity, it is ever to be held in mind, as a truth, remaining true forever, that Literature has other aims than that of harmlessly amusing indolent, languid men: or if Literature have them not, then Literature is a very poor affair; and something else must have them, and must accomplish them, with thanks or without thanks; the thankful or thankless world were not long a world otherwise! Under this head, there is little to be sought or found in the Waverley Novels. Not profitable for



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doctrine, for reproof, for edification, for building up or elevating, in any shape! The sick heart will find no healing here, the darkly struggling heart no guidance: the Heroic that is in all men no divine awakening voice. We say, therefore, that they do not found themselves on deep interests, but on comparatively trivial ones, not on the perennial, perhaps not even on the lasting. In fact, much of the interest of these Novels results from what may be called contrasts of costume. The phraseology, fashion of arms, of dress and life, belonging to one age, is brought suddenly, with singular vividness, before the eyes of another. A great effect this; yet by the very nature of it, an altogether temporary one. Consider, brethren, shall not we too one day be antiques, and grow to have as quaint a costume as the rest? The stuffed Dandy, only give him time, will become one of the wonderfullest mummies. In antiquarian museums, only two centuries hence, the steeple-hat will hang on the next peg to Franks and Company’s patent, antiquaries deciding which is uglier; and the Stulz swallow-tail, one may hope, will seem as incredible as any garment that ever made ridiculous the respectable back of man. Not by slashed breeches, steeple-hats, buff-belts, or antiquated speech, can romance heroes continue to interest us; but simply and solely, in the long run, by being men. Buff-belts and all manner of jerkins and costumes are transitory; man alone is perennial. He that has gone deeper into this than other men, will be remembered longer than they; he that has not, not. Tried under this category, Scott with his clear practical insight, joyous temper, and other sound faculties, is not to be accounted little,—among the ordinary circulating library heroes he might well pass for a demigod. Not little; yet neither is he great; there were greater, more than one or two, in his own age: among the great of all ages, one sees no likelihood of a place for him. What then is the result of these Waverley Romances? Are they to amuse one generation only? One or more! As many generations as they can, but not all generations: ah no, when our swallow-tail has become fantastic as trunk-hose, they will cease to amuse!—Meanwhile, as we can discern, their results have been several-fold. First of all, and certainly not least of all, have they not perhaps had this result: that a considerable portion of mankind has hereby been sated with mere amusement, and set on seeking something better? Amusement in the way of reading can go no farther, can do nothing better, by the power of man; and men ask, Is this what it can do? Scott, we reckon, carried several things to their ultimatum and crisis, so that change became inevitable: a great service, though an indirect one. Secondly, however, we may say, these Historical Novels have taught all men this truth, which looks like a truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history and others, till so taught: that the bygone ages

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of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state-papers, controversies, and abstractions of men. Not abstractions were they, not diagrams and theorems; but men, in buff or other coats and breeches, with colour in their cheeks, with passions in their stomach, and the idioms, features, and vitalities of very men. It is a little word this; inclusive of great meaning! History will henceforth have to take thought of it. Her faint hearsays of ‘philosophy teaching by experience’ will have to exchange themselves everywhere for direct inspection and embodiment: this, and this only, will be counted experience; and till once experience have got in, philosophy will reconcile herself to wait at the door. It is a great service, fertile in consequences, this that Scott has done; a great truth laid open by him;—correspondent indeed to the substantial nature of the man; to his solidity and veracity even of imagination, which, with all his lively discursiveness, was the characteristic of him. A word here as to the extempore style of writing, which is getting much celebrated in these days. Scott seems to have been a high proficient in it. His rapidity was extreme, and the matter produced was excellent considering that: the circumstances under which some of his Novels, when he could not himself write, were dictated, are justly considered wonderful. It is a valuable faculty this of ready writing; nay farther, for Scott’s purpose it was clearly the only good mode. By much labour he could not have added one guinea to his copyright; nor would the reader on the sofa have lain a whit more at ease. It was in all ways necessary that these works should be produced rapidly; and, round or not, be thrown off like Giotto’s O. But indeed, in all things, writing or other, which a man engages in, there is the indispensablest beauty in knowing how to get done. A man frets himself to no purpose; he has not the sleight of the trade; he is not a craftsman, but an unfortunate borer and bungler, if he know not when to have done. Perfection is unattainable: no carpenter ever made a mathematically accurate right-angle in the world; yet all carpenters know when it is right enough, and do not botch it, and lose their wages by making it too right. Too much pains-taking speaks disease in one’s mind, as well as too little. The adroit sound-minded man will endeavour to spend on each business approximately what of pains it deserves; and with a conscience void of remorse will dismiss it then. All this in favour of easy writing shall be granted, and, if need were, enforced and inculcated. And yet, on the other hand, it shall not less but more strenuously be inculcated, that in the way of writing no great thing was ever, or will ever be done with ease, but with difficulty! Let ready writers with any faculty in them, lay this to heart. Is it with ease, or not with ease, that a man shall do his best, in any shape; above all, in this shape, justly named of ‘soul’s travail,’



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working in the deep places of thought, embodying the True out of the Obscure and Possible, environed on all sides with the uncreated False? Not so, now or at any time. The experience of all men belies it; the nature of things contradicts it. Virgil and Tacitus, were they ready writers? The whole Prophecies of Isaiah are not equal in extent to this cobweb of a Review Article. Shakspeare we may fancy, wrote with rapidity; but not till he had thought with intensity: long and sore had this man thought, as the seeing eye may discern well, and had dwelt and wrestled amid dark pains and throes,—though his great soul is silent about all that. It was for him to write rapidly at fit intervals, being ready to do it. And herein truly lies the secret of the matter: such swiftness of mere writing, after due energy of preparation, is doubtless the right method; the hot furnace having long worked and simmered, let the pure gold flow out at one gush. It was Shakspeare’s plan; no easy writer he, or he had never been a Shakspeare. Neither was Milton one of the mob of gentlemen that write with ease; he did not attain Shakspeare’s faculty, one perceives, of even writing fast after long preparation, but struggled while he wrote. Goethe also tells us he ‘had nothing sent him in his sleep;’ no page of his but he knew well how it came there. It is reckoned to be the best prose, accordingly, that has been written by any modern. Schiller, as an unfortunate unhealthy man, ‘könnte nie fertig werden, never could get done;’ the noble genius of him struggled not wisely but too well, and wore his life itself heroically out. Or did Petrarch write easily? Dante sees himself ‘growing lean’ over his Divine Comedy; in stern solitary death-wrestle with it, to prevail over it, and do it, if his uttermost faculty may: hence, too, it is done and prevailed over, and the fiery life of it endures for evermore among men. No: creation, one would think, cannot be easy; your Jove has severe pains and fire-flames in the head out of which an armed Pallas is struggling! As for manufacture, that is a different matter, and may become easy or not easy, according as it is taken up. Yet of manufacture too the general truth is that, given the manufacturer, it will be worthy in direct proportion to the pains bestowed on it; and worthless always, or nearly so, with no pains. Cease, therefore, O ready-writer, to brag openly of thy rapidity and facility; to thee (if thou be in the manufacturing line) it is a benefit, and increase of wages; but to me it is sheer loss, worsening of my pennyworth: why wilt thou brag of it to me? Write easily, by steam if thou canst contrive it, and canst sell it; but hide it like virtue! “Easy writing,” said Sheridan, “is sometimes d——d hard reading.” Sometimes; and always it is sure to be rather useless reading, which indeed (to a creature of few years and much work) may be reckoned the hardest of all.

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Scott’s productive facility amazed everybody; and set Captain Hall, for one, upon a very strange method of accounting for it without miracle;—for which see his Journal, above quoted from. The Captain, on counting line for line, found that he himself had written in that Journal of his almost as much as Scott, at odd hours in a given number of days; ‘and as for the invention,’ says he, ‘it is known that this costs Scott nothing, but comes to him of its own accord.’ Convenient indeed!—But for us too Scott’s rapidity is great, is a proof and consequence of the solid health of the man, bodily and spiritual; great, but unmiraculous; not greater than that of many others besides Captain Hall. Admire it, yet with measure. For observe always, there are two conditions in work: let me fix the quality, and you shall fix the quantity! Any man may get through work rapidly who easily satisfies himself about it. Print the talk of any man, there will be a thick octavo volume daily; make his writing three times as good as his talk, there will be the third part of a volume daily, which still is good work. To write with never such rapidity in a passable manner is indicative not of a man’s genius, but of his habits; it will prove his soundness of nervous system, his practicality of mind, and in fine, that he has the knack of his trade. In the most flattering view, rapidity will betoken health of mind; much also, perhaps most of all, will depend on health of body. Doubt it not, a faculty of easy writing is attainable by man! The human genius, once fairly set in this direction, will carry it far. William Cobbett, one of the healthiest of men, was a greater improviser even than Walter Scott: his writing, considered as to quality and quantity, of Rural Rides, Registers, Grammars, Sermons, Peter Porcupines, Histories of Reformation, ever-fresh denouncements of Potatoes and Paper-money,—seems to us still more wonderful. Pierre Bayle wrote enormous folios, one sees not on what motive-principle; he flowed on forever, a mighty tide of ditch-water; and even died flowing, with the pen in his hand. But indeed the most unaccountable ready-writer of all is, probably, the common Editor of a Daily Newspaper. Consider his leading-articles; what they treat of, how passably they are done. Straw that has been thrashed a hundred times without wheat; ephemeral sound of a sound; such portent of the hour as all men have seen a hundred times turn out inane: how a man, with merely human faculty, buckles himself nightly with new vigour and interest to this thrashed straw, nightly thrashes it anew, nightly gets up new thunder about it; and so goes on thrashing and thundering for a considerable series of years; this is a fact remaining still to be accounted for, in human physiology. The vitality of man is great. Or shall we say, Scott, among the many things he carried towards their ultimatum and crisis, carried this of ready-writing too, that so all men might better



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see what was in it? It is a valuable consummation. Not without results;—results, at some of which Scott as a Tory politician would have greatly shuddered. For if once Printing have grown to be as Talk, then Democracy (if we will look into the roots of things) is not a bugbear and probability, but a certainty, and event as good as come! ‘Inevitable seems it me.’—But leaving this, sure enough the triumph of ready-writing appears to be even now; everywhere the ready-writer is found bragging strangely of his readiness. In a lately translated Don Carlos, one of the most indifferent translations ever done with any sign of ability, a hitherto unknown individual is found assuring his reader, ‘The reader will possibly think it an excuse when I assure him that the whole piece was completed within the space of ten weeks, that is to say, between the 6th of January and the 18th of March of this year (inclusive of a fortnight’s interruption from over-exertion); that I often translated twenty pages a-day, and that the fifth act was the work of five days.’* O hitherto unknown individual, what is it to me what time it was the work of, whether five days or five decades of years? The only question is, How hast thou done it?—So, however, it stands; the genius of Extempore irresistibly lording it, advancing on us like ocean-tides, like Noah’s deluges—of ditch-water! The prospect seems one of the lamentablest. To have all Literature swum away from us in watery Extempore, and a spiritual time of Noah supervene? That surely is an awful reflection, worthy of dyspeptic Matthew Bramble in a London fog! Be of comfort, O splenetic Matthew; it is not Literature they are swimming away; it is only Book-publishing and Book-selling. Was there not a Literature before Printing or Faust of Mentz, and yet men wrote extempore? Nay, before Writing or Cadmus of Thebes, and yet men spoke extempore? Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls; this, by the blessing of God, can in no generation be swum away, but remains with us to the end. Scott’s career, of writing impromptu novels to buy farms with, was not of a kind to terminate voluntarily, but to accelerate itself more and more; and one sees not to what wise goal it could, in any case, have led him. Bookseller Constable’s bankruptcy was not the ruin of Scott; his ruin was that ambition, and even false ambition, had laid hold of him; that his way of life was not wise. Whither could it lead? Where could it stop? New farms there remained ever to be bought, while new novels could pay for them. More and more success but gave more and more appetite, more and more audacity. The impromptu writing must have waxed ever thinner; declined faster and faster into the questionable * Don Carlos, a Dramatic Poem, from the German of Schiller. Mannheim and London, 1837.

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category, into the condemnable, into the generally condemned. Already there existed, in secret, everywhere a considerable opposition party; witnesses of the Waverley miracles, but unable to believe in them, forced silently to protest against them. Such opposition party was in the sure case to grow; and even, with the impromptu process ever going on, ever waxing thinner, to draw the world over to it. Silent protest must at length have come to words; harsh truths, backed by harsher facts of a world-popularity overwrought and worn out, behoved to have been spoken;—such as can be spoken now without reluctance when they can pain the brave man’s heart no more. Who knows? Perhaps it was better ordered to be all otherwise. Otherwise, at any rate, it was. One day the Constable mountain, which seemed to stand strong like the other rock-mountains, gave suddenly, as the icebergs do, a loud-sounding crack; suddenly, with huge clangour, shivered itself into ice-dust; and sank, carrying much along with it. In one day, Scott’s high-heaped money-wages became fairy-money and nonentity; in one day the rich man and lord of land saw himself penniless, landless, a bankrupt among creditors. It was a hard trial. He met it proudly, bravely,—like a brave proud man of the world. Perhaps there had been a prouder way still: to have owned honestly that he was unsuccessful then, all bankrupt, broken, in the world’s goods and repute; and to have turned elsewhither for some refuge. Refuge did lie elsewhere; but it was not Scott’s course, or fashion of mind, to seek it there. To say, Hitherto I have been all in the wrong, and this my fame and pride, now broken, was an empty delusion and spell of accursed witchcraft! It was difficult for flesh and blood! He said, I will retrieve myself, and make my point good yet, or die for it. Silently, like a proud strong man, he girt himself to the Hercules’ task, of removing rubbish-mountains, since that was it; of paying large ransoms by what he could still write and sell. In his declining years too; misfortune is doubly and trebly unfortunate that befalls us then. Scott fell to his Hercules’ task like a very man, and went on with it unweariedly; with a noble cheerfulness, while his life-strings were cracking, he grappled with it, and wrestled with it, years long, in death-grips, strength to strength;—and it proved the stronger; and his life and heart did crack and break: the cordage of a most strong heart! Over these last writings of Scott, his Napoleons, Demonologies, Scotch Histories, and the rest, criticism, finding still much to wonder at, much to commend, will utter no word of blame; this one word only, Woe is me! The noble warhorse that once laughed at the shaking of the spear, how is he doomed to toil himself dead, dragging ignoble wheels! Scott’s descent was like that of a spent projectile; rapid, straight down;—perhaps mercifully so. It is a tragedy, as all life is; one proof more that



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Fortune stands on a restless globe; that Ambition, literary, warlike, politic, pecuniary, never yet profited any man. Our last extract shall be from Volume Sixth; a very tragical one. Tragical, yet still beautiful; waste Ruin’s havoc borrowing a kind of sacredness from a yet sterner visitation, that of Death! Scott has withdrawn into a solitary lodginghouse in Edinburgh, to do daily the day’s work there; and had to leave his wife at Abbotsford in the last stage of disease. He went away silently; looked silently at the sleeping face he scarcely hoped ever to see again. We quote from a Diary he had begun to keep in those months, on hint from Byron’s Ravenna Journal: copious sections of it render this Sixth Volume more interesting than any of the former ones:— ‘Abbotsford, May 11 (1826).— * * It withers my heart to think of it, and to recollect that I can hardly hope again to seek confidence and counsel from that ear, to which all might be safely confided. But in her present lethargic state, what would my attendance have availed—and Anne has promised close and constant intelligence. I must dine with James Ballantyne to-day en famille. I cannot help it; but would rather be at home and alone. However, I can go out too. I will not yield to the barren sense of hopelessness which struggles to invade me. ‘Edinburgh, Mrs. Brown’s lodgings, North St. David Street—May 12.—I passed a pleasant day with kind J. B., which was a great relief from the black dog, which would have worried me at home. He was quite alone. ‘Well, here I am in Arden. And I may say with Touchstone, “When I was at home I was in a better place;” I must, when there is occasion, draw to my own Bailie Nicol Jarvie’s consolation, “One cannot carry the comforts of the Saut-Market about with one.” Were I at ease in mind, I think the body is very well cared for. Only one other lodger in the house, a Mr. Shandy,—a clergyman; and despite his name, said to be a quiet one.’ ‘May 14.—A fair good-morrow to you, Mr. Sun, who are shining so brightly on these dull walls. Methinks you look as if you were looking as bright on the banks of the Tweed; but look where you will, Sir Sun, you look upon sorrow and suffering. Hogg was here yesterday; in danger, from having obtained an accommodation of 100l. from James Ballantyne, which he is now obliged to repay. I am unable to help the poor fellow; being obliged to borrow myself.’ ‘May 15.—Received the melancholy intelligence that all is over at Abbotsford. ‘Abbotsford, May 16.—She died at nine in the morning, after being very ill for two days; easy at last. I arrived here late last night. Anne is worn out, and has had hysterics, which returned on my arrival. Her broken accents were like those of a child, the language as well as the tones broken, but in the most gentle voice of submission. “Poor mamma—

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never return again—gone forever—a better place.” Then, when she came to herself, she spoke with sense, freedom, and strength of mind, till her weakness returned. It would have been inexpressibly moving to me as a stranger: what was it then to the father and the husband? For myself I scarce know how I feel; sometimes as firm as the Bass Rock, sometimes as weak as the water that breaks on it. I am as alert at thinking and deciding as I ever was in my life. Yet, when I contrast what this place now is with what it has been not long since, I think my heart will break. Lonely, aged, deprived of my family, all but poor Anne; an impoverished, an embarrassed man, deprived of the sharer of my thoughts and counsels, who could always talk down my sense of the calamitous apprehensions which break the heart that must bear them alone. Even her foibles were of service to me, by giving me things to think of beyond my weary self-reflections. ‘I have seen her. The figure I beheld is, and is not my Charlotte, my thirty-years’ companion. There is the same symmetry of form, though those limbs are rigid which were once so gracefully elastic;—but that yellow mask, with pinched features, which seems to mock life rather than emulate it, can it be the face that was once so full of lively expression? I will not look on it again. Anne thinks her little changed; because the latest idea she had formed of her mother is as she appeared under circumstances of extreme pain. Mine go back to a period of comparative ease. If I write long in this way, I shall write down my resolution, which I should rather write up if I could.’ ‘May 18.— * * Cerements of lead and of wood already hold her; cold earth must have her soon. But it is not my Charlotte, it is not the bride of my youth, the mother of my children, that will be laid among the ruins of Dryburgh, which we have so often visited in gaiety and pastime. No, no.’ ‘May 22.— * * Well, I am not apt to shrink from that which is my duty, merely because it is painful; but I wish this funeral-day over. A kind of cloud of stupidity hangs about me, as if all were unreal that men seem to be doing and talking.’ ‘May 26.— * * Were an enemy coming upon my house, would I not do my best to fight, although oppressed in spirits; and shall a similar despondency prevent me from mental exertion? It shall not, by heaven!’ ‘Edinburgh, May 30.—Returned to town last night with Charles. This morning resume ordinary habits of rising early, working in the morning, and attending the Court. * * I finished correcting the proofs for the “Quarterly;” it is but a flimsy article, but then the circumstances were most untoward.—This has been a melancholy day, most melancholy. I am afraid poor Charles found me weeping. I do not know what other folks feel, but with me the hysterical passion that impels tears is a terrible violence; a sort of throttling sensation; then succeeded by a state of dreaming stupidity, in which I ask if my poor Charlotte can actually be dead.’* * Vol. vi. pp. 297-307.



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This is beautiful as well as tragical. Other scenes, in that Seventh Volume, must come, which will have no beauty, but be tragical only. It is better that we are to end here. And so the curtain falls; and the strong Walter Scott is with us no more. A possession from him does remain; widely scattered; yet attainable; not inconsiderable. It can be said of him, When he departed he took a Man’s life along with him. No sounder piece of British manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of Time. Alas, his fine Scotch face, with its shaggy honesty, sagacity and goodness, when we saw it latterly on the Edinburgh streets, was all worn with care, the joy all fled from it;—ploughed deep with labour and sorrow. We shall never forget it; we shall never see it again. Adieu, Sir Walter, pride of all Scotchmen, take our proud and sad farewell.

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HEINTZE’S TRANSLATION OF BURNS.

Lieder und Balladen des Schotten Robert Burns: übertragen von Heinrich Julius Heintze (Songs and Ballads of the Scotchman, Robert Burns; translated by Heinrich Julius Heintze). Brunswick, George Westermann, 1840. Genius, like murder, “will out.” Here is the Scottish Ploughman done partly into German verse. It is very curious to see the old familiar face of the “Peasant Thundergod,” as our own engravers have a hundred times given it (for want of a better and truer to give), reproduced here from German copper, with the rugged facsimile, Robert Burns Poet,—engraved by Schwerdgeburth of Weimar! This man wrote in the dialect of obscure peasants; as a Ploughman in the shire of Ayr, as a Gauger in the little Burgh of Dumfries; but he has travelled far since then. A polished, almost fastidious, Goethe is drawn from his artistic height to comment lovingly on the fiery Son of Nature, whom he recognises for a brother; and Goethe’s countrymen, we find, have produced four versions, or select-versions, of him this summer! So goes it. Let but any son of Adam, in the obscurest slough of human existence, in the rudest dialect of men, utter from the heart of him a genuine word,—all sons of Adam feel it to be genuine, and will lay hold of it as the undoubted possession of all. Such a word, if it do come from the heart, has by and by to go into all hearts; to be reproduced in all corners of the articulate-speaking world, till, consciously or unconsciously, all mankind have got the good of it. For indeed, not this man or that man, but mankind, is the true owner of such a word;—it was spoken from the general heart that belongs to us all. 329

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Whether the Germans mean now to run upon Burns, and produce translation on translation of him, thick as blackberries,—thick as English Fausts,—we cannot say. Four in one summer do seem to be enough! But the Germans themselves can look to that. What we have to report is that there are four: Kaufmann’s of Berlin, this of Heintze’s from Brunswick,—both these reputed to be good; then two others, names not given, which probably are rather bad. We ourselves know little of Kaufmann, of the other two nothing at all. But this Heintze, in smart blue octavo, from “the firm of George Westermann Braunschweig,”—him we will salute with some kind of welcome, if merely as the first that has arrived here. Considering all things, it must be said that Herr Heintze has done his task in a decidedly creditable manner. The selection of pieces is good; if perhaps not the best. “For a’ that, and a’ that,” is not one of the songs chosen; the German latitude, we suppose, did not well admit it. One could have liked to see The rank is but the guinea-stamp The man’s the gowd for a’ that, how it would have sounded in German:—but perhaps some Schmidt-Phiseldeck would not have liked! Heintze in general has seized the grammatical sense very correctly; a thing which in translating from Ayrshire Scotch cannot always have been easy. Neither has the poetical expression entirely evaporated, as the risk was: for the most part there is a kind of poetical expression; if not Burns’s, then something which a German may have taken to be Burns’s. Herr Heintze himself has clearly some music in his head. In one or two instances, of singular felicity, we have, as it were, the very Burns, with all his graces and rhythms; and always, over and above the mere prosaic sense, there is a poetic something which afar off resembles Burns. We should say in general, that Herr Heintze had not always learnt the tune of his song. Burns’s songs have a tune, so as few or rather as no modern songs we know of have. Every thought, every turn of phrase, sings itself: the tune modulates it all, shapes it as a soul does the body it is to dwell in. The tune is always the soul of a song, in this sense;—that is to say, provided the song be a true song, and have any soul! As Herr Heintze, it would seem, purposes to go on translating Burns, let us recommend him to procure Thomson’s Collection, or some such musical work; and before entering on any song, fill his head and heart with the melody of it, and never start till his whole mind is singing to it;—the words will then come dancing to the right measure, in every syllable of them a tune!



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“Green grow the rashes, O,” is but indifferently given here: “Grün werden nun die Binsen, O,” is even grammatically incorrect; the meaning is not that the rushes are now becoming green, but that they stand habitually in that state: “grün wächst das Binsenkraut” gives the sense, and would have also preserved the tune. However, that is not the worst. Rashes, except as a kind of rough rhyme for lasses, is of no particular significance; but as such a rhyme, the whole song rests on it; and Heintze’s accordingly is either no song or another! A perfect translator would have to find some equivalent German word, signifying this or that, rushes, ragweed, watercresses, it matters little,—but rhyming to “mädchen” (to “weiberschen” were better), as this does to “lasses;” otherwise it is not to the purpose: Auld Nature swears, the lovely dears Her noblest work she classes, O; Her ’prentice hand she tried on man, And then she made the lasses, O. Green grow the rashes O, &c. Perhaps about a half of Herr Heintze’s songs are decidedly below what he could make them, did he know the tune, and stand honestly by it. We have met grammatically with no important blunder but one; a very excusable blunder, but of a rather sad effect where it stands. In “Macpherson’s Farewell,” Herr Heintze has considered that these words, “He played a spring, and danced it round below the gallows tree,” must signify the leap a condemned robber gives from the ladder, and his dance—alas, too hideous a dance for singing of ! “Spring” he did not know to mean dancing-tune, which a man plays on his fiddle, dancing to it; and so, of this wild burden, Sae rantingly, sae wantonly, Sae dauntingly gaed he; He played a spring and danced it round Below the gallows tree,

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Herr Heintze has made this altogether horrible one, So ging er froh und wohlgemuth, Und unerschrocken fort; Ein Sprung—dann tantzt’er in der Luft [Ach Gott!] Am Galgenstamme dort.

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But let us now, by way of counterpoise, give Heintze’s best translation, the best we have fallen in with: that of “Duncan Gray.” Readers who know, and all song-readers and singers might as well know, what the jovial, genial humour of the original is, will find that it bounds along with little less expressiveness in German than in Scotch. “Freit,” indeed, is far inferior as a singing or speaking phrase to “wooing o’t;” but that and several other things we must even put up with. Hear Heintze: Duncan Gray kam her zu frein, Ha, ha, die lust’ge Freit! Als zu Christnacht wir voll Wein, Ha, ha, die lust’ge Freit! Gretchen that gewaltig dick, Gab ihm manchen schnöden Blick; Duncan fuhr erschreckt zurück, Ha, ha, die lust’ge Freit! Duncan bat und Duncan fleht’, Ha, ha, die lust’ge Freit! Sie blieb taub wie Ailsa-Craig,— Ha, ha, die lust’ge Freit! Duncan seufzt’ in Liebesnoth, Weinte sich die Augen roth, Sprach von Strick und Wassertod— Ha, ha, die lust’ge Freit! Zeit und Glück sind Ebb’ und Fluth— Ha, ha, die lust’ge Freit! Verschmähte Lieb’ gar wehe thut— Ha, ha, die lust’ge Freit! Soll ich, sprach er, wie ein Fant Sterben, weil sie hirnverbrannt? Geh sie doch—ins Pfefferland! Ha, ha, die lust’ge Freit! Wie’s nun kam, genug ’s hat Grund— Ha, ha, die lust’ge Freit! Sie ward krank—als er gesund,—



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Ha, ha, die lust’ge Freit! Ihren Busen Etwas drückt, Bis ein Seufzer sie erquickt,— Und was aus dem Aug’ ihr blickt! Ha, ha, die lust’ge Freit! Duncan hatt’ ein weiches Herz— Ha, ha, die lust’ge Freit! Und mit Gretchen war’s kein Scherz— Ha, ha, die lust’ge Freit! Duncan konnt’ ihr Tod nicht sein, Und den Zorn wiegt’ Mitleid ein; Nun sind froh sie in Verein Ha, ha, die lust’ge Freit! We shall be glad to hear of Herr Heintze’s progress in this work of translating Burns. Probably not more than half his songs are given here; of his Poems only some three, “To the Daisy,” “The Mouse,” and “Man was made to Mourn,”—an imperfect sample. To a man meritoriously bent on making Burns known to his countrymen, we would recommend, as more decisively legible at least, the Letters of Burns. The whole or part of these, intercalated at the due place in the Poet’s history, would show the Germans a man they have not yet seen, and perhaps would like to see. Heintze has given a praiseworthy sketch by way of Life; but it is hardly Burns yet, or a very formidably diluted Burns. He quotes Lockhart’s Life, but seems not to have read it well. He has not even sufficiently consulted his Goethe. Let him read Cunningham, Currie, above all, the Letters themselves; and then see what he does see, and what he has got to tell his people about that. Right good speed to him!

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PREFACE TO EMERSON’S ESSAYS.

To the great reading public entering Mr. Fraser’s and other shops in quest of daily provender, it may be as well to state, on the very threshold, that this little Reprint of an American Book of Essays is in no wise the thing suited for them; that not the great reading public, but only the small thinking public, and perhaps only a portion of these, have any question to ask concerning it. No Editor or Reprinter can expect such a Book ever to become popular here. But, thank Heaven, the small thinking public has now also a visible existence among us, is visibly enlarging itself. At the present time it can be predicted, what some years ago it could not be, that a certain number of human creatures will be found extant in England to whom the words of a man speaking from the heart of him, in what fashion soever, under what obstructions soever, will be welcome;—welcome, perhaps, as a brother’s voice, to ‘wanderers in the labyrinthic Night!’ For these, and not for any other class of persons, is this little Book reprinted and recommended. Let such read, and try; ascertain for themselves, whether this is a kind of articulate human voice speaking words, or only another of the thousand thousand ventriloquisms, mimetic echoes, hysteric shrieks, hollow laughters, and mere inarticulate mechanical babblements, the soul-confusing din of which already fills all places? I will not anticipate their verdict; but I reckon it safe enough, and even a kind of duty in these circumstances, to invite them to try. The name of Ralph Waldo Emerson is not entirely new in England: distinguished Travellers bring us tidings of such a man; fractions of his writings have found their way into the hands of the curious here; fitful hints that there is, in New England, some spiritual Notability called Emerson, glide through 335

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Reviews and Magazines. Whether these hints were true or not true, readers are now to judge for themselves a little better. Emerson’s writings and speakings amount to something:—and yet hitherto, as seems to me, this Emerson is perhaps far less notable for what he has spoken or done, than for the many things he has not spoken and has forborne to do. With uncommon interest I have learned that this, and in such a never-resting locomotive country too, is one of those rare men who have withal the invaluable talent of sitting still! That an educated man of good gifts and opportunities, after looking at the public arena, and even trying, not with ill success, what its tasks and its prizes might amount to, should retire for long years into rustic obscurity; and, amid the all-pervading jingle of dollars and loud chaffering of ambitions and promotions, should quietly, with cheerful deliberateness, sit down to spend his life not in Mammon-worship, or the hunt for reputation, influence, place or any outward advantage whatsoever: this, when we get notice of it, is a thing really worth noting. As Paul Louis Courrier said: “Ce qui me distingue de tous mes contemporains c’est que je n’ai pas la prétention d’être roi.” ‘All my contemporaries;’—poor contemporaries! It is as if the man said: Yes, ye contemporaries, be it known to you, or let it remain unknown, There is one man who does not need to be a king; king neither of nations, nor of parishes or cliques, nor even of cent-per-annums; nor indeed of anything at all save of himself only. ‘Realities?’ Yes, your dollars are real, your cotton and molasses are real; so are Presidentships, Senatorships, celebrations, reputations, and the wealth of Rothschild: but to me, on the whole, they are not the reality that will suffice. To me, without some other reality, they are mockery, and amount to zero, nay to a negative quantity. Eternities surround this god-given Life of mine: what will all the dollars in creation do for me? Dollars, dignities, senate-addresses, review-articles, gilt coaches or cavalcades, with world-wide huzzaings and parti-coloured beefeaters never so many: O Heaven, what were all these? Behold, ye shall have all these, and I will endeavour for a thing other than these. Behold, we will entirely agree to differ in this matter; I to be in your eyes nothing, you to be something, to be much, to be all things:—wherefore, adieu in God’s name; go ye that way, I go this!——Pity that a man, for such cause, should be so distinguished from all his contemporaries! It is a misfortune partly of these our peculiar times. Times and nations of any strength have always privately held in them many such men. Times and nations that hold none or few of such, may indeed seem to themselves strong and great, but are only bulky, loud; no heart or solidity in them;—great, as the blown bladder is, which by and by will collapse and become small enough!



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For myself I have looked over with no common feeling to this brave Emerson, seated by his rustic hearth, on the other side of the Ocean (yet not altogether parted from me either), silently communing with his own soul, and with the God’s World it finds itself alive in yonder. Pleasures of Virtue, Progress of the Species, Black Emancipation, New Tariff, Eclecticism, Locofocoism, ghost of Improved-Socinianism: these with many other ghosts and substances are squeaking, jabbering, according to their capabilities, round this man; to one man among the sixteen millions their jabber is all unmusical. The silent voices of the Stars above, and of the green Earth beneath, are profitabler to him,—tell him gradually that these others are but ghosts, which will shortly have to vanish; that the Life-Fountain these proceeded out of does not vanish! The words of such a man, what words he finds good to speak, are worth attending to. By degrees a small circle of living souls eager to hear is gathered. The silence of this man has to become speech: may this too, in its due season, prosper for him!— Emerson has gone to lecture, various times, to special audiences, in Boston, and occasionally elsewhere. Three of those Lectures, already printed, are known to some here; as is the little Pamphlet called Nature, of somewhat earlier date. It may be said, a great meaning lies in these pieces, which as yet finds no adequate expression for itself. A noteworthy though very unattractive work, moreover, is that new Periodical they call The Dial, in which he occasionally writes; which appears indeed generally to be imbued with his way of thinking, and to proceed from the circle that learns of him. This present little Volume of Essays, printed in Boston a few months ago, is Emerson’s first Book. An unpretending little Book, composed probably, in good part, from mere Lectures which already lay written. It affords us, on several sides, in such manner as it can, a direct glimpse into the man and that spiritual world of his. Emerson, I understand, was bred to Theology; of which primary bent his latest way of thought still bears traces. In a very enigmatic way, we hear much of the ‘universal soul,’ of the &c. &c.: flickering like bright bodiless Northern Streamers, notions and half-notions of a metaphysic, theosophic, theologic kind are seldom long wanting in these Essays. I do not advise the British Public to trouble itself much with all that; still less, to take offence at it. Whether this Emerson be ‘a Pantheist,’ or what kind of Theist or Ist he may be, can perhaps as well remain undecided. If he prove a devout-minded, veritable, original man, this for the present will suffice. Ists and Isms are rather growing a weariness. Such a man does not readily range himself under Isms. A man to whom the ‘open secret of the universe’ is no longer a closed one, what can his speech of it be in these days? All human speech, in the best days, all human thought that can or could

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articulate itself in reference to such things, what is it but the eager stammering and struggling as of a wondering infant,—in view of the Unnameable! That this little Book has no ‘system,’ and points or stretches far beyond all systems, is one of its merits. We will call it the soliloquy of a true soul, alone under the stars, in this day. In England as elsewhere the voice of a true soul, any voice of such, may be welcome to some. For in England as elsewhere old dialects and formulas are mostly lying dead; some dim suspicion, or clear knowledge, indicates on all hands that they are as good as dead;—and how can the skilfullest galvanizing make them any more live? For they are dead: and their galvanic motions, O Heavens, are not of a pleasant sort!—That one man more, in the most modern dialect of this year 1841, recognises the oldest everlasting truths: here is a thing worth seeing, among the others. One man more who knows, and believes of very certainty, that Man’s Soul is still alive, that God’s Universe is still godlike, that of all Ages of Miracles ever seen, or dreamt of, by far the most miraculous is this age in this hour; and who with all these devout beliefs has dared, like a valiant man, to bid chimeras, “Be chimerical; disappear, and let us have an end of you!”—is not this worth something? In a word, while so many Benthamisms, Socialisms, Fourrierisms, professing to have no soul, go staggering and lowing like monstrous mooncalves, the product of a heavy-laden moonstruck age; and, in this same baleful ‘twelfth hour of the night,’ even galvanic Puseyisms, as we say, are visible, and dancings of the sheeted dead,—shall not any voice of a living man be welcome to us, even because it is alive? For the rest, what degree of mere literary talent lies in these utterances, is but a secondary question; which every reader may gradually answer for himself. What Emerson’s talent is, we will not altogether estimate by this Book. The utterance is abrupt, fitful; the great idea not yet embodied struggles towards an embodiment. Yet everywhere there is the true heart of a man; which is the parent of all talent; which without much talent cannot exist. A breath as of the green country,—all the welcomer that it is New-England country, not second-hand but first-hand country,—meets us wholesomely everywhere in these Essays: the authentic green Earth is there, with her mountains, rivers, with her mills and farms. Sharp gleams of insight arrest us by their pure intellectuality; here and there, in heroic rusticism, a tone of modest manfulness, of mild invincibility, lowvoiced but lion-strong, makes us too thrill with a noble pride. Talent? Such ideas as dwell in this man, how can they ever speak themselves with enough of talent? The talent is not the chief question here. The idea, that is the chief question. Of the living acorn you do not ask first, How large an acorn art thou? The smallest living acorn is fit to be the parent of oaktrees without end,—could clothe all



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New England with oaktrees by and by. You ask it, first of all: Art thou a living acorn? Certain, now, that thou art not a dead mushroom, as the most are?— But, on the whole, our Book is short; the Preface should not grow too long. Closing these questionable parables and intimations, let me in plain English recommend this little Book as the Book of an original veridical man, worthy the acquaintance of those who delight in such; and so: Welcome to it whom it may concern! T. CARLYLE. London, 11th August, 1841.

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Notes to “Miss Baillie’s Metrical Legends” 3.1-2. Metrical Legends of exalted Characters. By Joanna Baillie, author of “Plays on the Passions”: Joanna Baillie (1762-1851), Scottish dramatist and poet. By the time Carlyle wrote this review, she was well known and highly successful. Her first success was Plays on the Passions (see next note). 4.9-10. project of producing two plays, a tragedy and a comedy, on each of the passions: Baillie’s A Series of Plays: In Which It Is Attempted to Delineate the Stronger Passions of the Mind—Each Passion Being the Subject of a Tragedy and a Comedy (1798-1812), more commonly known as Plays on the Passions. 4.18. Godwin: William Godwin (1756-1836), philosophical radical whose best-known works are his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and his novel Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are (1794), written (as were his other novels) at least partly to propagate his philosophical and political views. 4.33. Basil and Ethwall: Baillie’s Count Basil: A Tragedy (1811), intended to illustrate the passion of love, and Ethwald: A Tragedy (1802), the passion of ambition. See note to 4.9-10. 5.34-36. it does not array itself in oriental gorgeousness, . . . or rave in the frenzy of despair: This is one of many such passages in which Carlyle condemns escapist literature like Byron’s oriental romances, the vogue of morbid sentimentality or “Wertherism” in literature (from Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther [1774]), and Byronic expressions of passionate self-pity over the inhospitability of the world. In her preface to Metrical Legends, Baillie expresses a view similar to Carlyle’s: “These days are rich in Poets, whose fertile imaginations have been chiefly employed in national or Eastern romance; the one abounding in variety of character, event, and description of familiar or grand objects, and enlivened with natural feelings and passions; the other, decorated with more artificial and luxurious description, and animated with exaggerated and morbid emotions, each in its own way continually exciting the interest and curiosity of the reader, and leading him on through a paradise of fairy-land” (xiv–xv).

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6.8-10. The ancient critical precept, that every drama should have for its groundwork some historical or credited event: Carlyle embroiders on an extension of the classical view proposed by Aristotle in his Poetics (330? b.c.) that art is an imitation (mimesis) of life: “Now, epic and tragic poetry, as well as comedy, dithyramb, and most music for aulos and lyre, are all, taken as a whole, kinds of mimesis” (1.1). From this basic premise developed the idea that such representations should focus on realistic portrayals of life, or nature, though Aristotle himself does not require that a drama be based on literal historical fact. In his discussion of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell (1805), Carlyle gives a characteristic statement of his preference for realism in literature: These Switzers are not Arcadian shepherds or speculative patriots; there is not one crook or beechen bowl among them, and they never mention the Social Contract, or Rights of Man. They are honest people, driven by oppression to assert their privileges; and they go to work like men in earnest, bent on the despatch of business, not on the display of sentiment.  .  .  .  Truth is superior to Fiction: we feel at home among these brave good people; their fortune interests us more than that of all the brawling, vapid, sentimental heroes in creation. Yet to make them interest us was the very highest problem of art; it was to copy lowly Nature, to give us a copy of it embellished and refined by the agency of genius, yet preserving the likeness in every lineament. (Life of Schiller 174-75) He writes in similar fashion in “German Playwrights”: “We are not contending that fiction should become fact, or that no dramatic incident is genuine, unless it could be sworn to before a jury; but simply that fiction should not be falsehood and delirium. How shall any one, in the drama, or in poetry of any sort, present a consistent philosophy of life, which is the soul and ultimate essence of all poetry, if he and every mortal know that the whole moral basis of his ideal world is a lie?” (Essays 1:389-90). 7.5-6. Richard and Wallenstein are no longer the thin shadows they appeared to us, in the mirror of Holinshed and Harte: As here, Carlyle always commends writers who are able to transform mundane facts recorded in historical record into enlivened accounts. Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587) was a main source for

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Shakespeare’s Richard II and Richard III. Albrecht Eusebius von Wallenstein (1583-1634) was a major figure commanding the Imperial armies in the Thirty Years’ War. His history was recorded by Walter Harte (1709-1774) in his The History of the Life of Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden (1759). Carlyle does not state directly that Harte was a source for Schiller’s own History of the Thirty Years’ War (1791-1793) or for Schiller’s subsequent dramatic trilogy Wallenstein (1798-1799), but certainly Carlyle judged Harte’s history to be an example of the sort of arid historical compilation that he deplores. In a letter of 1819, Carlyle had written: “I may not detain you with the Tales of my Landlord. They are unpopular I hear: from which one might infer that the public has been spoiled with an excess of dainty food. For my own particular—I admire the plastic power that has combined the rude delineations of Harte & Monro into the pleasant Capt Dalgetty” (Letters 1:193-94; see also 3:40, 42). In his discussion of Schiller’s History of the Thirty Years’ War in Life of Schiller, Carlyle repeats his observation with respect to Harte and Scott and includes a comment on Schiller’s own defects as historian in this instance: Harte’s History of Gustavus, a wilderness which mere human patience seems unable to explore, is yet enlivened here and there with a cheerful spot, when he tells us of some scalade or camisado, or speculates on troopers rendered bullet-proof by art-magic. His chaotic records have, in fact afforded to our Novelist the raw material of Dugald Dalgetty, a cavalier of the most singular equipment, of character and manners which, for many reasons, merit study and description. To much of this, though, as he afterwards proved, it was well known to him, Schiller paid comparatively small attention; his work has lost in liveliness by the omission, more than it has gained in dignity or instructiveness. (103) Schiller’s failings as historian here were redeemed for Carlyle by his talents as dramatic artist when he reshaped his materials for Wallenstein, “by far the best performance he had yet produced” (Life of Schiller 129; see 150-51). Carlyle discusses Wallenstein in Life of Schiller (128-51) and makes passing comments in “Schiller” (Essays 2:165-215). 7.9. our old French wars: The Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453).

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7.11. Henry: England’s King Henry V (1387-1422), who led an invasion of France in 1415 and is the focus for Shakespeare’s Henry V. 7.12. ancient Pistol and Bardolph: Comic characters and old companions of Falstaff; their fall into hard times in Henry V symbolically represents the king’s repudiation of a former irresponsible indulgence in tavern life. “Ancient” was a term for “A standard-bearer, an ‘ensign.’” 7.12-13. “a soldier firm of heart”: From Pistol’s speech when he attempts to save Bardolph from execution for looting: “Bardolph, a soldier, firm and sound of heart, / And of buxom valor” (Henry V 3.6.25-26). 7.14-15. “dreadful note of preparation”: Henry V 4.Prologue.11-14. 7.15. Agincourt: The battle in which the English under Henry V defeated the French in 1415. 7.35. the day of trial: Carlyle may be alluding to the day of temptation from Hebrews, which is sometimes translated as “the day of trial”: “Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, in the day of temptation in the wilderness” (Hebrews 3:8). 8.2. “compunctious visitings”: From Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy in which she seeks to avoid remorse and “compunctious visitings of nature” (Macbeth 1.5.43-47). He had quoted the phrase in a letter of 1824 (Letters 3:72) and in Wotton Reinfred (99). 8.7. Filippo and Macbeth are not less instructive than Brutus or Virginius: Carlyle suggests that more modern subjects such as Filippo and Macbeth are as suitable for drama as classical Roman ones, such as Brutus and Virginius. Filippo probably refers to the villainous Philip II of Spain from Alfieri’s Filippo (1783). Carlyle mentions Alfieri in a letter of September 15, 1820 (Letters 1:273), and he discusses Alfieri’s Filippo in Life of Schiller (79). For Alfieri, see note to 213.22-24. Brutus refers to Marcus Junius Brutus (85?–42 b.c.), the idealist whom Cassius persuades to join the assassination conspiracy against Caesar in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The history of Virginius, who killed his daughter Virginia in order to prevent her unwanted betrothal to the magistrate Appius, was the subject of several plays, including John Webster’s Appius and Virginia (early seventeenth century) and James Sheridan’s Virginius (1820).

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8.8. pleasure and profit: Carlyle refers to the ancient critical principle that literature should provide pleasure and instruction. The classical expression of the idea is generally attributed to Horace: “He has won every vote who has blended profit and pleasure, at once delighting and instructing the reader” (Ars Poetica 343-44). 8.36-37. like the fragments of an antediluvian animal, as contemplated by the mind of a Cuvier: Baron Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagovert Cuvier (1769-1832), pioneering French naturalist and paleontologist who initiated a system of zoological classification using analysis of structural variants in skeleton and organs. During his visit to Paris in 1824, Carlyle heard Cuvier lecture (Reminiscences 311). 9.25-27. “that rousing and generous admiration  .  .  .  fitted to inspire”: Preface to Metrical Legends vi. 9.28-29. “by throwing . . . form of an angel”: Preface to Metrical Legends vii. Carlyle’s “by” at the beginning of his quotation does not appear in Baillie’s text, and he alters her “figure of an angel” to “form of an angel.” 9.32-10.3. “Having this view of the subject in my mind  .  .  .  actors and scenery of our story?”: Preface to Metrical Legends viii–ix. 10.3-20. “In imitation  .  .  .  memorials of exalted worth”: Preface to Metrical Legends xi–xiii. 12.10. William Wallace: Sir William Wallace (1272?–1305) was the legendary Scottish patriot who dedicated his life to delivering his country from English dominion during the reign of Edward I of England. In 1297 at Stirling Bridge he defeated the English, but was himself defeated a year later at Falkirk and became a fugitive for seven years. Finally, he was betrayed, captured, and executed in London. 12.13. The deliverers of Switzerland, Tell and Stauffacher: William Tell and Werner Stauffacher were leaders of the revolt against Austrian rule in Switzerland. Carlyle’s poem “Morgarten” (1822) concerns a later incident in the Swiss rebellion against Austria (Letters 2:219; Poems 17, 142-44). Tell and Stauffacher are also mentioned in “Early German Literature” (Essays 2:313). 12.15-16. imperishable canvass of Schiller: Friedrich von Schiller (1759-

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1805), German poet, dramatist, and historian. One of the best-known treatments of the Tell story is Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell (1805), which Carlyle characterized in “Schiller” as “the last, and, so far as spirit and style are concerned, the best of all his dramas” (Essays 2:200). Carlyle discusses Wilhelm Tell in Life of Schiller (173-88) and makes passing comments in “Schiller” (Essays 2:165-215). 12.16. Gessler: Herman Gesler was the Austrian bailiff for the cantons of Uri and Schwyz whose actions did much to provoke the Swiss rebellion. 12.21-22. des Vaterlandes Schütz und Erretter: “The Fatherland’s Protector and Savior”; the phrase is not a direct quotation from Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell but echoes the crowd that calls out at the end of the play: “Es Lebe Tell! Der Schütz und Erretter!” (Long live Tell! Our Protector and Savior!) (5.3). 12.24-25. perished on the scaffold  .  .  .  freedom he had bought for it: Wallace was hanged, drawn, and quartered in London in 1305; his head was impaled on London Bridge, and his body parts sent for display in several Scottish towns as a warning against treason. The battle that secured Scotland’s independence from England was fought in 1314 when Robert the Bruce (1274-1329) defeated the English army of King Edward II at Bannockburn. 12.26. vulgar rhymer: Blind Harry (see next note). 12.27. Blind Harry: Also known as Henry the Minstrel (fl. 1470-1492), he is the attributed author of The Wallace (1475?), a spirited epic in excess of eleven thousand lines narrating the heroic deeds of Wallace. 12.29. prey of novelists and poetasters: Other than Baillie herself, Carlyle has in mind contemporary authors such as the following whom Baillie mentions or alludes to in Metrical Legends (xix–xx, 101-2n9, and 105-7n12): Margaret Holford, Wallace; or The Fight of Falkirk: A Metrical Romance (1809); Jane Porter, The Scottish Chiefs: A Romance (1810); William Barrymore, Wallace—The Hero of Scotland: A Romantic-Historical Drama (1817); and Felicia Hemans, Wallace’s Invocation to Bruce: A Poem (1819). 12.30. “carpet knight”: “Originally, perhaps Knight of the Carpet . . . but, usually a contemptuous term for a knight whose achievements belong to ‘the carpet’ (i.e. the lady’s boudoir, or carpeted chamber) instead of to the

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field of battle; a stay-at-home soldier. In modern use with less reference to the lady’s boudoir, and more to the drawing-room with its avoidance of practical work” (oed). 12.30. Metastasio: Pseudonym for Pietro Antonio Domenico Bonaventura Trapassi (1698-1782), Italian poet, composer, and dramatist. 12.31. “metre ballad-monger”: Part of Hotspur’s rejoinder to Glendower: “I had rather be a kitten and cry mew / Than one of these same metre ballet-mongers” (1 Henry IV 3.1.127-28). In a letter of January 31, 1825, Carlyle would write to Jane Baillie Welsh: “I swear to you I had rather be a substantial peasant that eat my bread in peace, and loved my fellow mortals, tho’ I scarcely knew that my own parish was not all the universe, than one of these same miserable metre-ballad-mongers, whose heart is dead or worse, for whom creation is but a mirror to reflect the image of his own sorry self and still sorrier doings!” (Letters 3:271). 12.31-33. Valla (for the very name is lost,) trills forth his patriotism and his gallantry in many a quaver, as an opera-hero ought: Valla may be an Italianization of Wallace’s name, but the specific Metastasio source is untraced. 12.34-35. as a Vauxhall tin-cascade resembles the falls of Niagara: Vauxhall Gardens, laid out in the seventeenth century near St James’s Park in London, were the most famous public pleasure gardens in Europe, providing nightly spectacles of entertainment to thousands of visitors from all classes. Carlyle contrasts the artificial waterfall at Vauxhall to Niagara Falls, which were well established as an icon of the American sublime, a breathtaking display of the power and mystery of nature. 12.35-36. author of Waverley: Walter Scott (1771-1832). On the anonymous publications of Scott’s novels, see note to 303.32. 12.36-37. Cavaliers and Covenanters: Of Scott’s romances of Scottish history and life published prior to Carlyle’s essay, Cavaliers and Covenanters figure notably in Waverley (1814), Old Mortality (1816), The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), and A Legend of Montrose (1819). In Scott the two groups represent the Scottish version of the disputants in the English Civil War (1642-1660) and later those forces contesting primacy of the Crown and Established Church (Cavaliers) over local church governance and choice of doctrine (Covenanters).

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12.37. The Wizard: Walter Scott did not publicly acknowledge authorship of his novels until 1827, and “The Wizard of the North” was one of several sobriquets used by the public to denominate the author of the Waverley novels. 13.13. sets fire to the barns of Ayr: The county town of Ayrshire in Scotland, where Wallace achieved his first major victory over English forces. Baillie narrates the episode in stanzas 20-27 of “A Metrical Legend of William Wallace” (Metrical Legends 18-24). 13.13. fights at Stirling: “A Metrical Legend of William Wallace,” stanzas 31-48 (Metrical Legends 26-38). 13.13-14. offers to fight at Stanmore: “A Metrical Legend of William Wallace,” stanzas 55-60 (Metrical Legends 109-10). 13.14. refuses at Falkirk: “A Metrical Legend of William Wallace,” stanzas 69-81 (Metrical Legends 54-64). 13.14. overcomes the Red Reaver: “A Metrical Legend of William Wallace,” stanzas 61-62 (Metrical Legends 48-50, 110n16). In another context, Baillie cites Jane Porter’s novel The Scottish Chiefs: A Romance (1810) (see 12.29), and it is Porter who in chapter 60 of that novel identifies the pirate De Longoville as “the Red Reaver.” In a letter of October 18, 1814, discussing his recent reading, Carlyle had written that “Miss Porter’s Scottish Chiefs and Waverl[e]y have been the principal of my Novels” (Letters 1:29). 13.14-15. is betrayed, and dies very edifyingly: “A Metrical Legend of William Wallace,” stanzas 93-101 (Metrical Legends 72-78). 14.9. proëmium: Latin: “proem.” 14.11-15.12. “Insensible to high heroic deeds, . . . List to my legend lay of Wallace wight”: Metrical Legends 3-4. 15.25-17.35. “‘Oh! go not to the barns of Ayr! . . . lay of Wallace wight”: Metrical Legends 19-24. Carlyle alters Baillie’s “roused Warders” to “rous’d warders” (16.22). 18.3. Christopher Columbus: Genovese navigator (1451-1506) credited with the European discovery of the Americas.

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18.39. Edwards’ History of the West Indies: Bryan Edwards (1743-1800), The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1793). 19.2. Robertson’s prose: William Robertson (1721-1793), The History of America (1777). Baillie cites Robertson’s History in Metrical Legends (190-91, 202-3, and 354-57). 19.12-37. “But hath there lived of mortal mould . . . like Rachel, weeps”: Metrical Legends 129-30. 20.4-21.15. “From shore and strait, and gulph and bay, . . . With sunny look and brow elate”: Metrical Legends 131-34. 21.20-22.23. “Where he, the sea’s unwearied, dauntless rover, . . . thro’ rising vapour smiles”: Metrical Legends 161-63. Carlyle alters “vapours” to “vapour” at 22.23. 22.26. the fourth “Legend”: Baillie gives only three “Metrical Legends”; Lady Griseld Baillie’s is the third. 22.26-27. Lady Griseld Baillie: Lady Grizel (also Griselda, Griselle, Grisel) Baillie (1665-1746), poet and eldest daughter of Sir Patrick Hume (or Home); see note to 23.36 for Hume. Carlyle assumes, as do others, some family relationship between Lady Grizel and Joanna Baillie (see Carlyle’s reference to her as Joanna Baillie’s “amiable kinswoman” [22.37]), but Baillie herself is less certain: “My ignorance regarding her is the more extraordinary, as she married into a family of my own name, from which it is supposed, my forefathers took their descent.  .  .  .  Had her character, claiming even this very distant and slight connection with it, been known to me in my youthful days, I might have suspected that early association had something to do in the great admiration with which it has inspired me” (Metrical Legends xxv–xxvi). 23.1-16. “She of gentler nature, softer, dearer,  .  .  .  yea, this is womankind!”: Metrical Legends 208-9. 23.20. small still voice: 1 Kings 19:12. Carlyle had quoted the phrase in Life of Schiller (201) and would repeat it in On Heroes (48) and Latter-Day Pamphlets (15, 302).

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23.36. “dear and helpful child”: “Griseld our dear and helpful child hath been” (Metrical Legends 249). Baillie gives the following note on this line: “This was the commendation which her mother gave her, upon her death-bed” (Metrical Legends 271). 23.36. Sir Patrick Hume: Or Home (1641-1724), Scottish statesman who was implicated in Monmouth’s unsuccessful rebellion (1685) and fled with his family to Holland. 23.37. hide in the burial-vault: The episode is narrated in Metrical Legends 217-28, 262-63n4. 24.1. take shelter with their family in a foreign country: Metrical Legends 229-36, 265n9. 24.3. younger Jerviswood: Metrical Legends 237. George Baillie of Jerviswood (1664-1738) married Grizel Baillie in 1692. 24.3. wife and mother: Metrical Legends 246-49, 273n26. 24.5. when a widow: Metrical Legends 251-56. 24.24. “studious of household good”: John Milton, Paradise Lost: “for nothing lovelier can be found / In Woman, than to study household good, / And good works in her Husband to promote” (9.232-34). The biblical source is the good wife from Proverbs: “She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness” (31:27). Carlyle also uses the phrase in his unfinished novel Wotton Reinfred (123) and in “Cruthers and Jonson” (Essays 5:187). 24.24-25. simplex munditiis: Latin: “unaffected by manners”; “beauty that is simple in its elegance.” The phrase comes from Horace’s “Pyrrha Ode” (Odes, 1.5.5), the opening lines of which Milton (see preceding note) translated (1626?) as follows: What slender Youth bedew’d with liquid odors Courts thee on Roses in some pleasant Cave, Pyrrha? for whom bind’st thou In wreaths thy golden Hair, Plain in thy neatness? (1-5)

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The phrase also supplied the title for Ben Jonson’s poem that is more commonly known by the opening phrase “Still to Be Neat” (1609). Carlyle also uses the phrase to characterize his sister Margaret after her death in 1830 (Letters 5:120), and he uses it again in Reminiscences (127). 25.10. Monmouth’s invasion: James Scott, Duke of Monmouth (16491685), illegitimate son of Charles II whom supporters of a Protestant succession proclaimed heir to the British throne upon the death of his father. Following the accession of the Roman Catholic James II in 1685, Monmouth landed with an army in Dorset and was defeated, captured, and beheaded. 25.13-26.28. “And well, with ready hand and heart,  .  .  .  No archer tale than hers was told”: Metrical Legends 233-35. 26.30-31. the “Elden tree” and “Malcolm’s heir”: “The Elden Tree: An Ancient Ballad” (Metrical Legends 305-18) and “Malcolm’s Heir: A Tale of Wonder” (Metrical Legends 288-304). 26.34. more in sorrow than in anger: Hamlet 1.2.231-22: “A countenance more / In sorrow than in anger” is Horatio’s description to Hamlet of the facial expression of Hamlet’s father’s ghost. Carlyle alludes to it again in Sartor Resartus (3.5.175).

Notes to “Burns” 29.title. Burns: Robert Burns (1759-1796), poet. 29.4. like Butler, ‘ask for bread and receive a stone’: Samuel Butler (1612-1680), author of Hudibras (1663-1678), was rewarded with a gift of £300 from Charles II when the first part of the poem was published. After this initial success, however, further patronage was slow in coming, and a proverbial story developed of Butler as a neglected patriotic poet wasting away in poverty and neglect to the shame of the nation. In 1721 a monument was erected to Butler’s memory and provoked Samuel Wesley to write his epigram, “On the Setting Up Mr. Butler’s Monument in Westminster Abbey”: While Butler, needy Wretch! was yet alive, No gen’rous Patron would a Dinner give: See him, when starv’d to Death and turn’d to Dust,

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Presented with a Monumental Bust! The Poet’s Fate is here in Emblem shown; He ask’d for Bread, and he receiv’d a Stone. Currie prints a letter to Burns dated March 8, 1787, wherein the unidentified correspondent quotes the last two lines of Wesley’s poem (Works of Robert Burns 2:70). The ultimate source is Matthew 7:9: “Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?” 29.4-5. our grand maxim of supply and demand: The principle that prices will be determined by the ratio of supply and demand, one of the chief tenets of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776). 29.6. inventor of a spinning-jenny: James Hargreaves (1720?–1778) invented the spinning jenny around 1765, which doubled the capacity for thread production in cloth manufacture. At his death, Hargreaves is said to have left property valued at £7,000. 29.12. mausoleum: With final statuary completed in 1817, Burns’s mausoleum is located in Dumfries and was built at a cost of about £1,500, to plans by T. F. Hunt. Lockhart writes that it was raised by subscription and that Burns’s remains were transferred into it in 1815 (283-84). Carlyle had visited Dumfries in June 1815 to witness the laying of the mausoleum’s foundation stone (Letters 1:50, 54). In a letter of October 23, 1830, Carlyle writes the following: “Burns perished miserably, deserted and disgraced, in that same Dumfries, where they have erected Mausoleums over him now that it is all unavailing, and would buy a scrap of his hand-writing, as if it were Bank-paper. Such is the sad history which, in generation after generation, is too often repeated to us” (Letters 5:178). 29.13-14. more than one splendid monument has been reared in other places to his fame: In 1821 a resolution was formed to erect a monument to Burns in Edinburgh, but construction did not begin until 1831. The Burns monument in Ayr was completed in 1823. 29.14. the street where he languished in poverty: Lockhart writes that the street on which Burns lived in Dumfries “is now, by the authority of the Dumfries Magistracy, called Burns’ Street” (285). 29.16. the sixth narrative of his Life: Variously detailed biographical accounts or materials were given in Robert Heron’s “A Memoir of the

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Life of the Late Robert Burns” in his edition of the Poems (1797); Currie (1800; see note to 30.22); David Irving’s Lives of the Scottish Poets (1804); Robert Hartley Cromek’s Reliques of Robert Burns (1808); Josiah Walker (1811; see note to 30.22); Alexander Peterkin’s A Review of the Life of Robert Burns, and of Various Criticisms on His Character and Writings (1815); Hamilton Paul’s The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, with a Life of the Author (1819); and Gilbert Burns’s notes for the eighth edition of Currie (1820). Lockhart lists Heron, Currie, Walker, and Irving as “the four principal biographers of our poet” (207). Heron’s “Memoir” had originally appeared in two parts in The Monthly Magazine and British Register (vol. 3, 1796); Carlyle mentions Heron in a letter of August 4, 1820 (Letters 1:267-68 and 267n8), and he seems to quote from Heron’s “Memoir” on occasion in the present essay (see notes to 35.13-14 and 36.18-19, for instances). In addition to the reference to Currie given above, Carlyle mentions him in the present essay (see note to 30.22), quotes a passage from Dugald Stewart’s letter to Currie that Lockhart does not print (see note to 43.27-31), and cites Currie’s edition in a letter dated April 12, 1830 (Letters 5:93). 29.18. Mr. Lockhart thinks it necessary to apologize: In his prefatory note to Life of Burns, Lockhart apologizes for presenting yet another biography of Burns (v) but offers the convenience of the format of his volume as a rationale for such an undertaking, concluding that “the humble purpose of the following Essay was, therefore, no more than to compress, within the limits of a single small volume, the substance of materials already open to all the world” (vi–vii). Although he was admitted to the Scottish bar in 1816, John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854) was primarily a man of letters, serving on the staff of Blackwood’s Magazine, where he had reviewed Carlyle’s translation of Wilhelm Meister in 1824 (Letters 3:101n1), and later editing the Quarterly Review from 1825 to 1853. In 1820 he wed Walter Scott’s daughter Sophia. Carlyle later reviewed Lockhart’s Life of Scott in “Sir Walter Scott,” included in this volume. 29.23. No man, it has been said, is a hero to his valet: Variously attributed to, among others, Madame de Sévigné (1627-1696), Madame Cornual (1614-1694), or Marchal Catinat (1637-1712), the saying expresses a sentiment dating at least as far back as Antigonus (822?–301? b.c.). Carlyle may have known it from Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities; 1809): “Es gibt, sagt man, für den Kammerdiener keinen Helden. Das kommt aber bloß daher, weil der Held nur vom Helden anerkannt werden kann. Der Kammerdiener wird aber wechrscheinlich Seinesgleichen

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zu schätzen wissen” (It is said that no man is a hero to his valet. That is because a hero can be recognized only by a hero. The valet will probably be able to appreciate his like) (Werke 17:262). The saying is a favorite of Carlyle’s, and he also uses it in “Schiller” (Essays 2:167) and in On Heroes (157), where he credits the saying to “the witty Frenchman.” 30.5. Sir Thomas Lucy’s: Lucy (1532-1600) was the Warwickshire squire said to have prosecuted the young Shakespeare for deer poaching, although the story does not appear to have begun to circulate until late in the seventeenth century, long after Shakespeare’s death; it appears in fully developed form in Nicholas Rowe’s preface to his 1709 edition of Shakespeare. Carlyle also cites the story in “Goethe’s Works” (Essays 2:439), On Heroes (86-87), and History of Literature (151). 30.5. John a Combe’s: Combe (1560?–1614) was reputed to have been the wealthiest citizen in Stratford, having amassed his fortune through usury. Beginning in 1634 and again culminating in Rowe (see preceding note), the legend began to circulate that Shakespeare was the author of a comic epitaph satirizing Combe as the devil’s son. However, the fact appears to be that no ill will existed between the two men, Combe remembering Shakespeare in his will, and Shakespeare bequeathing his sword to Combe’s nephew and heir. 30.6. preservation of his game: Laws against hunting or trapping by unauthorized individuals (just about everyone other than the landowner and his guests) had been strengthened by the Night Poaching Acts of 1817, which imposed severe penalties for infractions. Carlyle often characterizes the aristocracy as having betrayed its responsibilities of leadership and example to the nation by indulging self-serving pleasure seeking, represented by partridge hunting and game preserving, while the masses suffer privation (see Two Note Books 159-60; Sartor Resartus 2.4.100). 30.7-8. What dissertations should we not have had,—not on Hamlet and The Tempest, but on the wool-trade: Shakespeare’s father, John Shakespeare, traded in wool, a byproduct of his craft as glover. 30.12. Honourable Excise Commissioners: The commissioners who signed Burns’s Excise Commission in 1788 were J. Wharton, George Brown, and James Stoddard, but Robert Graham and William Corbet were the members of the Excise Board who helped Burns to gain his appointment as an excise officer and who later defended him when his loyalty

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was questioned by other commissioners in 1792 (over Burns’s ill-advised expressions of enthusiasm for the French Revolution). On the excise scheme, see note to 62.8-9. 30.13. the Caledonian Hunt: A social association of noblemen and country gentlemen sharing an enthusiasm for field sports, some of whose members patronized Burns in Edinburgh; Lockhart characterizes the organization as “an association of the most distinguished members of the northern aristocracy” (105). Burns dedicated the first Edinburgh Edition of Poems (1787) to the Hunt and was himself a member from 1792. 30.14. Ayr Writers: Members of the legal profession in Ayr, the county town of Ayrshire, one of whom was Robert Aiken, to whom Burns dedicated “The Cotter’s Saturday Night.” 30.14. New and Old Light Clergy: The basic issues involved in the New Light–Old Light antagonism were over the matter of church governance and strictness of doctrinal interpretation, with the Old Light adherents holding more orthodox Calvinist beliefs (and norms of conduct) and the New Light tending to hold more liberal views. Burns joined his patron and landlord Gavin Hamilton, to whom he dedicated his first volume of verse, in supporting the New Light side of the argument. Lockhart tells the story of the controversy in chapter 3. 30.22. Dr. Currie: Dr. James Currie (1756-1805) was Burns’s first editor and major biographer with The Works of Robert Burns; with an Account of His Life, and a Criticism on His Writings (1800). 30.22. Mr. Walker: Josiah Walker (1761-1831) wrote “An Account of the Life and Character of Robert Burns” for an edition of Burns’s Poems (1811). 30.28. man of science: Currie was a physician by profession. 31.9. Constable’s Miscellany: Archibald Constable (1774-1827) was publisher of the Edinburgh Review and of some of Walter Scott’s works. In 1826 he began to publish Constable’s Miscellany of Original and Selected Publications in the Various Departments of Literature, Science, and the Arts as a series of inexpensive books that continued until 1835. Lockhart’s Life of Burns is volume 23 in the series and was commissioned for it. 31.16-17. Mr. Morris Birkbeck observes  .  .  .  for a moment’: Birkbeck

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(1764-1825) was an English agriculturist who migrated to the United States in 1817 to create a settlement in Illinois. His Notes on a Journey in America (1817) and Letters from Illinois (1818) were both widely read and helped to bring European settlers to the middle west of the United States. In Notes on a Journey in America Birkbeck writes, “But what is most at variance with English notions of the American people, is the urbanity and civilization that prevail in situations remote from large cities. In our journey from Norfolk, on the coast of Virginia, to this place [Pittsburgh], in the heart of the Alleghany [sic] mountains, we have not for a moment lost sight of the manners of polished life” (30). 32.12. ‘nine days’: “In reference to the time (nine days or nights) during which a novelty is proverbially said to attract attention.” A nine-days’ wonder is “an event or thing of temporary interest” (oed). 32.38. Ferguson or Ramsay: Robert Fergusson (1750-1774) and Allan Ramsay (1686-1758) were Scottish poets who contributed to the renaissance of Scottish literature in the eighteenth century and who were both influential models for Burns’s satires (Fergusson) and songs (Ramsay). Burns praises them in the preface to the first (1786) edition of his poems, which is reprinted by Lockhart (90-92), who later observes that “our poet bestowed some of the first fruits of this edition in the erection of a decent tombstone over the hitherto neglected remains of his unfortunate predecessor, Robert Ferguson, in the Canongate churchyard” (142). 32.22-23. He was often advised to write a tragedy: Currie and Lockhart both give examples of individuals who offered Burns varying advice concerning poetic projects, but none of them specifically suggested a tragedy. 33.26. Sir Hudson Lowe: Lowe (1769-1844) was the British general who served as governor of St. Helena and custodian of Napoleon I after Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo (1815). Lowe was criticized for alleged mistreatment of the French exiles entrusted to his care, and in a letter of 1822, Carlyle had asserted: “Since the days of Prometheus vinctus, I recollect of no spectacle more moving and sublime, than that of this great man in his dreary prison-house; given over to the very scum of the species to be tormented by every sort of indignity, which the heart most revolts against; captive, sick, despised, forsaken” (Letters 2:154). 33.26. ‘amid the melancholy main’: James Thomson, The Castle of Indolence

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(1748) 1.263. Carlyle’s essay “Memoirs of Mirabeau” would also refer to the “melancholy main” (Historical Essays 198). 33.27. ‘spectacle of pity and fear’: A possible reference to Aristotle’s Poetics, which ascribes the purpose of tragic drama as being that “through pity and fear it effects relief [catharsis] to these and similar emotions” (6.2). In Carlyle’s translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, the broken-hearted Meister alludes to this Aristotelian purpose, when he is about to destroy his poems: “What should these miserable leaves do here? To me they give neither pleasant recollections nor pleasant hopes. Shall they remain behind to vex me to the end of my life? Shall they perhaps one day serve the world for a jest, instead of awakening sympathy and horror?” (1:115; Werke 19:132). 33.36. ‘Eternal Melodies’: Carlyle perhaps alludes to a passage from Goethe’s Helena that he had translated as follows: “And with such a bearing moves he, in himself this boy announces / Future Master of all Beauty, whom the Melodies Eternal / Do inform through every fibre” (“Goethe’s Helena,” Essays 1:191; Werke 4:273). In a letter of 1830, Carlyle would write, “In Hazlitt, as in Byron and Burns and so many others in their degree, there lay some tone of the ‘Eternal melodies,’ which he could not fashion into terrestrial music, but which uttered itself only in harsh jarrings, and inarticulate cries of pain” (Letters 5:184). The phrase suggests the “sphere-melody” to which he alluded in later writings, such as Sartor Resartus (3.8.193), where he refers to the Pythagorean doctrine that the rotation of the planets created the “music of the spheres”; see also On Heroes: “The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies: it was the feeling they had of the inner structure of Nature; that the soul of all her voices and utterances was perfect music” (71-72). See also Latter-Day Pamphlets 185. 34.14. ‘Daisy’: Burns’s “To a Mountain Daisy. On Turning One Down with the Plough in April 1786” (Works of Robert Burns 3:201-3). 34.15-16. ‘wee, cowering, timorous beastie’: Burns’s “To a Mouse, on Turning Her up in Her Nest with the Plough, November, 1785”: “Wee, sleekit, cowrin,’ tim’rous beastie” (Works of Robert Burns 3:146). 34.16-17. ‘thole the sleety dribble, and cranreuch cauld’: “To a Mouse”: “To thole the winter’s sleety dribble, / An’ cranreuch cauld!” (Works of Robert Burns 3:147).

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34.17. ‘hoar visage’: Burns’s “The Vision” has “I saw grim nature’s visage hoar” (Works of Robert Burns 3:109). 34.20. ‘it raises his thoughts to Him that walketh on the wings of the wind ’: Lockhart quotes the lines from Burns’s journal (not letter) for April 1784, where Burns discusses writing his poem “Winter: A Dirge” (Works of Robert Burns 3:171-72) and describes the inspiration he experiences “in a cloudy winter day” with “the stormy wind howling among the trees, and raving over the plain”: “It is my best season for devotion: my mind is wrapt up in a kind of enthusiasm to Him, who, in the pompous language of the Hebrew Bard, ‘walks on the wings of the wind’” (Lockhart 254). The biblical source is Psalms 104:3: “Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters: who maketh the clouds his chariot: who walketh upon the wings of the wind.” 34.27. Arcadian: Arcady was the picturesque region in the Greek Peloponnese said to have been the realm of Pan, the god of shepherds. The name is thus associated with the ideal of rural peace and simplicity. 35.2. ‘insolence of condescension’: Lockhart has “There was probably no blast that pierced this haughty soul [Burns] so sharply as the contumely of condescension” (127). 35.9. ‘quick to learn’: Burns’s “A Bard’s Epitaph”: “The poor inhabitant below / Was quick to learn and wise to know” (Works of Robert Burns 3:345). 35.13-14. ‘a soul like an Æolian harp  .  .  .  articulate melody’: The aeolian harp, or wind harp, is a pervasive period symbol for the poet in inspiration or for the mind in perception, responding to the spirit of the universe. Heron (see note to 29.16) writes, “To the soul of Burns, they [ballads and folk songs] were like a happy breeze touching the strings of an Æolian harp, and calling forth the most ravishing melody” (8). In his unfinished novel Wotton Reinfred, Carlyle had written, “I have heard the poet’s spirit likened to an Eolian harp, . . . over which the common winds of this world cannot pass but they are modulated into music, and even their anger and their moaning become kindly and melodious” (135). 35.15-16. quarrelling with smugglers and vintners. . . and gauging alebarrels: Carlyle often refers to Burns’s position as an excise officer. Lockhart quotes from a letter, dated February 2, 1790, in which Burns writes, “I am now  .  .  .  a rascally gauger, condemned to gallop two hundred miles

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every week, to inspect dirty ponds and yeasty barrels” (196). In his own words, Lockhart expresses a common sentiment regarding this episode in Burns’s life: “Who can open the page of Burns, and remember without a blush, that the author of such verses, the human being whose breast glowed with such feelings, was doomed to earn mere bread for his children by casting up the stock of publicans’ cellars, and riding over moors and mosses in quest of smuggling stills?” (288). 36.16. ‘in homely rustic jingle’: Burns’s “Epistle to Davie, A Brother Poet” has “In hamely, westlin jingle” (Works of Robert Burns 3:154). 36.18-19. Horace’s rule, Si vis me flere: Horace, Ars Poetica line 102: “Si vis me flere, dolendum est Primum ipsi tibi” (If you wish me to weep, you yourself must first feel grief ). Heron gives the complete quotation in “Memoir of the Life of the Late Robert Burns” in his edition of the Poems (40). In Life of Schiller, Carlyle had written that “the grand secret of moving others is, that the poet be himself moved” (18). 36.36. Cant: Always used deprecatingly by Carlyle, the term refers to professional jargon and stock phrases repeated merely as habit or for form’s sake and with no genuine expression of belief, especially with respect to moral or religious principles and conduct. Carlyle was fond of quoting Samuel Johnson’s advice, “Clear your mind of cant,” as he does in his essay on Boswell’s Life of Johnson (below 191 and note to 191.21-22). See also “Corn-Law Rhymes,” below 221 and On Heroes 156. 37.4. Byron  .  .  .  was no common man: George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), English Romantic poet. Carlyle is ambivalent toward Byron, admiring his talents and charismatic persona (which along with his aristocratic status make him “no common man”), but faulting him for unfulfilled potential and excessive self-pity expressed in Sturm und Drang complaints over the unfairness of life when he might instead have attempted to provide an example of a powerful and noble spirit’s struggle and moral victory over such necessary human limitations. Carlyle often cites Byron as a cautionary example, but the best-known instance is the “Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe” advice from Sartor Resartus (2.9.143). 37.8. Harolds and Giaours: Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812, 1816, 1818) is his epic-length autobiographical travelogue that introduced the Byronic hero and established Byron’s fame internationally, which he further exploited in such “Oriental” romances as The Giaour (1812).

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37.19-20. Don Juan: Byron’s vast satire (1819-1824) on just about everything of his time. 38.18. Mrs. Dunlop: Frances Anna Dunlop (1730-1815) began correspondence with the poet when a friend gave her a copy of Burns’s “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” while Mrs. Dunlop was experiencing illness and depression following the death of her husband. She and Burns continued correspondence until his death, he addressing many letters (including one of his last) to her. Lockhart narrates the occasion of her first writing to Burns and continues as follows: “[Burns] shortly afterwards commenced a personal acquaintance with one that never afterwards ceased to befriend him to the utmost of her power. His letters to Mrs. Dunlop form a very large proportion of all his subsequent correspondence, and, addressed as they were to a person, whose sex, age, rank, and benevolence, inspired at once profound respect and a graceful confidence, will ever remain the most pleasing of all materials of our poet’s biography” (93). 38.29-31. Virgins of the Sun  .  .  .  Chiefs in wampum: Representative rather than specific characters from romance (especially gothic romance) literature, which Carlyle consistently condemns for celebrating a fantasy realm that has no relevance to the actual contemporary world. For a similar sentiment, see “Goethe,” Essays 1:213. 38.34. ‘a sermon on the duty of staying at home’: The “great moralist” was Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (see note to 71.27-28). Part of Carlyle’s translation from the preface to Jean Paul’s Life of Quintus Fixlein in German Romance, is as follows: “The most essential sermon one could preach to our century, were a sermon on the duty of staying home” (2:195; Sämmtliche Werke 4:x). 39.2-5. Homer  .  .  .  thirty centuries: Homer, Greek epic poet; his dates and other biographical details are still disputed, as they were in Carlyle’s day, but Carlyle’s belief that Homer wrote about 1000 b.c. is consistent with possible dates given in encyclopedias of the time. 39.17-19. Is there not the fifth act of a Tragedy in every death-bed, though it were a peasant’s, and a bed of heath?: Carlyle here paraphrases a passage he had recently translated from Goethe’s autobiographical Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811-1832) in “Goethe”: “Montesquieu confers on his heroes and great men the right of putting themselves to death when they see good; observing, that it must stand at the will of every one to

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conclude the Fifth Act of his Tragedy whenever he thinks best” (Essays 1:222; Werke 26:217). Carlyle later quoted this passage in “Boswell’s Life of Johnson,” below 193. 39.20-21. that Laughter must no longer shake his sides: Milton’s “L’Allegro” (1631?) has “And Laughter holding both his sides” (32). 39.24. vates: Latin for “soothsayer,” “prophet”; “bard,” “poet.” This is a term that Carlyle uses to define the basic requirement for any of his heroes. As he later put it in On Heroes: “Poet and Prophet differ greatly in our loose modern notions of them. In some old languages, again, the titles are synonymous; Vates means both Prophet and Poet: and indeed at all times, Prophet and Poet, well understood, have much kindred of meaning. Fundamentally indeed they are still the same; in this most important respect especially, That they have penetrated both of them into the sacred mystery of the Universe; what Goethe calls ‘the open secret!’” (69). 39.25. Delphi: The location in the foothills of Mount Parnassus of the temple and oracle of Apollo, whose priestess, under the impetus of divine inspiration, uttered her prophesies in hexameters. 39.28. Minerva Press: A combined publishing house and circulating library begun by William Lane in London in 1790 and generally associated with women authors writing gothic and sentimental novels for female readers. 39.34. ‘the elder dramatists’: English Renaissance dramatists. In his anthology Select Poets of Great Britain (1825), William Hazlitt includes only dramatists from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries under his selections from the “elder dramatists.” Similarly, in “Miss Baillie’s Metrical Legends,” Carlyle writes that Baillie “cannot be compared with our older dramatists. Basil and Ethwall [characters from Baillie’s own dramas] are not known to us like Othello and MacBeth” (4), and in his journal for March 1823, he had written, “The old Dramatists, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher &c. have disappointed me a good deal” (Two Note Books 31). Carlyle also refers to the “elder dramatists” in “Memoirs of Mirabeau,” Historical Essays 160; and Frederick 8:21.2.15. 40.2. ‘travels from Dan to Beersheba, and finds it all barren’: Laurence Sterne, Sentimental Journey (1768): “I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, ’Tis all barren’” (115); Sterne in turn alludes to Judges 20:1: “Then all the children of Israel went out, and the congregation

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was gathered together as one man, from Dan even to Beer-sheba” (see also 1 Samuel 3:20; 2 Samuel 3:10, 17:11, 24:2; 1 Kings 4:25). Dan was the northernmost city of Israel and Beersheba the southernmost, thus from one end of the country to the other. Carlyle repeated the phrase in “Historic Survey of German Poetry,” (Essays 2:354), in a letter of February 22, 1833 (Letters 6:326), Latter-Day Pamphlets (207, 222), and Life of Sterling (38). This sentence was inserted in 1840. 40.8. Borgia: Probably Cesare Borgia (1475-1507), notorious for violence and ruthlessness and the model for Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513), but possibly his father, Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503), who was also infamous, as was (apparently without foundation) his sister Lucrezia (1480-1519), another child of Alexander VI. In his journal in 1827 Carlyle had written a poem that begins, The Hildebrands, the Philips and the Borgias Where are they now? Behind the scene; mute as The millions whom they butchered in their rage. (Two Note Books 103; and Poems 30, 152-53) 40.8. Luther: Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a leading figure of the Protestant Reformation and much admired by Carlyle, who presents him as an example of “The Hero as Priest” in On Heroes. 40.10-11. Mossgiel and Tarbolton: Tarbolton was the parish in which Lochlea, the last farm rented by Burns’s father, was located. Mossgiel was the farm that Burns and his brother Gilbert rented in 1784 as a haven for the family during their father’s financial difficulties and final illness. 40.11-12. Crockford’s, or the Tuileries: Crockford’s was a London gambling club established by William Crockford (1775-1844) in 1827. The Tuileries was a Paris palace begun in 1564. 40.14-16. for it is hinted that he should have been born two centuries ago  .  .  .  no longer attainable by men!: Eighteenth-century cultural historians had argued that as society develops, poetry deteriorates. Thomas Love Peacock famously put the idea to ironic use in “The Four Ages of Poetry” (1820), provoking Shelley’s “Defense of Poetry” (1821, 1840), where Shelley argues that poetry is still relevant in the contemporary world. A major argument supporting the necessary decline of poetry, and appearing around the time of Carlyle’s essay, was Thomas Babington Ma-

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caulay’s “Milton,” published in the Edinburgh Review: “We think that, as civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines” (42 [1825]: 306). 40.25. Wounded Hare: Burns’s “On Seeing a Wounded Hare Limp by Me Which a Fellow Had Just Shot At” (Works of Robert Burns 3:337-38). Burns mentions the incident and includes a version of the poem in two letters, and Lockhart also discusses the incident (199-200). 40.27. Halloween: Burns’s “Halloween” (Works of Robert Burns 3:124-39). Lockhart discusses the poem in chapter 3 of Life of Burns. 40.27-28. era of the Druids: That is, since ancient times when the Druids were priests of pre-Christian Celtic Britain, Ireland, and Gaul and guided religious rituals dedicated to various nature deities that required magic as well as animal and sometimes human sacrifices. 40.28. Theocritus: Syracusan Greek living in the third century b.c. and said to have been the originator of Greek pastoral poetry. 40.29. neither was the Holy Fair any Council of Trent, or Roman Jubilee: Carlyle cites the Council of Trent and the Jubilee as examples of great religious gatherings having worldwide significance, in contrast to the raucous local meeting depicted in Burns’s poem. Burns’s “The Holy Fair” (Works of Robert Burns 3:28-39) satirizes the annual rural meeting of the local church for conference and celebration of Holy Communion. The Council of Trent was the ecumenical council opened at Trent in 1545 with the object of defining the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church in response to Protestant heresies on the one hand and, on the other hand, of reforming the church from within by eliminating various abuses that had arisen in it. A jubilee is a holy year in the Roman Catholic Church, consisting of various observances dedicated to the encouragement of holiness of life in Christ. The only jubilee held in the nineteenth century was that of 1825. 40.30 Superstition, and Hypocrisy, and Fun: Three female allegorical figures who appear in Burns’s “The Holy Fair” (see preceding note) and accompany the speaker to the fair; they are also mentioned in Lockhart’s discussion of the poem (77-78). 41.7-8. ‘lightly-moved and all-conceiving spirit’: Carlyle quotes his 1824

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translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1:112; Werke 18:129). 41.20. the burin of a Retzsch: A burin is an engraver’s tool. Friedrich August Moritz Retzsch (1779-1857) was a German illustrator whose outline engravings of scenes from Goethe, Schiller, and Shakespeare were popular in England. Earlier in the same year that he wrote “Burns,” Carlyle had written in “Goethe’s Helena”: “We have made it our duty to inspect the English Translation of Faust, as well as the Extracts which accompany Retzsch’s Outlines” (Essays 1:152). He may be referring to his earlier review of Faustus: from the German of Goethe (1822), which contains a partial translation and summary that was originally written to accompany Retzsch’s illustrations. See plate 4. 41.24-38. Winter Night  .  .  .  Down headlong hurl: Carlyle quotes from Burns’s “A Winter Night” (Works of Robert Burns 3:149-50; with variants in punctuation and spelling). 42.1. ‘descriptive touches’: Untraced; presumably a journalistic cliché or commonplace saying. 42.8-23. Auld Brig. . . . the pouring skies: From Burns’s “The Brigs of Ayr, A Poem” (Works of Robert Burns 3:55; with variants in punctuation and spelling). Carlyle has misapplied the prophecy here: the speaker is the old bridge prophesying the fall of the new bridge. 42.25. Poussin-picture of that Deluge: Nicholas Poussin (1594-1665) was a French classical painter who was especially noted for mathematically precise and formal landscape painting. One of his paintings is The Deluge (1660-1664). 42.28: the Farmer’s commendation of his Auld Mare: Burns’s “The Auld Farmer’s New-Year Morning Salutation to His Auld Mare Maggie, On Giving Her the Accustomed Ripp of Corn to Hansel in the New Year” (Works of Robert Burns 3:140-45). 42.29. Homer’s Smithy of the Cyclops: In classical myth the Cyclopses were a race of giants having one eye, and in some versions of their myth they were said to be the assistants of Hephaestus (god of fire and the forge; the Roman god Vulcan) and to inhabit the volcano Mt. Etna in Sicily. Bradley (120n34.6ff.) and Sprague (118n13) note, however, that

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the Cyclopses are not blacksmiths in Homer and that Carlyle probably alludes to Aeneid 8.424: “Ferrum exercebant vasto Cyclopes in antro” (In the vast cave the Cyclopes were forging iron.) Nonetheless, in his several references to the Cyclopses in his published and private writings, Carlyle is consistent in referring to them as smiths, as in Jean Paul’s “Cyclopean workshop” in “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter” (Essays 1:15; repeated in History of Literature 166); in “Memoirs of Mirabeau,” he mentions “Cyclops’ hammers” (Historical Essays 205), and in a letter of 1852, he writes that “one’s imagination is a black smithy of the Cyclops where strange things are incessantly forged” (Letters 27:182). 42.29-30. yoking of Priam’s chariot: The specific incident is unclear, if indeed Carlyle has one in mind. Possibly the allusion is to book 3 of the Iliad when Priam, king of Troy, has his chariot yoked in order to carry him to confirm a treaty with the invading Greeks; another conspicuous occasion occurs when Priam mounts his chariot to ransom Hector’s body from Achilles in book 24. 42.30. Burn-the-wind: “Burnewin,” the blacksmith in Burns’s “Scotch Drink” (Works of Robert Burns 3:15). 42.31. Scotch Drink: See preceding note. 42.36-42.2. ‘The Pale Moon . . . thee O’: Burns’s “Open the Door to Me, Oh!” Currie gives the stanza as follows: The wan moon is setting behind the white wave, And time is setting with me, Oh: False friends, false love, farewell! for mair I’ll ne’er trouble them, nor thee, Oh. (Works of Robert Burns 4:45) 42.39. Fabulosus Hydaspes!: Horace, Odes 1.22.7-8: “loca fabulosus / lambit Hydaspes” (“regions that storied Hydaspes waters”). 43.9. Richardson and Defoe: Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) and Daniel Defoe (1660?–1731) both exerted a powerful influence on the early development of the novel in England. 43.20-21. ‘a gentleman that derived his patent of nobility direct from Almighty God’: The complete title of Burns’s elegy on Matthew Hen-

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derson is “Elegy on Capt. Matthew Henderson, A Gentleman Who Held the Patent for His Honours Immediately from Almighty God!” (Works of Robert Burns 3:306-10). In “State of German Literature,” Carlyle had written, “Neither must we think so hardly of the German nobility as to believe them insensible to genius, or of opinion that a patent from the Lion King [Gustavus Adolphus] is so superior to ‘a patent direct from Almighty God’” (Essays 1:44), and from about the same time he mentions human free will as “that celestial patent of nobility” that marks man “for the sovereign of this lower world” (Wotton Reinfred 96). He also quotes a version of Burns’s line in Letters 11:33 and “Shooting Niagara: And After?,” Essays 5:21, referring in the latter instance to “the unclassed Aristocracy by nature.” 43.21-22. Our Scottish forefathers in the battle-field struggled forward ‘red-wat-shod’: “red-wet-shod” from Burns’s “To William S[impso]n, Ochiltree” (Works of Robert Burns 3:251). 43.26. Professor Stewart: Dugald Stewart (1753-1828) held the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and, as an early admirer of Burns’s first volume of poetry, he entertained Burns and introduced him to other influential persons in Edinburgh. 43.27-31. ‘All the faculties of Burns’s mind . . . abilities.’: Carlyle quotes from a letter written by Stewart to Currie in 1787 (Works of Robert Burns 1:144-45). Though parts of this letter are quoted in Lockhart, the present passage is not included in Lockhart’s volume. For Stewart, see preceding note. 43.33-34. Poetry, except in such cases as that of Keats, where the whole consists in a weak-eyed maudlin sensibility, and a certain vague random tunefulness of nature: John Keats (1795-1821) was an English Romantic poet about whom Carlyle has generally little to say; that little is predominantly negative, for the reasons that he gives here. 44.1. Hell of Dante: Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Italian poet whose greatest work is the Divina Commedia (1307-1321?), comprising three parts giving respective visions of hell, purgatory, and paradise. Dante is one of Carlyle’s abiding heroes in literature, and Carlyle includes him as an example of “The Hero as Poet” in On Heroes. 44.3-5. Shakspeare, it has been well observed  .  .  .  Novum Organum:

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Although similar observations concerning Shakespeare’s omnicompetent genius are a commonplace (as they were in 1828), Carlyle’s specific source is untraced. Novum Organum (1620) is Francis Bacon’s philosophical treatise demonstrating inductive methods as a means to universalize knowledge. Carlyle repeats this observation, in much the same wording, in On Heroes 88. 44.18-19. ‘the highest,’ it has been said, ‘cannot be expressed in words’: Carlyle’s translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship has: “Words are good, but they are not the best. The best is not to be explained by words. The spirit in which we act is the highest matter” (2:76; Werke 20:26). He repeats variations of the quotation in Wotton Reinfred 83; “Diderot,” below 266; Sartor Resartus 3.3.162; Reminiscences 370; and History of Literature 165. Froude gives an instance from June 23, 1870, where Carlyle also uses the passage in his journal (Life in London 2:394). See also Sartor Resartus note to 3.3.162. 44.21-24. Mr. Stewart  .  .  .  from of old been familiar to him: Lockhart refers to this passage from Stewart’s letter to Currie (see 43.27-31) and makes a point similar to Carlyle’s (121). 44.23. ‘doctrine of association’: The doctrine of the association of ideas from John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), which was further elaborated by David Hartley and Joseph Priestley. Beginning from the premise that the human mind at birth is like a tabula rasa (blank tablet) upon which the senses impress data from the external world, Locke contended that the most complex ideas are ultimately only combinations of these sense impressions. Because, however, individuals have different experiences, temperaments, habits, educations, etc., ideas can become connected in one person’s mind in a way that is quite different from the connections formed in another person’s, and ideas that are not inherently related can come to seem to be related by mere association. 44.26-45.2. ‘We know nothing  .  .  .  death and the grave’: Quoted in Lockhart, from Burns’s letter of January 1, 1789 (187-88). 45.16. ‘Love furthers knowledge’: No specific source has been found, but Carlyle expresses the sentiment frequently, as in “Biography”: “Truly, it has been said, emphatically in these days it ought to be repeated: A loving Heart is the beginning of all Knowledge. This it is that opens the whole mind, quickens every faculty of the intellect to do its fit work,

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that of knowing” (below 140; see also Two Note Books 133; “Death of Goethe,” Essays 2:381). 45.22-23. ‘the hoary hawthorn,’ the ‘troop of grey plover,’ the ‘solitary curlew’: All are phrases from Burns’s letter that Carlyle quotes above (44.26-45.2). 45.29-46.2. I thought me on the ourie cattle . . . And close thy ee?: Stanzas 3 (minus its first line) and 4 of Burns’s “A Winter Night” (Works of Robert Burns 3:150; with variants in wording, punctuation, and spelling). 46.4. ‘ragged roof and chinky wall’: “A Winter Night” (Works of Robert Burns 3:152). 46.10-15. But fare you weel, . . . Even for your sake: Burns’s “Address to the Deil” (Works of Robert Burns 3:76; with variants in punctuation and spelling). Nickie-ben is a name for the devil. 46.17-18. “He is the father of curses and lies” . . . my uncle Toby: Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759-1767), where part of the exchange is as follows: “I declare, quoth my uncle Toby, my heart would not let me curse the devil himself with so much bitterness.——He is the father of curses, replied Dr. Slop.——So am not I, replied my uncle.——But he is cursed, and damn’d already, to all eternity,——replied Dr. Slop. I am sorry for it, quoth my uncle Toby” (3.11.143). Carlyle owned the 1794 edition of Tristram Shandy (Sotheby and Co. 19). 46.20-21. ‘Indignation makes verses’: Juvenal, Satire 1.79: “Si natura negat, facit indignatio versum” (If nature refuses, indignation will make verses). Carlyle would later refer to the saying in a letter of 1834 (Letters 7:263) and in “The Diamond Necklace,” Historical Essays 146. 46.27-28. Johnson said, he loved a good hater: Samuel Johnson (see note to 145.title) is reported to have said the following of Dr. Richard Bathurst: “Bathurst  .  .  .  was a man to my very heart’s content: he hated a fool, and he hated a rogue, and he hated a whig; he was a very good hater” (Piozzi 83). The anecdote was included in Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson (see below), which Carlyle would review in 1832. Carlyle alluded to the phrase again in On Heroes 92. 46.36-37. ‘Dweller in yon Dungeon dark;’ a piece that might have been

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chaunted by the Furies of Æschylus?: Carlyle suggests that Burns’s poem (see note to 47.4-9) might have been sung by the Furies, the avenging deities of justice in Greek myth and Aeschylus’s trilogy The Oresteia; the final play of the trilogy, The Eumenides, is sometimes translated as The Furies. 47.1. ‘darkness visible’: From Milton’s description of hell in Paradise Lost 1.63. Carlyle used this phrase frequently, and it appears in his writings as early as 1822 (Letters 2:48). 47.4-9. Dweller in yon Dungeon dark, . . . a deadly curse?: Burns’s “Ode, Sacred to the Memory of Mrs. [Oswald] of [Auchencruive]” (Works of Robert Burns 3:303; with variants in wording, punctuation, and spelling). 47.11. Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled: The first line of Burns’s “Bruce to His Troops on the Eve of the Battle of Bannock-Burn” (Works of Robert Burns 4:108-9). Burns also wrote another, slightly different, version of this poem and titled it “Bannock-Burn. Robert Bruce’s Address to His Army” (Works of Robert Burns 4:125-27). 47.14. Mr. Syme: John Syme (1755-1831), Distributor of Stamps in Dumfries. Syme and Burns became friends and toured Kirkcubright and Galloway together in the summer of 1793. Syme later reported an anecdote (differing from Burns’s own account) describing Burns composing “Scots Wha Hae” during that tour (Lockhart 253-54). 47.15. Bruce’s Address: “Scots Wha Hae.” See note to 47.11. 47.22. Macpherson’s Farewell: Burns’s note for his poem is as follows: “M’Pherson, a daring robber in the beginning of this century, was condemned to be hanged at the assizes of Inverness. He is said, when under sentence of death, to have composed this tune, which he calls his own Lament or Farewell” (Reliques 235-36). 47.23. Cacus: Son of Vulcan, Cacus was a giant who lived in a cave on Mount Aventine and plundered the surrounding countryside before being slain by Hercules. 47.24. ‘lived a life of sturt and strife, and died by treacherie’: The first two lines of stanza 4 of Burns’s “M’Pherson’s Farewell” are “I’ve liv’d a life of sturt and strife; / I die by treacherie” (Reliques 440). The poem was not included in Currie’s edition and was first collected in Cromek.

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47.25. Nimrods: Nimrod is mentioned in Genesis 10:1-10 as a mighty hunter, king of Shinar, and a great-grandson of Noah. 47.31. at Thebes, and in Pelops’ line: Milton, “Il Penseroso” (1631?): “Sometime let Gorgeous Tragedy / In Scepter’d Pall come sweeping by, / Presenting Thebes, or Pelops’ line” (97-99). Thebes is the setting of tragedies by Sophocles (Oedipus the King) and Aeschylus (Seven against Thebes); Pelops was father of Atreus and grandfather of Agamemnon and Menelaus and the subject of Aeschylus’s tragic trilogy, the Oresteia. 47.37-48.2. Sae rantingly, sae wantonly,  .  .  .  Below the gallows tree: The refrain of “M’Pherson’s Farewell” (see note to 30.23-24). Carlyle would later comment on the translation of these lines in “Heintze’s Translation of Burns,” below 331. 48.12. Address to the Mouse: See note to 34.15-16. 48.12. the Farmer’s Mare: See note to 42.28. 48.12. Elegy on Poor Mailie: Burns’s “The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie, the Author’s Only Pet Yowe. An Unco Mournfu’ Tale” (Works of Robert Burns 3:77-80) or “Poor Mailie’s Elegy” (Works of Robert Burns 3:81-83). 48.14. Sterne: Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), eighteenth-century novelist best known for Tristram Shandy (1759-1767) and A Sentimental Journey (1768), both of which Carlyle has alluded to earlier in this essay (40.2, 46.17-18). 48.23. Tam o’ Shanter: Burns’s seriocomic poem “Tam o’ Shanter. A Tale” dealing with folk belief and based on an old witch story concerning the ruined Alloway Kirk near his house in Ayr (Works of Robert Burns 3:327-36). Lockhart discusses the poem (200-203) and writes, “To the last Burns was of opinion that Tam o’ Shanter was the best of all his productions” (201). 48.32. not the Tieck but the Musäus: Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) and Johann August Musäus (1735-1787), German Romantic writers, were both included in Carlyle’s German Romance. His comment here is explained by the view stated in the prefaces to this work in which he claims that Tieck is “a true Poet, a Poet born as well as made.  .  .  .  He is no mere observer and compiler; rendering back to us, with additions or subtractions,

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the Beauty which existing things have of themselves presented to him; but a true Maker, to whom the actual and external is but the excitement for ideal creations, representing and ennobling its effects” (1:264), while Musäus is “in fact, no poet; he can see, and describe with rich graces what he sees, but he is nothing, or very little, of a Maker. His imagination is not powerless: it is like a bird of feeble wing, which can fly from tree to tree; but never soars for a moment into the æther of Poetry, to bathe in its serene splendour, with the region of the Actual lying far below, and brightened into beauty by radiance not its own. He is a man of fine and varied talent, but scarcely of any genius” (1:17). 48.35. Tophet: A valley near Gehenna, which later became symbolic of the torments of hell (see Jeremiah 19:2–6 and Isaiah 30:33). 48.37-38. phantasmagoria, or many-coloured spectrum: An entertainment employing a combination of magic-lantern projections and other stage machinery to produce the illusion of the appearance of ghostly phantasms. The entry in the oed states that the performances, and their title, appeared in France in 1798 and in England in 1802; however, we have found textual evidence of its use as early as 1793 (Feuille Villageoise 510). One definition of “spectrum” is “an apparition or phantom; a spectre” (oed), though Carlyle also exploits the meaning of the term as the component colors in a beam of light when displayed by use of a prism. Carlyle used “phantasmagoria” several times in his writings to describe certain qualities of literary texts, but with differing emphases. As here, in his translator’s preface to Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship he had used “phantasmagoria” pejoratively: “To the great mass of readers, who read to drive away the tedium of mental vacancy, employing the crude phantasmagoria of a modern novel, as their grandfathers employed tobacco and diluted brandy, Wilhelm Meister will appear beyond endurance weary, flat, stale and unprofitable” (1:6), but later, in 1832, in the introduction to “The Tale,” he contrasted Goethe’s “phantasmagoric adumbration” with Bunyan’s allegory: “This is no Allegory; which, as in the Pilgrim’s Progress, you have only once for all to find the key of, and so go on unlocking: it is a Phantasmagory, rather; wherein things the most heterogeneous are with homogeneity of figure, emblemed forth; which would require not one key to unlock it, but, at different stages of the business, a dozen successive keys” (Essays 2:448–49). He may have been influenced by the fact that Goethe subtitled the “Helena” section of Faust, which Carlyle reviewed in 1828, “klassisch-romantische Phantasmagorie” (see Essays 1:147). For other instances, see German Romance 1:259; “Life and Writings of Werner,”

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Essays 1:114; “German Playwrights,” Essays 1:389; “Biography,” below 141; “Corn-Law Rhymes,” below 147, Sartor Resartus 1.8.42; “The Diamond Necklace,” Historical Essays 88. 49.10. The Jolly Beggars: Burns’s comic work “The Jolly Beggars: A Cantata” set in a disreputable inn where a rambunctious group of criminals, ne’er-do-wells, and social outcasts gather to carouse and sing individual songs connected by brief recitations. It was not included in Currie’s Works of Robert Burns, but did appear in Cromek. See Lockhart 442-43. 49.15. raucle carlin, that wee Apollo, that Son of Mars: Characters who sing representative solo songs in “The Jolly Beggars” (see preceding note): respectively they are a boisterous old woman pickpocket, a fiddler, and a maimed soldier who has been reduced to begging and drinking. 49.16. Rag-castle: Apparently Carlyle’s coinage, “a haunt of beggars” (oed). 49.17. ‘Poosy Nansie’: Nickname of Agnes Gibson, the proprietress of the alehouse that Burns visited and that inspired “The Jolly Beggars” (see 49.10). See Lockhart 133. 49.20. tatterdemalions: A person in ragged clothing; a ragged or beggarly fellow. 49.22-23. our Caird and our Balladmonger: Characters who sing representative solo songs in “The Jolly Beggars” (see 49.10); a caird is a tinker and a balladmonger is a composer or seller of ballads. 49.23. ‘brats and callets’: “The Jolly Beggars” (Burns, Reliques 251); brats are rags and callets are prostitutes. 49.28. Teniers: David Teniers the elder (1582-1649) and David Teniers the younger (1610-1690) were both Flemish painters of tavern life, as well as (especially in the case of the younger) scenes of more peaceful peasant life. 49.32. In the Beggar’s Opera, in the Beggar’s Bush: John Gay, Beggar’s Opera (1728); John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, Beggar’s Bush (1622). Both are comedies depicting vagabond life. Lockhart is one of the critics who made the same point that Carlyle makes here with respect to these plays (308).

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49.34. Cantata: See the full title of Burns’s poem, which describes it as cantata (note to 49.10). 50.6. Queen Elizabeth: Elizabeth I (1533-1603) ruled during the period when England emerged as a world power in the arts as well as in politics, and the Elizabethan Age is considered by many to have been the Golden Age of English literature, especially of poetry. 50.8. ‘by persons of quality’: A journalistic cliché or commonplace saying. 50.9-10. ‘in the flowing and watery vein of Ossorius the Portugal Bishop’: Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1.4.2). Bacon refers to Jerónimo Osório (1506-1580), bishop of Silves, known as the “Portuguese Cicero.” Carlyle also mentions him in his unfinished history of German literature (German Literature 33). 50.21. Venus rose from the bosom of the sea: Venus was the Roman name for Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty who legend says was born from sea foam. 50.34. ‘sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet, and soft as their parting tear!’: From the chorus of Burns’s song “Here’s a Health” (Works of Robert Burns 4:261). 51.5. Fletcher’s aphorism: Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (1655-1716) is credited with various wordings of the aphorism that follows. In a discussion of Burns in “Varnhagen von Ense’s Memoirs,” Carlyle would again give the (there unattributed) quotation (Essays 4:116). 51.25-26. Our Grays and Glovers: Thomas Gray (1716-1771), English scholar and poet associated with the Graveyard School on the basis of his best-known poem, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” Richard Glover (1712-1785), English poet whose Leonidas (1737) was the most discussed epic of the second half of the eighteenth century. In a letter of 1814, Carlyle had mentioned reading Leonidas (Letters 1:29) and he refers to it also in “Goethe,” the essay he had completed just prior to writing “Burns” (Essays 1:213). 51.26. in vacuo: Latin: “in a vacuum,” “in isolation.”

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51.29. Goldsmith: Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774), Anglo-Irish novelist, poet, and dramatist. 51.29. Johnson: Samuel Johnson (see note to 145.title). 51.29-30. Rambler  .  .  .  Rasselas: The Rambler (1750-1752) was the first of Johnson’s series of periodical essays and established his reputation as a moralist and stylist. The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759) is his Oriental tale mildly satirizing the same sort of sentimental optimism that Voltaire ridicules in Candide (1759). 51.35. Addison and Steele  .  .  .  Spectators: Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and Richard Steele (1672-1729) collaborated in the development of the periodical essay in the Tatler (1709-1711) and Spectator (1711-1712, 1714). 51.36-37. Thomas Boston  .  .  .  Fourfold State of Man: Thomas Boston (1677-1732) was a Scottish divine whose Human Nature in Its Fourfold State (1720) was considered a classic text of Calvinist theology; he was one of the controversialists involved in the schisms Carlyle discusses in this passage. In the Edinburgh Review text, his first name is incorrectly given as John. 51.37-38. the schisms in our National Church, and the fiercer schisms in our Body Politic: During the eighteenth century there was a series of conflicts and schisms in the Church of Scotland. The schisms in the body politic refer to the attempts in 1715 and in 1745 to restore the house of Stuart to the English throne by means of armed rebellion. 52.1. Jacobite: From Jacobus, Latin for “James,” denoting a supporter of the Stuarts following the expulsion of James II (1633-1701) from the throne of England in 1688 in the rebellions noted above (see preceding note). 52.2-4. Lord Kames . . . Hume, Robertson, and Smith: All were members of the leading intellectual circle in Edinburgh. Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696-1782) was a Scottish jurist and writer on legal subjects whose Elements of Criticism (1762) contains significant discussion of literary theory as well as influential criticism of Shakespeare. David Hume (1711-1776) is now preeminently known as a philosopher whose Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740), Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), and posthumous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), along with other works, presented a philosophical skepticism that helped

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prepare the way for nineteenth-century positivism and utilitarianism. His greatest contemporary popularity, however, was as a historian, and his History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688 (1772, 8 vols.) is generally considered to be the first great English history. William Robertson (1721-1793) was a Scottish divine and historian, gaining contemporary fame with his History of Scotland during the Reigns of Queen Mary and of King James VI (1759) and his History of the Reign of Emperor Charles the Fifth (1769). Appointed Professor of Logic at Glasgow University in 1751 and of Moral Philosophy in 1752, Adam Smith came into prominence with his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), but his most influential work was An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), which revolutionized economic theories of the time. 52.5. ‘fervid genius’: Less a directly attributable quotation than a critical and journalistic cliché or commonplace saying. Thus, in “Life and Writings of Werner,” Carlyle had written of Werner’s play Martin Luther (1807) that it displays “much scenic exhibition, many a ‘fervid sentiment,’ as the newspapers have it” (Essays 1:125). 52.10-11. It was by studying Racine and Voltaire, Batteux and Boileau, . . . critic and philosopher: All were seminal figures in the development of French classicism, which provided the theoretic model for Kames and most other English neoclassicists. Jean Racine (1639-1699) was the leading tragic dramatist in the Paris of Louis XIV. Voltaire (1694-1778) was the name under which François Marie Arouet published his works. For Carlyle he is the epitome of the deficiencies of the Age of Reason (see “Voltaire” below). Charles Batteaux (1713-1780) was a French critic, philosopher, and writer on aesthetics. Nicholas Boileau (1636-1711) was a French critic and poet. 52.12. Montesquieu and Mably: Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689-1755), French jurist and political philosopher, and Gabriel Bonnet de Mably (1709-1785), French historian and political theorist. Carlyle had written an article on Montesquieu for David Brewster’s Edinburgh Encyclopædia (1820). 52.13. Quesnay: François Quesnay (1694-1774), French economist who attempted to identify the “natural law” of economy and embraced laissez-faire economic doctrine.

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52.16. La Flèche: The Jesuit college in Anjou where Hume studied, 1734-1737. 52.32. ‘Doctrine of Rent’: Smith was a major influence on David Ricardo, whose theory of rent was elaborated in his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817). 52.33. ‘Natural History of Religion’: One of Hume’s dissertations in Four Dissertations (1757) is titled “The Natural History of Religion.” 52.35. Sir Walter Scott: Walter Scott (1771-1832), Scottish poet and the most popular British novelist of the first part of the century. The mature Carlyle always had reservations about Scott as a writer, and those reservations are formally expressed in “Sir Walter Scott,” below. 53.7-10. ‘a tide of Scottish prejudice,’  .  .  .  ‘had been poured along his veins; and he felt that it would boil there till the floodgates shut in eternal rest’: Lockhart quotes this passage from Burns’s autobiographical letter written in August 1787 (16). 53.19-28. ——a wish, (I mind its power,)  .  .  .  And spared the symbol dear: From Burns’s “To the Guidwife of Wauchope House” (Works of Robert Burns 3:378), titled “On My Early Days” in Currie (Works of Robert Burns 3:377-79; with variants in wording, punctuation, and spelling). Lockhart also gives the title as “On My Early Days” and prints the first twenty-four lines (not divided into stanzas), following Currie’s wording, with variants in punctuation and spelling (25). 54.21. one thing needful: Luke 10:42: “But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.” Carlyle uses the phrase throughout his writings. 54.23. ‘Rock of Independence’: In a letter of April 6, 1793, Burns writes the following: “In my walks of life I have met with a few people to whom how gladly would I have said—‘Go, be happy! I know that your hearts have been wounded by the scorn of the proud, whom accident has placed above you—or worse still, in whose hands are, perhaps, placed many of the comforts of your life. But there! ascend that rock, Independence, and look justly down on their littleness of soul’” (Works of Robert Burns 2:383). 55.8. ‘pre-established harmony’: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz originat-

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ed the doctrine of preestablished harmony in his Theodicée (1710) and Monadologie (1714). The basic tenets of the doctrine are that spirit and matter comprise two different substances, that they have no direct causal effect on each other, but that the two substances act in parallel concert by a harmony established by God at the creation. Carlyle also mentions “Pre-established Harmony” in Sartor Resartus 2.5.104. 55.17. his residence at Irvine: Lockhart narrates Burns’s experiences of the town in chapter 3 and writes, “In 1781-2 he spent six months at Irvine, and it is from this period that his brother dates a serious change” (37). 55.21. his father: William Burnes (1721-1784). 55.29. Mighty events turn on a straw: Carlyle repeats this proverbial sentiment in “Memoirs of Mirabeau,” Historical Essays 172.20 and On Heroes 52. 55.29-30. the crossing of a brook decides the conquest of the world: Julius Caesar committed himself to war against the Roman senate when in 49 b.c. he overstepped the boundaries of his province by bringing an army across the Rubicon, a small river separating Italy from Gaul. 56.3. Let us worship God: From Burns’s “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” (Works of Robert Burns 3:178) and a common call to worship. Lockhart reports an anecdote from Burns’s brother Gilbert: “Robert had frequently remarked to me, that he thought there was something peculiarly venerable in the phrase, ‘Let us worship God,’ used by a decent sober head of a family introducing family worship. To this sentiment of the author the world in indebted for the Cottar’s [sic] Saturday Night” (72-73). 56.4. ‘priest-like father’: From the first line of stanza 14 of Burns’s “The Cotter’s Saturday Night”: “The priest-like father reads the sacred page” (Works of Robert Burns 3:179). 56.7. ‘little band of brethren’: Perhaps an echo from Henry V’s St. Crispin speech in Shakespeare’s Henry V: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers” (4.3.60), but the phrase is also a common self-description among Protestant congregations, particularly Evangelical ones. In On Heroes, Carlyle would refer to Cromwell’s puritans as “a little band of Christian Brothers” (188).

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56.19-20. ——in glory and in joy / Behind his plough, upon the mountain side: Carlyle follows Lockhart’s title page in slightly misquoting William Wordsworth writing of Burns in “Resolution and Independence” (1807): “Of Him who walked in glory and in joy / Following his plough, along the mountain-side” (45-46). Carlyle also uses the lines in Letters 1:363 and 2:240. 57.5. Necessity: Rather than any formal doctrine of necessity, Carlyle usually means by the term “necessity” the immediate and unavoidable circumstances and limitations in which one finds oneself. An often repeated doctrine of Carlyle’s is that success in life comes from turning those conditions to one’s best advantage, directing them into creative and productive channels. His view derives in part from Goethe, whose Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship he had translated as follows: “For our friends, too, it is well, when they soon recover their composure, when they say each to himself: There where thou art, there where thou remainest, accomplish what thou canst; be busy, be courteous, and let the present scene delight thee” (2:54; Werke 20:90). In the introductory essay to Wilhelm Meister , Carlyle writes as follows: “This is the true Rest of man; no stunted unbelieving callousness, no reckless surrender to blind Force, no opiate delusion; but the harmonious adjustment of Necessity and Accident, of what is changeable and what is unchangeable in our destiny; the calm supremacy of the spirit over its circumstances; the dim aim of every human soul, the full attainment of only a chosen few. It comes not unsought to any; but the wise are wise because they think no price too high for it” (1:24). 57.11-12. in collision with the sharp adamant of Fate, attracting us to shipwreck us: In the story of the “Third Calendar” from The Thousand and One Nights, the Black Mountain of adamant attracts ships by means of magnetic power on their iron nails, finally drawing the nails from the planking so that the ships sink at the foot of the mountain. 57.19. New-Light Priesthood: See note to 30.14. 57.29. ‘passions raging like demons’: Lockhart quotes from Burns’s autobiographical letter: “My passions, once lighted up, raged like so many devils” (36; see note to 53.7-10). 58.2. ‘hungry Ruin has him in the wind’: Lockhart quotes from Burns’s autobiographical letter: “Hungry ruin had me in the wind” (89; see note

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to 53.7-10). Burns gives the line as a quotation, but the source is untraced. Carlyle repeats this line from Burns in “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter Again” (Essays 2:117). 58.3. exile from his loved country: The reference is to Burns’s soon abandoned plan to escape his troubles by emigrating to Jamaica in 1786. See also the next two notes. 58.4. ‘gloomy night is gathering fast’: The first line, and sometimes title, of the poem that Burns wrote as his intended farewell to his native land: “The gloomy night is gath’ring fast” (Currie 3:289; see preceding note). Lockhart gives Burns’s account of the poem (89) and quotes the final stanza (98). In “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter Again,” Carlyle translates a passage from Jean Paul’s autobiography in which the author describes how “we placed ourselves in a circle, and in concert devotionally chanted the hymn, Die finstre Nacht bricht stark herein (The gloomy Night is gathering round)” (Essays 2:109; see Wahrheit 1:57). 58.8-11. Farewell, my friends  .  .  .  Adieu, my native banks of Ayr!: The lines come from Burns’s “The Gloomy Night Is Gathering Fast” (Works of Robert Burns 3:291; Lockhart 98; both with variants in punctuation; both Currie and Lockhart give the wording of the final line as “Farewell the bonnie banks of Ayr”). 58.14. He is invited to Edinburgh: Lockhart devotes part of chapter 4 (98-103) and all of chapter 5 to Burns’s experiences in Edinburgh in the winters of 1786-1787 and 1787-1788. Burns was not actually invited to Edinburgh; rather Thomas Blacklock wrote a letter to George Lawrie praising Burns’s first volume of poems and expressing confidence that a second edition “were much to be wished” (Lockhart 100). Blacklock’s letter was shown to Burns, who then made his way to Edinburgh. Lockhart quotes from Burns’s autobiographical letter of August 1787: “‘Doctor Blacklock,’ says Burns, ‘belonged to a set of critics, for whose applause I had not dared to hope. His opinion that I would meet with encouragement in Edinburgh, fired me so much, that away I posted for that city, without a single acquaintance, or a single letter of introduction’” (101). 58.21. ‘a mockery king’: Shakespeare, Richard II, 4.1.260. 58.22. Rienzi: Cola di Rienzi (1313?–1354) was a Roman popular leader who assumed dictatorial powers, effected reforms, was in and out of power,

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and finally became so violent and arbitrary in his rule that he provoked a popular uprising and was murdered. 58.28-59.10. ‘It needs no effort of imagination . . . with wit pointed at themselves’: Lockhart 130-31. 59.15. Sir Walter Scott: See note to 52.35. 59.18-60.38. ‘As for Burns . . . forty years since’: Lockhart 112-15. 59.18. Virgilium vidi tantum: Ovid, Tristia 4.10: “I only saw Virgil” (with the force of “I only saw him; I was not intimate with him”). 59.25-26. Professor Fergusson: Dr. Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), professor of natural philosophy (1759) and professor of moral philosophy (1764), both at Edinburgh University. 59.27. Dugald Stewart: See note to 43.26. 59.29. Bunbury: Henry William Bunbury (fl. 1780-1811), now known primarily as a caricaturist. 60.3. Langhorne: John Langhorne (1735-1779), English poet and writer of sentimental tales. 60.4. ‘The Justice of Peace’: The correct title of the poem is “The Country Justice.” 60.9. Nasmyth’s picture: Alexander Nasmyth (1758-1840) painted two portraits of Burns, the first for the first Edinburgh Edition of Burns’s poems (1787), and then a full-length portrait forty years later for Lockhart’s Life of Burns. See plates 2 and 3. 60.14. douce gudeman: Currie’s glossary gives douce as “sober, wise, prudent” and guidman as “master of the house” (3: appendix 32, 36). 60.29. Allan Ramsay and of Ferguson: See note to 32.38. 60.33. in malam partem: Latin: “in bad part,” “unfavorably.” 60.37. Duchess of Gordon: Jane Gordon, Duchess of Gordon (1745-1812).

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61.23-24. ‘long for the merchandise, yet would fain keep the price’: See Carlyle’s translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship: “You cannot have the ware and the money both at once: and he who always hankers for the ware without having heart to give the money for it, is no better off than he who repents him of the purchase when the ware is in his hands” (1:445; Werke 19:340). In a letter of 1825, Carlyle had quoted a version of the same part of the passage as here in “Burns” (Letters 3:255). 61.28. Blacklock: Dr. Thomas Blacklock (1721-1791), a blind poet who was an early enthusiast for Burns’s poetry and who provided hope for an alternative when Burns was preparing to emigrate to Jamaica as a last resort to escape various difficulties. 61.31-32. pudding and praise: Proverbial for material reward in addition to verbal praise, as in Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad (1728-1743): “Poetic Justice, with her lifted scale / Where, in nice balance, truth with gold she weighs, / And solid pudding against empty praise” (1.52-54). Carlyle had used “pudding and praise” in this sense in German Romance 1:5 and repeated it later in “Novalis,” Essays 2:7, and “Boswell’s Life of Johnson,” below 148, 150. 62.8-9. Excise and Farm scheme: Burns’s efforts to achieve financial independence led him to undertake Ellisland farm in 1788 and to enter active employment in the Excise Service as a customs officer, or gauger, in 1789; he gave up the failing farm in 1791. See Lockhart, chapter 7. 62.11-12. would have had him lie at the pool, till the spirit of Patronage stirred the waters: Carlyle alludes to the miraculous healing waters of the pool named Bethesda in John 5:3-4: “In these [five porches of the pool] lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water. For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.” He also refers to waiting at the pool for the waters to stir (in the sense of awaiting a favorable change in fortune) in Letters 1:123, 5:129, and 6:91. 62.22-23. ‘did not intend to borrow honour from any profession’: Lockhart 197. 62.28-29. donation to his mother: The £180–£200 (or approximately half his profits from the first Edinburgh Edition of his poems) that Burns

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advanced his brother Gilbert to help with the maintenance of the Mossgiel farm, where their mother was resident. See Lockhart 172. 62.31-32. the woman whose life’s welfare now depended on his pleasure: His wife, Jean Armour Burns (1767-1834). 62.35. ‘patrons of genius’: Heron writes of Patrick Miller, Burns’s landlord of Ellisland farm: “And Mr Millar [sic] might, for some short time, please himself with the persuasion, that he had approved himself the liberal patron of genius” (Burns, Poems 30). But Carlyle may be using the term here only as a commonplace, as in Past and Present 2.9.89. 63.6. Mecænases: Gaius Cilnius Maecenas (70-8 b.c.) was a friend of Caesar Augustus and became famous for, and synonymous with, patronage of learning and literature; Virgil and Horace were among those who benefited from his support. 63.17. the ‘Rock of Independence’: See note to 54.23. 63.28-39. There is one little sketch  .  .  .  by such poor mummeries: See Lockhart 204-5. 63.37. Dennis: John Dennis (1657-1734) was a dramatist and in his time an important literary critic, much embattled with Alexander Pope. 64.1. Meteors of French Politics: Lockhart devotes much of chapter 8 to detailing Burns’s initial enthusiasm for French Revolutionary precepts and the trouble that his partisanship caused him. 64.12-13: they that are not without sin, cast the first stone at him!: Carlyle’s allusion is to the story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” ( John 8:7). 64.14. Jacobin: Originally the name for a member of the French political party most identified with extreme revolutionary ideals and practices, which was established in 1789 in Paris in the old convent of the Jacobins, hence the name. Later the term was used generally to describe anyone perceived to sympathize with revolutionary principles. 64.22. Grazierdom: The realm of graziers, those who graze or feed cattle for the market.

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64.26-65.12. ‘A gentleman of that county  .  .  .  the hour of the ball arrived’: Lockhart 212-13. 64.34. Lady Grizzel Baillie’s pathetic ballad: Lady Grizel Baillie’s (see note to 22.26-27) best-known song “And Werena My Heart Light, I Wad Dee” was first printed in 1725. Lady Grizel was one of the subjects of Joanna Baillie’s Metrical Legends of Exalted Characters, which Carlyle had reviewed (see “Miss Baillie’s Metrical Legends,” above). 65.24-27. ‘If he entered an inn at midnight,  .  .  .  all his guests were assembled’: Lockhart 198. Carlyle, in the persona of Teufelsdröckh, also cites this incident in “Goethe’s Works,” Essays 2:393. 65.34. ‘thoughtless follies’ that had ‘laid him low’: Lockhart gives part of a letter from William Wordsworth in which Wordsworth quotes from the last two lines of stanza 4 of Burns’s “A Bard’s Epitaph” (Works of Robert Burns 3:344-45): “Thoughtless follies laid him low, / And stain’d his name” (260). 66.1. volunteer: Lockhart narrates the account of Burns joining as “an original member” when a battalion of volunteers was formed in Dumfries after war with France actually began (224). 67.6-8. A close observer of manners has pronounced ‘Patronage,’ . . . to be ‘twice cursed;’ cursing him that gives, and him that takes!: In Life of Schiller, Carlyle makes the same comment and identifies the “close observer of manners” as Maria Edgeworth (312). The specific source is her 1814 novel Patronage: “It is twice accursed—once in the giving, and once in the receiving” (Works 6.20.210). In the same passage from Life of Schiller, Carlyle also writes that patronage is “directly the antipodes of Mercy,” alluding to Edgeworth’s wording as an ironic inversion of Portia’s speech on the quality of mercy from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, where the relevant lines are as follows: “It [mercy] is twice blest: / It blesseth him that gives and him that takes” (4.1.186-87). 67.37. English did Shakespeare: As in the legends given in the notes to 30.5. 67.37-38. King Charles and his Cavaliers did Butler: See 29.4 and note. 67.38. King Philip and his Grandees did Cervantes: Miguel de Cervant-

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es Saavedra (1547-1616) was the Spanish novelist, dramatist, and poet whose masterpiece was Don Quixote (1605, 1615). For most of his life Cervantes struggled to earn a livelihood and could not earn a living by writing. Among other employment, he served in the armed forces under King Philip II (1527-1598). While Philip’s responsibility for the situation is not clear, Cervantes on one occasion was imprisoned because of his involvement in a bankruptcy. Cervantes is an enduring favorite with Carlyle, who discusses him at greatest length in History of Literature (107-14). 67.38-68.1. Do men gather grapes of thorns?: Matthew 7:16: “Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?” Also alluded to in Sartor Resartus (2.3.90). 68.2-3. ‘nobility and gentry of his native land’ . . . ‘Scottish Bard, proud of his name and country’: The phrases are loosely quoted from Burns’s dedication of the Edinburgh Edition of his poems (1787) “To the Noblemen and Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt”: “A Scottish Bard, proud of the name, and whose highest ambition is to sing in his Country’s service, where shall he so properly look for patronage as to the illustrious names of his native Land; those who bear the honours and inherit the virtues of their Ancestors?” (Works of Robert Burns 3:i–ii). Carlyle later quoted part of the passage in “Chartism,” Essays 4:164. 68.12-13. little Babylons they severally builded by the glory of their might: Carlyle’s allusion is to Daniel 4:30, where Nebuchadnezzar says: “Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty?” 68.19. let us go and do otherwise: Continuing his biblical allusions, Carlyle inverts the injunction from the story of the Good Samaritan: “Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise” (Luke 10:37). In his journal between March 1827 and January 8, 1828, Carlyle had written, “Is it not singular that so many men of note should have been produced or gathered at Göttingen? Mosheim—Blumenbach. These Germans put us to shame! We have lost our old honesty; even in literature we are eye-servants. Go thou, and do otherwise!” (Two Note Books 117-18). 68.20-21. ‘Love one another, bear one another’s burdens’: John 15:12, 17 and Galatians 6:2. Carlyle also uses variants of the quotation in Letters 4:118, 6:78, 8:23.

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68.23. fardels of a weary life: From Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy: “Who would fardels bear, / To grunt and sweat under a weary life” (Hamlet 3.1.75-76). A fardel is a bundle. Carlyle uses the phrase in a letter of 1832 (Letters 6:159). 68.29. the cross, the poison-chalice: References to the means of death of Jesus and Socrates (see next note). 68.31-32. Homer and Socrates, and the Christian Apostles: Tradition describes Homer (see note to 39.2-5) as being blind and poor in old age. Socrates was the Greek philosopher and teacher condemned for impiety to death by drinking hemlock (see preceding note). The Christian apostles were the disciples of Jesus who were chosen to be his twelve apostles; more loosely, the term describes the principal early missionaries of Christianity, several of whom became martyrs. As here and on the following pages, Carlyle often makes the point that great writers and thinkers have frequently had to rise above poverty and hardship in life; in “State of German Literature,” he would point out that Shakespeare was “a peasant by birth, and by fortune something lower” (Essays 1:41) and continues, “Is he . . . poor? So also were Homer and Socrates; so was Samuel Johnson; so was Milton” (Essays 1:42-43). 68.33. Roger Bacon and Galileo languish in priestly dungeons: Philosopher and Franciscan friar, Bacon (1214?–1294) came under suspicion of heresy by his order and spent about twenty-four years in confinement. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was the Italian astronomer, mathematician, and physicist whose observations led him to support the Copernican rather than the Church-approved Ptolemaic explanation of the universe, with the result that he was summoned before the Inquisition in Rome and required to renounce his views and writings supporting the new theory. 68.34. Tasso: Torquato Tasso (1544-1595) was a major Italian poet and tragic figure who from youth was beset by fears of persecution and criticism, leading to erratic behavior (perhaps exacerbated by a blow to the head) that caused the Duke of Ferrara Alphonso II d’Este to have him confined as mad from 1579 to 1586. Carlyle also discusses Tasso briefly in “The Nibelungen Lied” (Essays 2:235-36) and mentions him in other works. 68.34. Camoens: Luís Vaz de Camões (1524?–1580) is Portugal’s national poet and greatest literary figure who nonetheless was banished from court, lost an eye in battle, and was imprisoned for street brawling, dismissed

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from an official post in Macao, and shipwrecked while returning to Portugal (swimming to shore with one hand while holding his poems in the other). Perhaps not surprisingly, although he was granted a small royal pension, he died in poverty. 68.35. ‘persecuted they the Prophets,’ not in Judea only: Matthew 5:12: “Rejoice, and be exceeding glad; for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.” Containing both Bethlehem and Jerusalem, Judea was the kingdom ruled by the Herods and the locale for Jesus’s birth, ministry, trial, and sacrifice. 69.13. the cup of human woe: Carrying resonances of Socrates’s “poison-chalice” (see 68.29), the source for the cup of woe in Christian tradition is usually taken to be Matthew, where, after Jesus has foretold his betrayal and passion, the mother of Zebedee’s children comes to Jesus to ask him if her two sons may sit by his right and left hands in his kingdom, and Jesus replies, “Ye know not what ye ask. Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of, and to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” (20:22). Carlyle had previously used the phrase in his translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, where it appears in the context of a discussion of Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia (1:283). 69.26. Restaurateur: A keeper of a restaurant; Carlyle’s term for those whom he regarded as merely commercial writers who sought only to entertain. In his journal between December 3 and 5, 1826, he had written, “Sir W. Scott is the great Restaurateur of Europe: he might have been numbered among their Conscript Fathers; he has chosen the worser part, and is only a huge Publicanus. What is his novel, any of them? A bout of champagne, claret, port or even ale drinking. Are we wiser, better, holier, stronger? No: we have been—amused” (Two Note Books 71). 70.9-10. Locke was banished as a traitor and wrote his Essay on the Human Understanding, sheltering himself in a Dutch garret: John Locke (1632-1704), English philosopher whose most influential work is the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Expelled from his position in Oxford in 1684 for his supposed involvement in the first Earl of Shaftesbury’s opposition plots against the government, he then took residence in Holland until 1689. 70.10-11. Was Milton rich or at his ease, when he composed Paradise

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Lost?: Because of his support of the revolution and his involvement with the Commonwealth government (1649-1660), following the Stuart Restoration in 1660, Milton was in ill favor and living in reduced circumstances as he composed Paradise Lost (1667, 1674). 70.13. fit audience, though few: The phrase comes from Paradise Lost itself: “still govern thou my song, / Urania, and fit audience find, though few” (7.30-31). In Carlyle’s unfinished novel Wotton Reinfred, he had written of the poet: “Fit audience he will find though few, let him speak where he will; and if his words are sure and well-ordered they will last from age to age, and the hearing ear and the understanding heart will not be wanting” (133). Carlyle had also alluded to Milton’s lines in Life of Schiller 203. 70.14. Did not Cervantes finish his work, a maimed soldier, and in prison?: Cervantes (see note to 67.38) permanently lost the use of his left hand during the naval battle of Lepanto (1571). 70.15-17. the Araucana,  .  .  .  written without even the aid of paper; on scraps of leather, as the stout fighter and voyager snatched any moment from that wild warfare?: An epic poem (published 1559-1589) by the Spanish poet Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga (1533-1594) relating the history of Chile and of Spanish military conflict with the native Araucanian people, parts of which he wrote in the lulls of battle on whatever he could find, including scraps of leather but also small scraps of paper. 70.26-27. Thus the ‘golden-calf of Self-love,’ however curiously carved, was not their Deity: The ultimate source for golden-calf idolatry is Exodus 32, but Carlyle is quoting from his translation of Jean Paul’s Schmelzle’s Journey to Flætz in German Romance: “The Golden Calf of Self-love soon waxes to a burning Phalaris’ Bull, which reduces its father and adorer to ashes” (2:166n11; see Sämmtliche Werke 50:47). Carlyle also quotes the above passage (with some alteration in wording) in “Sir Walter Scott,” below 300. 71.3. New and Old Light forms of Religion: See note to 30.14. 71.7. Rabelais, ‘a great Perhaps’: François Rabelais (1494?–1553) was by turns a French Franciscan friar, Benedictine monk, physician, humanist, and satirist most remembered for Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-1562). His last words are alleged to have been “Je m’en vais chercher un grand

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peut-être; tirez le rideau, la farce est jouée” (I am going to seek a grand perhaps: draw the curtain; the farce is played). Carlyle repeated the phrase (in French and English respectively) in Letters 10:180, 19:124. 71.14. ‘independent’: See 54.23 and note. 71.16-17. ‘to seek within himself  .  .  .  would forever refuse him’: In his translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, Carlyle had given the following: “Let a man learn, we say, to figure himself as without permanent external relation; let him seek consistency and sequence not in circumstances but in himself; there will he find it; there let him cherish and nourish it” (2:415; Wanderjahre 548). 71.27-28. ‘I would not for much,’ says Jean Paul, ‘that I had been born richer’: In “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter Again” Carlyle would give the following translation from Jean Paul’s autobiography Wahrheit aus Jean Pauls Leben (The truth of Jean Paul’s life, 1826-1828): “The poor Historical Professor [ Jean Paul], in this place, would not, for much money, have had much money in his youth” (1:14; Essays 2:122). Jean Paul is the nom de plume of Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (1763-1825), novelist and humorist, much admired by Carlyle and the subject of his essays “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter,” “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter Again,” and “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter’s Review of Madame de Stael’s ‘Allemagne’”; his translations from Jean Paul appeared in German Romance. 71.29-30. ‘The prisoner’s allowance is bread and water; and I had often only the latter’: Wahrheit 1:15. Carlyle would also quote this passage from Jean Paul’s autobiography in “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter Again” (Essays 2:120) and refers to the anecdote in “Diderot,” below 242; Past and Present 4.3.259; Reminiscences 272; and History of Literature 213. 71.31-32. ‘the canary-bird sings sweeter, the longer it has been trained in a darkened cage’: Wahrheit 1:14-15. In “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter Again,” Carlyle would give the following translation from Jean Paul’s Wahrheit aus Jean Pauls Leben: “Fate manages Poets, as men do singing-birds; you overhang the cage of the singer and make it dark, till at length he has caught the tunes you play to him, and can sing them rightly” (Essays 2:122). 72.10. ‘respectability’: Carlyle generally uses the term to indicate a materialistic and hypocritical concern with maintaining appearances. Elsewhere on a number of occasions he mocked a concern with respectability by

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citing an exchange during the murder trial of John Thurtell in which respectability was associated with owning a gig (a light two-wheeled carriage); see 278.10 and note. 72.13. Byron: see note to 37.4. 72.20-21: ‘purchased a pocket-copy of Milton to study the character of Satan’: From a Burns letter written June 18, 1787 (Lockhart 148-49). 72.25. cannot serve God and Mammon: Matthew 6:24: “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” 73.9.10. ‘He who would write heroic poems, must make his whole life a heroic poem’: In Apology for Smectymnuus (1642) Milton writes, “He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem” (694). Carlyle had also included his version of this quotation from Milton in Life of Schiller 44 and repeated it in “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter Again,” Essays 2:130. 73.25. Courser of the Sun: In classical myth, Helios (the Roman god Sol) was the god of the sun who drove his fiery chariot across the sky each day, drawn by four horses. 73.33. Plebiscita: Decrees or ordinances voted on by all the electors, or the people at large, not only the patrician senate. 73.38-74.2. Not the few inches of deflection from the mathematical orbit,  .  .  .  constitutes the real aberration: Carlyle is suggesting that the best way to measure how an orbit differs from a circle is not in the number of inches between their paths but in the ratio between how far off the object is from a circle and the diameter of the circle. 74.7. Swifts, Rousseaus: Both Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) and JeanJacques Rousseau (1712-1778) had difficult personalities that caused them troubles in their personal and professional lives and that for some observers overshadowed their literary accomplishments and the influence that each exerted on his times. Carlyle includes Rousseau as an example of the “The Hero as Man of Letters” in On Heroes.

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74.11. Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs: Carlyle’s point is that neither destination requires much of a voyage, both locations being within walking distance of shore. Ramsgate is located on the Isle of Thanet that, like the Isle of Dogs, is an island only in a technical sense. The Isle of Dogs was originally a peninsula in the Thames River opposite Greenwich and only became an actual island when canals were dug. 74.14. nobler mausoleum than that one of marble: See note to 29.12. 74.18. Valclusa Fountain: A reference to Vaucluse, written Valclusa by Petrarch, a village in the south of France where the poet lived and whose fountain he commemorated.

Notes to “Voltaire” 75.title. Voltaire: Voltaire is an anagram for “Arouet l[e] j[eune],” François Marie Arouet (1694-1778), and the name under which his works were published. 75.1-6. Voltaire. Mémoires sur Voltaire, et sur ses Ouvrages, par Longchamp et Wagnière, . . . 2 Tomes. Paris, 1826: Sébastien Longchamp (1718-1793) was Voltaire’s secretary from 1746 to 1751, and Jean-Louis Wagnière (1739-1802) was his secretary from 1756 to 1778. These memoirs appeared in 1826, thirty-six years after Longchamp’s death, and thus we do not know exactly what their role was in composing them. Jacques Joseph Marie Decroix (1746-1827) edited the book and may have played a significant role in its composition. 75.11-14. practical calculations, nay which our Utilitarian friends have recognized as the sole end and origin,  .  .  .  missionary: Carlyle refers to the utilitarian ideal of “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” propounded by Jeremy Bentham and his followers. In Benthamite philosophy, self-interest is the only motivation for human conduct, and an individual or society adopts a course of action that will yield more pleasurable effects than painful ones, as determined by mathematical formula (the “felicific calculus”). 75.19. rush-light of understanding: Carlyle on several occasions uses the rushlight—a candle with the pith of a rush as the wick, which casts a faint light—to depict weak vision (e.g., “German Playwrights,” Essays 1:392; Sartor Resartus 1.1.3). In “Signs of the Times,” which he wrote

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about the same time as this essay, he would join this figure with Novalis’s “closet-logic”; see note to 128.26. 75.22. Opinion rules the world: The idea is ancient but is especially prominent in nineteenth-century political debate and discussions of emerging democratic social rearrangements. One of the volumes that Carlyle is ostensibly reviewing in the contemporaneous “Signs of the Times,” which he wrote about the same time as this essay, is The Rise, Progress, and Present State of Public Opinion in Great Britain (1829). 76.1-4. Could some Asmodeus, by simply waving his arm, . . . one through the roofs of Madrid: Asmodeus is a demon of marital discord from Talmudic and Apocryphal tradition. In Alain-René Le Sage’s satirical tale Le Diable Boiteux (1707), itself based on an earlier tale by Luis Vélez de Guevara, Asmodeus is a more playful devil who places a Castilian student on a church steeple in Madrid and, by stretching out his hand, opens the roofs to expose to him the secret vices and foibles occurring inside the houses. Carlyle also refers to Asmodeus in “Diderot,” below 254.15 and French Revolution 2:6.6.291. 76.16. Rhene or Danaw: The Rhine and Danube Rivers, as in Milton’s “multitude, like which the populous North / Pour’d never from her frozen loins, to pass / Rhene or Danaw, when her barbarous Sons / Came like a Deluge on the South” (Paradise Lost 1.351-54). 76.22. Crœsuses: Croesus was the last king of Lydia (reigned 560-546 b.c.), legendary for his fabulous wealth. 76.26. the Prophet’s gourd, wither on the third day: Jonah 4:6-11. 76.26-29. What was it to the Pharaohs of Egypt, . . . Moses still lives: Moses fled from Egypt to Midian after killing an Egyptian and there married Zipporah, the daughter of Jethro. Legend has it that he worked for Jethro forty years as a shepherd before returning to Egypt to lead his people out of exile. Carlyle also alludes to the pursuit of the Jews by the pharaoh and the drowning of him and his army in the Red Sea, as recorded in the book of Exodus. 76.31. Mahomet, in his youthful years, ‘travelling to the horse-fairs of Syria’: This journey by the thirteen-year-old Muhammad is reported by Gibbon, though Gibbon’s wording is “two short trading journeys to the

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fairs of Syria” in one instance, and journeys to “the fairs of Bostra and Damascus” in the other (5:5.358-59). Carlyle later discussed the significance of Mohammed’s “journey to the Fairs of Syria” in On Heroes (45). 76.32-34. those lines of Tacitus; inserted as a small, transitory, altogether trifling circumstance in the history of such a potentate as Nero: Roman historian (55-116?) from whose Annals Carlyle quotes and translates below. He again used the translated passage in his 1838 History of Literature (57). 77.6-7. Tiberius, . . . Procurator, Pontius Pilate: Tiberius Julius Caesar Augustus (42 b.c.–a.d. 37) was emperor of Rome. Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor (procurator) who tried to avoid responsibility during the trial of Jesus of Nazareth. 77.8. Judea: See note to 68.35. 77.20. ‘a chain of causes’: One of the articles in Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique portatif (1764) is “Chaîne des événemens” (Chain of events), but the phrase and idea were widespread in his time and since. Carlyle makes the same point as in the present essay in “On History,” Historical Essays 8. 77.29-30. When Tamerlane had finished building his pyramid of seventy thousand human skulls: The Mongol conqueror Tamerlane, or Timur (1336?–1405), is notorious in history and legend for his harsh treatment of defeated foes, and he reputedly left pyramids of their severed heads or skulls at the sites of several cities that he destroyed. Edward Gibbon reports a pyramid made of seventy thousand heads having been raised following Tamerlane’s capture of Isfahan (in Iran) in 1387 (3:34.452n26). In a letter from 1818, Carlyle had written of reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, asking, “I wonder what benefit is derived from reading all this stuff. What business of mine is it tho’ Timur Beg [Tamerlane] erected a pyramid of eighty thousand human sculls in the valley of Baghdad & made an iron cage for Bajazet?” (Letters 1:120-21). 77.30-31. ‘standing at the gate of Damascus, glittering in steel, with his battle-axe on his shoulder’: Untraced. 77.36. Mentz: Mainz, the city in Germany where Johann Gutenberg and Johann Fust, or Faust, set up the first printing press (see 78.7 and note).

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78.1. Tartar Khan: Genghis Khan (1167?–1227), Mongol conqueror. 78.2. ‘passed away like a whirlwind’: From Carlyle’s translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship: “The hero listened to their songs; and the conqueror of the earth did reverence to a poet, for he felt that without poets, his own wild and vast existence would pass away like a whirlwind, and be forgotten forever” (1:113-14; Werke 18:130). 78.6. Walter the Pennyless to Napoleon Buonaparte: Gautier Sans-Avoir (1040?–1096), known as Walter the Penniless, was a French crusader who joined Peter the Hermit on the First Crusade. Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) conquered much of Europe in the Revolutionary Wars of 1792–1802 and Napoleonic Wars of 1803-1815. 78.7. ‘moveable types’ of Johannes Faust: While Johann Gutenberg is usually credited with inventing movable type for printing, Carlyle usually credits Johann Faust (d. 1466?), or Fust, who was a goldsmith who financed Gutenberg’s press and went into partnership with him (see 77.36 and note). Faust also appears in “German Playwrights,” Essays 1:372; “Signs of the Times,” Essays 2:69; “Early German Literature,” Essays 2:307n1; Sartor Resartus 3.7.181. 78.10-12. ‘canvas city’ of a camp,—this evening loud with life, to-morrow all struck and vanished, ‘a few earth-pits and heaps of straw!’: This appears to be a redaction of the following passage from Carlyle’s translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship: “A little while ago there was a stately camp: how pleasantly the tents looked; what restless life and motion was within them; how carefully they watched the whole enclosure! And behold, it is all vanished in a day! For a short while, that trampled straw, those holes which the cooks have dug, will show a trace of what was here; and soon the whole will be ploughed and reaped as formerly, and the presence of so many thousand gallant fellows in this quarter will but glimmer in the memories of one or two old men” (1:237; Werke 19:3). 78.13-15. as in the Fable, the mild shining of the sun shall silently accomplish what the fierce blustering of the tempest has in vain essayed: Carlyle’s allusion is to Aesop’s fable “The North Wind and the Sun.” Determining to resolve a disagreement over which is more powerful, they agree to attempt to remove the cloak from a traveler. The stronger the wind blusters, the more tightly the man wraps himself in his cloak, but when the sun begins to shine ever more warmly on him, he removes his cloak.

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78.24. the victory of Waterloo: The final battle of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, which was fought on June 18, 1815, resulting in the defeat of Napoleon’s army by British and Prussian forces. 78.24-25. the opening of the first Mechanics’ Institute: Mechanics’ Institutes, which were popular through most of the nineteenth century, were adult-education societies intended to serve the working class. 78.30. by birth nowise an elevated one: Longchamp reports that Voltaire’s father was a Parisian notary and treasurer in the Chamber of Accounts and left a modest legacy of eight thousand francs per year to each of his three children (Mémoires 2:330). 78.34. Luther: See note to 40.8. 79.25. the ‘Age of the Press’: A period commonplace. 79.25-26. he who runs may not only read but furnish us with reading: Carlyle often alludes to the saying “He who runs may read,” which derives from Habakkuk: “And the Lord answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it” (2:2). 79.27. scattered leaves, thick as the autumnal in Vallombrosa: From Milton’s Paradise Lost, describing the fallen angels in hell: “who lay intrans’t / Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks / in Vallombrosa” (1.301-3). Carlyle had previously used the phrase in a letter of 1820 (Letters 1:288). 79.30-31. Lives of Voltaire by friend and by foe: Condorcet, Duvernet, Lepan: Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (17431794), Vie de Voltaire (1785), in Œuvres completes de Voltaire, vol. 70; Abbé Théophile Imarigeon Duvernet (1734-1796), La Vie de Voltaire (1786); Édouard-Marie-Joseph Lepan (1767-1836), Vie politique, littéraire et morale de Voltaire, où l’on réfute Condorcet et ses autres historiens, en citant et rapprochant un grand nombre de faits inconnus et très-curieux (1817). Condorcet’s and Duvernet’s biographies were friendly to Voltaire, while Lepan’s, as indicated by the title, sought to counteract their portrait. Carlyle’s copy of Duvernet’s biography is at the Carlyle House, Chelsea (Tarr 260). 79.34. Collini’s, published some twenty years ago: Cosimo Alessandro Collini (1727-1806), Mon séjour auprès de Voltaire et lettres inédites que

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m’écrivit cet homme célèbre jusqu’à la dernière année de sa vie (1807). Collini served as Voltaire’s secretary from 1752 to 1756, the period between Longchamp and Wagnière (see note to 75.1-5). 79.35. Two massive Octavos from Longchamp and Wagnière: See note to 75.1-5. 79.36. Baron de Grimm’s Collections: Baron Friedrich Melchior von Grimm (1723-1807), Correspondance, littéraire, philosophique et critique adressée a un souverain d’Allemagne  .  .  .  par le Baron de Grimm et par Diderot (1812-1814). Carlyle owned a copy of a later edition of this work (Tarr 260). Grimm was also the author of Mémoires, Correspondance, et Ouvrages inédits de Diderot, and Carlyle discusses him throughout his essay “Diderot,” below. 79.37-38. six-and-thirty volumes of . . . Mémoires de Bachaumont: Mémoires de Bachaumont is the short title for the compilation of literary news and gossip contributed by various hands and edited by Louis Petit de Bachaumont (1690-1771), Mathieu François Pidanzat de Mairobert, and Moufle d’Angerville, under the title Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de la république des lettres en France, depuis MDCCLXII jusqu’à nos jours (1777-1789). The editors of Mémoires sur Voltaire give an introductory note concerning Mémoires de Bachaumont (1:180-84) and print Wagnière’s extensive comments on Voltaire items collected in the work (1:185-515, 2:1-74). 80.3. diamond edition: Diamond type is the next-to-smallest standard size of printer’s roman or italic type. 80.16-17. dreadful death-scenes painted like Spanish Sanbenitos: Under the Spanish Inquisition, a sanbenito was a garment worn by a heretic, in particular that worn by an impenitent heretic burned at the stake. As Carlyle observes, accounts of Voltaire’s final moments vary, his enemies describing his terrors over the coming judgment and his friends telling of a firm and contented passing. Wagnière stresses that Voltaire had no fear of death (Mémoires 1:203, 451-52). 80.19-20. English Life of Voltaire: As indicated in Carlyle’s footnote, the author is Frank Hall Standish (1799-1840), The Life of Voltaire, with Interesting Particulars Respecting His Death, and Anecdotes and Characters of His Contemporaries (1821).

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80.20-21 in terrorem: “In terror,” “as a warning.” 80.21-22. some pamphlet, ‘by a country gentleman,’ either on the Education of the People, or else on the question of Preserving the Game: “Country gentleman” is a commonplace courtesy term, often used ironically in the spirit of Thomas Love Peacock’s definition of the phrase in “An Essay on Fashionable Literature” (1818) as “a generic term applied by courtesy to the profoundly ignorant of all classes” (Works 8:268). “Education of the People” refers to contemporary discussions of the question of universal education. For game preserving, see note to 30.6. 81.2. Colburn-Novels: Fashionable novels published by Henry Colburn (1784/5-1855). 81.4-5. would that every Johnson in the world had his veridical Boswell, or leash of Boswells! We could then tolerate his Hawkins: James Boswell (1740-1795) was a man of letters, whose most important work was his Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D (1791). For Samuel Johnson, see note to 145.title and for both see Carlyle’s essay on Boswell’s Life of Johnson below. Sir John Hawkins (1719-1789) was a friend of Johnson’s, whose The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1787) was overshadowed by Boswell’s biography; Hawkins also edited Johnson’s works (1787-1788). 81.9. assaulting the Christian religion: Although Voltaire was constantly in bad odor with clergy and church hierarchy, both he and his memorialists repeatedly insist that his fight was against fanaticism, error, and superstition, not against divinity or religion. For representative examples, see Mémoires 1:12-15, 47-48, 2:77-79, and Collini 223-25, 366-67. Wagnière gives a formal declaration that Voltaire wrote in the last year of his life at a time when he thought that death was imminent: “Je meurs en adorant Dieu, en aimant mes amis, en ne haïssant me ennemis, et en détestant la superstition” (I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition) (Mémoires 1:14). 81.13-14. for the last fifty-one years, the discussion has been indifferent enough: Voltaire died in 1778, fifty-one years prior to the publication of Carlyle’s essay. 81.19. quæstio vexata: “Vexed question.” 81.22-24. ‘universal genius,’ this ‘apostle of Reason,’ and ‘father of sound

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Philosophy;’ and many again of this ‘monster of impiety,’ this ‘sophist,’ and ‘atheist,’ and ‘ape-demon’: Although not all of these specific epithets appear in Mémoires, they are representative of ones commonly used throughout the period in reference to Voltaire. 81.25. Dr. Clarke of Cambridge: Samuel Clarke (1675-1729), controversial English churchman whom Voltaire had met when exiled in England (1726-1728) and discussed in Lettres Ecrites de Londres sur les Anglois (1734), letter 7, “Sur les Sociniens ou Ariens, ou Anti-trinitaires.” See also Œuvres 47:526-27. 81.27-28. truth is better than error, were it only ‘on Hannibal’s vinegar’: The Roman historian Livy wrote in his History of Rome that when crossing the Alps, Hannibal used vinegar to help soften obstructing boulders so that they could be broken up (chapter 32). In his Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), Sir Thomas Browne discusses the improbability of Livy’s account (7.18), and Carlyle records in his journal for December 3, 1826, that he had read Browne’s work (Two Note Books 67). Carlyle also mentions “Hannibal’s rock-rending vinegar” in French Revolution 2:3.1.105. 81.35-38. the duty of fairness . . . a duty, which we have the happiness to hear daily inculcated; yet which, it has been well said, no mortal is at bottom disposed to practise: In his recently written essay “Goethe,” Carlyle had discussed the necessity for fairness in evaluating foreign literature: “The fairness, the necessity of this can need no demonstration; yet how often do we find it, in practice, altogether neglected!” (Essays 1:256). 82.8-9. the heart sees farther than the head: This distinction appears fairly regularly in Carlyle’s writings; in 1832 he repeats the present passage as a quotation in “Biography” (below 140.36) and in “Boswell’s Life of Johnson” (155.5-6) characterizes the quotation as “that old saying.” In the introductory essay to his translation of Wilhelm Meister, Carlyle had praised Goethe as one who “has learned not in head only, but also in heart; not from Art and Literature, but also by action and passion, in the rugged school of Experience” (1:26). 82.13-14. it is not by bread alone that the basest mortal lives: Matthew 4:4: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” 82.16. Bedlam: The Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem in London,

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dedicated since the early fifteenth century to the reception and treatment of the mentally ill. 82.27-28. Deists or Millennarians: Deism expresses a belief in a supreme being as creator who does not involve himself directly in earthly affairs. He is the “watchmaker” God who created the “machine” of the universe and then withdrew to let it run according to the natural laws that he had put in place. Deists generally reject revelation and the supernatural aspects of Christianity. Millenarianism is the doctrine of or belief in the coming of a millennium, a future thousand-year age of blessedness, beginning with or culminating in the Second Coming of Christ. The Carlyles’ old friend Edward Irving was a prominent millenarian leader in England, a fact regretted by both Thomas and Jane Carlyle (see for instance Carlyle’s account of Irving in “Death of Edward Irving” and in Reminiscences). Carlyle mentions contemporary millenarian movements in “Signs of the Times,” which he was writing around the same time as he was working on “Voltaire”: “The Millennarians have come forth on the right hand, and the Millites on the left. The Fifth-monarchy men prophesy from the Bible, and the Utilitarians from Bentham” (Essays 2:58). 82.31. Peterloo platform: A mass rally in support of parliamentary reform met in 1819 in St. Peter’s Field, near Manchester. When the crowd was dispersed by a troop of cavalry, several people were killed and many injured. The event soon came to be called the Peterloo Massacre, an ironic coinage comparing it to the Battle of Waterloo, in which Britain and its allies defeated Napoleon (see note to 78.24). Carlyle had noted “the massacre of Manchester” at the time, in a letter of November 11, 1819 (Letters 1:206). 82.36-37. Charle-Magne, . . . Voltaire-ce-grand-homme: Carlyle suggests that the epithet equates Voltaire-ce-grand-homme, “Voltaire, that great man,” with Charlemagne, “Charles the Great” (742?–814), the king of the Franks and founder of the first European empire after the fall of Rome. 83.4. ‘tumultuously assembled’: Not traced; the context suggests that this is probably a journalistic cliché. 83.5-6. Pennenden Heath has been mistaken for a Field of Runnymead: Penenden Heath was the site where a crowd assembled in 1828 to hear speeches concerning Catholic emancipation, the movement to remove the

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political disabilities imposed by law on Roman Catholics. Runnymede was the meadow where in 1215 King John accepted the Magna Carta. 83.6-10. the couplet on that immortal Dalhousie  .  .  .  the Earl of Mar: The couplet comes from Alexander Pope’s Peri Bathous or the Art of Sinking in Poetry (1728), where it is given as an example of “The Anticlimax” (11.3.1). Carlyle implies a similar contrast between Pennenden Heath and Runnymede. 83.28-29. Superstition already armed for deadly battle against Unbelief; in which battle he himself plays a distinguished part: Many of Voltaire’s causes involved religious persecution, such as the execution of the Chevalier La Barre in 1766. Most biographers include this case, but perhaps the major pertinent accounts are Duvernet (244-48), Condorcet (Voltaire, Œuvres 70:117-19), and Mémoires (1:89-90). 83.32. Ninon de l’Enclos: Known as Ninon, Anne de Lenclos (1616?– 1705) was a French courtesan of great beauty, wit, and charm; Wagnière discusses their first meeting in Mémoires 1:20, and Duvernet records her legacy to Voltaire (26). 83.34. “We are all Princes or Poets”: This is reported to have been said by the seventeen-year-old Voltaire at a dinner party given by Prince Conti. Of the biographers whom Carlyle mentions in his essay, Duvernet is the earliest to record the incident (31), but Lepan also includes it (5). 83.36-37. from Queen Caroline of England to the Empress Catherine of Russia, from Pope Benedict to Frederick the Great: Voltaire dedicated La Henriade (1728) to Queen Caroline (1683-1737), wife of George II; Catherine II, or Catherine the Great (1729-1796), Czarina of Russia; and Pope Benedict XIV (1675-1758). As Carlyle discusses below, Frederick the Great (1712-1786), king of Prussia, initiated a correspondence with Voltaire, and a complex relationship developed; later, he would be the subject of Carlyle’s Frederick the Great. Catherine the Great also initiated a correspondence and purchased his library at his death. 84.3. Coryphée du Déisme: While the young Voltaire was a student at the Jesuit college St. Louis-le Grand, one of his teachers predicted “qu’il serait en France le coryphée du déisme” (that he would be in France the coryphée of Deism) (Voltaire, Œuvres 70:6). While the French coryphée means, literally, lead dancer in a ballet, the schoolmaster probably was using it

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in the sense of the Greek coryphaeus, leader of the chorus. Contributors to Mémoires de Bachaumont similarly characterize Voltaire as the coryphée of “les philosophes modernes” (Mémoires 1:347, 436, 439, 462) and “de l’impiété” (1:440, 497). 84.6-10. he speculates in the funds,  .  .  .  raises his income from 800 francs a-year to more than centuple that sum: Longchamp gives these and other details of Voltaire’s finances in Mémoires 2:328-36, though he writes that Voltaire’s initial income was eight thousand francs a year rather than eight hundred; Wagnière writes that Voltaire’s annual income at the time of his death was 160,000 livres, livres being roughly equal to francs (Mémoires 1:24). 84.14. country-seats: Although his château at Ferney is perhaps the best known, Mémoires lists other residences in France and Switzerland (2:336-37n41). 84.14. Henriades and Philosophical Dictionaries: La Henriade (1723, 1728) is Voltaire’s epic poem on Henry of Navarre and his struggle against religious intolerance. Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique portative (1764) presents in alphabetic arrangement Voltaire’s enlightened views on a variety of topics, though many deal with religious and theological subjects. Both the French government and the Vatican condemned the book, and it was one of the works of which Voltaire denied authorship (Mémoires 1:222). 84.23. Mahlstrom: A famous whirlpool in the Arctic Ocean fabled to draw ships to destruction from a great distance. 84.26. Manilla voyage: Manila galleons were Spanish treasure ships sailing annually from Manila in the Philippines to Acapulco in Mexico, where they unloaded their cargo of riches from the far-eastern trade. Carlyle later mentions “the old Acapulco Ship” in “Dr. Francia” (Essays 4:270). 84.31. Hyperion-like: In Greek myth, Hyperion the Titan is the son of Heaven (Uranus) and Earth (Ge) and is father of the Sun (Helios), the Moon (Selene), and the Dawn (Eos). 85.5. ‘European Power’: A journalistic cliché of the period. 85.8-9. he has his coat of darkness, and his shoes of swiftness, like that other Killer of Giants: Jack the Giant Killer from English nursery lore

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had “shoes of swiftness” and a coat that could make him invisible. Carlyle would again mention him and his various accouterments in On Heroes 32. 85.10. build churches: Voltaire had a church built at Ferney in 1761, bearing the inscription “Deo erexit Voltaire” (Voltaire erected this to God) (Mémoires 1:42-45). 85.12. the poor Printer of his Zadig: In order to keep control of publication of Zadig (1747), Voltaire tricked two printers into each printing only half of the work, so that neither would have the complete text until after he had circulated copies where he wished. On the source see the note to 85.38. 85.12-13. he manages the Cardinal Fleuri, and the Curé of St. Sulpice: André-Hercule de Fleury, Cardinal Fleury (1653-1743), was the de facto prime minister of France from 1723 until his death and thus an embodiment and enforcer of the established order. Noted for his fiscal austerity, and though he was sometimes a personal friend and benefactor to Voltaire, he reduced the amount of Voltaire’s government pension and income from rents (Mémoires 2:490-91); it is not clear how Carlyle concluded that Voltaire had “managed” him. When Voltaire was on his deathbed, the Curé of St. Sulpice asked him if he recognized the divinity of Jesus Christ, upon which Voltaire replied, “Let me die in peace!” (Memoires 1:160-61), and he had earlier written a flattering letter to him (1:134-35). 85.22-24. his generous acts, from the case of the Abbé Desfontaines down to that of the Widow Calas, and the Serfs of Saint Claude: Voltaire used his influence to free Desfontaines from prison, but Desfontaines nevertheless later became one of Voltaire’s vocal detractors (see Mémoires 1:26, 194, 2:416-47, 497-98). When Jean Calas (1698-1762), a Huguenot cloth merchant, was tortured and executed in Toulouse following conviction for the murder of his son, who had been found hanged in his father’s shop, Voltaire undertook an extensive press campaign to vindicate the father and to rehabilitate the family name, and in 1765 the conviction was overturned and the family awarded an indemnity of 36,000 livres (Mémoires 2:97; see Mémoires 1:56-57, 88-89, 204, 479; Duvernet 236-42; Voltaire, Œuvres 70:104-8). Saint-Claude was a Roman Catholic diocese that retained feudal seigneurial rights over the inhabitants and their property, but, beginning in 1750, vigorous legal challenges began to be made against the canons of Sainte-Claude, and Voltaire later became one of the supporters of the inhabitants in their unsuccessful dispute against

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church prerogatives, which he discussed in Requête au Roi pour les habitans du Mont-Jura, serfs de chanoines de Saint-Claude (1776-1777; see Mémoires 1:97, 316, 339). Duvernet gives the most extensive narrative of this case (270-75), and Condorcet also discusses it (Voltaire, Œuvres 70:135-37). 85.33-37. Of one such ‘taking to cover’ we have a curious and rather ridiculous account  .  .  .  for his amusement: This episode is narrated in Mémoires 2:133-54. Carlyle would give a version of this episode in Frederick the Great 5:16.2.213-18. 85.34. Duchess du Maine: Louise Bénédicte de Bourbon, Duchess du Maine (1676-1753), who had a wide range of interests, in politics and the arts, and led a popular salon. 85.36-37. compose Zadig, Babouc, Memnon: Zadig (1747), Le monde comme il va: Vision de Babouc écrit par lui-même (1748), and Memnon, ou la sagesse humaine (1747), all satires. Voltaire’s composition of them is recounted in Mémoires 2:140. 85.38. See in Longchamp (pp. 154-163): Carlyle here fails to note that this is volume two of Mémoires. 86.2-3. such sots as Thiriot: Nicholas Thiriot (d. 1772) was Frederick the Great’s “literary agent” in Paris, sending him news and gossip. Voltaire’s secretaries are more charitable toward Thiriot than Carlyle is. Wagnière writes that Thiriot was one of Voltaire’s oldest friends (Mémoires 1:341), and Longchamp characterizes him as “un homme aimant beaucoup ses plaisirs et le bon vin, assez léger de charactère et peu mystérieux” (a man much loving his pleasures and good wine, rather light of character and a little mysterious) (Mémoires 2:321). The editors of Mémoires, however, write that except for his fine literary taste, Thiriot had few endearing qualities and that “c’était une espèce de parasite qui passa presque toute sa vie chez les autres” (he was the kind of parasite who spent almost all his life at others’ houses) (2:408). His equivocal part in the Desfontaines fracas figures prominently in Mémoires 2:417-47, where he is accused of failing in his loyalty to Voltaire. 86.7-10. Against Montesquieu, perhaps  .  .  .  the author of the Esprit des Loix: De l’esprit des lois (1748) is Montesquieu’s (see note to 52.12) highly influential work on political theory. Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) was a Dutch statesman and the author of what was considered to be

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the definitive work of its time on international law theory. In the article on Montesquieu that he wrote for the Edinburgh Encyclopædia in 1820, Carlyle offers additional context for this allusion. He writes that while Voltaire was perusing Montesquieu’s book, he called to the Abbé Olivet, “Venez, L’Abbé, venez lire Arlequin Grotius” (Come, Abbé, come read Buffoon-Grotius). Carlyle also gives a note for the passage, and in it he cautions, “If Voltaire really used the epithet in question, it must not be considered as expressing the deliberate opinion which that extraordinary person had formed of the Esprit des Lois; to the author of which, notwithstanding their mutual dislike, he pays a just and elegant tribute, in the discourse read at his admission into the Academy” (Essays 5:84n1). The note also indicates that the anecdote “is recorded in M. Suard, who had it personally from Oliver.” Carlyle probably found this anecdote in the Dictionnaire universel (12:136), which gives as the source Suard’s Nouvelles politiques. 86.20. ‘war to the knife’: From Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (18121818) 1.86.9. The oed gives the phrase as a figurative expression for war to the final extremity, to the death with no quarter given or asked. Carlyle again used the phrase in a letter of 1831 (Letters 5:268) and in Latter-Day Pamphlets 275. 86.25-26. ‘great character’: A period commonplace. 86.29. Pococurante: A careless or indifferent person; one who shows little interest or concern; also the name of a character exhibiting such a disposition in Voltaire’s Candide (1759). 87.9. ‘discourse of reason’: Shakespeare uses the phrase in Hamlet (1.2.150) and in Troilus and Cressida (2.2.116), but the editors of Letters note that Samuel Taylor Coleridge is Carlyle’s contemporary with whom the phrase is most prominently associated (7:131n4). Carlyle later distinguished serious speech as “articulate discourse of reason” in a letter of 1834 (Letters 7:131). 87.12-14. the laughter of fools  .  .  .  the ‘crackling of thorns under the pot’: Ecclesiastes 7:6: “For as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool: this also is vanity.” Carlyle later cited this verse in On Heroes (93) and specifically with reference to Voltaire in History of Literature (113).

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87.16-17. Increase of Crime in the Metropolis: A perennial cliché of periodical journalism. 87.18-20. that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury . . . that ridicule is the test of truth: Carlyle probably has in mind the Earl of Chesterfield (Philip Dromer Stanhope) in Letters to His Son (1774): “It is commonly said, and more particularly by Lord Shaftesbury, that ridicule is the best test of truth; for that it will not stick where it is not just. I deny it” (February 6, 1752). He refers to Anthony Ashley Cooper (see note to 120.22-23). A statement to similar effect concerning truth and ridicule, but not in the same wording, is cited for Shaftesbury’s Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor (1709) (1.1). Carlyle had read Chesterfield’s Letters in 1815 (Letters 1:43, 77). 87.26-27. If the philosophers of Nootka Sound were pleased to laugh at the manœuvres of Cook’s seamen: While seeking a Northwest Passage, the British explorer James Cook (1728-1779) entered Nootka Sound in present-day British Columbia in 1778 in order to refit his ships and to take on fresh water. He and his crews were the first Europeans to set foot on shore there and to begin what would become a lucrative trade with the indigenous peoples, whom Carlyle here imagines as philosophers observing Cook’s activities. 88.3-4. Reverence, the highest feeling that man’s nature is capable of: The subject of reverence is often found in Carlyle’s works, but the ultimate source for his doctrine comes from the discussion of education in chapters 10-11 of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, which he translated as: “Out of those Three Reverences springs the highest reverence, reverence for oneself, and those again unfold themselves from this; so that man attains the highest elevation of which he is capable, that of being justified in reckoning himself the best that God and Nature have produced” (2:268; see 265-68; Wanderjahre 175). He had quoted much of his translation of these chapters in his recently published essay “Goethe” (Essays 1:234-42), which, like “Voltaire,” appeared in the Foreign Review. 88.15-16. ‘The Divine Idea, that which lies at the bottom of Appearance’: Carlyle quotes from his translation in “State of German Literature” of a passage from the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), where Carlyle discusses “The Divine Idea” (Essays 1:60; see 58-60). In Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrten, a series of lectures delivered in 1805, Fichte, the German idealist philosopher and disciple of Kant, wrote: “The whole

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material world, . . . and in particular the life of man in this world, are by no means . . . that which they seem to be to the uncultivated and natural sense of man; but there is something higher, which lies concealed behind all natural appearance. This concealed foundation of all appearance may, in its greatest universality, be aptly named the Divine Idea [die göttliche Idee]” (On the Nature of the Scholar 210; Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrte 41). Carlyle used the phrase and idea again in Sartor Resartus 3.1.154, 3.3.164, and On Heroes 69, 135. 88.20-21. ‘dark with excess of light’: An apparent allusion to Milton, Paradise Lost, as part of a description of God on his throne: “Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear” (3.380). Other variants—“unimaginable, formless, dark with excess of bright”—would appear in Sartor Resartus (1.10.51) and “dark with excess of bright” in Latter-Day Pamphlets (277). 88.22. between the Encyclopédie and the Sorbonne: L’Encyclopédie (17511776) is the central intellectual expression of the Age of Reason in France, a dictionary of universal knowledge to which the foremost intellects, including Voltaire, contributed; its chief editor and contributor, Denis Diderot, was the subject of Carlyle’s “Diderot” (reprinted below). To the encyclopedists, the Sorbonne (University of Paris) of the time was a bastion of ancien régime intellectual stagnation, obscurantism, and impacted authority. In a letter of March 5, 1829, written while he was working on “Voltaire” and making reference to it, Carlyle characterizes the Sorbonne as “the forsaken crow-nest of Theology” (Letters 5:9). 88.24-25. Patrimony of St. Peter . . . the Pope: Patrimonium Sancti Petri, the landed possessions and revenues belonging to the Church of St. Peter in Rome, i.e., to the papacy of the Roman Catholic Church. 88.33. no local habitation and no name: In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the poet’s pen is said to give “to aery nothing / A local habitation and a name” (5.1.16-17). Carlyle had used “local habitation and some name” in a letter from 1820 (Letters 1:292), used Shakespeare’s line in Life of Schiller (117), and had written of Goethe that “he felt a thousand times more keenly what every one was feeling;  .  .  .  he bodied it forth into visible shape, gave it a local habitation and a name; and so made himself the spokesman of his generation” (“Goethe,” Essays 1:217). 88.35. emportemens: fits of passion.

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88.37. He is nigh shooting poor Dorn: Collini is the source for the account of this incident, though in Collini’s text Dorn appears as an obnoxious bully and braggart, and Collini makes no mention of an actual discharge of firearms (91). In Frederick the Great, Carlyle would revisit in detail Voltaire’s sojourn with Frederick and, based on Varnhagen von Ense’s Voltaire in Frankfurt am Mayn, 1753 (1846), revise his interpretation and presentation of some events, particularly those that occurred in Frankfort (5:16.12.370n1; see 5:16.6-7, 9-12). 88.38-89.1. that melancholy business of the ‘Œuvre de Poéshie du Roi mon Maître’: “Work of Poetry by the King, my Master.” Contemporary writers attribute Voltaire’s arrest in Frankfort to the fact that he had in his possession a privately printed copy of Frederick’s poems, some of which were of a candid and satirical nature that Frederick feared would prove embarrassing to him should they be published openly. In Frederick the Great, Carlyle would present a revised version of this episode (5:16.12.366-81). There he gives the title of the volume as Œuvre de Poésies and attributes the earlier misspelling of the title to Voltaire, who thus wished to characterize the intellect of the Frankfort Resident Authority (5:16.12.371). Voltaire was to be detained until the volume was surrendered to Frederick’s agents in Frankfort. Most contemporary biographers and memorialists mention this incident, but the ultimate contemporary sources at the time of Carlyle’s essay are Collini 76-91 and Voltaire’s own Mémoires pour servir à la vie de M. De Voltaire, écrits par lui-même, printed in Condorcet (Voltaire, Œuvres 70:261-344). Carlyle’s 1784 edition of Voltaire’s Mémoires is at the Arched House, Ecclefechan (Tarr 261). 89.2-3. A bookseller . . . a slap on the face: See Collini 181-82. 89.4-5. second-table respectability: A “second-table” is the servants’ table at meals. Jane Carlyle had used the phrase “‘second table’ airs” in a letter of 1828 (Letters 4:418), and Carlyle uses “second table knavery” in a letter of 1831 (Letters 5:414). On respectability, see note to 72.10. 89.5-6. how Voltaire dashed away his combs, and maltreated his wig: Mémoires 2:135. 89.11-12. “Vous êtes donc de concert pour me faire mourir?”: Mémoires 2:176: “You are therefore in league to cause me to die?” 90.4-9. these two influences hung like fast-gathering electric clouds . . . to

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unite softly these hostile elements: Carlyle would employ a similar analogy in Sartor Resartus (3.10.209-10; see note). 90.12-13. Not by Gracchi, but by Catalines; not by Luthers, but by Aretines: The Gracchi were two brothers who were Roman statesmen and reformers. Cataline (108–62 b.c.) attempted to foment a popular insurrection in 63 b.c. in an attempt to become dictator of Rome. For Martin Luther see note to 40.8. Following Carlyle’s scheme of antithesis, Aretine is probably Griffolino d’Arezza Aretine, an alchemist from Dante’s Comedia (Canto 29) who is in hell for falsely taking money by promising to deliver miracles. 90.22-23. Voltaire called himself Philosopher, nay the Philosopher: Collini prints a letter in which Voltaire refers to himself as “the philosopher of Ferney” (243), and the epithet is common in contemporary writings about him. 90.25. Corn-Exchange: The market that set the price of grain in Britain. 90.30. Bacon: Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English statesman, jurist, philosopher, and essayist who affirmed the inductive scientific method. Carlyle may be alluding here to Bacon’s vision of a utopian future in The New Atlantis (1623). 90.31-35. ‘Is it much for me,’ said Kepler, . . . what I have seen!’: Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), German astronomer and court mathematician to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, formulated laws of planetary motion supporting the Copernican theory of the universe. The tumults of the Thirty Years’ War, along with other conflicts, caused hardships for Kepler, who died while traveling to collect a debt. The quotation from Kepler comes from the preface to the fifth chapter of his Harmonice Mundi (1619) (Baumgardt 17-18). 91.10. one of ‘Heaven’s Swiss’: Pope, Dunciad: “Heaven’s Swiss, who fight for any God or Man” (2.358). The Swiss Guards are mercenary soldiers formerly serving as bodyguards to French and other royalty and who are still employed at the Vatican. Carlyle also uses the term in French Revolution 2.1.3.22, 3.3.6.148. 91.20. Jean Jacques: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), along with Voltaire the most influential thinker and author of eighteenth-century

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France, one of the philosophes (see note to 99.17). His quarrel with Voltaire is discussed in Mémoires 1:66-67, 258-59, and 2:498-99, where the blame is placed firmly on Rousseau. Carlyle included him as a “Hero as Man of Letters” in On Heroes. 91.26. Cades and Tylers: Jack Cade led a rebellion against royal policies in England in 1450. Wat Tyler was one of the leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. 91.29-31. ‘To such questioners,’ it has been said, ‘Truth, who buys not, and sells not, goes on her way, and makes no answer’: Carlyle quotes loosely from his translation from Fichte in “State of German Literature”: “But Truth, which once for all is as she is, and cannot alter aught of her nature, goes on her way; and there remains for her, in regard to those who desire her not simply because she is true, nothing else but to leave them standing as if they had never addressed her” (Essays 1:60). See Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrte 21; On the Nature of the Scholar 132. 92.5. Dionysius’ Ear: The name given to a Sicilian natural cavern possessing extraordinary acoustic properties and said to have been used as a prison by Dionysius of Syracuse (432-367? b.c.) so that he might eavesdrop on the conversations of his prisoners. Carlyle again mentions Dionysius’s Ear in Sartor Resartus 3.6.178. 92.6-7. any little evil-disposed Abbé, any Fréron, or Piron: The abbé is presumably Abbé Desfontaines (see above 85.22-24 and note). Élie Catherine Fréron (1718-1776), “l’ennemi de Voltaire” (Mémoires 2:479), was a French critic and journalist who was tireless and vituperative in attacking the philosophes, especially Voltaire (who in turn ridiculed Fréron in various works); Carlyle gives additional details in “Diderot” (250). Alexis Piron (1689-1773) was a French epigrammatist and dramatist “qui se croyait fort supérieur à lui, et qui était jaloux de ses succès” (who thought himself to be far superior to him, and who was jealous of his success) (Mémoires 2:210). 92.9-10. Pauvre Piron  .  .  .  même Académicien: This is Piron’s burlesque self-epitaph, written after his rejection for membership in 1753: “Ci-gît Piron qui ne fut rien, / Pas même académicien” (Here lies Piron who was nothing / Not even a member of the Academy). Mémoires prints a verse epistle from Piron to Voltaire (2:521-25); the editors’ notes to it discuss the relationship between the two men and record that Piron took offense

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at Voltaire’s allusion to Piron’s “epitaph” in “La Vanité, faite spécialement contre Lefranc de Pompignan” (1760) (2:526-28n4). 92.17-18. his ‘voices,’ his ‘most sweet voices’: Public opinion, as in later works such “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter Again” (Essays 2:126) and in Carlyle’s journal for February 9, 1848 (Froude, Life in London 1:421). 92.20. Parterre: French for the theater stalls, that is, the audience. 92.21. Café de Procope: Longchamp explains its significance in the passage that follows. 92.22. Delphic Oracle: See note to 39.25. 92.27-93.29. ‘Judges could appreciate the merits of Sémiramis,  .  .  .  a Doctor of the Sorbonne’: Carlyle translates Mémoires 2:211-14. 92.27. Sémiramis: Voltaire’s 1748 tragedy about the legendary Assyrian queen. 92.29-30. two great tragedians, Mademoiselle Dumèsnil and M. le Kain: Marie-Françoisse Dumesnil (1713-1803) and Henri Louis Cain (17291778), who used the stage name “Lekain,” were stars of the Comédie Française. Longchamp gives an extensive discussion of Voltaire’s relationship with Lekain (Mémoires 2:272-90). 93.26. shade of Ninus: Ninus was the husband of Semiramis and the supposed founder of Nineveh (named after him) and of the Assyrian monarchy. In the drama, after Ninus has been murdered by Semiramis and her lover, Ninus’s ghost appears to prophesy retribution. 92.35-36. Haroun-Alraschid visit: The caliph who goes in disguise to amuse himself among his people in “The Story of Abou Hassan the Wag” in The Thousand and One Nights. 93.38. Promethean: In Greek mythology, Prometheus was the Titan who was the champion of humanity, sometimes said to have created man from clay, and credited with bringing various gifts of civilization and incurring the wrath of Zeus for doing so. The one gift that is always credited to Prometheus is that of fire, which he stole from heaven.

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94.1. ‘on the second night’: From the passage quoted above (93.6). 94.3. ‘instruct by pleasing’: For the traditional source given for this phrase, see note to 8.8. 94.9. whose ‘talk,’ or whose ‘babble’: Carlyle quotes his translation of Longchamp above (93.21-22). 94.15-19. a quaint naturalist and moralist has noted, ‘if you hold a stick . . . an otherwise impassable barrier!’: Carlyle repeats this quotation in “Boswell’s Life of Johnson” and there identifies the “quaint naturalist and moralist” as Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (below 163). We have not been able to locate the original. 94.21. ‘Catholic Disabilities’: Legal restrictions dating from the seventeenth century barring Roman Catholics in England from official participation in government and other institutions. They were repealed by the Catholic Emancipation Act, which was passed in April 1829, the same month that “Voltaire” was published. Carlyle had alluded to the “Catholic Question,” as the issue was known, in “German Playwrights,” written in late 1828 (Essays 1:357) and would allude to it again in “Signs of the Times,” completed shortly after passage of the bill (Essays 2:463). 94.27-28. Voltaire reproachfully says of St. Louis, that ‘he ought to have been above his age’: The quotation is untraced, but Voltaire expresses the sentiment in chapter 58 (“De saint Louis”) of his Essai sur l’histoire générale et sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à nos jours (1756). Saint Louis was Louis IX of France (1214-1270), the exemplar of a Christian monarch of his time and one who led his country to prosperity and peace. 94.35-36. no Duc de Richelieu, no Prince Conti, no Frederick the Great: Louis François Armand de Vignerot du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu (16961788), French general and statesman, was a good friend of Voltaire’s and an influential patron in high circles. Louis François de Bourbon, Prince de Conti (1717-1776) was a French general and royal cousin and one of the most conspicuously wealthy nobles in France. Longchamp writes that Voltaire received benefits from Prince de Conti (Mémoires 2:330), and Condorcet prints a poem that Conti addressed to Voltaire in 1718 (Voltaire, Œuvres 70:183-85). On Frederick the Great, see note to 83.36-37.

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94.37-95.1. the lath-sword of Harlequin will pierce, when the club of Hercules has rebounded from them in vain: Harlequin is a character originally from Italian comedy who carries a bat or wand made of thin wood, or lath. Hercules is the most popular of the ancient Greek heroes, renowned for his strength and represented as wearing a lion’s skin and carrying a club. 95.3. bienséance: propriety, decorum. 95.6. menus plaisirs: “Simple pleasures; small personal expenses or gratifications; frivolous or inessential objects bought with a personal allowance intended for this purpose” (oed). 95.11. Proteus: A classical sea deity whose ability to change form made him proverbial for changefulness. Mémoires de Bachaumont describes Voltaire as a “Protée littéraire” (literary Proteus) (cited in Voltaire, Mémoires 1:292; a similar passage appears at 1:300). Carlyle later repeated the comparison of Voltaire to Proteus in “Goethe’s Works” (Essays 2:405). 95.18-27. ‘The necessity of lying in order to disavow any work,’ . . . the means of committing an injustice’: Carlyle translates from Condorcet (Voltaire, Œuvres 70:32-33). 95.30-32. the old Catholic doctrine, if it ever was more than a Jesuitic one, ‘that faith need not be kept with heretics’: The Council of Constance (1414-1418) decreed that no law obliges that faith must be kept with heretics. A long tradition of British anti-Catholicism portrayed the Jesuits as particularly devious in applying this doctrine, in particular in the practice of making statements while retaining mental reservations about their truth. Carlyle would title one of his Latter-Day Pamphlets “Jesuitism.” 96.26-28. the scorn of Alfieri; for there is nothing better than the spirit of ‘a French plebeian’ apparent in it: Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803), Italian poet and dramatist. The quotation is a translation from Alfieri’s posthumously published autobiography, Vita di Vittorio Alfieri da Asti: scritta da esso (1804): “un francese nato plebeo” (4.16.236). 96.30. Trajan est-il content?: Carlyle refers to a frequently repeated anecdote of an incident that occurred following the first performance of Voltaire’s opera Temple de la gloire in 1745 at Versailles. The editors of Mémoires write that the opera allegorically celebrated Louis XV under the name of

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Trajan. When the king and his entourage retired after the conclusion of the performance, they passed by Voltaire’s gallery, and in a subdued voice Voltaire asked his friend the Duc de Richelieu, “Trajan est-il content? Le roi qui l’entendit, croyant peut-être que ces mots lui étaient adresses, se retourne, jette un regard sévère sur l’interrogateur, et passé sans proférer une parole: apparemment moins flatté du parallèle, dit Condorcet, que blessé de la familiarité d’un sujet” (“Trajan, is he pleased?” The king who heard it, perhaps believing that these words were addressed to him, turned around, cast a stern look at the questioner, and passed without offering a word: apparently “less flattered by the parallel,” says Condorcet, “than wounded by the familiarity of a subject.”) (Mémoires 2:355n47). Condorcet also narrates the incident (Voltaire, Œuvres 70:67-68). Carlyle later included the anecdote in Frederick the Great (5:16.2.211-12). 96.34. ‘âme paisible’: “peaceable soul”; Carlyle uses this English translation in “Diderot” (below 251.19). The expression is fairly common, but Carlyle may here refer to Voltaire’s Eloge Funebre Louis XV: “C’était le dangereux effet du principe le plus estimable, de cette défiance de lui-même, de cette condescendance aux volontés des personnes qui avaient moins de lumières et d’expérience que lui, enfin de cette même égalité d’une âme paisible, à laquelle ces grands bouleversements ne coûtaient point d’efforts” (It was the dangerous effect of the most admirable principle, of this distrust of himself, of this condescension to the wishes of persons who were less enlightened and experienced than himself, and of the same equality of a peaceable soul, to which these great upheavals did not cost any effort.) (Œuvres 61:136-37). Apart from the reference to Trajan that follows, Carlyle’s reference in “Diderot” to how, owing to Louis’s character, “Minister after Minister must consult his own several insight, his own whim, above all his own ease” echoes the sentence that begins the quoted paragraph: “On s’est étonné que dans sa vie toujours uniforme il ait si souvent changé de ministres; on en murmurait, on sentait que les affaires en pouvaient souffrir; que rarement le ministre qui succède suit les vues de celui qui est déplacé” (One was astonished that in his ever uniform life he so often changed ministers; they murmured, and felt that affairs might suffer; that the succeeding minister rarely follows the views of the one he has replaced). 96.35. Pompadour: Jeanne Antoinette Poisson Le Normant D’Étoiles, Marquise de Pompadour (1721-1764) was Louis XV’s mistress and confidant, and under her patronage Voltaire enjoyed a brief period of favor at court. She was instrumental in obtaining for him in 1745 the king’s

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appointment to the positions of Gentleman-in-Ordinary to the royal chamber and of Royal Historiographer. His own indiscretions and the intrigues of jealous courtiers brought this episode of Voltaire’s life to an end (Voltaire, Œuvres 70:58-60; Mémoires 2:291-94). 96.38-97.1. D’Alembert says, there are two things that can reach the top of a pyramid, the eagle and the reptile: The statement is untraced. Jean d’Alembert (1717-1783) was a French mathematician, philosophe, and Diderot’s chief assistant in editing L’Encyclopédie. Carlyle discusses d’Alembert in “Diderot,” below esp. 245. 97.5. Persifleur: One who habitually engages in persiflage—light banter, frivolous talk. 97.26. Ship-of-Fools: Sebastian Brant’s Das Narrenschiff (1494) presents a satire of human foolishness and sinfulness on the seas leading to eternity. Carlyle had listed “the Ship of Fools” in company with such works as the Nibelungen Lied and Faust in “State of German Literature” (Essays 1:2829), and in a letter from 1830, he mentions “the old German Narrenschiff ” (Letters 5:88). He later mentions the work in “Early German Literature,” Essays 2:294, and “Historic Survey of German Poetry,” Essays 2:344. 97.27-28. like Bolingbroke, ‘patronise Providence’: Untraced. Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751) was a British statesman, man of letters, and deist, who rejected the idea of providence in the form of a God actively shaping human history. Carlyle had previously cited “Bolingbroke’s plan . . . of ‘patronising Providence’” in “State of German Literature” (Essays 1:69). 97.28-29. Si Dieu n’existait pas il faudrait l’inventer: If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Quoted in Mémoires 1:13, from Voltaire’s “Épître á l’auteur du livre des trois imposteurs” (1771). 97.32. Werterism: To be like Werter, the hero of Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774), who committed suicide because of unrequited love; in this context to be Werterian is to be passionate and emotional. Note that while the name in the German original is Werther, English translations usually spelled it Werter. 97.35. Apocalypse of Nature: As his use of the term here and in later works indicates, Carlyle has in mind revelation, not the end of the

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world. Thus in Sartor Resartus he equates the “Apocalypse of Nature” with “Heaven Unveiled” (3.10.202; see also 2.5.109), and in On Heroes he writes, “Literature, so far as it is Literature, is an ‘apocalypse of Nature,’ a revealing of the ‘open secret’” (141). 97.38. chaunt any Miserere: A musical setting of the Vulgate Bible version of Psalms 51:1, “Have mercy upon me, O God.” Carlyle had alluded to it in Wotton Reinfred (2) and would do so again in “Corn-Law Rhymes” (below 205). 98.3-4. Affliction, it is true, has not for him any precious jewel in its head: In folklore, the toad was thought to have in its head a jewel or stone, called a “toadstone,” which possesses special medicinal and protective powers. Carlyle’s alludes specifically (continuing with the mention of the toad in 96.9) to Shakespeare’s As You Like It: “Sweet are the uses of adversity, / Which like the toad, ugly and venomous, / Wears yet a precious jewel in his head” (2.1.12-14). Carlyle had used the quotation in a letter of 1823 (Letters 2:340). 98.11-12. the ridiculum were really better than the acre: Major W. Broome, an English visitor to Voltaire in 1765, recorded that “he said that Swift had a great deal of the ridiculum acre” (De Beer and Rousseau 94). Ridiculum is Latin for something laughable, a jest, joke, jester; acre is Latin for “sharp,” “stinging,” “pungent,” “piercing,” “keen,” etc. 98.15. that last ill-omened visit of his to Frederick the Great: From 1750 to 1753, culminating in his arrest at Frankfort. See note to 88.38-89.1. 98.28. French at Rossbach: Frederick the Great defeated the French at the Battle of Rossbach (1757). 98.29. Sans-Souci: Sans Souci (“without care”) was the palace built by Frederick the Great where he lived for forty years. 98.29. Maupertuis: Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759) was a former friend of Voltaire who had left France to take a position as president of Frederick’s academy in Berlin. Mémoires narrates details of the quarrel between Voltaire and Maupertuis (2:311-18), but the acknowledged contemporary authority for details of Voltaire’s German experiences is Collini (33-46, 62-64). Voltaire’s partisans claim that the basic issues were professional jealously and wounded ego on the part of Maupertuis.

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98.34. laurel-water pharmacy: Laurel water (aqua laurocerasi) is a sedative prepared from the leaves of the cherry laurel. 98.37. Dr. Akakia: Voltaire’s name for Maupertuis (see note to 98.29) in Voltaire’s satire Diatribe du docteur Akakia, médecin du pape (1752). 99.1. The arrest at Frankfort: Collini 76-91. See note to 88.38-89.1. 99.5. old Frederick William, the father: Friedrich Wilhelm (1688-1740), father of Frederick the Great. 99.7-15. ‘He had a minister at the Hague, . . . lived twelve years’: Carlyle translates from Voltaire’s Mémoires (Voltaire, Œuvres 70:265-66). 99.17. Roi-Philosophe: “Philosopher king,” Voltaire’s characterization of Frederick the Great in his Mémoires (Voltaire, Œuvres 70:288). In a letter from November 1750, he refers to Frederick as “un philosophe sur le trône” (a philosopher on the throne) (Mémoires 2:518). “Philosophe” refers here specifically to intellectuals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment who insisted on the primacy of reason in consideration of all questions. 99.18. ‘buckwasher’: The oed defines “buckwashing” as “the process of washing coarse and very dirty linen, by boiling it in clear water.” An often-cited anecdote is that when General Manstein pressed Voltaire to help him in revising his memoirs, Voltaire responded, “Le roi vient de m’envoyer son linge sale à blanchir; je blanchirai le vôtre après” (The king just sent me his dirty linen to clean; I’ll clean yours afterward) (Collini 43-44). Repeated in Frederick the Great (5:16.9.329). 99.23. Widow Denis: Voltaire’s niece Marie Louise Mignot (1712-1790) became his companion following the death of Madame du Châtelet in 1749. 99.27-28. losing money at play, and purloining wherewith to make it good: Mémoires gives a couple of instances of her complicity in the theft of Voltaire manuscripts for sale and mentions her extravagant lifestyle, but we have found no mention of gaming there or in Duvernet, Condorcet, Collini, or Lepan. The Mémoires do describe Madame du Châtelet losing money at the gaming tables (2:137-38). 99.29-30. uncle must turn off his beloved Collini, nay almost be run

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through the body by him: Wagnière gives an account of the incident (Mémoires 1:10n), but Collini does not mention it in his own memoir. 99.33-35. He openly accuses her of hastening her uncle’s death by her importunate stratagems to keep him in Paris: That Voltaire’s final trip to Paris, importuned and extended by Madame Denis, shortened his life is a view expressed by several commentators. Wagnière provides the most extensive narrative of this episode in Mémoires 1:137-61, which includes the following: “C’est le jour où M. de Voltaire fit sortir sa niece de sa chambre, en l’accusant d’être la cause de sa mort” (It was the day when M. Voltaire sent his niece from his room, while accusing her of being the cause of his death) (Mémoires 1:160). See also his insistence that Voltaire did not want to go to Paris (Mémoires 1:396). For similar observations, see also 1:137-38, 147-49, 149n1, 305, 2:223n20, and 361n48. 99.37-38. ‘how she was to get him buried’: Wagnière writes, “Madame Denis m’avoua au moment de mon retour à Paris, que son grand souci, depuis huit jours, avait été de savoir comment elle pourrait faire enterrer son oncle” (The moment that I returned to Paris, Madame Denis admitted that her great care, for eight days, had been to know how she would be able to have her uncle buried) (Mémoires 1:492). 100.6. Marquise du Châtelet: Gabrielle Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet (1706-1749), French mathematician, scientist, writer, and Voltaire’s mistress from 1733. 100.12. Lisbon earthquakes: On November 1, 1755, a strong earthquake struck Lisbon, Portugal, and was followed by a tsunami, resulting in the deaths of more than sixty thousand people. As in Carlyle’s text, the event became a period figure for any similarly violent upheaval, physical or emotional. Voltaire composed a poem on the disaster (Mémoires 2:533, 533n1), and it was a chief inspiration for Candide, ou l’Optimisme (1759). 100.12-13. Marmontel, we remember, speaks of knives . . . other purposes than carving: Jean-François Marmontel (1723-1799), French dramatist and man of letters and one of Voltaire’s protégés. In his posthumously published Mémoires d’un père (1804), he writes: “Moi, à qui il avoit dit souvent qu’elle étoit comme une furie attachée à ses pas, et qui savoit qu’ils avoient été plus d’une fois dans leurs querelles aux couteaux tirés l’un contre l’autre, je le laissai pleurer et je parus m’affliger avec lui” (I, to whom he had often said she was like a fury at his heel, and who knew

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that they had, more than once in their quarrels drawn daggers against one other, I let him cry and I appeared to grieve with him) (Œuvres 1:361). 100.14. Socrates’ spouse: Xanthippe, traditionally described as the personification of the scolding, ill-tempered wife. 100.16-17. Queen Elizabeth, if she had the talents of a man, she had more than the caprices of a woman: Queen Elizabeth I of England (see note to 50.6) considered many candidates but never married and ruled effectively on her own from 1558 to 1603. 100.20. to Cirey, to Lunéville: Cirey was Madame du Châtelet’s country home where Voltaire resided from 1734 to 1743. For Lunéville, see note to 102.28-29. 100.21-22. il faut se ranger: “One must acquiesce.” The phrase appears in five letters written by the Carlyles between November 29, 1827, and August 25, 1838 (Letters 4:292, 6:81, 208, 328, 10:148). 100.24-26. when Madame has been known . . . the games went against her: Mémoires 2:226-27. 100.30-31. ‘under a mountain of bandboxes’: This would appear to be Carlyle’s characterization of “Madame avait fait préparer tout l’attirail qui la suivait dans ses voyages. Sa vieille voiture était chargée comme un coche” (Madame had all the gear that followed her in her trips made ready. Her old wagon was loaded like a coach) (Mémoires 2:163). 100.32. ‘et divers effets de sa maîtresse’: “And various personal effects of his mistress” (Mémoires 2:163). 100.34. ‘time and hours’: Macbeth: “Come what may, / Time and the hour runs through the roughest day” (1.3.146-47). Carlyle had used Shakespeare’s second line (with slight variation) in three letters from 1823-1824 (Letters 2:301, 3:12, 83-84). In appendix 1 of his Life of Schiller, Carlyle had written, “Time and hours wear out the roughest day” (299), and in “German Playwrights,” which appeared in the previous issue of the Foreign Review to “Voltaire,” Carlyle writes, “But time and hours bring relief, as they always do” (Essays 1:364-65). A version also appears in the contemporaneous “Signs of the Times” (Essays 2:59).

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100.35. Tyburn-coach: Tyburn was a place of public execution in London until 1783; thus, by association, a Tyburn-coach journey suggests one to be dreaded. The oed gives Carlyle’s usage as a figurative illustration under “Tyburn.” 101.4-17. ‘The carriage was in the stage  .  .  .  set them finally on the ground’: Mémoires 2:166-67. For this entire episode see 2:163-70. 101.19. Dr. Kitchiner, with his Traveller’s Oracle: William Kitchiner (1775?–1827) and John Jervis (1802-1856) published a guide for travelers, The Traveller’s Oracle, or, Maxims for Locomotion Containing Precepts for Promoting the Pleasures and Hints for Preserving the Health of Travellers (1827). 101.25-28. several times, that this unhappy axle-tree . . . will not trust them: Mémoires 2:138-39. 101.30-31. certain discoveries and explanations: Voltaire’s discovery of Madame du Châtelet’s affair with Jean-François, Marquis de Saint-Lambert (1716-1803), a courtier at Lunéville (Mémoires 2:200-205, 229-35). Saint-Lambert also appears in “Diderot” (below 247). 102.3. contretems de famille: “Family crisis”; Mémoires has “affaire de famille” (2:231). Carlyle refers to the plot in which Voltaire participated to trick her husband into thinking that he, not Saint-Lambert, was the father of the child whom Madame du Châtelet was carrying. 102.11. ‘progress of society’: A commonplace catchphrase throughout the period, often given a skeptical twist in Carlyle’s writings. 102.15-16. ‘the battle and the breeze,’ on that wild Bay of Biscay: The quotation is from line 4 of Thomas Campbell’s poem “Ye Mariners of England” (1801). The Bay of Biscay is an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean on the coasts of France and Spain notorious to mariners for its navigational hazards and violent storms. 102.17-18. D’Israeli has omitted to enumerate it in his Calamities of Authors: Isaac Disraeli (1766-1848), Calamities of Authors: Including Some Inquiries Respecting Their Moral and Literary Characters (1812). Calamities of Authors is also mentioned in “Diderot” (below 242). 102.19. Pope also had his Mrs. Martha Blount: Martha Blount (1690-

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1763) was Alexander Pope’s (1688-1744) closest woman friend for about thirty years and the principal legatee in his will. 102.20. daily tale of Egyptian bricks to bake: Exodus 5:18: “Go therefore now, and work; for there shall no straw be given you, yet shall ye deliver the tale of bricks.” 102.22. Every one knows the earthly termination of Madame la Marquise: For this episode see Mémoires 2:245-51. Carlyle also included it in Frederick the Great 5:16.3.236-37. 102.23. Nemesis: From Greek myth, the daughter of Night and goddess of righteous retribution. 102.26. ‘les assiduités de M. de Saint-Lambert’: Mémoires 2:229: “c’est que malheureusement les assiduités de M. de Saint-Lambert auprès d’elle l’avaient mise dans le cas d’être mère à l’âge de quarante-quatre ans” (it was that unhappily the assiduities of M. de Saint-Lambert toward her had put her in the circumstance to be a mother at the age of forty-four years). 102.28-29. at Lunéville, in the peaceable court of King Stanislaus: Stanislaus I (1677-1766), King of Poland and—having abdicated his powers while retaining his royal title—Duke of Lorraine and Bar in France (1735-1766); Lunéville was where he maintained his court in France. 102.31-103.14. ‘Seeing that the aromatic-vinegar did no good,  .  .  .  the excess of their sorrow’: Mémoires 2:250-51. 103.10. “Ah, my friend, it is you that have killed her!”: Mémoires has “Ah! mon ami, c’est vous qui me l’avez tuée!” (2:251). In Frederick the Great, Carlyle more accurately translates the line as “Ah, mon ami, it is you that have killed her to me!” (5:16.3.237). 103.11-12. “Eh! mon Dieu! Monsieur, de quoi vous avisiez-vous de lui faire un enfant?”: Mémoires 2:251: “Oh! my God! Sir, what were you thinking about to make a baby with her?” In Frederick the Great, Carlyle translates the line as “‘Good God, Sir, what put it into your head to—to—!’” (5:16.3.237). 103.22-25. L’univers a perdu la sublime Emilie.  .  .  .  que l’immortalité: From Mémoires 2:251: “The universe has lost the sublime Emilie. / She

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loved pleasures, the arts, the truth: / The gods, in giving her their spirit and their genius, / Retained for themselves only immortality!” 103.28. ‘his happiness had been chiefly on paper’: Untraced. 103.33. a broken reed, which only ran into his hand: Isaiah 36.6: “Lo, thou trustest in the staff of this broken reed, on Egypt; whereon if a man lean, it will go into his hand, and pierce it: so is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all that trust in him.” 103.35-36. that Dutchwoman who published his juvenile letters: Voltaire met Olympe Dunoyer in 1713 when his father sent him to The Hague, and she is said to have been the first serious love in his life. Wagnière narrates the incident and notes that Olympe Dunoyer’s mother published some of Voltaire’s letters to her daughter (Mémoires 1:21 and n. 2). 103.36. Niece Denis: See note to 99.23. 104.4-5. Chamouni-Needles and Staubbach-Falls: Chamonix is a village in the French Alps, and the Needles (Aiguilles) is a name for the mountains that bound it to the north; the Staubbach Falls are the highest waterfalls in Switzerland and among the highest in the world. 104.18-19. weighed its significance, and found it wanting: Daniel 5:27: “Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.” 104.34. the Calases, the Sirvens: For Calas, see note to 85.22-24. The plight of the Sirven family was another celebrated case from the same time in Toulouse. The youngest daughter of a Protestant family was removed by church authority from the family and taken to a convent, from which she escaped and returned home. The daughter was mentally unstable, and when her drowned body was discovered soon after in a well, the family was accused of having murdered her to prevent her conversion to Roman Catholicism. Voltaire undertook the defense of the family, but total exoneration did not come until nine years later, in 1771. The case is summarized in Duvernet (280-82), Condorcet (Voltaire, Œuvres 70:1089), and Mémoires (1:310). For Voltaire’s own discussion of the Calas and Sirven cases, see Voltaire in His Letters 185-98. 104.38. J’ai fait un peu de bien; c’est mon meilleur ouvrage: “I have done a little good, that is my best work” (Voltaire, Œuvres 70:180).

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105.15-16. as he himself said, ‘smothered under roses’: “On veut m’étouffer sous des roses” (Mémoires 1:142). Carlyle includes mention of this and other incidents from Voltaire’s life in On Heroes 13-14. 105.22-23. he might have said with Alexander: “O Athenians, what toil do I undergo to please you”: From Plutarch’s Lives, spoken by Alexander the Great when crossing the swollen Hydaspes River in India during a thunderstorm (“Alexander” 60.3). Carlyle repeated the quotation in a letter of 1838 (Letters 10:211). 105.33-34. the power of all Xerxes’ hosts: Xerxes the Great (d. 465 b.c.) was the king of Persia who invaded Greece, defeated the Spartans at Thermopylae, and pillaged Athens before his fleet was destroyed at Salamis and he was forced to withdraw. 105.34-35. these ‘may destroy the case of Anaxarchus, himself they cannot reach’: Anaxarchus (fl. 340 b.c.) was a Greek philosopher and advisor to Alexander the Great, who, when being tortured to death by Nicocreon, king of Cyprus, spoke the words that Carlyle quotes. Diogenes Laetius and Cicero both give accounts of Anaxarchus’s execution and dying words, and Montaigne includes them in Essais 2.2 (“Of Drunkenness”). Carlyle also gives a version of Anaxarchus’s words in “Cruthers and Jonson” (Essays 5:170). 106.6-11. ‘he was recognised,’ says Wagnière, ‘while the horses were changing,  .  .  .  tu mènes M. de Voltaire’: Mémoires 1:120. “Go at a good pace, push my horses, I don’t care; you are driving M. de Voltaire!” Carlyle also cites this incident in On Heroes 14. 106.11-13. At Dijon, there were persons  .  .  .  this stratagem: Mémoires 1:121. 106.15-22. ‘At the barrier of Paris,’. . . whither he pleased’: Mémoires 1:121-22. 106.19. C’est pardieu! M. de Voltaire: “By God, it is M. de Voltaire!” 106.24-25. Kien-Long, or the Grand Lama of Thibet: Kien-Long, or Qianlong (1711-1799), emperor of China. He established the Grand Lama (Dalai Lama) as the ruler of Tibet. Mentioned also in French Revolution 2:5.5.229.

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106.28. ‘dans un petit logement à part’: Mémoires 2:344: “in a small lodging apart.” 106.33-107.8. ‘Several persons of my acquaintance  .  .  .  the arrival of M. de Voltaire in Paris’: The correct page citation for this passage is Mémoires 2:252-53. 107.11. interview of ten minutes: Mémoires 2:360. 107.16-17. He himself, says Wagnière, expressed dissatisfaction at much of this: See below 108. 107.18-19. Condorcet mentions . . . “C’est le sauveur des Calas”: Voltaire, Œuvres 70:: “It’s the savior of Calas.” Wagnière reports hearing similar questions and responses in the Parisian crowd of 1778 (Mémoires 1:479). 107.21-24. “Here, gentlemen,” said he, “is a trick I learned at Ferney, . . . the master of us all!”: Mémoires 1:468. 107.29-31. Longchamp says, he appeared ‘extremely worn,  .  .  .  a very firm voice’: Mémoires 2:360: “extrêmement cassé, quoiqu’il parût d’ailleurs jouir encore de la plénitude de ses sens, et eût la voix très-forte.” 107.34-108.4. ‘M. de Voltaire appeared in full dress  .  .  .  with ordinary men’: Mémoires 1:466 is the correct citation for this passage. 108.6-7. grande perruque à la Louis XIV: “great wig in the style of Louis XIV.” 108.9-10. borrowing from this same sceptical hand, which, however, is vouched for by Wagnière: The passage that Carlyle translates from Mémoires is itself quoted from the Mémoires de Bachaumont, on which Wagnière offers commentary (Mémoires 1:468-72). 108.11. La Harpe’s more heroical narrative: Mémoires 1:473 cites an account “écrite d’un ton plus noble et plus convenable par La Harpe, dans le Journal de Littérature, qu’il rédigeait alors” (written in a nobler and more becoming tone by La Harpe in the Journal de Littérature, which he edited then). Jean-François de La Harpe (1739-1803) was a French dramatist and something of a Voltaire protégé; the editors of Mémoires list other works that La Harpe wrote in praise of Voltaire in 2:374n53.

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108.14-110.23. ‘On Monday, M. de Voltaire,  .  .  .  he would not have gone’: Carlyle translates from Mémoires 1:468-72. 109.5. M. le Duc de Chartres: Louis Philippe Joseph (1747-1793), Duc de Chartres, then Duc d’Orleans (from 1785), was a libertine royal cousin who supported the French Revolution, renouncing his titles and, as Carlyle’s footnote indicates, taking the name Citizen Philippe Égalité (“Equality”) in 1792. In this role, he features prominently in Carlyle’s French Revolution. 109.15. Prince de Beauvau: Charles Just de Beauvau-Craon, Prince de Craon (1720-1793), French statesman, soldier, and member of the French Academy. 109.15-16. our Sophocles: Sophocles (498-406 b.c.), author of tragedies. 109.27. Marquis de Saint-Marc: The Marquis de Saint-Marc (1723-1818) was a poet and composer of operas. 109.30-110.4. Aux yeux de Paris enchanté  .  .  .  qui la donne!: Mémoires 1:470-71: In the sight of enchanted Paris, Receive on this day an homage, That stern posterity Will confirm from age to age! No, you have no need to reach the dark shore In order to possess the honors of immortality; Voltaire, receive the crown That is to be presented to you; It is noble to merit it, When it is France who gives it! 110.12. M. le Comte d’Artois: Charles Philippe, Comte d’Artois (17571836), later Charles X of France. 110.29-111.2. ‘He expired,’ says Wagnière, . . . last words uttered by M. de Voltaire’: Mémoires 1:161. 110.36-37. As Dryden said of Swift, so may we say: Our cousin SaintMarc has no turn for poetry: “Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet” is

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attributed to Dryden in Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1779-1781). In a journal entry written in early 1827, Carlyle characterizes his own poem “The Hildebrands” with the same quotation (Two Note Books 103; see also Poems 30, 152-53). 111.8-9. The conduct of the Parisian clergy on that occasion, seems totally unworthy of their cloth: In response to Voltaire’s claim to have contributed to effect a change toward a more gentle and humane clergy, Wagnière writes, “La conduite indigne du clergé de Paris envers M. de Voltaire à sa mort, est une triste preuve du contraire” (The unworthy conduct of the clergy of Paris toward M. de Voltaire at his death is a sad proof of the contrary) (Mémoires 1:48). In addition to the deathbed badgering that Carlyle translates from Wagnière in this note (Mémoires 1:160-61), contemporary writers note that the archbishop of Paris attempted to deny burial to Voltaire’s body and forbade the French Academy from holding its memorial service that was customary for any deceased member (Voltaire, Œuvres 70:, Mémoires 1:161-66, 2:361-66). 111.19. Cartouches and Thurtells: Executed in 1721, Louis Dominique Cartouche (1693-1721) was a French highwayman and leader of a gang of robbers in Paris. Carlyle gives an anecdote concerning him in “Goethe’s Works,” Essays 2:396. For the murderer John Thurtell, see below 278.10 and note. 112.11-12. Pasquinade: A lampoon affixed to some public place, or a piece of satire generally. 112.30-31. Thus Truth, which, to the philosopher, has from of old been said to live in a well: The saying “Truth lies at the bottom of the well” has been attributed variously to the stoic philosopher Cleanthes (331?–232? b.c.) and to Democritus the Derider (460-370 b.c.?), among others. 113.1. ‘a smart freethinker, all things in an hour’: Alexander Pope, Moral Essays (1731-1735), Epistle I, To Sir Richard Temple, Lord Cobham, “Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men” (157). 113.3. Concionator: “Haranguer of people”; “one who makes speeches.” In a journal entry from about September 28, 1830, Carlyle characterizes Francis Jeffrey as “a true Newspaper Critic, on the great scale; no Priest, but a Concionator!” (Two Note Books 175).

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113.8. Diderot: Denis Diderot (1713-1784), French philosopher and man of letters who was chief editor of L’Encyclopédie and the subject of Carlyle’s “Diderot,” below. 113.10. Fontenelle: Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657-1757) was a highly respected popularizer of contemporary scientific thought. 113.12. Rousseau: See note to 74.7. 113.19. Dutch commentator: “Dutch” apparently in the sense of a “Dutch uncle,” a stern, heavy-handed critic. 113.19-20. From Newton’s Principia to the Shaster and Vedam: Isaac Newton (1642-1727), Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), which laid the foundations of classical mechanics. Voltaire was one of the first to attempt to make Newton’s discoveries known to a popular readership, and it was Voltaire who preserved the story of Newton and the apple in Lettres Ecrites de Londres sur les Anglois (1734), letter 15 “Sur L’Attraction” (121-22). The Shaster and the Vedam (plural Vedas) are ancient Hindu sacred books, containing rules and defining precepts. 113.24-25. a discovery, it is true, rather of the Curtis than of the Columbus sort: Curtis is unidentified, but presumably someone whose discoveries are minor in comparison to the discovery of the Americas. 113.30. Siècle de Louis Quatorze: Voltaire’s history Le siècle de Louis XIV (1751). 113.33. eastern Zends and Jewish Talmuds: The Zend is the commentary on the Avesta, the most ancient scriptural writings of Zoroastrianism, with its beginnings in ancient Persia. The Talmud is a compilation of Jewish oral law and commentary on the laws. 114.30-34. ‘king of this lower world’ . . . ‘god of this lower world’: The “god of this lower world” in this context probably comes from Carlyle’s translation of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1:100) or his Life of Schiller (114), but it is not unique to him. 115.4. Hooker: Richard Hooker (1554?–1600) was an English theologian much praised as a prose stylist and a favorite of Carlyle’s.

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115.10-13. Compare, for example, the plan of the Henriade to that of our so barbarous Hamlet. The plan of the former is a geometrical diagram by Fermat; that of the latter a cartoon by Raphael: Carlyle suggests that Voltaire’s Henriade (see note to 84.14) is constructed according to the mathematical principles of Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665), while Shakespeare’s Hamlet follows the principles of a preparatory drawing (cartoon) of the great Italian painter Raphael (1483-1520). 115.14. Tuileries . . . Valhalla: The Tuileries was the royal palace begun in 1564 in Paris. In Germanic myth, Valhalla was the “hall of heroes” in Odin’s palace where the Valkyries brought the souls of heroes who had fallen in battle. 115.26. beadrolls of exterior occurrences: A beadroll was originally a list of persons to be prayed for, from the rosary or string of beads for counting prayers; by transference the word came to denote any list, catalog, or series. In Sartor Resartus Carlyle would ask, “Wilt thou know a Man, above all, a Mankind, by stringing together beadrolls of what thou namest Facts?” (2.10.150). 115.32. Charles the Twelfth: Voltaire’s first foray into full-length history, Histoire de Charles XII (1731) on the Swedish king Charles XII (16821718). In a letter of May 21, 1830, Carlyle writes that Voltaire’s volume “has always seemed to me one of the most delightful Books” (Letters 5:102). 115.35. Sallust: Gaius Sallustius Crispus (86-35 b.c.), Roman historian. 116.5. His Zadigs and Baboucs and Candides: Candide: ou l’optimisme (1759) along with Zadig and Babouc (see above 85.36-37) satirize human nature and philosophic optimism. 116.28. the Pucelle: Voltaire’s ribald mock epic of the Joan of Arc story, La pucelle d’Orleans (1755, 1762). 116.33-34. a Quixote or a Shandy; even of a Hudibras or Battle of the Books: All are satires on foibles of human nature, and enduring favorites of Carlyle’s. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615); Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767); Samuel Butler, Hudibras (1663); Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books (1704).

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116.34-37. Indeed, it has been more than once observed that Humour . . . vanished from among them: In “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter,” Carlyle had written of humor, “In France, since the days of Montaigne, it seems to be nearly extinct. Voltaire, much as he dealt in ridicule, never rises to humour” (Essays 1:17). 116.35. Montaigne’s: Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), author of Essais (1580). 117.10. ‘difficulties overcome’: Condorcet describes Voltaire contesting the opinion of Antoine Houdan de la Motte (1672-1731), who claimed to find no other merit in verse than that of “la difficulté vaincue” (Voltaire, Œuvres 70:14). In “State of German Literature,” Carlyle had noted the love of “seeing difficulties overcome” as one of the sources of poetic beauty that German theorists rejected (Essays 1:55). 117.27-32. That censure of Shakspeare, . . . the smallest acquaintance with the rules’: Voltaire first published this, and the passage below (117.35-36), in Lettres Ecrites de Londres sur les Anglois (1734), letter 18, “Sur la tragédie” (158), but as he indicates in the footnote to the passage at 118.1-21, Carlyle is quoting from Mélanges Littéraires in Voltaire’s Œuvres 47:272. Although his comments provoked some angry responses from England, Voltaire is credited with bringing Shakespeare to serious critical attention in France. Voltaire’s views are in line with the principles of French classicism, which set out strict rules for drama. 117.33. bon goût: “good taste.” 117.35-36. ‘farces monstrueuses qu’on appelle tragédies,’ where, however, there are ‘scenes so beautiful, passages so grand and so terrible: Carlyle again quotes Voltaire, Œuvres 47:272 (see note to 117.27-32). The first phrase translates as “monstrous farces that one calls tragedies.” Voltaire does not apply this description to Hamlet but to Shakespearean tragedy generally. 118.1-21. ‘The first, how so many wonders . . . some beauties of detail’: First published in Voltaire’s Appel à toutes les nations de l’Europe (1761), a pamphlet defending Corneille and Racine as Shakespeare’s superiors in dramatic art. Carlyle here cites the same volume as quoted just above, Œuvres 47:303-4; note that his footnote incorrectly gives page 300.

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118.27-36. ‘To convince yourself of the wretched taste  .  .  .  (de ces dégoûtantes platitudes)’: As the footnote indicates, Carlyle cites Varnhagen Von Ense’s Goethe in den Zeugnissen der Mitlebenden (124), which in turn gives the citation of Frederick’s De la Littérature Allemande. 118.33. Goetz de Berlichingen: Goethe’s 1773 drama Götz von Berlichingen mid der eisernen Hand. 119.5-6. Lapland witchcraft, or Cagliostro jugglery: Lapland was long infamous as a haunt of witchcraft, as expressed in Milton’s Paradise Lost, where the “night-hag  .  .  .  comes / Lured with the smell of infant blood, to dance / With Lapland witches” (2.662-65). Giuseppe Balsamo (1743-1795), calling himself Count Cagliostro, became a byword for an opportunistic adventurer, through his frauds and deceptions practiced on fashionable society. Carlyle often mentions him in such a context and would give him extended treatment in “Count Cagliostro.” 119.7-8. ‘dégoûtantes platitudes’: From 118.36 above. 119.10-11. ‘a manifestation of man’s Reason in forms suitable to his Sense’: Carlyle quotes himself from “Goethe”: “We speak of that Poetry which Masters write, which aims not at ‘furnishing a languid mind with fantastic shows and indolent emotions,’ but at incorporating the everlasting Reason of man in forms visible to his Sense, and suitable to it” (Essays 1:255). 119.12. egg-dance: “A dance blindfolded among eggs; fig. an intricate and difficult task” (oed). In Carlyle’s translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Mignon is an accomplished egg dancer and performs the dance for Wilhelm (1:146-47; Werke 18:182-84). 119.18-19. falling into the sere and yellow leaf: From Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “My way of life / Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf ” (5.3.23-24). Carlyle had used the phrase in a letter of 1820 (Letters 1:232) and Wotton Reinfred, where he cites the character Macbeth specifically (184). See also “Boswell’s Life of Johnson,” below 154; “Goethe’s Works,” Essays 2:425. 119.27. scrambling controversies of Romanticists and Classicists: This was the contemporary version of the immemorial ideological and, particularly, aesthetic conflicts between the ancients and moderns. Carlyle had also

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mentioned this “grand controversy, so hotly urged” in “State of German Literature” (Essays 1:53). 119.38. Racine  .  .  .  Corneille: For Racine, see note to 52.10-11. Pierre Corneille (1606-1684) is regarded as the inventor of French classical tragedy. 120.3. Zaire and Mahomet: Two of Voltaire’s tragedies, Zaïre (1732) and Mahomet, ou, le fanatisme (1741). 120.5-6. a vehement opponent of the Christian Faith: See note to 81.9. 120.22. Porphyry: Porphyry (234-305?) was a Neoplatonist philosopher and author of Against the Christians. 120.22-23. Shaftesbury . . . Hobbeses, Tindals, Tolands: All were British thinkers who to varying degrees questioned or rejected the supernatural aspects of religion and belief in specific theological creeds and traditions, but they were not uniform in their views (Shaftesbury, for example, was philosophically opposed to Hobbes). Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), was an English politician, philosopher, and writer who derived morality from reason rather than divine revelation; Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), author of Leviathan (1651), was considered by many an atheist, though he denied the accusation. Matthew Tindal (1657-1733) was a prominent deist author, and John Toland (1670-1722) was a rationalist philosopher and freethinker. 120.24. Bayle: Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), whose Dictionnaire historique et critique (1695-1697) was a seminal text of Enlightenment skepticism. 120.33-34. that he entered the Temple and continued there: Carlyle suggests that whereas Jesus cast the money changers out of the Temple in order to restore it to its real purpose (see Matthew 21:12-13), Voltaire attacks falsity without seeking to restore truth. 121.4. ‘plenary Inspiration of the Scriptures’: The theological teaching that the Holy Scriptures were written under the immediate influence of the Spirit of God and that “the inspiration of the writers extends to all subjects treated of, so that all their statements are to be received as infallibly true” (oed). Carlyle would refer to it again in Sartor Resartus, where he also alludes to Voltaire (2.9.144).

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121.9. Bank-of-Faith Bill: Carlyle possibly alludes to Methodist books like William Huntington’s God the Guardian of the Poor and the Bank of Faith (1784) and Dorothy Ripley’s The Bank of Faith and Works United (1819). The idea of religion as a form of exchange-trade agreement, however, is one that he often criticizes. In the contemporary essay “Signs of the Times” he writes that religion has become “for the most part, a wise prudential feeling grounded on mere calculation; a matter, as all others now are, of Expediency and Utility; whereby some smaller quantum of earthly enjoyment may be exchanged for a far larger quantum of celestial enjoyment. Thus Religion too is Profit, a working for wages; not Reverence, but vulgar Hope or Fear” (Essays 2:76-77). 121.21. ‘Worship of Sorrow’: The phrase and idea appear throughout Carlyle’s writings, but his ultimate source is his translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Travels and its “Sanctuary of Sorrow” (2:275; Wanderjahre 192). Carlyle would articulate his view of it most fully in Sartor Resartus 2.9.143-44. 121.22. ‘Essays on Miracles’: Voltaire included an essay on miracles in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764) and published a pamphlet entitled Questions sur les miracles (1765; Mémoires 1:235), but miracles, as violations of natural law, were a frequent subject for rationalist discussion. Perhaps the best-known freethinking essay on miracles is David Hume’s “Of Miracles” in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), chapter 10. For Carlyle’s most extended treatment of this subject, see Sartor Resartus 3.8.187-95. 121.25. Ithuriel: One of the angels dispatched by Gabriel to apprehend Satan in the Garden of Eden in Milton’s Paradise Lost (4:788). His name means “discovery of God.” 121.28. Religion is ‘not of Sense, but of Faith’: Similar expressions of this distinction appear often in Carlyle’s writings. From the immediate period of “Voltaire,” Carlyle discusses the contrast between matter and spirit at length in “Signs of the Times,” Essays 2:56-82. The ultimate biblical source is probably John 20:29: “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” 121.37. Socrates or Thales: For Socrates, see note to 68.31-32. Thales (636-546? b.c.) was regarded as the first Greek philosopher; he sought

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to explain natural phenomena through reason rather than reference to actions of the gods. 122.16-17. ‘the Gates of Hell shall not prevail against it’: Matthew 16:18: “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” 122.22-23. ‘It is a height to which the human species were fated and enabled to attain; and from which, having once attained it, they can never retrograde’: Carlyle quotes loosely from his translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Travels: “And this being now attained, the human species cannot retrograde; and we may say, that the Christian religion having once appeared, cannot again vanish; having once assumed its divine shape, can be subject to no dissolution” (2:267; Wanderjahre 275). Carlyle also included the passage in the recently published “Goethe,” Essays 1:238; he would use it again in “Shooting Niagara: And After?, “Essays 5:29, and, in part, in “Sir Walter Scott,” below 291. 123.10-11. The Ephesian Temple, which it had employed many wise heads and strong arms for a life-time to build, could be un-built by one madman, in a single hour: The temple of Artemis at Ephesus had been built and rebuilt over several centuries before Herostratus set fire to it in 356 b.c. in order to immortalize his name. Madame du Châtelet calls Desfontaines “Cet Erostrate nouveau” in a public letter from December 1738 (Mémoires 2:428), and in a letter of November 24, 1750, to Voltaire, le Compte d’Argental accuses Baculard Darnaud (another of Voltaire’s betraying former friends) of having become famous “à la façon d’Erostrate” (Mémoires 2:514). “Erostratus” is also mentioned in Sartor Resartus 1.7.38. 123.30-31. Encyclopédies: See note to 88.22. 123.32-33. Louis XV: Louis XV (1710-1774), reigned 1715-1774. 124.6. caput-mortuum: Literally, “dead head” or skull; in alchemy, the residuum of chemicals after their volatile properties have escaped. 124.10-11. Attilas and Alarics: Both were feared conquerors. Attila (d. 453) was the king of the Huns who spared Rome when he invaded Italy in 452; Alaric I (370?–410) was the Visigoth king who sacked Rome in 410. 124.12. ‘horrors of the French Revolution’: Presumably a commonplace,

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in reference to the Terror, the period of the revolution during which the authorities executed their opponents including those who had earlier been allied with them. The phrase later appears in Letters 7:21; “The Diamond Necklace,” Historical Essays 117; and French Revolution 1.6.1.212. 125.8. experimentum crucis: “Crucial experiment,” a decisive experiment, crucial test. 125.27-28. ‘Lucifer, son of the Morning’: Isaiah 14:12. 125.29. cast-clothes Abigail: The oed defines an Abigail as “a waiting-woman; lady’s-maid” and cites as an example the following from Tobias Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker (1771), to which Carlyle probably alludes: “An antiquated Abigail, dressed in her lady’s cast clothes.” 125.36-37. John Kepler, not to fare sumptuously among Rodolph’s Astrologers and Fire-eaters, but to perish of want: Carlyle here describes Kepler (see note to 90.31-35) suffering privations rather than seeking to satisfy the astrological interests or to entertain (as a fire eater) the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612), though, in fact, Kepler was Rudolf ’s official astrologer. 126.8. “Enlighten Self-interest!” cries the Philosophe, “Do but sufficiently enlighten it!”: This appears to be a characterization of utilitarian teaching (see note to 75.11-14) rather than an actual quotation. An enlightened self-interest recognizes that it is sometimes in one’s interest to respect the interests of others. For “philosophe,” see note to 99.17. 126.10. horn-lantern: A lantern with panels made of thin translucent horn rather than of glass and thus casting a weak light. 126.25. ‘made man in all points a man’: Carlyle quotes from his translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Travels: “One thing there is, however, which no child brings into the world with him; and yet it is on this one thing that all depends for making man in every point a man” (2:265; Wanderjahre 168-69). This passage comes just a little before the passage cited above (88.3-4 and note). Carlyle also includes the passage in “Goethe,” Essays 1:236; and “Inaugural Address,” Essays 4:474. 127.13-128.36. ‘The thinking heads of all nations,’ . . . they themselves were aware of ’: As Carlyle indicates below, the “deep observer” is Nova-

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lis (see note to 129.1). Carlyle gives only the first page number of the quotation, which appears on 1:198-200, 200-201, 204-5, with elisions as indicated by Carlyle’s asterisks. 128.26. Closet-Logic: Carlyle’s translation of “Stubenverstandes” (Novalis 1:204), which would become part of his repertoire of pejorative terms for logical thinking. “Stube” indicates a small cozy room, usually windowless; Carlyle uses “closet” in the older sense of a small private room, possibly also invoking the sense of a place for study. In the context of contemporary German philosophy Verstand (understanding) is a lesser more logical-bound apprehension in opposition to Vernunft (reason), the higher, more imaginative form of apprehension. Carlyle had summarized these views in his discussion of Kant and the German “Transcendentalists” in “State of German Literature”: Kant maintains, that the logical mechanism of the mind is arbitrary, so to speak, and might have been made different, it will follow, that all inductive conclusions, all conclusions of the Understanding, have only a relative truth, are true only for us, and if some other thing be true.  .  .  .  We allude to the recognition, by these Transcendentalists, of a higher faculty in man than Understanding; of Reason (Vernunft), the pure, ultimate light of our nature; wherein, as they assert, lies the foundation of all Poetry, Virtue, Religion; things which are properly beyond the province of the Understanding, of which the Understanding can take no cognisance, except a false one. (Essays 2:27) Carlyle would refer to the “rush-light of closet-logic” in his next essay, “Signs of the Times,” Essays 2:75, as well as “Goethe’s Works,” Essays 2:424, and “Diderot,” below 266.4. See also note to 75.19. 129.1. Novalis: Pseudonym of Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801), a German Romantic writer often cited by Carlyle. Carlyle was preparing an essay on him at the same time that he was working on “Voltaire”; it appeared in July 1829, three months after the publication of “Voltaire” in the same periodical, though it was written immediately prior to “Voltaire.” 129.7-9. A wise man has well reminded us, . . . striving for Ourselves’: Untraced.

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129.11. ‘worked together for good’: Romans 8:28: “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” 129.15. racks and poison-chalices: Forms of suppression of those considered heterodox. The rack was an instrument of torture used to extract confessions from suspected heretics. For Socrates’s poison chalice, see note to 68.29. 129.17. “No Popery”: In England, the slogan of those who were anti-Catholic, in particular of those who opposed Catholic emancipation (see note to 94.21). 129.17. ‘Smithfield fires’: Smithfield was a place of execution in London where Protestants were burned at the stake during the reign of Mary Tudor (1516-1558). 129.19. signs of the times: Matthew 16:3. Carlyle’s essay “Signs of the Times” appeared in the Edinburgh Review in June 1829, two months after “Voltaire” was published. Although the immediate source for Carlyle’s title may have been suggested by Edward Irving’s book of 1829, The Signs of the Times (see Letters 5:81n14), Carlyle had previously used the phrase in German Romance (1:5). 129.19-20. Edinburgh thumbscrews: This may refer to the tortures associated with the witch hunts or with the religious conflicts of the seventeenth century in Scotland. 129.28-30. we must repeat the often-repeated saying, . . . . and brotherly commiseration: Untraced. 129.32-34. Old Ludovicus Vives has a story of a clown  .  .  .  ut lunam redderet: The story is commonly attributed to Juan Luis (Ludovicus) Vives (1492-1540), a Spanish humanist who taught for a time at Oxford and was a private schoolmaster to Mary Tudor. Carlyle’s journal contains the following entry from between December 7 and 18, 1826: “A clown that killed his ass for drinking up the moon, ut Lunam mundo redderet—In Lud[ovicus] Vives. True of many critics of skeptics: the latter have not drunk up the moon but the reflexion of it in their own dirty puddle; therefore need not be slain.—(Who was Lud. Viv.? Should have a modern Biographical Dictionary)” (Two Note Books 86). Charles Eliot

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Norton translates the Latin passage as “That he might restore the Moon to the world” (86n1).

Notes to “Biography” 131.3. ‘The proper study of mankind is man’: Alexander Pope, Essay on Man: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of Mankind is Man” (2.1-2). 131.5-6. ‘Man is perennially interesting to man; nay, if we look strictly to it, there is nothing else interesting’: Carlyle paraphrases his translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship: “Man is ever the most interesting object to man, and perhaps should be the only one that interests” (1:131; Werke 18:158); see also Sartor Resartus 1.11.58. 131.22-24. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.:  .  .  .  London, 1831: James Boswell (1740-1795), The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791). As discussed in the introduction (xv), “Biography” began as an introduction to Carlyle’s review of Boswell, but he eventually separated them into two essays, which appeared in successive issues of Fraser’s Magazine. 132.9-10. both natural and magical: An early figuration of Carlyle’s idea of natural supernaturalism. While he was working on “Biography,” he wrote in a journal entry of January 1832: “The world grows to me ever more as a Magic Picture, a true Supernatural Revelation; infinitely stern, but also infinitely grand” (Two Note Books 238; see also Sartor Resartus 3.8.187-95). 132.22. the one thing needful: See note to 54.21. 132.25-27. the Transfiguration, while studying the Iliad, . . . in Raphael; what a head was that of Homer: The last painting of the Italian Renaissance artist Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, known as Raphael (1483-1520), was The Transfiguration, commissioned in 1516 and left unfinished at his death. The ancient Greek epic poem the Iliad, by Homer, depicts the events of the Trojan War. 132.27. Elysian light and Tartarean gloom: Elysium is the land of the heroic dead in ancient Greek mythology, while Tartarus is an abyss reserved for tormenting the wicked; they eventually became synonymous with heaven and hell.

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132.38-133.1. The Vatican is great; yet poor to Chimborazo or the Peak of Teneriffe: The dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, rising to 448.1 feet, is the tallest in the world. Chimborazo (20,564 feet) is the tallest mountain in Ecuador. Mount Teide (12,198 feet), on the Canary Island of Tenerife, is the highest point of Spain and of any island in the Atlantic Ocean. 133.2. Big-endian or Little-endian chip of an egg-shell: In Gulliver's Travels (1726), Jonathan Swift’s satire on political strife arising from meaningless distinctions is figured through the opposition between two political parties, the “Big-Endians,” who break their eggs on the larger end, and the “Little-Endians,” who break them on the smaller end. 133.3. Arcturus and Orion: Arcturus, of the constellation Boötes, is the brightest star in the northern celestial sky. Orion is a northern constellation named after the mythological Greek hunter. 133.6. Michael Angelo: Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475-1564), artist of the Italian Renaissance; Carlyle alludes here to his design for the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome (see note to 132.38-133.1). 133.7. ‘Temple of Immensity’: Carlyle quotes his translation of Jean Paul’s Sienbenkäs (Sämmtliche Werke 12:61), in which Christ calls the universe a “Temple of Immensity” (“Jean Paul Friedrich Richter Again,” Essays 2:158; see also Sartor Resartus 3.1.154). 133.13-14. ‘History,’ it has been said, ‘is the essence of innumerable Biographies’: Carlyle quotes his “On History,” Historical Essays 5. Compare the opening paragraph of Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild (1743), which begins with the claim that “all great and surprising events” are “produced by great and eminent men” whose “lives  .  .  .  may be justly and properly styled the Quintessence of History” (1.1). 133.17-18. ‘Philosophy, teaching by Experience’: Dionysius’s dictum “History is Philosophy by examples” (Ars Rhetorica 11.2), by way of Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, who writes in On the Study and Use of History (1752): “I have read somewhere or other—in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, I think,—that history is philosophy teaching by examples” (letter no. 2). Carlyle had used the phrase in Life of Schiller 101 and in

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“On History,” Historical Essays 4 and note; see also Letters 7:52 and “Sir Walter Scott,” below 320. 133.29. some Millennium or some new Noah’s Deluge: The millennium here refers to the thousand-year period during which Christ is to reign on earth and, by extension, a period of peace following a radical transformation. In this context, a new Noah’s deluge (see Genesis 6-8), in which all life, except that on his ark, is destroyed, represents a similar epochal transformation. 133.30. Universal History: A view of history from the beginning of time to the present that recognizes continual progress as a defining attribute of the human experience. See also “Boswell’s Life of Johnson,” below 145, and “On History Again,” Historical Essays 16. 133.33-34. Ossian’s ‘feast of shells’: Ossian, the alleged narrator and author of ancient Scots Gaelic epic poems published in 1760 by James Macpherson as The Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal. The book was a great success and widely known, but from the beginning the authenticity of the poems and the existence of Ossian were questioned, the ultimate consensus being that they were Macpherson’s fabrication. Carlyle refers here to book I, “Feast of Shells,” of the poem “Temora,” in which the usurper of the Irish throne Cairbar lures Ossian’s son Oscar to a “feast of shells,” at which he plans to begin an argument as a pretext for killing the hero, the episode ending with Cairbar and Oscar killing each other. See also Sartor Resartus 2.9.144. 134.5. Fashionable Novel: Novels depicting fashionable life, which had been popular since the mid-1820s. 134.9-10. Minerva Press: During the period of its existence (1790-1820), the Minerva Press had been the largest publisher of fiction in Britain. It specialized in cheaply produced gothic and other fiction that was often criticized for lack of literary merit. By the time its imprint was dropped, the Minerva Press had become proverbial for cheap, popular fiction. Carlyle had referred to it in this way in “Burns,” above 39, and would refer to it again in “Sir Walter Scott,” below 318. 134.30. Friar Bacon’s Oracle: Roger Bacon (1214?–1294), English philosopher and Franciscan friar, who appears in The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1590?), by Robert Greene (1558-1592). In

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the play, Friar Bacon attempts and fails to make a brass-headed automaton that will answer any question asked of it. Carlyle alludes to it again in “The Diamond Necklace,” Historical Essays 103, and Past and Present 2.5.66. 134.34. Long-ear: As in an ass, but also a liar. Carlyle used the term again in “Count Cagliostro,” Historical Essays 61-62. 135.4-5. Professor Gottfried Sauerteig’s Æsthetische Springwürzel: Both the author and his book are Carlyle’s inventions. “Sauerteig” means Sourdough, or leaven, and it may also be noted that the German name Gottfried derives from roots meaning God-protected. Æsthetische Springwurzeln translates literally as “Aesthetic Mandrakes,” but also, as the parenthetic gloss below indicates, as “Aesthetic Magical Picklocks.” The further reference to how they “‘start’ every bolt” is explained by a long note to his unfinished history of German literature, in which Carlyle translates Springwürzel as “start-root” and cites Musäus’s Volksmärhchen der Deutschen 5:150 as his source (German Literature 42, 43–44). The mandrake has a root that is often shaped like a human figure and has long been used in magic and religious rituals because of its alleged power to open and find things. Carlyle had previously referred to the “‘Springwurzel ’ (start-root)” in “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter’s Review of Madame de Stael’s ‘Allemagne,’” Essays 1:486n1; he would again use “Sauerteig” and the Æsthetische Springwürzel in “Count Cagliostro,” Historical Essays 26, and quotes Sauerteig in Latter-Day Pamphlets 315 and Frederick the Great 1:1.1.17. 135.15. Rousseau’s Confessions: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Les Confessions (1782, 1789), one of the first modern autobiographies. 135.19-20. All Mythologies were once Philosophies; were believed: the Epic Poems of old time, so long as they continued epic, and had any complete impressiveness, were Histories: Carlyle here first articulates his view that epics are historical documents unconsciously recording widely held cultural values and beliefs. He would conclude “On History Again” with an allusion to this passage (Historical Essays 22). Carlyle is following contemporary thinking on epic poetry. Richard Bentley’s idea that the Iliad could be described as a collection of “songs and rhapsodies” had become a commonplace (Myres 49), and Friedrich Wolf, the foremost Homeric scholar of the era, had argued further that his epic poems were created by collecting songs composed in a preliterate era (Turner 138–47; see Foerster 59–60, 72–73). Thus in his 1838 lectures on the history of literature Carlyle would compare the “ballad delineations” of the Iliad to

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the legends of Robin Hood (History of Literature 16; see 20). See also Past and Present 2.17.132 and “Early Kings of Norway,” Historical Essays 401-2. 135.31-32. only in so far as Imagination, were it but momentarily, is believed, can there be any use or meaning in it: See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who in Biographia Literaria (1817) writes of the “transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (208). 135.36. “Machinery”: “Contrivances employed for effect in a literary work; supernatural personages and incidents, or other devices of plot, etc., in a narrative” (oed). 135.37. (schaff ’es mir vom Halse): Idiomatic German expression meaning roughly “get this off of my neck.” Here and below Carlyle pretends to cite the “original” from which he is purportedly translating, here giving the translation as “sweep it out of sight.” 136.8-11. the gods of an Iliad are to us no longer authentic . . . Epigoniad be, the dead-living Pagan-Christian gods of a Lusiad, the concrete-abstract, evangelical-metaphysical gods of a Paradise Lost?: Carlyle contrasts Homer’s epic with modern epics. In Homer’s Iliad (see note to 39.2-5), on the Trojan War, the gods intervene frequently. William Wilkie (17211772), Scottish poet and author of the Epigoniad (1757), an epic poem recounting the story of the Epigoni, sons of the seven heroes killed in the first Theban War. Luís Vaz de Camões (see note to 68.34), author of the Lusiads (1572), an epic poem of the age of discovery in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. John Milton (1608-1674), English poet and polemicist, author of Paradise Lost (1667), an epic poem of the fall of man. In “Goethe,” Carlyle had cited the Epigoniad as an instance of literature no longer holding “the mirror up to nature” (Essays 1:213). 136.16. an Iliad, a Shaster, a Koran: In keeping with his view of epic as summing up a culture’s beliefs (see note to 135.19-20), Carlyle here classes the Shaster, an ancient Hindu sacred book, and the Koran, the sacred text of Islam, with the Iliad. 136.18. Virgil’s Æneid: The Roman poet Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 b.c.), author of the Aeneid (29-19 b.c.), the national epic of Rome and, like the Iliad, predecessor of the modern epics Carlyle is discussing here.

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136.36. a Tom Jones, a Meister, a Crusoe: Major eighteenth-century works of fiction. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749); Johan Wolfgang Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795-1796), translated by Carlyle in 1824; Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719). 137.11. (ich meines Ortes): Fictitious original of the preceding “For myself, I.” On German phrases in this quotation, see note to 135.37. 137.16-17. the oldest Pelasgic Greek, or Mesopotamian Patriarch, or Father Adam: That is, the earliest humans. The Pelasgians were the ancestors of the ancient Greeks (see the Odyssey 19.177); Abraham, the first of the patriarchs of Judaism (see Genesis 11-17); Adam, the first man (see Genesis 2-5). 138.4-5. ‘An Irishman with whisky in his head,’ as poor Byron said, will invent, in this kind: Carlyle alludes to a letter published by Byron: “An Irish peasant with a little whiskey in his head will imagine and invent more than would furnish forth a modern poem” (Letter 42). 138.19. Lord Clarendon: Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon (16091674), author of The History of the Rebellion and the Civil Wars in England (1702-1704); Carlyle cites an edition of 1807. 138.21-22. Charles, after the battle of Worcester, glides down, with Squire Careless: King Charles II (1630-1685) was defeated at the battle of Worcester on September 3, 1651, by the parliamentary forces of Oliver Cromwell. Charles escaped by hiding in a large oak tree near Boscobel Wood with the royalist officer William Careless ( d. 1689). See Clarendon 3.2.625. 138.22-27 ‘making a shift to get over hedges and ditches, . . . was known to Careless’: Clarendon 3.2.625; Carlyle’s italics. Carlyle’s footnote indicates the page of all the quotations as 625, but they extend, as indicated below, to 627. 138.28-29. ‘carried them into a little barn  .  .  .  had for himself ’: Clarendon 3.2.626. 138.30. ‘a piece of bread and a great pot of butter-milk’: Clarendon 3.2.626. 138.31-32. ‘he himself lived by his daily labour, . . . his wife had’: Clarendon 3.2.626.

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138.33. ‘staying upon the haymow’: Carlyle conflates “stay upon his haymow” (Clarendon 3.2.626) and “rested upon his hay-mow” (Clarendon 3.2.627). 138.35. ‘old pair of shoes’: Clarendon 3.2.627. 138.35-36. as worthy Bunyan has it, ‘goes on his way, and sees him no more’: John Bunyan (1628?–1688), Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). Carlyle alludes to the first section, in which Christian and his neighbor Pliable, who has agreed to travel with Christian away from the city of Destruction, carelessly stumble into the slough of Despond. The angry Pliable, after “a desperate struggle or two,  .  .  .  got out of the mire, on that side of the slough which was next to his own house. So away he went, and Christian saw him no more” (9). 139.6-9. ‘to rest his galled back’ . . . ‘fifth day of September’: Although the context suggests that these quotations are from Clarendon, they are not and remain unidentified. Squire Careless left the king on September 5, two days after the Battle of Worcester (see Clarendon 3.2.626). 139.14. Boswell’s Life of Johnson: See note to 131.22-24. 139.16. a King and Clown: Carlyle uses clown in the older sense of countryman or peasant and here alludes to the anecdote above in which the countryman assists King Charles. 139.17. ‘on the borders of Staffordshire’: Clarendon 3.2.625. 139.30-31. Golgotha, and Gottesacker (Field of God): Golgotha, meaning place of skulls, is where Jesus was taken to be crucified (see Matthew 27:33, Mark 15:22). Gottesacker is German for graveyard, but translates literally, as Carlyle’s parenthesis indicates, as “field of God.” 139.31-35. ‘As we walked along the Strand to-night,  .  .  .  life of such women’: Boswell 1:468-69. 140.7. Calista: Nymph of Greek mythology sworn to virginity but seduced by the god Zeus disguised as the goddess Artemis, who subsequently turned her into a bear, after which Zeus installed her in the heavens as Ursa Major.

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140.27-29. Truly has it been said, . . . A loving Heart is the beginning of all Knowledge: Carlyle had similarly written in “Burns”: “There is a true old saying, that ‘Love furthers knowledge’” (above 45.16 and note). 140.36. It has been said, ‘the heart sees farther than the head’: Possibly proverbial, but Carlyle is also quoting his own “Voltaire,” above 82. 141.1. phantasmagoria: See note to 48.37-38. 141.10-11. Printers’ Devils: Errand boys in a printer’s office. 141.13-14. Oblivion, like the Grave, cries: Give! Give!: Proverbs 30:15: “The horseleach hath two daughters, crying, Give, give.” 141.16. ‘snow-flake on the river’: See Burns, “Tam O’Shanter”: “Or like the snow-falls in the river, / A moment white—then melts for ever” (61-62). 141.22. ‘open secret’: Carlyle’s translation of Goethe’s “das offenbare Geheimnis” (Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre 266), which first appeared in his translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Travels: “While Nature unfolded the open secret of her beauty, he could not but feel an irresistible attraction towards Art, as towards her most fit expositor” (2:305). Carlyle had cited this phrase in “State of German Literature,” Essays 1:41; “Goethe,” Essays 1:225; “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter,” Essays 2:131; “The Tale,” Essays 2:460; and “Characteristics,” Essays 3:58, and would repeat it in “Death of Goethe,” Essays 2:377; On Heroes 69; and “Preface to Emerson’s Essays,” below 337. 141.27. magic-lantern shadow: An image projected by an optical device (magic lantern) on a wall or screen in a darkened room. 141.34. ‘Governess-English’: In a fictitious exchange in the anonymous New Monthly Magazine article “Art and Artists,” one speaker explains that “writing ‘governess English’” is “out of five words written down, to make every two alien, and those two of illegitimate breed in their own country” (25 [1829]: 573). Carlyle’s allusion may not be to this article, which itself puts the phrase in quotation marks and thus suggests it is already in circulation; however, we have not traced any earlier instances. 142.2-5. Parson White in Selborne?  .  .  .  Natural History of Selborne:

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Gilbert White (1720-1793), curate at Selborne and author of the widely read The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789). 142.7. Go ye and do likewise: Jesus’s injunction from the story of the Good Samaritan: “Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise” (Luke 10:37). 142.17. the Editor of this Magazine: William Maginn (1794-1842), editor of Fraser’s Magazine from 1830. 142.27-28. ‘worth that lies in Reality’: Not an exact quotation but similar to statements made by Sauerteig; see above esp. 135. 142.36-37. Moreris, Bayles, Jördenses, Jöchers, their innumerable Mémoires, and Schilderungen, and Biographies Universelles: Louis Moréri (16431680), French priest and encyclopedist, author of Le grand dictionaire historique (1697); Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), French philosopher and author of the Dictionnaire historique et critique (1695-1697); Karl Heinrich Jördens (1757-1835), German literary historian, author of Lexicon der deutscher Dichter und Prosaisten (1806-1811); Christian Gottlieb Jöcher (1694-1758), German librarian and lexicographer, best known for his Allgemeines Gelehrten-Lexicon (1750-1751). Carlyle routinely used several of these resources. He owned a 1716 edition of Moréri, a 1717 edition of Bayle, and a 1806-1811 edition of Jördens, all of which are at the Carlyle House, Chelsea (Tarr 260, 262). “Mémoires” and “Schilderungen” frequently appear in the titles of various nonfictional narratives. First published by J. F. Michaud (1767-1839) in 1811, the Biographie universelle was a favorite biographical source for Carlyle. 142.38. Rousseaus, Goethes, Schubarts, Jung-Stillings: Carlyle has in mind autobiographical works rather than biography per se. He has mentioned Rousseau’s Confessions earlier in the essay (135 and note). Carlyle had translated, reviewed, and frequently cited Goethe, author of the autobiographical Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811–1833). Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart (1739-1791), German poet and the author of the autobiography Schubarts Leben und Gesinnungen (17911793). Johann Heinrich Jung (1740-1817), physician who assumed the name Heinrich Stilling, author of the autobiography Heinrich Stillings Alter (1817). 143.1. Birches and Kippises and Pecks: Unlike the authors just men-

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tioned, these men did not write autobiographies but instead produced compilations of biographies. Thomas Birch (1705-1766), English compiler and biographer, editor of the General Dictionary, Historical and Critical (1734-1741), a translation and expansion of Bayle’s Dictionnaire; Andrew Kippis (1725-1795), English clergyman and biographer, editor of Biographia Britannica (1778-1793) and author of Cook’s Voyages (1788); Francis Peck (1692-1743), English antiquary, author of Desiderata curiosa (1732, 1735). 143.10. Let the foolish April-fool-day pass by: April 1, the publication date of “Biography” in Fraser’s Magazine. 143.13. May-day: the publication date of “Boswell’s Life of Johnson”; see preceding note.

Notes to “Boswell’s Life of Johnson” 145.title. Boswell’s . . . Johnson: On Boswell, see note to 81.4-5. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), author and lexicographer, was the preeminent man of letters of his time, renowned as a moralist, stylist, and wit. Carlyle would include Johnson as one of his heroes as man of letter in On Heroes. 145.1. Æsop’s Fly: Aesop (620?–564 b.c.), credited with the composition of the stories known as the Aesopica, or Aesop’s Fables. It is not certain that Aesop wrote this tale, but both Laurentius Abstemius and Francis Bacon took it to be so. In Britain, the fly on the wheel became a commonplace. 145.9. Mr. Croker: John Wilson Croker (1780-1857), a leading contributor to the Quarterly Review. His edition of Boswell was his major literary endeavor and its publication a literary event of note. 145.12. Universal History: See note to 133.30. 145.16-17. the Reviews, and ‘Organs of Public Opinion,’ from the National Omnibus upwards: As indicated in the note to 145.9, the publication of Croker’s edition was a major literary event, and it was reviewed, as Carlyle indicates, by a wide range of periodicals, or “Organs of Public Opinion.” The National Omnibus, and General Advertiser was a penny weekly paper devoted to literature, the arts, and commercial advertisement. It published two notices of Croker’s edition, on September 30 and October 7, 1837. According to the reviewer in the first notice, Croker “has done every justice to the distinguished and extraordinary man,  .  .  .  and we

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also award him every credit for the completeness which he has contrived to attain” (122). Carlyle also probably has in mind the review by Thomas Babington Macaulay in the Edinburgh Review. On Carlyle’s efforts to write a review for the Edinburgh see the introduction xvii, xix. 145.18. Io Pæans: Hymns or chants of triumph in Greek antiquity, later applied poetically to any victory song. Repeated in “Sir Walter Scott,” below 281, and Past and Present 2.14.221. 145.20-146.2. Boswell’s Book had a noiseless birth,  .  .  .  Paradise Lost and the Iliad were ushered in!: Boswell’s Life of Johnson was published on May 16, 1791, was well-received, and sold well, though it was both praised and criticized. Milton’s Paradise Lost narrowly escaped rejection by the licenser and caused great confusion and anxiety because it was unrhymed; similarly the publication of Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad caused a firestorm of reaction after the first four books were published in 1715. Johnson wrote of both of these events in his biographical sketches of Milton and Pope that appeared in the Lives of the English Poets (1779-1781). 146.10-11. ‘all works which describe manners, require notes in sixty or seventy years, or less’: Boswell 1:vi, n. 1. 146.13-14. his high place in society unlocking all manner of archives to him: In his preface, Croker details how he obtained materials from archives (Boswell 1:xvii–xxii). 146.37. cleanly, Shovel-hatted look: “Shovel-hatted” refers to the broadbrimmed hat with sides turned up worn by English clergy. 147.1-2. the Editor is known as a decided Politician and Party-man: A favorite of George IV and a close friend of Wellington, Croker (see also note to 145.9) was a Tory politician who served as secretary of the navy (1809) and as a privy councilor (1828). His articles attacking the Whig ministry in the Quarterly Review after 1830 helped to establish his reputation as a staunchly partisan Tory. 147.21-22. what was dark in the figure of the Past had thereby been enlightened: Compare Milton, Paradise Lost: “What in me is dark / Illumine” (1.21-22).

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147.29-30. ‘the Editor does not understand,’ that ‘the Editor cannot guess’: Carlyle’s complaint echoes that made by Macaulay in his review of Croker’s edition that was published in the Edinburgh Review. See, for example, Croker’s notes in Boswell, 1:277, 333. 147.31-33. if Johnson say, in one sentence, that ‘English names should not be used in Latin verses;’ and then, in the next sentence, speak blamingly of ‘Carteret being used as a dactyl’: Carlyle is responding to the note associated with two sentences that appear in Boswell: “Mattaire’s account of the Stephani is a heavy book. He seems to have been a puzzle-headed man, with a large share of scholarship, but with little geometry or logick in his head, without method, and possessed of little genius. He wrote Latin verses from time to time, and published a set in old age, which he called ‘Senilia;’ in which he shews so little learning or taste in writing, as to make Carteret a dactyl. In matters of genealogy it is necessary to give the bare names as they are.” Croker’s note reads, “The Editor does not understand this objection, nor the following observation” (Boswell 4:335). Johnson refers to John Carteret, second Earl of Granville (16901763), politician. Note that Johnson does not literally say that “English names should not be used in Latin verses.” Thomas Babington Macaulay in his review in the Edinburgh Review also chided Croker for this note. In a new edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson in one volume (London, 1848), Croker responded to Carlyle and Macaulay with a revised note: “The ‘want of learning and taste’ in not giving English names classical inflections (if that be Johnson’s meaning) is a strange charge against Mattaire. If he uses ‘Carteret’ once in its vernacular form, then we have a hundred such pedantries such as Rutlandus and Granbeius living at Belvoricum—  .  .  .  Boothius uttering Shak’speriana verba sonantia  .  .  .  so that if such inflections be a sign of taste and learning, I really cannot see the meaning of Johnson’s complaint of Mattaire” (Boswell 655n1). 147.34-148.1. ‘I always remember a remark made to me by a Turkish lady,  .  .  .  the Editor cannot guess’: Boswell 1:333 and n. 2. The French translates as “Well, sir, our happiness depends upon how well our blood flows.” 148.10. ‘Neediness and Greediness and Vainglory’: Carlyle quotes his “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter Again,” Essays 2:132. 148.15-32. “What good is it,” will such cry, “when we had still some faint

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shadow of belief . . . might have been no Note at all?”: As indicated at the end of this quotation, Carlyle imagines his reader’s response to Croker. 148.16. Digesting-machine: Carlyle alludes to Denis Papin’s invention (see note to 165.22-23). He had previously alluded to it in “On History,” Historical Essays 5-6. 148.19-20. Pudding, and the finer species of pudding which is named Praise: See note to 61.31-32. 148.21-22. ‘a love-match on both sides’: According to Boswell, “Mr. Topham Beauclerk used archly to mention Johnson’s having told him with much gravity, ‘Sir, it was a love-marriage on both sides’” (Boswell 1:65). Johnson married Elizabeth Jervis Porter (1689-1752), “Tetty,” on July 9, 1735. She was twenty years older than him. 148.22-25. ‘Is it not possible that the obvious advantage . . . in point of age—Ed.?’: Boswell 1:66n1. 148.28-30. ‘When we find Dr. Johnson tell unpleasant truths  .  .  .  he might be forgiven for doing so?’: Boswell 1:74n3. 149.9-12. Four Books Mr. C. had by him, wherefrom to gather light for the fifth, . . . and sew these together into a sextum quid: Sextum quid is “a sixth something.” Carlyle is referring to the lengthy insertion of works by Hawkins, Tyers, Murphy, and Piozzi. Croker used Malone’s edition of Boswell’s Life and Boswell’s first edition of the Tour to the Hebrides (see Boswell 1:xv). 149.13-14. By what art-magic,  .  .  .  by Brackets: In his preface, Croker notes his editorial decision to use square brackets to indicate the insertion of material other than Boswell’s (Boswell 1:xxiii). 149.19. Hawkins, Tyers, Murphy, Piozzi: Sir John Hawkins (1719-1789), author of The Life of Dr. Johnson (1787); Thomas Tyers (1726-1787), author of Sketches of Dr. Johnson (1785); Arthur Murphy (1727-1805), author of Essay on the Life of Dr. Johnson (1792); Hester Lynch Thrale, later Piozzi (1741-1821), author of Anecdotes. There is a copy of the second edition of Hawkins (1787) at the Carlyle House, Chelsea (Tarr, “Carlyle’s Libraries” 255).

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149.21. There is much between the cup and the lip: Proverbial, as in “There’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip.” According to legend, Ancaeus, one of the Greek Argonauts who was able to return home, mocked a seer who had told him he would die before he drank another drop of wine from his vineyard. As he raised his glass in mocking toast, the seer responded with the proverb. Before Ancæus could drink, a boar was reported to be loose in his vineyard, and when he went to investigate, the boar killed him. 149.23-25. Boswell’s French wine . . . or even alegar: Carlyle allegorizes Johnson’s biographers from the fine wine of Boswell and the alcohol-free ginger beer of Piozzi to the vulgar working-class entire, or porter beer, of Hawkins. Penny-swipes were a cheap, watery kind of small beer costing a penny; alegar is vinegar made from ale and a term used to describe sour ale. 149.28. Printer’s Devils: See note to 141.10-11. 149.31-32. All faults, the Moralists tell us, are properly shortcomings: The British moralists included philosophers beginning with Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who framed his interrogation of moral judgment around self-reflection and the self-interested weakness of human nature. Another moralist, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), countered Hobbes by contending that self-reflection led to the approval or disapproval of moral choices based upon a collective common sense. His Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711) asserts: “Now as for that other part of conscience, viz. the remembrance of what was at any time unreasonably and foolishly done, in prejudice of one’s real interest or happiness: this dissatisfactory Reflection must follow still and have effect wheresoever there is a sense of moral Deformity, contracted by Crime, and Injustice” (2:122). The work influenced Carlyle, and the idea is present in “Signs of the Times.” He took from it the title of his essay “Characteristics,” which he finished around December 16, 1831 (see Two Note Books 230), just before he began work on this review. Carlyle also may be referring to the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), whose concepts of moral and metaphysical perfectionism served as the basis for the highest good in humans, although humans, unlike God, all have elements of imperfection (i.e., “shortcomings”). 149.34-36. ‘The worst that can happen  .  .  .  be rejected as surplusage’: Boswell 1:xxiii.

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150.19. recompense in solid pudding (so far as copyright went): “Solid pudding” refers to the expression “pudding and praise,” which Carlyle has used above 148.19-20; on this expression, see note to 61.31-32. According to Pat Rogers, Boswell earned a net £600 in the two years following the publication of the Life (xxvii). 150.33. a riband, imprinted ‘Corsica Boswell’: Boswell 2:71n1. 150.36. The very look of Boswell: Carlyle probably refers to the sketch by Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830), portrait painter and second president of the Royal Academy after Reynolds, that was used for the frontispiece of volume 4 of Croker’s edition. See plate 5. 151.10-12. (in old Touchwood Auchinleck’s phraseology) “took on with Paoli,” . . . and ca’d it an academy”: Boswell 3:78n1. Touchwood Auchinleck is Bosworth’s father, Alexander Bosworth, Lord Auchinleck (1707-1782). In referring to him as “Touchwood,” Carlyle may be alluding to Peregrine Touchwood, a character in St. Ronan’s Well, whom Scott’s narrator refers to as a “fidgety, fiery old Nabob” (3:17). In his note, Croker provides Walter Scott’s narrative of Bosworth’s father and his attitude toward his son. Boswell traveled to Corsica to meet Filippo Antonio Pasquale di Paoli (1725-1807), exiled leader of the Corsican Republic, in October 1765 and was captivated by him and his cause. He came home to London the following year and was interviewed on Corsica by Pitt, and he subsequently published his Account of Corsica. Paoli would meet Johnson in 1769 (see Boswell 3:291). 151.14. ‘open sense’: The gloss that follows (“an open loving heart”) repeats the phrase used in “Biography” (above 140). 151.23-24. the English Dominie: See Boswell 3:78n1. 150.24-25. Your Scottish Laird, . . . of all bipeds yet known: Not identified. 151.27. a very Gamaliel: Hebrew name meaning “reward of God,” and the name of a first-century doctor of Jewish law who spoke in favor of the arrested Jesus Christ (see Acts 5:34). 151.33-37. how the ancient man, . . . “I, the first King’s Sheriff in Scotland”: The quotations are not traced. Auchinleck was named sheriff of Wigtown in 1748, among the first group of sheriffs appointed by royal

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warrant after the Heritable Jurisdictions Act (1746), which was passed by Parliament after the Jacobite uprising (1745) in order to disrupt the ascension of the Scottish clan chiefs afforded to them by tradition. 152.1. Bozzy: Johnson’s nickname for Boswell. Boswell records that “Johnson had a way of contracting the names of his friends: as Beauclerk, Beau; Boswell, Bozzy” (Boswell 2:242). 152.6. gulosity: Gluttony, greediness, voracity. By the nineteenth century this word was becoming rare, and it is possible that Carlyle picked it up from Boswell, who records: “Yet I have heard him, upon other occasions, talk with great contempt of people who were anxious to gratify their palates; and the 206th number of his Rambler is a masterly essay against gulosity. His practice, indeed, I must acknowledge, may be considered as casting the balance of his different opinions upon this subject: for I never knew any man who relished good eating more than he did” (Boswell 1:479-80). Carlyle would apply the adjective to Count Cagliostro in “The Diamond Necklace,” Historical Essays 20, and French Revolution 1:2.7.57. 152.6. ‘gigmanity’: Owners of gigs; Carlyle’s coinage, derived from the anecdote cited in his footnote (see note to 152.37-38). While he had cited the anecdote previously, this is the first appearance of this word in his published writings. He had used it in a letter of September 11, 1831, the autumn before he began writing this essay. It appears in a number of subsequent letters as well as “The Diamond Necklace,” Historical Essays 86-87. 152.7. rag-and-dust mountain: Trash (rags and dust, or garbage) was at this time gathered in mounds from which various materials were recycled. 152.28-29. dwelling in Temple-lane: According to Croker, Johnson lived in Temple Lane, 1760-1765 (Boswell 1:81; see 351-450). 152.37-38. ‘Q. What do you mean by “respectable?”—A. He always kept a gig.’—(Thurtell’s Trial.): Carlyle had first quoted this exchange in “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter Again,” Essays 2:130n1, where Carlyle gives the source as the Quarterly Review; it appeared in the January 1828 issue (37:15). Thurtell was tried and hanged for murder in January 1824. Carlyle had followed the trial and written a week and half after the execution, “Thurtell being hanged last week, we grew duller than ever” (Letters 3:16).

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Carlyle frequently alludes to the episode as an example of a false view of respectability. 152.38-39. ‘Thus,’ it has been said, . . . and Men’: Carlyle invents a quotation repeating his own sentiments as expressed in “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter Again” and elsewhere (see preceding note). 153.7. Advocate’s-wig: British attorneys, known as barristers and solicitors, wear a horsehair wig with short hair that is curled on the sides with ties on the back. 153.9. Feast of Tabernacles: The fall feast Sukkot, which lasts for seven days and is intended to celebrate the dwellings of the Israelites during their forty years in the desert (see Leviticus 23:33-44). 153.11. a sour-tempered blind old woman: Anna Williams (d. 1783) lived with Johnson in his final London residence at Bolt Court (Boswell 1:220-21 and n. 1). 153.14-15. Mr. Croker says, Johnson was, to the last, little regarded by the great world: Not identified. 153.25-26. Henry Erskine, . . . “for the sight of his Bear”: Henry Erskine (1746-1817), lawyer and politician, lord advocate or chief prosecutor of Scotland, and also a patron of Robert Burns. The great hall of the Parliament House in Edinburgh was known as the “Outer House.” The incident took place during Johnson and Boswell’s tour of the Hebrides (see Boswell 2:74n2). For Johnson as a “Bear,” see Boswell 2:67-68. For Carlyle’s memory of the “chaotic hurly-burly” of the Outer House, see Froude, First Forty Years 1:23-24. 154.3-4. the symbol of the Godlike to him, which even weak eyes may discern; that Loyalty, Discipleship, all that was ever meant by Hero-worship: An early articulation of the doctrine that Carlyle would later develop in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, in which he regards certain men as “symbols of the Godlike,” or manifestations of the divine, an idea he repeats in several later works. Johnson would be one of the Men of Letters heroes. This is Carlyle’s first published use of the term “hero-worship,” though he may by this time have drafted the passage of Sartor Resartus that closely parallels this one (3.7.184-85).

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154.11-12. God-worship and Mammon-worship: “Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24, Luke 16:13). Mammon is usually taken to refer to wealth. Carlyle used the term elsewhere, notably in “The Gospel of Mammonism” in Past and Present 3.2. 154.13. Beelzebub’s: A name for the devil, used in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, which also condemn mammon (see note to 154.11-12). 154.13-14. all things were fallen into the yellow leaf: See note to 119.18-19. 154.17-20. A precious medicine  .  .  .  the medicine also begin to shew itself !: Compare the Roman poet Lucretius, who in his epic poem De Rerum Natura tells his reader that he is going to explain his philosophy in verse: “Just as doctors, who must give vile wormwood / to children, begin by painting the cup-lip round / with sweet and golden honey; thus the child, / is tricked and brought to set / the cup to his lip; meanwhile, he swallows the bitter / wormwood, and though deceived is not infected, / but by this trick grows well and strong again” (1.936-42). 154.20-21. his corruptible part: See 1 Corinthians 15:53: “For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.” 154.25. ‘open sense’: See 151.14 and note. 154.33. Johnsoniad: As suggested by the comparison to Homer below, Carlyle implies that Boswell’s Life is an epic, on the model of the Iliad, Epigoniad, or Lusiad; on the latter and on Carlyle’s use of “epic,” see “Biography” (above 136.8-11 and note). 154.36. Odyssey: Homer’s epic poem, in which the Greek hero Odysseus makes his way home to Ithaca after the fall of Troy. Boswell compared his biography to Homer’s poem in his advertisement for the second edition (Boswell 1:xli). 155.4-5. talent was, as such ever is, an unconscious one: Carlyle’s recently published “Characteristics” had opposed unconscious, in the sense of unself-conscious, thought to conscious thought, giving the preference to the former. 155.6-7 ‘The heart sees farther than the head’: Proverbial. Carlyle had

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employed the proverb in “Voltaire” (above 82; see note to 82.8-9) and in the introductory essay to his translation of Wilhelm Meister (1:26). 155.12. All, or Pan: Pan is the Greek word for “all” and for the god of shepherds, flocks, and pastures; it is also associated with fertility and spring. Compare Goethe, Faust 1261. 155.16-17. half-mad panic Awe: According to Greek mythology, Pan had the ability to inflict great fear, or panic. 155.19-20. ‘the waste fantasy of his own dream?’: Carlyle quotes with variation his translation from Novalis’s Lehrlinge zu Sais (1802): “a waste Fantasy of their Dream” (“Novalis,” Essays 2:35; Schriften 2:56). 155.29. the cattle on a thousand hills: See Psalms 50:10: “For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills.” 156.5-6. Reverence, which is the highest of human feelings: See 88.3-4 and note. 156.21-22. Prolegomena and expository Scholia to this Johnsoniad: A prolegomena is an introductory discourse, and a scholia is an ancient exegetical note or comment upon a passage in a Greek or Latin author. Carlyle is extending the idea that the Life is an epic modeled on Homer (see above 154.33, 36 and notes). 156.34-35. speculation ‘on the import of Reality,’ . . . in this Magazine: Carlyle quotes his “Biography” (above 137) and alludes to the fictive Æsthetische Springwürzel of Gottfried Sauerteig quoted in that essay (135-37). 156.38. those chaunted hexameters: Epic meter of Greek poetry, including the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid. 157.8. Euclid’s Elements: Euclid of Alexandria (365?–275 b.c.), author of the Stoicheia, or Elements, a treatise on mathematics and geometry composed around 300 b.c. 157.9. Herr Sauerteig: See 135.4-5 and note.

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157.11. that local habitation, are not shadow but substance: See note to 88.33. 157.13-17. Critics insist much on the Poet . . . ennoble the Actual into Idealness: No specific source identified. These views are characteristic of several German writers of the era as well as English writers like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and are appropriately similar to those Carlyle had articulated in “State of German Literature”: Religion, Poetry is not dead; it will never die. Its dwelling and birthplace is in the soul of man, and it is eternal as the being of man. In any point of Space, in any section of Time, let there be a living Man; and there is an Infinitude above him and beneath him, and an Eternity encompasses him on this hand and on that; and tones of Sphere-music, and tidings from loftier Worlds, will flit round him, if he can but listen, and visit him with holy influences, even in the thickest press of trivialities, or the din of busiest life. (Essays 1:85-86) 157.19. ‘Time-element’: On December 2, 1832, later in the year in which he wrote this essay, Carlyle would write his brother, “Man issues from Eternity; walks in a ‘Time-Element’ encompassed by Eternity and again in Eternity disappears Fearful and wonderful! This only we know, that God is above it, that God made it, and rules it for good” (Letters 6:267). In Sartor Resartus, which had been drafted when he wrote this essay, he writes: “The curtains of Yesterday drop down, the curtains of To-morrow roll up; but Yesterday and To-morrow both are. Pierce through the Time-Element, glance into the Eternal” (3.8.192). See also preceding note. 157.21. ‘infinitude’: See notes to 157.13-17 and 157.19. 157.27-29. ‘that History after all is the true Poetry; . . . genuine Poetry consist’: Although he had not previously ascribed these words to Sauerteig, the basic idea can be found in “Biography,” above 136. 157.33. The Mitre Tavern still stands in Fleet Street: The Mitre Tavern of Johnson’s day, at 39 Fleet Street, was closed in 1788 and demolished in 1829 in order to make room for the offices of Hoare’s Bank. In 1788, Joe’s Coffeehouse in Mitre Court took the name of the tavern, which led to subsequent confusion. See Bell 493-94.

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158.2. a ghost at cock-crowing: The ghost of Hamlet’s father, Bernardo reports in the opening scene of Hamlet, was “about to speak when the cock crew” (1.1.162). 158.6. baseless fabric of Prospero’s air-vision: From Prospero’s speech at the conclusion of the masque in The Tempest: These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air; And like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. (4.1.165-73). 158.12. Revocation of the Edict of Destiny: A play on the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), which granted freedom of religion to the Huguenots. 158.14. Naphtha-lamps: Invented in 1830, lamps lit by naphtha, a byproduct of producing gas from coal. 158.24-27. Smolletts and Belshams keep dinning . . . and North: Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) wrote the continuation, covering the period from William and Mary through George II, of David Hume’s (1711-1776) A Complete History of England (1757-1765). William Belsham (1752-1827), political writer and historian, was author of A History of Great Britain from 1688 to 1820 (1805-1824). These histories covered the reigns of George II (1683-1760) and George III (1738-1820) and the careers of the prime ministers Robert Walpole (1676-1745); Henry Pelham (16941754); Thomas Pelham-Holles (1693-1768); Charles Watson-Wentworth, second Marquess of Rockingham (1730-1782); and William Petty, first Earl of Shelburne and later first Marquess of Lansdowne (1737-1805). 158.27. their Coalition or their Separation Ministries: The prime ministers mentioned in the preceding note all governed by the exclusion or separation of opponents and/or by a coalition of allies. 158.28-29. ‘the thing they called the Rudder of Government . . . Spigot

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of Taxation’: See Albrecht von Haller, who used the metaphor of the Ruder der Regierung (211) in his Alfred König der Angel-Sachsen (1773), in which Haller described a moderate monarchy. He dedicated the work to George III. Haller may have derived the phrase from Cicero’s Pro Sestio, section IX, where he refers to “the rudder of the ship of state” (61). No source is identified for “Spigot of Taxation.” 158.30-31. road-bills and enclosure-bills, and game-bills and India-bills: The General Turnpike Act (1773) regulated the toll road system in Britain, and the Enclosure Act (1773) enabled owners to enclose fields and restrict commoners’ access; both were passed during the administration of Lord North. The Black Act (1723) mandated the death penalty for nearly fifty offenses, many of them related to hunting and fishing on royal lands. The Regulating Act for India (1773) began the process of bringing the East India Company under the control of the British government by requiring the company to appoint governors-general who would be advised and monitored by a panel of four government officials and by sending British judges to India to administer the British system of justice. The East India Act (1783) was an attempt to establish direct parliamentary control of the East India Company. 158.33. King’s Stationer: The office that held the patent for publishing the proceedings of the British Parliament (see note to 159.4-5). 158.33-34. he who sat in Chancery,  .  .  .  from the Woolsack: The lord chancellor presides over the Court of Chancery and also serves as the Speaker of the House of Lords, where he would sit on a cushion stuffed with wool, a recognition of the wool trade’s historical significance to the economy of Britain. 159.4-5. Redbook Lists, and Court Calendars, and Parliamentary Registers: The Red Book of the Exchequer is a thirteenth-century manuscript compilation of precedents and office memoranda, which contains additional entries down to the eighteenth century. Court calendars established the dates of trials for various courts. The Parliamentary Register; or, History of the proceedings and debates of the House of Commons was the record of the proceedings of the British Parliament. 159.12. How men lived and had their being: See Acts 17:28: “For in him we live and have our being.”

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159.15. Mr. Senior and Mr. Sadler: Nassau William Senior (1790-1864), lawyer and political economist, and Michael Thomas Sadler (1780-1835), social reformer and political economist. 159.20. How my House Servant was hired: Like many of their contemporaries, the Carlyles, who kept a single maid of all work, had difficulties finding and keeping good servants, as many discussions in their letters show. 159.24. “Robertson”: William Robertson (1721-1793), author of The History of Scotland during the Reigns of Queen Mary and James VI (1759). Carlyle appears to have read this, and probably some of his other historical works, by early 1818 (see Letters 1:120). He refers to him in “On History,” Historical Essays 4. 159.31. Bacchus-tamed Lion: Dionysus, or Bacchus, the Greek god of wine and fertility, is often depicted as being pulled in a chariot by lions. 159.35. Letter of Æneas Sylvius: Aeneas Silvius Bartholomeus (14051464), born Enea Silvio Bartolomeo Piccolomini and later named Pope Pius II (1458), was sent on a mission to Scotland in 1435, about which he left accounts of his many perils. 159.37. the age of the Reformation: The Reformation in Scotland was part of the broader movement that has been traditionally dated as beginning with the nailing of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg in 1517. 160.10-13. Mary Stuart, a Beauty, but over lightheaded; . . . with gunpowder: Mary Stuart (1542-1587), queen of Scots and her second consort, Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley (1545/6-1567). Mary and Darnley were Catholics and were caught up in the religious conflicts of the era. Darnley died after an explosion, hence the reference to gunpowder, but his death apparently had other causes; Mary was forced to abdicate, tried for treason, and executed. 160.21-22. ‘the essence of innumerable Biographies’: Carlyle quotes himself from “On History,” Historical Essays 5. 160.30. ‘House wherein our life was led’: Carlyle again quotes himself from “On History,” Historical Essays 6.

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161.8. Father of Lies: Satan (see John 8.44). 161.11. ‘taking notes’: Carlyle alludes to Burns, “On the Late Captain Grose’s Peregrinations through Scotland” (1789): “If there’s a hole in a’ your coats, / I rede you, tent it; / A chield’s amang you takin’ notes / And, faith, he’ll prent it” (3-6). 161.21. Criminal Calendar: A schedule of cases to be tried. 161.27-28. out of it are the issues of Life!: Proverbs 4:23: “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.” 161.28. ‘Man is properly an incarnated word’: In accord with the teaching that Jesus Christ is the incarnation of the word of God (see John 1:1, 14), Carlyle, like many contemporaries, sees human beings as manifestations of the divine (see Sartor Resartus 1.10.51 and note). 161.38.-162.4. Consider the significance of Silence: . . . Speech is human, Silence is divine’: In Sartor Resartus, which he had drafted by this time, Carlyle’s fictive persona Diogenes Teufelsdröckh writes: “As the Swiss Inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden (Speech is silver, Silence is golden); or as I might rather express it: Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity” (3.3.162). While the basic thought is proverbial, it seems to have been given this form by Carlyle, who frequently praises silence. His views on silence might be traced to a passage in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship that he had translated as “Words are good, but they are not the best. The best is not explained by words. The spirit in which we act is the highest matter” (2:76; Werke 20:126). In his journal for September 1830 he had written: “There is a deep significance in silence. Were a man forced for a length of time but to hold his peace, it were in most cases an incalculable benefit to his insight. Thought works in silence, so does virtue.  .  .  .  Beware of speaking. Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts; they are both difficult. Flower roots hidden under soil. Bees working in darkness, &c.” (Froude, First Forty Years 2:91). As we can see in this passage from the recently published “Characteristics,” he relates silence to being unconscious (see note to 155.4-5): “Unconsciousness is the sign of creation; Consciousness, at best, that of manufacture. . . . Well might the ancients make Silence a god; for it is the element of all godhood, infinitude, or transcendental greatness; at once the source and the ocean wherein all such begins and ends” (Essays 3:16).

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162.6-7. No idlest word thou speakest but is a seed cast into Time, and grows through all Eternity!: Carlyle alludes to the verses prefaced to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre: “Mein Vermächtniss, wie herrlich weit und breit! / Die Zeit is mein Vermächtniss, mein Acker ist die Zeit,” which he had translated as “My inheritance, how wide and fair! / Time is my estate; to Time I’m heir” (Wilhelm Meister 2:193; Werke 18: unnumbered page). Carlyle quoted and translated these lines several times. In “Characteristics” his translation read: “My inheritance how wide and fair! / Time is my fair seed-field, of Time I’m heir” (Essays 3:43). See also Sartor Resartus 1.2.8; “Count Cagliostro,” Historical Essays 33; French Revolution 3:2.2.107; “Chartism,” Essays 4:193; On Heroes 156; Letters 5:200. 162.7-9. The Recording Angel, . . . the ‘iron leaf ’: In Jewish, Christian, and Islamic tradition, the recording angel is assigned by God to record the life of each individual. Carlyle appears to refer in particular to Islamic tradition, as is clear in his ascription of “written . . . ‘on the iron leaf ’” to “the Arabs” in “German Playwrights” (Essays 1:384) and to “my Moslem friends” in Past and Present (3.10.189). 162.15. ‘much-enduring man’: A frequent epithet for Ulysses (Odysseus) in Alexander Pope’s translation of the Odyssey. 162.18-19. ‘the Life of the lowest mortal, if faithfully recorded, would be interesting to the highest’: Not identified. 162.22-23. ‘There is not a man whom I meet . . . know his Biography:’ Not identified, but a characteristic Carlylean sentiment. 162.32-33. Natus sum; esuriebam, quærebam; nunc repletus requiesco: Familiar Latin quotation meaning “I was born, I felt hungry, and sought for food; now that I am satiated, I lay me down to rest.” 163.16. Turnip-lanterns: Jack-o’-lanterns made of turnips. 163.34-38 Jean Paul’s quick eye: ‘If you hold a stick before the Wether,  .  .  .  an otherwise impassable barrier’: On Jean Paul, see note to 71.27-28. In “Voltaire,” Carlyle had described Jean Paul “as a quaint naturalist and moralist” and then quoted another version of this philosophical parable (see above 94).

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164.14. Isaac Newton: Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), the great English physicist and mathematician. 164.18. ‘if we will but hear his voice?’: Compare John 10:27: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” 164.33-34. These are properly our Men, our Great Men: An early statement of Carlyle’s idea of the “great man” or hero, which would form the basis for his On Heroes, in which Johnson figures as a “Hero as Man of Letters.” 164.38. Vanity-fair: A fair in the city of Vanity, which is located along Christian’s way in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). Carlyle had alluded to Bunyan’s book in “Biography” (above 138). 165.6. Mumbojumbos: British travelers identified Mumbo Jumbo as an idol among the Mandingo people of the Niger region. Carlyle would later refer to “Mumbo-Jumbo of the African woods” in French Revolution 3:6.4.267. One possible source is Mungo Park, Travels to the Interior Districts of Africa (1799), which Carlyle would cite in Past and Present 3.13.210. 165.22-23. a Clothes-horse and Patent Digester: A “clothes-horse” is a wooden frame for hanging clothes to dry, but also a person whose main function appears to be to show off clothes. “Patent Digester” refers to “Papin’s digester,” a device that the French physicist Denis Papin (16471712?) used to demonstrate that the boiling point varies according to changes in atmospheric pressure. As Carlyle’s reference to “Papin’s-Digester” in Sartor Resartus makes clear, he indicates here the mere physical process of digestion: “The stupidest of Oysters has a Papin’s-Digester, with stoneand-lime house to hold it in” (2.10.147) and “if Man were but a Patent Digester, and the Belly with its adjuncts the grand Reality” (3.1.155). See also above 148.16. 165.29-30. Devils even must believe and tremble: James 2:19: “Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.” 165.30-33. “Man is heaven-born;  .  .  .  ‘the Messias of Nature!’”: Carlyle seems to paraphrase Sartor Resartus, which was drafted but not yet published: “[Man] everywhere finds himself encompassed with Symbols, recognised as such or not recognised: the Universe is but one vast Sym-

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bol of God; nay, if thou wilt have it, what is man himself but a Symbol of God; is not all that he does symbolical; a revelation to Sense of the mystic god-given Force that is in him; a ‘Gospel of Freedom,’ which he, the ‘Messias of Nature,’ preaches, as he can, by act and word?” (3.3.16263). In turn, he draws on “the Thinker” Novalis: “Man has ever expressed some symbolical Philosophy of his Being in his Works and Conduct; he announces himself and his Gospel of Nature; he is the Messiah of Nature” (“Novalis,” Essays 2:40; Schriften 126). 165.34-35. ‘force of circumstances,’ ‘the creature of the time,’ ‘balancing of motives’: Not specific quotations but stock phrases in discussions of human agency. Carlyle had similarly quoted “force of circumstances” in “Signs of the Times,” Essays 2:75, 79. On “motives” see also “Schiller,” Essays 2:192. 166.14-15. bodily windows that were dim, . . . the human face divine!’: Johnson struggled with poor eyesight throughout his life. According to Hawkins, Johnson confessed that he “never saw ‘the human face divine’” (33; see also 313). Croker omits the story. In Paradise Lost Milton bemoans his own blindness, which prevents him from seeing the “human face divine” (3.44). 166.17-18. ‘valuable,’ as he owned, ‘if from the meanest of human beings’: Not found in Boswell or elsewhere. 166.25. Ariel finds himself encased in the coarse hulls of a Caliban: In The Tempest the spirit Ariel had been encased in a pine tree by the mother of Caliban, Sycorax. After she dies, Caliban and the entrapped Ariel are the only two inhabitants of the island when Prospero arrives and frees the spirit (see 1.2.269-93). 167.3-4. new French Prophets,  .  .  .  A chacun selon sa capacité; à chaque capacité selon ses œuvres: “To everyone according to his capacity, to every capacity according to its works,” a doctrine of Claude Henri Rouvroy, Comte de Saint Simon (1760-1825), French political and economic theorist. Carlyle calls him a new prophet because he sought in his Le Nouveau Christianisme (1825) to envision a new Christianity centered on the ethics of the revolutionary principle of fraternity. Carlyle was at this time interested in the writings of Saint Simon and his followers, who, after having read “Signs of the Times,” sent Carlyle some of their pamphlets (see Letters 5:133-139; see also Sartor Resartus 3.5.174, 3.12.217).

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167.5. Birmingham-lacker: Birmingham was known for its production of lacquer of a golden color that was used to coat brass in imitation of gold. 167.14. gauging ale-tubs in the little burgh of Dumfries!: Robert Burns supported himself as an exciseman, whose duty was to make sure proprietors paid their due share of tax by “gauging” their ale tubs and recording the amount of beer consumed. Carlyle often cites the fact that Burns supported himself in this way as an example of a literary man who is poorly compensated (see “Burns,” above 35; “Heintze’s Translation of Burns,” below 329; “Chartism,” Essays 4:164; On Heroes 164-65; Past and Present 2.9.89). 167.15-16. ‘Strength was mournfully denied its arena’: Carlyle quotes Jean Paul’s Life of Quintus Fixlein: “Still oftener is strength denied its Arena” (German Romance 2:195; Sämmtliche Werke 4:x; see also On Heroes 165) 167.18-23. ‘His favourites,’ says Boswell,  .  .  .  borne triumphant’: Boswell 1:22. 167.23. purfly: The only instances of the word in this form in the oed are this one and another from Carlyle’s journals (Froude, First Forty Years 2:231), dated January 18, 1832, about the time he began work on this essay. It derives from “purfled”: “of a person: stout and fleshy, with a ruddy complexion; congested, wheezing.” 167.25. ‘King’s-chair’: Carlyle refers to the Scottish tradition of children bringing their schoolmaster money on Candlemas Day. The child who brought the largest gift was declared the “king” for the day. After school was dismissed, the “king” would be carried out in a precession on the clasped hands of his schoolmates, or the “king’s chair.” 167.27-28. The child is father of the man: Wordsworth, “My heart leaps up” (1802) (7). 167.33. Corporal Trim’s ‘auxiliary verbs’: Corporal Trim is the servant of Uncle Toby in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. In chapter 160 Tristram’s father, Walter, complains to Mr. Yorick that there is a “north-west passage to the intellectual world” but that “every child . . . has not a parent to point it out.” Much to Yorick’s surprise, Walter concludes, “The whole entirely depends  .  .  .  upon the auxiliary verbs” (5.42.322-23).

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167.36-37. uncouth bulk and youthhood, wrestling with Disease and Poverty: Johnson was famous for his large size and uncouth mannerisms. He claimed to have inherited “melancholy,” or depression, from his father (Boswell 1:3 and 3n2) and contracted scrofula, a form of tuberculosis manifested in swelling of the lymph nodes, from his mother or nurse (Boswell 1:35n1). 167.37-38. At College we see little of him: Johnson entered Pembroke College, Oxford, on October 31, 1728. According to Croker, he left Oxford for good in December 1729 (Boswell 1:29n1). Boswell, however, contends that although his depression kept him home after the holiday in 1729, he returned but then was forced to leave because of his father’s money troubles in the fall of 1731. Regardless of the timeline, Johnson left Pembroke without a degree (Boswell 1:30-47). 168.5-6. the toes of the man are looking through his shoes: See Boswell 1:46. 168.11-19. ‘Shall I be particular,’  .  .  .  threw them away’: Carlyle cites Hawkins 9-10, and his spelling of Andrew “Corbet” also follows Hawkins and not Croker, who spells the name Corbett. The passage does not appear in Croker’s edition. Croker felt Hawkins’s timeline to be inaccurate and claimed that Corbett left Pembroke before Johnson (Boswell 1:29n1). 168.21. Rev. Dr. Hall: George William Hall (1770-1843), D.D., master of Pembroke College, with whom Croker consulted extensively (see Boswell 1:xvii–xviii and 44n1). 168.21-23. ‘As far as we can judge . . . commoners and scholars’: Boswell 1:46n2. 168.27-33. ‘Johnson,’ quoth Sir John, ‘could not . . . civil polity’: Hawkins 18. Carlyle again quotes a passage in Hawkins that Croker does not include. Hawkins uses the phrase “civil policy,” not “polity.” 168.35. He must leave these butteries of Oxford: See note to 167.37-38. 169.1. ‘become perfect through suffering’: See Hebrews 2:10: “For it became him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings.”

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169.3. Pope himself has seen that Translation, and approved of it: A translation into Latin of Pope’s poem Messiah (1712), itself a version of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue (see Boswell 1:32-33). 169.4. ‘one and somewhat’: Carlyle’s translation (“Life and Writings of Werner,” Essays 1:109) of a passage from Zacharias Werner’s Die Söhne des Thals (1801-1802): “Ein und Etwas” (2:265). Later in his essay, he glosses it: “He longs to be ‘One and Somewhat’; that is, he labours under the very common complaint of egoism; cannot, in the grandeur of Beauty and Virtue, forget his own so beautiful and virtuous Self; but, amid the glories of the majestic All, is still haunted and blinded by some shadow of his own little Me” (Essays 1:113; see 112, 116). The phrase also appears in Frederick 8:21.2.33. 169.9-10. ‘a disagreement between him and Sir Wolstan Dixie, the patron of the school’: Boswell 1:53. Sir Wolstan Dixie (1701-1767) was patron of Market Bosworth, a grammar school in Leicestershire. 169.10. bread of affliction and water of affliction: 1 Kings 22:27: “And say, Thus saith the king, Put this fellow in the prison, and feed him with bread of affliction and with water of affliction, until I come in peace.” See also 2 Chronicles 18:26. 169.11-12. Sampson will grind no more in the Philistine mill: In the Old Testament narrative, after Delilah cuts off Samson’s hair, the Philistines bind him and force him to turn a millstone, but when his hair grows back he pulls down the house on himself and his captors (see Judges 16:29-31). 169.13. ‘domestic chaplaincy, so far at least as to say grace at table,’ . . . ‘treated with what he represented as intolerable harshness;’: Boswell 1:53-54. 169.20. Sylvanus Urban: The pseudonym of Edward Cave (1691-1754), printer, founder, and editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731). 169.22-30. ‘Sir,—As you appear no less sensible than your readers, . . . designs to impart’: Boswell 1:95-96. 169.32-33. ‘Mr. Edmund Cave, at St. John’s Gate, London’: In 1729 Cave (see note to 169.20) moved to a printing office located at St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell.

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169.36. ‘Better a small bush,’ say the Scotch, ‘than no shelter’: As Carlyle indicates, the saying is proverbial, but he was also probably aware that Robert Burns was fond of it, hence his attribution to the “Scotch.” In a letter of March 3, 1794, Burns described his coat of arms, which included the motto that Carlyle here Anglicizes: “Better a wee bush than nae bield.” Lockhart, whose biography of Burns Carlyle reviewed in his essay above, cites it (366). 170.1. Go thou and do likewise!: Luke 10:37: “Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.” 170.2. he can earn ‘five guineas’: Boswell 1:56. 170.3-4. Johnson’s marriage with the good Widow Porter: See note to 148.21-22. 170.6. Irish Gallowglass: Member of a Gaelic clan, first in Scotland and later in Ireland, that served as an elite military force. 170.8-9. “This is the most sensible man I ever met with”: Not a quotation from a source but the speech of the imagined woman remarking on the Gallowglass. 170.14-15. Johnson’s deathless affection for his Tetty: Johnson annually commemorated the death of his wife Tetty by praying for her and meditating on redemption (Boswell 3:389). 170.18-19. ‘At Edial near Lichfield, in Staffordshire, . . . Samuel Johnson’: Boswell 1:66. 170.21. Dr. Parr: Samuel Parr (1747-1825), schoolmaster, commonly known as the “Whig Johnson,” but without the conversational ability of Johnson or his biographer (see Boswell 4:347 and 5:22-23). 170.23-25. “ane that keeped a schule,” . . . a lith in their neck!”: Boswell 3:78-79n1; see above, note to 151.10-12. The latter phrase is Scottish for “made kings know that there was a joint in their neck.” In this passage, Croker notes Walter Scott’s story that Johnson the Tory and Auchinleck the Covenanter argued about Cromwell during the tour of the Hebrides.

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170.33. a Pactolus: Turkish river said to have gold dust on its bed because King Midas swam in it to rid himself of his golden powers. 170.34-35. Socrates, St. Paul,  .  .  .  Teachers: The Greek philosopher Socrates is known primarily through the writings of his student Plato, who recorded dialogues always involving Socrates’s instruction of his interlocutors. St. Paul is the author of many epistles instructing the early Christians about the teachings of Jesus Christ. 170.36. A shrewd Townclerk (not of Ephesus): See Acts 19:35, in which a town clerk of Ephesus appeases the people so that Paul may speak to them. 170.38. “D—n them, keep them poor!”: Not identified. 171.8. Otway could still die of hunger: Thomas Otway (1652-1685), impoverished playwright and poet, who according to legend died from choking on a piece of bread bought with money he had begged. 170.8-10. Scrogginses, whom ‘the Muse found stretched beneath a rug,’ with ‘rusty grate unconscious of a fire’: Carlyle quotes Oliver Goldsmith, “Description of an Author’s Bedchamber”: “There, in a lonely room, from bailiffs snug, / The Muse found Scroggen stretched beneath a rug: /  .  .  .  / The morn was cold, he views with keen desire / The rusty grate unconscious of a fire” (5-6, 15-16). 171.12-15. Mr. Boyce, whom we might have seen sitting up in bed, . . . in its vocation: Samuel Boyce (d. 1775), playwright and poet, author of Poems on Several Occasions (1775). Carlyle describes him as sitting up in bed wearing a blanket because, according to Johnson, Boyce had no clothes (Boswell 5:71). 171.17-18. stoico-epicurean principle of carpe diem: A combination of the Stoic principle of self-control as the secret to overcoming emotions and achieving happiness and the Epicurean principle of the pursuit of pleasure by means of living modestly and limiting desire. Carpe diem is Latin for “seize the day,” from Horace, Odes 1.9. 171.22-23. no mention of Illuminations  .  .  .  arrived in it: Johnson arrived in London as a relative unknown in early March 1737. Boswell writes, “How he employed himself upon his first coming to London is not particularly known” (Boswell 1:72-73).

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171.26. lodgings in Exeter Street, Strand: See Boswell 1:73. 171.26-28. Coronation Pontiff also,  .  .  .  Vatican of St. John’s Gate: Edward Cave (see note to 169.20). 171.30-172.11. ‘Cave’s temper,’ says our Knight Hawkins . . . his curiosity gratified’: Carlyle’s footnote reference, “Hawkins, pp. 46-50,” indicates that he was using the second edition, which, like the first, was published in 1787. Reprinted by Boswell 1:85-86, who in n. 1 identifies the person denoted by dashes as John Hawkins (see note to 149.19). 172.8. Mr. Browne: Isaac Hawkins Browne (1706-1760), poet, author of parodies entitled A Pipe of Tobacco (1735-1736) and of a collection of poems devoted to tobacco, Of Smoking (1736); see also Boswell 2:214, 464, and 3:35. 172.33-34. passing from the protection of Patrons into that of the Public: Johnson’s Dictionary, for example, had no patrons (see Boswell 1:274). According to Johnson, “Every man believes that mistresses are unfaithful, and patrons capricious” (Boswell 1:370). 172.34-35. no longer to supply its necessities by laudatory Dedications to the Great, but by judicious Bargains with the Booksellers: By 1756, “the booksellers, who, by his own confession, were his best friends, had their eyes upon Johnson,” who had earned much of his income by “furnishing magazines, reviews, and even newspapers, with literary intelligence, and the authors of books, who could not write them for themselves, with dedications and prefaces” (Boswell 1:308; see also 2:213, 512, and 3:479). 172.36-37. ‘lord of the lion heart and eagle eye’: Tobias Smollett (17211771), Ode to Independence (2). 173.14-15. Tasso, with a Gerusalemme . . . a Duke of Ferrara: Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), Italian poet, author of La Gerusalemme liberata (1581). Alfonso II d’Este (1533-1597), Duke of Ferrara (1559), patron of Tasso. 173.15. Shakspeare to his Southampton: Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton (1573-1624), patron of Shakespeare. 173.19. that became disgraceful for a Dryden: John Dryden (16311700), poet, playwright, and critic. According to John Barnard, “Dryden’s

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grandiose and extended praise of patrons in his dedications appears to be egregiously dishonest (if ingenious) flattery, a view forcibly supported by Johnson” (199). 173.21. Mecænasship: That is, “patronage” (see note to 63.6). 173.31. Puffery: Inflated praise, especially in advertising, a frequent target of Carlyle. In “Signs of the Times,” he had written “Literature, too, has its Paternoster-row mechanism, its Trade dinners, its Editorial conclaves, and huge subterranean, puffing bellows; so that books are not only printed, but, in a great measure, written and sold, by machinery” (Essays 2:62). This view was reinforced by his frustrations with finding a publisher for Sartor Resartus, which he had completed in July 1831, and, by the time he was writing this essay, had circulated to several publishers without success. In his journal between October 22 and 24, 1831, he had written: “Coburn and Bentley the Booksellers are known to expend Ten thousand pounds annually (I had this from Dilke, who had it from their man of business) on what they call ‘advertising,’ more commonly called puffing” (Two Note Books 208-9). In a letter of July 31, 1832, he would complain that “Bookselling, slain by Puffery, is dead, and will not come alive again, tho worms for some time may live on the carcase” (Letters 6:195). For later comments on puffery, see Sartor Resartus 1.2.11; “Characteristics,” Essays 3:23; and Past and Present 3.1.143, the last of which comments on the literal puffing up of a “Hat seven-feet high” to serve as an advertisement. 173.35. toga virilis: Latin for “manly gown,” from the ancient Roman practice of men beginning to wear a toga when they came of age at sixteen. 174.3. copyright in England: Copyright was established by the implementation of the Statute of Anne (1710). It primarily protected the right of booksellers; the first law to protect authors was not passed until 1842. 174.6-9. the original Covenant, stipulating to produce Paradise Lost . . . in Chancery Lane: William Pickering, who resided at 57 Chancery Lane, had acquired the contract between John Milton and the printer Samuel Symmons, dated April 27, 1667, which provided Milton with an immediate payment of £5 for Paradise Lost and an additional £5 for each of the first three editions of thirteen hundred copies once they were sold, for a total of £20. The third edition was not sold out until after Milton’s death in 1674, but there is a record of his wife Elizabeth receiving a payment of £8 from Symmons in exchange for relinquishing all rights to the work.

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174.16-18. the Mecænases proper in the West End of London; and the Mecænases virtual of St. John’s Gate and Paternoster Row: The former would be wealthy patrons who lived in the West End of London. The latter would include publishers such as Edward Cave (see note to 169.20) in St. John’s Gate; Paternoster Row was the location of several London publishing houses. 174.22. Osborne even required to be knocked down: When one day as Johnson was perusing a book, Thomas Osborne (1704?–1767), bookseller in Gray’s Inn, London, accused him of wasting time, the incensed and cursing Johnson knocked his employer down with a conveniently located folio (Hawkins 150, Boswell 1:129-30). 174.25. the wages of sin: Romans 6:23: “For the wages of sin is death.” 174.28. Lord Chesterfield: Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773), politician, diplomatist, and rather unsuccessful patron of literature and the arts. Chesterfield’s attempt to praise Johnson’s Dictionary, which he published in The World 100-101 (November 28 and December 5, 1754), led to an indignant reply from Johnson (see next note). 174.31-176.16. ‘Seven years, my Lord, have now past . . . Sam. Johnson’: The second half of Johnson’s letter to the Earl of Chesterfield (Boswell 1:249-50). 175.20-23. ‘with loose horseman’s coat, and such a great bushy wig . . . the alehouse at Clerkenwell’: Hawkins 50 (see Boswell 1:86). 175.27. mere hollow vizards: An allusion to the masks worn in ancient Greek theater. 175.29. Player (ὑποκριτὴσ): Greek for actor or player; the English word “hypocrite” is derived from this Greek word, with an emphasis on the idea that actors dissemble. 175.34. idol-cavern: See Francis Bacon, Novum organum (1620), which includes a section entitled “The Idols.” In Aphorism 42 Bacon comments on the “Idols of the den,” or “cavern,” which stem from each person’s particular associations and education and serve to distort and corrupt the perception of nature.

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175.35-176.1. What is Truth? said jesting Pilate: The opening line of Bacon’s essay “Of Truth” (1625); Bacon refers to Pilate’s response to Jesus’s assertion that he was born to “bear witness to the truth” ( John 18:37-38). 175.38-39. ‘Love’s being a native of the rocks’ actually has ‘a meaning’: “Native of the rocks” refers to Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Eighth Eclogue: “I know thee, Love; in Desarts thou wast bred” (43). Croker notes, “The editor confesses that he does not see the object of this allusion; if some more ingenious eye should discover a meaning, it must still be admitted to be pedantic” (Boswell, 1:250n1). 176.2-3. the Phœnix in rainbow plumage, poured, from her glittering beak, such tones of sweetest melody: The phoenix of ancient mythology is a bird with rainbow plumage that periodically, after a long life (see “waxing old”), burns up and is reborn from its own ashes. The song of the phoenix does not feature in most versions of the myth, but there is a mention of Apollo listening to it sing. Carlyle here associates it with truth, which again is not an element of the mythical tradition but perhaps associated with its eternal life. See also the chapter of Sartor Resartus entitled “The Phœnix” (3.5), in which Carlyle envisions the regeneration of society and links it to palingenesia (see also 187.26 and note). 176.11-12. French Revolutions, Reform Bills: France experienced revolutions in 1789 and 1830. The Reform Bill of 1832, which eliminated rotten boroughs and extended the eligibility to vote, was at the moment of publication working its way through Parliament, as Carlyle noted in a letter of February 16, 1832 (6:128). 176.17. ‘one flesh’: See Genesis 2:24, Matthew 19:5-6, etc. 176.23-24. no fixed pole-star any longer visible: The pole star (also loadstar) is the North Star, which travelers can use to orient themselves. The presence or absence of the loadstar is used by Carlyle to indicate the presence or absence of guiding principles. See, for example, Sartor Resartus: “My Loadstars were blotted out; in that canopy of grim fire shone no star” (2.6.118). 176.31-32. Bolingbrokes and Tolands: Henry St. John, first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751), politician and author of Reflections Concerning Innate Moral Principles (1752) and several essays that articulate his brand of religious skepticism. For John Toland, see note to 120.22-23.

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176.33. Bayle: See note to 120.24. 176.34. Voltaire: See note to 75.title and Carlyle’s “Voltaire” (above) generally. He was born in 1694, Johnson, as Carlyle notes below, in 1711. 176.35. Hume: See notes to 52.2-4 and 158.24-27. 177.4. Trulliber: Parson Trulliber, a character in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), who spends six days a week as a pig farmer. 177.9-10. Whigs struggling blindly forward, Tories holding blindly back: That is, the Whigs, the reform-minded political party that had dominated British politics during the reigns of George I and II, and the Tories, the more conservative-minded party that regained power with the ascension of George III. 177.13. he must be a Jacobite, and worshipper of the Divine Right: On Jacobites, see note to 52.1. Divine Right is the principle that a king in direct succession has a divine right to the throne and that he is responsible only to God, not to the people; in the seventeenth century this doctrine was supported by advocates of the monarchy and challenged by the parliamentarians and Puritans. On February 7, 1831, Carlyle had written in his journal: “Kings do reign by divine right, or not at all. The King that were God-appointed, would be an emblem of God, and could demand all obedience from us. But where is the King?” (Two Note Books 185; see also Sartor Resartus 3.7.183). 177.17-18. The English Nation had rebelled against a Tyrant; and, by the hands of religious tyrannicides, exacted stern vengeance of him: Charles I (1600-1649), whose taxation without parliamentary approval, attempts to move the English Church back toward Rome, and staunch belief in his Divine Right to rule led in 1642 to the English Civil War. Charles was defeated and beheaded by the forces loyal to Parliament, who were mostly Puritans. 177.19. ‘like an infant Hercules, strangled serpents in its cradle’: As an infant, the Greek hero Hercules strangled two serpents that Hera, the jealous wife of Zeus, sent to kill him. Carlyle is probably recalling Boswell’s comment that “Johnson is the Hercules who strangled serpents in his cradle” (2:245).

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177.22-24. the King-killers were all swept away,  .  .  .  ‘Glorious Revolution’: Between the restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the end of 1662, thirteen individuals deemed to be regicides were executed, nineteen were sentenced to life imprisonment, and three had their bodies dug up and desecrated. In 1688, James II was overthrown and William III of Orange became joint monarch with his wife Mary II. The relatively nonviolent quality of this transference of power led to its being called the Glorious Revolution. 177.29. heroic Puritans and heroic Cavaliers: Opponents and supporters of Charles II, respectively. 177.33-34. Whiggism, ever since a Charles and his Jeffries  .  .  .  Russel or Sidney to meddle with: George Jeffreys, first Baron Jeffreys (16451689), Lord Judge of Chester, convicted William Russell, Lord Russell (1639-1683), of conspiring in the Rye House plot to foment rebellion. As Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, Jeffreys convicted Algernon Sydney (1622-1683) for allegedly plotting the death of the king. Both men were executed and came to be regarded as martyrs for the Whig cause. 177.35-36. Radicalism: Carlyle refers to the politics of his own era and several related movements both in the working classes and among supporters of reform, notably the philosophic radicals. 178.1. the final expulsion of the Stuarts: The Glorious Revolution (see note to 177.22-24) resulted in the deposing of the last Stuart king, James II, though his daughter, Anne, was the last reigning Stuart. 178.10. Quackery: Like puffery (see note to 173.31), a frequent target of Carlyle’s scorn to which he linked it in a journal entry of October 22-24, 1831: “It [puffery] is rich also, stupid and ignorant, beyond example; thus, in all respects, the true Goshen of Quacks” (Two Note Books 209). He would soon focus his essay “Count Cagliostro” on the idea that Cagliostro was the epitome of the quackery of the eighteenth century, an idea he had broached in “Characteristics” (Essays 3:17). 179.3. Respectability: See note to 72.10. 179.5. a Burke, or a Wilkes: Edmund Burke (1729/30-1797), politician and author whose reputation as a moral guide was held widely in Carlyle’s time. John Wilkes (1725-1797), politician notorious for his womanizing

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and lack of principles, who was expelled from the House of Commons on multiple occasions. Wilkes was known to Johnson, who wrote a pamphlet entitled The False Alarm (1770) in which he argued that expelling a member of Parliament was synonymous with permanently excluding that person (see Boswell 2:114-15). 179.18. ‘twofold Problem’: Carlyle quotes himself from earlier in the essay (172.16). 179.22. ‘provision for the day that was passing over him’: Carlyle cites the preface to Johnson’s Dictionary (1755): “Much of my life has been lost under the pressure of disease; much has been trifled away; and much has been spent in provision for the day that was passing over me” (quoted in Boswell 5:453). There is a copy of a two-volume 1820 edition of the dictionary, with Jane Baillie Welsh’s bookplate, at the Carlyle House, Chelsea (Tarr 255). 179.34. Phlegethon and Fleet-ditch: The Phlegethon is one of the rivers that run through Hades in Greek mythology. Carlyle associates Fleet Street, synonymous with the newspapers published there and the writers who wrote for them and also resided there, with Fleet Ditch, or the River Fleet, which was notoriously filthy. See next note. 179.37-38. ‘mother of dead dogs’: An allusion to Fleet Street (see preceding note). On January 10, 1832, while he was at work on this essay, he wrote in a letter that British literature is a “boundless ‘mother of dead dogs’” (Letters 6:87; see 258). A month later, on February 16, he wrote about placing the article: “So this is the way I have adjusted myself: I say, will you on your Dog’s carrion-cart take this ‘Article’ of mine, and sell it unchanged? With the Carrion-cart itself I have and can have no personal concern” (Letters 6:124). Frederick W. Hilles traces Carlyle’s use of the phrase, as well as its association with Fleet Street, to a likely source in Pope’s Dunciad: “To where Fleet Ditch, with disemboguing streams, / Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames” (2.271-72). See also “Count Cagliostro,” Historical Essays 44; French Revolution 1:1.4.21, 2:1.3.20; Past and Present 4.3.256. 180.5. assurance of a Man!: Hamlet 3.4.61-62: “Where every god did seem to set his seal / To give the world an assurance of a man.” 180.6-7. confusion worse confounded: Paradise Lost 2.996.

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180.10. die as miserably as any Boyce: See note to 171.12-15. 180.13. ‘redeeming the time’: Colossians 4.5: “Walk in wisdom toward them that are without, redeeming the time” and Ephesians 5.15-16: “See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” 180.17. the gaining of the whole world set against the losing of one’s own soul: Matthew 16.26: “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” 180.19. Pit of Tophet: Hell, as in Jeremiah 7:31-32 and Isaiah 30:33. 180.28-29. waxing old as doth a garment: See Isaiah 51:6, Psalms 102:26, and Hebrews 1:11. This passage resonates with the clothes metaphor of the recently drafted Sartor Resartus, in which Carlyle also made this allusion (e.g., 3.3.165; see also 1.11.56 and note). 180.30. Pillar of Fire: The presence of God manifested in the pillar of fire so the Israelites could travel at night as they left Egypt (see Exodus 13:21-22). 180.30. witnesses: In this context, “witness” is used in the sense of martyr, one who gives witness to one’s faith through giving up one’s life. 180.36. inferior lights: The sun and the moon. 181.2-3. ‘in the Church of St. Clement Danes’: Boswell 2:5. The church, located on the Strand, that Johnson preferred and attended regularly. 181.9. quit him like a man: See 1 Samuel 4:9: “Be strong, and quit yourselves like men, O ye Philistines.” 181.21-22. an open eye and heart: See “Biography,” above 140.26-27. 181.29-30. Thus would the world,  .  .  .  into a coherent Whole: On the vision of history as an approximation of the whole observed from its parts, see Two Note Books 161; “On History,” Historical Essays 8.17 and note.

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181.36. Kerne: Like the Gallowglass (see note to 170.6), the Kerne is an Irish soldier, though in this case coming from the poorer classes. 181.38. hewing of wood and drawing of water: See Joshua 9:21: “Let them be hewers of wood and drawers of water unto all the congregation” (see also Deuteronomy 29:11). 182.7. Senate-of-Lilliput Debates: Johnson wrote on debates in both houses of Parliament for the Gentleman’s Magazine and entitled them “Debates in the Senate of Lilliput” (Boswell 1:87 and 5:485). Lilliput is the land of small, and small-minded, people in Swift’s Gulliver's Travels (1726). 182.7. Printer’s Devils: See note to 141.10-11. 182.8. impransus: Latin for “without dinner” (see Boswell 1:107). 182.9-11. a grain of mustard-seed cast into its Nile-waters, . . . fowls of heaven may lodge: One of Jesus’s parables compares heaven to “a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and cast into his garden; and it grew, and waxed a great tree; and the fowls of the air lodged in the branches of it” (Luke 13:18; see Matthew 13:31-32, Mark 4:31-32). Note that there is no mention of casting the seed on the Nile River. 182.13. Fourth Estate: Carlyle’s first use of the term “Fourth Estate.” Carlyle was among the first to use the term to designate the newspaper press, rather than, as had been usual until this time, the common people (the other estates being the Lords Spiritual, the Lords Temporal, and the Commons). Carlyle later, in On Heroes, attributed the modern usage to Burke: “Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than all” (141). However, no such statement has been traced in Burke’s writings. Carlyle might instead be recalling Macaulay, who wrote that “the gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm” (Edinburgh Review 48 [1828]: 165). He would title a chapter of French Revolution “The Fourth Estate” (1:6.5). 182.16. ‘behind the screen’: Boswell 1:139n1. 182.17-18. ‘great bushy wig’: See note to 175.21-23.

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182.18. ‘made a happy man of ’: Boswell 1:139n1. 182.20. ‘never pass without veneration’: Not identified, possibly referring to Carlyle himself. See Carlyle’s footnote. 182.22. that his Wife must leave him: Hawkins relates a story that Johnson’s relationship with the poet and playwright Richard Savage led to a brief separation with his wife (89). Croker claims that money trouble rather than Savage was the cause of the separation (Boswell 1:140n1). 182.27. ‘could not remember the day he had passed free from pain’: The precise quotation is not identified, but see Boswell: “He says he scarcely passed one day without pain after his twentieth year” (5:371) and Hawkins: “He  .  .  .  laboured under some secret bodily infirmities that gave him occasion once to say to me, that he knew not what it was to be totally free of pain” (395). 182.37-38. archangel though in ruins: See Milton, Paradise Lost: “All her original brightness, nor appeared / Less than archangel ruined” (1.592-93). 183.5-10. ‘He said, a man might live in a garret at eighteen pence a-week; . . . and paid visits’: Boswell 1:74. 183.12. circulating-library: Circulating libraries, which loaned books for a fee, began to appear in the first half of the eighteenth century and grew in popularity through much of the nineteenth century. 183.12. Giaours and Harolds: George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Giaour, a Fragment of a Turkish Tale (1813), and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (18121818); the heroes of these poems suffer from disillusionment and tend toward melancholy. 183.13-184.2. ‘when Dr. Johnson, one day, read his own Satire, . . . Hercules comically enough’: Boswell 1:169 cites Piozzi 38-39 as the source of this anecdote and presents it in square brackets. The “Satire” is Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes” (1749), an imitation of Juvenal’s “Tenth Satire.” In it, Johnson writes of the scholar: “Deign on the passing World to turn thine Eyes, / And pause a while from Learning to be wise; / There mark what Ills the Scholar’s Life assail, / Toil, Envy, Want, the Garrett, and the Jail” (158-60).

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183.15-16. Mr. Thrale’s family: Henry Thrale (1728/29?–1781), brewer and politician who was married to Hester Lynch Salisbury (1741-1821), writer and publisher of Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson (1786). Both were close friends of Johnson’s until his death (see Boswell 1:506-10). 183.16. Mr. Scott: George Lewis Scott (1708-1780), mathematician, subpreceptor to the royal family, and London commissioner of excise. 183.17. Hercules: According to legend, Hercules, hero of Greek mythology, suffered from madness. 183. 21-22. bricks it was in Lincoln’s Inn Buildings, that Ben Jonson’s hand and trowel laid: Ben Jonson (1572-1637), poet, playwright, and actor. According to Thomas Fuller, Jonson, who had apprenticed with his stepfather as a bricklayer, “helped in the new structure of Lincoln’s Inn, when, having a trowel in his hand, he had a book in his pocket” (2:425). 183.23-24. A Gentleman of the British Museum is said to have made drawings of all his residences: Either drawn or collected by John Thomas Smith, keeper of prints and drawings at the British Museum (see Boswell 5:380). 183.24. the blessing of Old Mortality: Robert Paterson (1716?–1801), stonemason, known as “Old Mortality.” Walter Scott, who met Paterson in 1793, used his story as the basis of his novel Old Mortality (1816). A follower of the Cameronians, Paterson spent many years traveling around southern Scotland repairing the graves of martyred Covenanters. According to Scott, he earned his nickname Old Mortality “from his converse among the dead” (Tales of My Landlord 2:18). 183.24-38. We ourselves, not without labour and risk,  .  .  .  it’s all one to me”: Johnson completed his Dictionary during the time he lived at 17 Gough Square (1748-1759), which still stands. In a journal entry written between January 13 and January 18, 1832, Carlyle writes: “I went one morning searching for Johnson’s places of abode. Found, with difficulty, the house in Gough (Goff ) Square where the Dictionary was composed: the landlord, whom Glen and I incidentally inquired of, was just scraping his feet at the door; invited us to walk in; showed us the garret rooms &c. (of which he seemed to have the obscurest traditions; taking Johnson for a schoolmaster!); interested us much; but at length (dog of a fellow!)

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began to hint that he had all these rooms to let as lodgings” (Two Note Books 237). 183.36. Tempus edax rerum! Yet ferax also: Tempus edax rerum is Latin for “time, devourer of all things,” from Ovid’s Metamorphosis 15:234. Carlyle’s addition of “ferax” would change it to “time, bearing fruit of all things.” 184.4-5. ‘One day it shall delight you also to remember labour done!’: Not identified. 184.7. Savage and he wander homeless through the streets: Richard Savage (1697/8-1743), poet and playwright. According to Boswell, Johnson told Sir Joshua Reynolds that one night as he and Savage walked around St. James Square because they could not afford lodging, they “resolved they would stand by their country” (Boswell 1:140). Johnson was the author of Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage, Son of the Earl Rivers (1744) (see Boswell 1:137-43). 184.11. they “will stand by their country,” the two ‘Back-woods-men’ of the Brick Desart!: Carlyle alludes to the irony of their Toryism by referring to Johnson and Savage as “Backwoodsmen” (members of the House of Lords who live in rural areas and rarely attend) of the “Brick Desert,” that is, London. See preceding note. 184.20-21. heavenly Constantine’s-Banner . . . conquer under: The Roman emperor Constantine (272-337), who converted the Roman Empire to Christianity. Various accounts report that before the battle of the Milvian bridge (312), he had a vision that he would make a banner, called the labarum, upon which the letters chi and rho create a cross; his vision also included the phrase in hoc signo vinces, “in this sign you will conquer.” 184.29. no man to be killed by a review: Carlyle alludes to the claim, made by Percy Bysshe Shelley in the preface to his elegy Adonais (1821), that John Keats (1795-1821) was killed by the despair resulting from the scathing review of his Endymion (1818): “The savage criticism on his Endymion, which appeared in the Quarterly Review, produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind; the agitation thus originated ended in the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs; a rapid consumption ensued, and the succeeding acknowledgements from more candid critics, of the true greatness of his powers, were ineffectual to heal the wound

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thus wantonly inflicted” (22). The reviewer was no other than John Wilson Croker (see note to 145.9) in the Quarterly Review 19 (1818): 204-8. 184.36-37. “Sir, if they should cease to talk of me, I must starve”: Carlyle imagines the author’s sentiment. 185.8. ‘light-nimbus’: A halo as depicted in paintings of the saints or of Jesus Christ. 185.18. like Homer’s peasants, ‘bless the useful light’: Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer’s Iliad: “The conscious swains, rejoicing in the sight, / Eye the blue vault, and bless the useful light” (8.697-98). 185.20. vomissement du Diable!: Vomiting of the Devil. 185.26. ‘An inspired-idiot,’ Goldsmith: Carlyle quotes Horatio (Horace) Walpole’s (1678-1757) opinion of Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774), poet, novelist, and dramatist (see Boswell 1:422n3). 185.27-29. ‘he loved not Johnson. . . “you harrow up my very soul!”’: Boswell 1:423, who quotes Hawkins 416-17. 185.30. ‘gooseberry-fool’: Goldsmith’s description of himself in his Retaliation: A Poem (1774) (16). 185.33-34. the Author of the genuine Vicar of Wakefield, nill he, will he, must needs fly towards such a mass of genuine Manhood: Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield (1766) was one of the most popular novels of the eighteenth century, known for the sunny disposition of its hero, the vicar. “Nill he, will he,” is an archaic version of willy-nilly, whether one wills it or not. 185.34-35. Dr. Minor keep gyrating round Dr. Major: Croker reports that the playwright George Graham gave these names to Goldsmith and Johnson respectively (Boswell 2:330). 185.36. chivalrous Topham Beauclerk: Topham Beauclerk (1739-1780), book collector, friend of Boswell and Johnson, original member of the club formed by Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1764. 185.37. Bennet Langton: Bennet Langton (1736?–1801), friend of Beau-

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clerk’s at Oxford, through whom he befriended Johnson. Langton served in the Lincolnshire militia, waited on Johnson on his deathbed, and succeeded him as professor of ancient literature at the Royal Academy in 1788 (see Boswell 1:231-33). 186.1-5. ‘could not stop his merriment, . . . from Temple-bar to Fleetditch!’: Boswell 2:247. 186.6. Thrale: See note to 183.15-16. 186.7. Thralia. Hester Lynch Thrale (see note to 183.15-16). During his trip to the Hebrides (September 6, 1773), Johnson composed an “Ode to Mrs. Thrale” in which he asks, “Quot modus mecum, quid agat, requiro, / Thralia dulcis?” (How measure with me what you are asking, sweet Thralia) (11-12). The ode ends, “Thraliæ discant resonare nomen / Littora Skiæ” (Thralia the shores of Skye learn to resound your name) (19-20). See Boswell 2:388. 186.11. usquebaugh: Gaelic for whiskey. 186.11. “Your health, Toctor Shonson!”: Boswell 2:487. 186.12-14. ‘Mr. F. Lewis,’ . . . hung loose upon society!”: Boswell 1:202-3. Boswell says, as Carlyle implies, that he knows nothing more about him. 186.13. res gestæ: Latin for “things done.” 186.14. Stat Parvi nominis umbra: Latin for “stands in the shadow of a small name.” Carlyle refers to the subtitle to The Letters of Junius: Stat nominis umbra (1772), a series of letters by an anonymous polemicist that attacked George III and his policies. Johnson characterized Junius in his pamphlet Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting the Falkland Islands (1771) (see Boswell 2:121-22). Johnson suspected Edmund Burke of being Junius, but Burke denied it (see Boswell 4:246). 186.15-16. Pension of three hundred pounds: See Boswell 1:361. 186.19. as some ancient slaves were, who had their ears bored: See Exodus 21:6: “His master shall bore his ear through with an aul; and he shall serve him for ever.” See also Deuteronomy 15:17.

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186.21. ‘Names do not change Things’: Not identified. Carlyle may have in mind contemporary speculations on the relationship between words and the things they represent. 186.27. Horse-subduers, and Game-destroyers: Members of the landed classes, especially the aristocracy, who entertained themselves with horse riding and game hunting; “game-destroyers” plays on “game-preserver,” the more usual epithet, in reference to a landowner’s right to preserve game on his own land in part through game laws that punished poaching. In a journal entry of June 30, 1830, he had complained that “[a] man with £200,000 a year eats the whole fruit of 6,666 men’s labour thro’ a year; for you can get a stout spademan to work and maintain himself for that sum of £30. Thus we have private individuals whose wages are equal to the wages of 7 or 8 thousand other individuals: what do those highly beneficed individuals do to society for their wages? Kill partridges. Can this last? No, by the soul that is in man, it cannot and will not and shall not!—” (Two Note Books 159-60). In Sartor Resartus, he had created the satirical figure Count Zähdarm, who, according to his epitaph, shot five thousand partridges in his lifetime (2.4.130). See also “Burns,” above 30.6 and note; “Voltaire,” above 80.21-22; “Corn-Law Rhymes,” below 209.17; Past and Present 3.3.149, 3.8.180. 186.28. Primates of England: The archbishops of Canterbury, who serve as the head of the Church of England. 186.36. scot-and-lot-paying: In general those required to pay the municipal tax, sometimes entitling them to the franchise. 186.37. remunerated like a Supervisor of Excise!: Like Robert Burns (see notes to 35.15-16 and 167.14). 187.6. Edmund Cave and Tobacco Browne: Edward Cave and Isaac Browne (see notes to 169.20 and 172.8). 187.7. a Reynolds and a Burke: Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), artist and later founding president of the Royal Academy (1768), and Edmund Burke (see note to 179.5). 187.12-13. ‘What I gave I have; what I spent I had!’: Boswell 3:536, where Johnson gives it as “What I gave, that I have; what I spent, that I had; what I left, that I lost.” Carlyle wrote in his journal in January

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1832, while working on this essay and shortly after the entry recounting his search for Johnson’s dwelling at Gough Square (note to 183.24-38): “‘What I gave I have; what I spent I had, what I left I lost.’ Epitaph at Doncaster(?) from Johnson’s Letters. The first, and only true, clause of it was long ago a perception of my own” (Two Note Books 238-39). 187.17-18. ‘took him away’: Johnson died on December 13, 1784 (see Boswell 5:344-45). The phrase “took him away” is not in Boswell or Hawkins. 187.26. palingenesia: Regeneration or rebirth. In the recently drafted Sartor Resartus, Carlyle depicts Teufelsdröckh as having written the book “On the Palingenesia, or Newbirth of Society; which volume, as treating practically of the Wear, Destruction, and Re-texture of Spiritual Tissues, or Garments, forms, properly speaking, the Transcendental or ultimate Portion of this my Work on Clothes, and is already in a state of forwardness” (3.2.160). In a later chapter, he links it to the figure of the phoenix (see note to 176.2-3): “In a word, do we at length stand safe in the far region of Poetic Creation and Palingenesia, where that Phœnix DeathBirth of Human Society, and of all Human things, appears possible, is seen to be inevitable?” (3.9.197). 187.36. thread this labyrinthic Time: An allusion to the thread that, in Greek myth, Ariadne supplied to Theseus to aid him in his escape from the labyrinth of King Minos. 188.1-2. ‘in a world where there is much to be done, and little to be known’: Carlyle quotes with minor variants Johnson’s prayer entitled “against Inquisitive and Perplexing Thoughts” (Boswell 5:285). 188.16. last of the Tories was Johnson: not Burke, as is often said: Not identified. 188.35. Pitt Administrations: The Tory administrations of William Pitt the Younger (1759-1806), prime minister (1783-1801; 1804-1806). 188.36. Continental Subsidies: Pitt the Younger granted subsidies to European sovereigns during the Napoleonic Wars. 188.36. Waterloo victories: see note to 78.24. 189.1-2. England had its Hume, as France had its Voltaires and Did-

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erots: On Hume, see note to 52.2-4. On Voltaire, see “Voltaire,” above and note to 75.title. On Diderot, see “Diderot,” below and note to 113.8. All were skeptical thinkers. 189.9. Chalk-Farm: Popular dueling ground starting in the late eighteenth century. Carlyle was likely aware that Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review who published several of his articles, had in 1806 arranged to fight a duel with the poet Thomas Moore there but was prevented from doing so by the authorities. 189.15-16. ‘plucked geese of the neighbourhood’: Carlyle quotes his 1827 translation of Jean Paul’s Army-Chaplain Schmelzle’s Journey to Flætz (1809): “Especially so good a lowly-born housewife as my Berga, conscious perhaps rather of her metallic than of her spiritual treasure, would still wish at banquets to be mistress of some seat or other, and so in place to overtop this or that plucked goose of the neighbourhood” (German Romance 2:174; Sämmtliche Werke 5:54-55). Presumably the coward is himself a plucked goose in accord with the idea that the goose bumps of a plucked goose are a sign of fear or cowardice. 189.20. losels: Scoundrels or profligates, “those who are lost.” 189.21-2. every one of whom, if once dressed in red, and trained a little,  .  .  .  have the soul blown out of him: In a journal entry of August 1830, Carlyle had written: “You see two men fronting each other; one sits dressed in red cloth, the other stands dressed in thread-bare blue; the first says to the other: Be hanged and anatomised!—and it is forthwith put in execution, and the matter rests not till Number Two is a skeleton! Whence comes it? These men have no physical hold of each other, they are not in contact; each of the Bailiffs &c. is included within his own skin, and not hooked to any other” (Two Note Books 160-61). In the recently drafted Sartor Resartus, Teufelsdröckh expresses a similar sentiment (1.9.46-47). 189.27. Newgate: Newgate Prison in London, where from 1783 public hangings took place. 189.32. Irish Whiskerando: Don Ferolo Whiskerandos, a heavily bearded character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Critic (1779). In the conclusion of the play, which satirizes dramatic conventions, Whiskerandos becomes engaged in a sword fight over a woman and apparently receives a mortal wound (3.1). Note that, as his name suggests, Sheridan’s char-

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acter is not Irish; Carlyle is thus referring generally to a belligerent and bewhiskered man. 189.32-33. English Game-cock: Carlyle contrasts the Irish Whiskerando to an English gamecock, that is, a fighting cock or generally a belligerent Englishman. 189.37. Waterloos and Peterloos: See notes to 78.24 and 82.31. 190.1-2. Saxon Invasion under Hengist: Hengst, or Hengist (d. 488?), and his brother Horsa (d. 455) were traditionally considered the leaders of the first Anglo-Saxon invasions of England. 190.7. ‘the bravest of the brave’: A commonplace epithet. 190.10. John Milton, no braver heart: John Milton’s polemical writings against Charles I nearly led to his execution. 190.13-14. No Giant Despair, no Golgotha-Death-dance or Sorcerer’s-Sabbath of ‘Literary Life in London’: The Giant Despair, owner of Doubting Castle, in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). For Golgotha, see note to 139.30-31. The “Sorcerer’s Sabbath,” April 30, known in Germany as Walpurgisnacht, was according to tradition observed by a meeting of witches on the Brocken, the highest peak in the Harz Mountains of central Germany. ‘Literary Life in London’ is unidentified. 190.19-21. tarrying by the wine-cup, and crying, Aha, the wine is red: See Proverbs 23:30-31: “They that tarry long at the wine; they that go to seek mixed wine. Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his colour in the cup, when it moveth itself aright.” For an example of Boswell’s wine drinking, see Boswell 3:483-84. 190.23. ‘talent of silence’: Carlyle frequently quoted this phrase, which alludes to the commonplace notion that the English are more taciturn than other European nationalities because of their talent for silence. Leigh Hunt attributed the phrase to Madame de Stael, who used it to describe the Earl of Liverpool (Hunt 210). In Sartor Resartus, which he had drafted by July 1831, Carlyle had written: “Has Teufelsdröckh to be put in mind that, nearly related to the impossible talent of Forgetting, stands that talent of Silence, which even travelling Englishmen manifest?” (1.7.39). He had subsequently used a variant of the phrase in a letter of

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August 30 and the phrase itself on September 8, 1831, in reference to Jane Welsh Carlyle (Letters 5:387 and 408). He also used it in “Characteristics,” written later that autumn (Essays 3:17). See also On Heroes 158 and Past and Present 2.11.99. On silence, see 161.38-162.4 and note. 190.25-26. ‘endured fifty years of wretchedness with unshaken fortitude’: Anna Williams (see note to 153.10-12) lived with Johnson for thirty years. In a letter of September 22, 1783, Johnson wrote of her: “She sustained forty years of misery with steady fortitude” (Boswell 5:125). 190.27. Prison-house and Doubting-castle: “Prison-house” may allude to Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (1807): “Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy” (68-69). Doubting Castle is the home of the Giant Despair in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (see note to 190.13-14). 190.27-28. ‘His great business,’ he would profess, ‘was to escape from himself ’: Boswell 1:116. 190.29. ‘with frigid indifference, having little to hope or to fear’: Carlyle quotes the concluding sentence of Johnson’s preface to his Dictionary (1:10; quoted by Boswell 1:282). Carlyle substitutes “indifference” for Johnson’s “tranquillity.” 190.30-31. ‘wearied of his stay, yet offended at his departure’: Not identified. 190.31-32. ‘By popular delusion,’ remarks he . . . will rise into renown’: Carlyle paraphrases a passage from Johnson’s preface to his Dictionary: “Illiterate writers will at one time or other, by publick infatuation, rise into renown, who, not knowing the original import of words, will use them with colloquial licentiousness, confound distinction, and forget propriety” (9). 191.17-18. the age of Wilkes and Whitefield: Two sides of the era represented by the notorious John Wilkes (see note to 179.5) and the popular Methodist preacher George Whitefield (1714-1770). Johnson held Whitefield, who was a classmate of his at Pembroke College, in rather low esteem (see Boswell 1:45).

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191.18-19. lives, moves, and has his being: See Acts 27:28: “For in him we live, and move, and have our being.” 191.21-22. ‘Clear your mind of Cant’: Boswell 5:102. 191.29. ‘popular delusion’: See 190.31-32. 191.33-34. Motive for writing he had none, as he often said, but money: Boswell cites Hawkins, who reports that Johnson wrote “two satirical pamphlets” that were “in some degree prompted by the principle which Johnson frequently declared to be the only true genuine motive to writing, namely, pecuniary profit” (1:114). 192.2. A labourer that was worthy of his hire: Luke 10:7: “For the labourer is worthy of his hire.” 192.3. not as an eye-servant, but as one found faithful!: See the parable of the faithful servant in Luke 17:12-25, esp. 17; see also Matthew 25:21-23. 192.6. Blacking Bottle: Blacking is shoe polish. 192.7-8. the seventh Apocalyptic Bladder (of Puffery) had not been rent open: Carlyle parodies the opening of the seven seals and the apocalyptic “vials” in the book of Revelation. As his references elsewhere to “blown bladders” indicate, he probably has in mind here a dried animal bladder that has been inflated. See “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter Again,” Essays 3:96; French Revolution 2:1.3.19; “Preface to Emerson’s Essays,” 336 below. On puffery, see note to 173.31. 192.8-9. a West-Indian Tornado: “Tornado” here is the contemporary navigator’s name for a violent storm with strong wind and torrential rain in the tropical Atlantic. 192.13-14. He was called the Bear: See Boswell 2:67-68. 192.20-21. Ark of the Covenant: whoso laid hand on them tore asunder his heart of hearts: The Ark is the container for the Decalogue (Exodus 25:10-22). God killed Uzza after he touched the Ark by mistake (see 1 Chronicles 13:9-10 and 2 Samuel 6:6-7). 192.25-26. to a blind old woman, to a Doctor Levett, to a Cat ‘Hodge’:

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Anna Williams (see notes to 153.10-12 and 190.25-26). Robert Levet (1705-1782), surgeon and apothecary who lived with Johnson from 1756 to 1762 (see Boswell 5:434-36). Hodge was Johnson’s cat (see Boswell 5:74-75). 192.26-28. ‘His thoughts in the latter part of his life  .  .  .  and then he died”’: Boswell 5:121. 192.32-33. the halfpence for the poor, that ‘waited his coming out,’ . . . ‘waited the coming out’: Not identified; for Johnson and his halfpence for the poor, see Boswell 1:366. 192.34. A Sterne can write sentimentalities on Dead Asses: Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) in the section entitled “Nampont. The Dead Ass.” 192.35-36. he finds the wretched Daughter of Vice fallen down in the streets; carries her home, on his own shoulders, and like a good Samaritan: See Boswell 5:219. For the story of the Good Samaritan, see Luke 10:30-37. 192.37-38. Ought not Charity, even in that sense, to cover a multitude of Sins?: 1 Peter 4:8: “And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves: for charity shall cover the multitude of sins.” 192.38. Penny-a-week Committee-Lady: Members of various religious groups who seek pledges to provide for the poor. 193.3-4. The widow’s mite, we know, was greater than all the other gifts: Mark 12:41-44, Luke 21:2-4. 193.7-9. ‘where lives and works some loved one,’ has beautified ‘this rough solitary Earth into a peopled garden’: From Carlyle’s translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship: “The world is so waste and empty, when we figure only towns and hills and rivers in it; but to know of some one here and there whom we accord with, who is living on with us even in silence, this makes our earthly ball a peopled garden” (2:2324; Werke 20:41). 193.10. Salve magna parens!: Virgil, Georgics 2:173: “Hail great mother!” See Johnson’s use in his Dictionary: “Lichfield, the field of the dead, a

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city in Staffordshire, so named from martyred Christians. Salve magna parens” (2:16). 193.10-11. Letters on his Mother’s death: Johnson’s mother, Sarah Johnson (1669-1759); for the letters see Boswell 1:326-30. 193.14. he must now write a Rasselas to defray her funeral!: See Boswell 1:330-31. The book is The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759). 193.15. Book of Devotion: Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations (1785), published after his death (see Boswell 5:344-45). 193.17-18. ‘the fifth act of a Tragedy,’ though unrhymed, does ‘lie in every death-bed, were it a peasant’s, and of straw’: Carlyle quotes his essay on Robert Burns (above 39.17-19). 193.20-31. ‘Sunday, October 18, 1767.  .  .  .  to part no more’: Boswell quotes from Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations (Boswell 2:42-43). 193.34-38. ‘Johnson mentioned that he could not in general  .  .  .  atone for this fault”’: Boswell 5:288. 194.4-11. ‘Madam, I beg your pardon  .  .  .  the penance was expiatory’: Boswell 5:288n3. 194.13-14. ‘rainy weather, and the sneers,’ or wonder, ‘of the bystanders?’: Carlyle paraphrases Boswell 5:288n3. 194.14. old Michael Johnson: Michael Johnson (1657-1731), Johnson’s father (see Boswell 1:1-4). 194.15: ‘moonlight of memory’: See Carlyle’s translation of Jean Paul’s The Life of Quintus Fixlein (German Romance 2:227; Sämmtliche Werke 4:102). 194.21. after life’s fitful fever, he sleeps: Macbeth 3.2.23: “After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well.” 194.31-32. ‘entering with the right foot,’ and ‘touching every post as he walked along’: See Boswell 1:496-97 and 497n2. Boswell was uncertain whether Johnson used the left or right foot.

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195.5-7. ‘his rusty brown morning suit, . . . his breeches hanging loose’: Boswell 1:428-29. 195.9-14. ‘A gentleman who frequently visited him whilst writing his Idlers, . . . to his visitor’: Boswell 5:391. 195.14-15. in the sartorial fashion: Seated cross-legged on the floor, like a tailor. 195.15-18. ‘It was remarkable in Johnson,’ continues Miss Reynolds (Renny dear),  .  .  .  is doubtful’: Boswell 5:391; see 5:417. “Renny dear” is Johnson’s nickname for Frances Reynolds (1729-1807), painter, poet, writer, and sister of Joshua Reynolds. 195.20. Pharisaical Brummellean Politeness: In the New Testament, the Pharisees are portrayed as hypocrites who “say, and do not” (Matthew 23:3). George Bryan “Beau” Brummell (1778-1840), a dandy and leader of fashion. Both are more concerned with the show of correctness than its substance. 195.20-21. would suffer crucifixion rather than ask twice for soup: See Tour in England, Ireland, and France, in the years 1828 & 1829  . .  .  in a series of letters by a German prince (1832): “A man, for instance, who were to manifest any timidity or courtesy towards women, instead of treating them in a familiar, confident, and ‘nonchalant’ manner, would awaken the suspicion that he was ‘no gentleman:’ but should the luckless man ask twice for soup at dinner, or appear in evening dress at a breakfast which begins at three in the afternoon and ends at midnight,—he may be a prince and a ‘millionnaire,’ but he is ‘no gentleman’” (1:189). The passage was cited in reviews of the book in the Quarterly Review 46 (1832): 531 and elsewhere. 195.24. dialogue with his King: Johnson met George III in February 1767 while visiting the king’s library; for their meeting and “dialogue,” see Boswell 2:34-40. 195.33. ‘Johnson’s Prejudices’: Boswell mentions these prejudices in various places. See, for example, “Nor can it be denied that he had many prejudices; which, however, frequently suggested many of his pointed sayings, that rather show a playfulness of fancy than any settled malignity” (Boswell 5:358-59).

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195.37-38. Jacobitism, Church-of-Englandism, hatred of the Scotch, belief in Witches: See Johnson’s defense of Jacobitism (Boswell 1:44546), his support of the Church of England (Boswell 1:214n1), his opinion of Scots (Boswell 1:380 and 5:47), and his views on witches (Boswell 2:280-81). 196.2. ‘country fires’: Not in Boswell; possibly an allusion to Merry Wives of Windsor: “Good husband, let us every one go home, / And laugh this sport o’er by a country fire” (5.5.242). 196.2-3. they grew with his growth and strengthened with his strength: See Pope, Essay on Man (1734): “The young disease, that must subdue at length, / Grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength” (135-36). 196.15-16. Dr. Adams, with placid surprise, asks, “Have we not evidence enough of the soul’s immortality?” Johnson answers, “I wish for more”: William Adams (1706-1789), Church of England clergyman and master of Pembroke College, Oxford. Recalling a report of Lord Lyttelton’s vision of the time and manner of his own death, Johnson declared, “I am so glad to have every evidence of the spiritual world, that I am willing to believe it.” Dr. Adams responded, “You have evidence enough; good evidence, which needs not much support.” Johnson replied, “I like to have more” (Boswell 5:197-98). 196.18. those good yeomen whose limbs were made in England: “And you, good yeoman, / Whose limbs were made in England” (Henry V 3.1.25-26). 196.21. he is the John Bull: John Bull is the personification of the English nation or the typical Englishman. Boswell explains Johnson’s “prejudice against Scotland” in terms of his Englishness: “He was indeed, if I may be allowed the phrase, at bottom much of a John Bull; much of a blunt true-born Englishman” (2:258). 196.23-24. confute Hume’s irreligious Philosophy by some ‘story from a Clergyman of the Bishoprick of Durham’: In 1766, Johnson told Boswell, “No honest man could be a Deist; for no man could be so after a fair examination of the proofs of Christianity.” When Boswell offered Hume as a possibility, Johnson responded: “No, sir; Hume owned to a clergyman in the bishoprick of Durham, that he had never read the New Testament with attention” (Boswell 2:8).

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196.24-25. see nothing in the great Frederick but ‘Voltaire’s lackey’: Johnson expresses his opinion on the writings of Frederick the Great (1712-1786), king of Prussia: “He writes just as you may suppose Voltaire’s footboy to do, who has been his amanuensis. He has such parts as the valet might have, and about as much of the colouring of the style as might be got by transcribing his works” (Boswell 1:449). For Voltaire, see 75.title. 196.25-26. in Voltaire himself but a man acerrimi ingenii, paucarum literarum: Boswell 3:293. The phrase is Latin for “of keenest intellect and of little learning.” 196.26. in Rousseau but one worthy to be hanged: Johnson seems to have pulled up short of calling for hanging, as he relates to Boswell: “Rousseau, sir, is a very bad man. I would sooner sign a sentence for his transportation, than that of any felon who has gone from the Old Bailey these many years” (Boswell 2:12). 196.27-28. a greensick milkmaid’s crotchet of, for variety’s sake, ‘milking the Bull’: Greensickness is an ailment (no longer recognized) that causes the skin to turn green and is ordinarily associated with women, as in the traditional “Milkmaid Song”: “But Oh! the green-sickness / Soon changed her likeness; / And all her beauty did fail.” Johnson used the metaphor of “milking the bull” in relation to “Hume and other skeptical innovators” for whom “truth . . . is a cow which will yield no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull” (Boswell 1:457), but also more generally (Boswell 2:229). 196.30-31. D’Alemberts and Diderots, or of the strange questionable work they did: For d’Alembert, see note to 96.38-97.1; for Diderot, see note to 113.8 and Carlyle’s essay below. The work they collaborated on was the great French enlightenment document L’Encyclopédie (1751-1776). 196.31-32. some Benedictine Priests, to talk kitchen-latin with them about Editiones Principes. “Monsheer Nongtongpaw!”: While in Paris in 1775, Johnson met some Benedictines, but they were English, so he would have no need to speak Latin to them, though he did generally use Latin in conversation with the French: “While Johnson was in France, he was generally very resolute in speaking Latin. It was a maxim with him that a man should not let himself down by speaking a language which he speaks imperfectly” (Boswell 3:291; see 290). Editiones principes are first editions. Monsheer Nongtonpaw is a comic English mispronunciation of

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Monsieur n’entend pas, or “Mr. doesn’t understand.” Possibly a commonplace joke, it appears in David Dibdin’s St David’s Day; or the Honest Welchman (1801), where the name is spelled “Nontongpaw,” and in Catherine Gore’s Mothers and Daughters (1830). 197.11. ‘with the bayonet of necessity at his back’: Carlyle quotes Richard Cumberland (1732-1811), playwright and novelist: “Who will say that Johnson himself would have been such a champion in literature, such a front-rank soldier in the fields of fame, if he had not been pressed into service, and driven on to glory with the bayonet of sharp necessity pointed at his back?” (Cumberland 259-60). 197.24. delineation of the Commonwealth Wars: Volume 6 of Hume’s History of Britain (1757) contains his account of the Commonwealth and the reigns of Charles II and James II. 197.29. Both were, by principle and habit, Stoics: Philosophers of the Stoic school, founded in Athens during the third century, professed doctrines of self-control and freedom from emotion. 197.33. Bartholomew-Fair Show-booth: The Smithfield cattle fair was a three-day event held on the days before, on, and after St. Bartholomew’s Day, August 24. 197.36-198.1. each died not unfitly, in his way: . . . enter a Reality still higher: Adam Smith wrote a letter to William Strahan (November 9, 1776) on the death of Hume that Strahan published the following year along with Hume’s autobiography. Smith describes Hume’s cheerful approach to death without mention of his professed atheism and writes that upon realizing he would not recover, Hume “submitted with the utmost cheerfulness, and the most perfect complacency and resignation” (Hume 42). He also included the report of a Dr. Black, who attended Hume: “He continued to the last perfectly sensible, and free from much pain or feelings of distress” (Hume 57-58). According to Strahan, who was in attendance, after a period of agitation in the hours before he died, Johnson “became quite composed, and remained so till his death.” Also present was Dr. Richard Brocklesby, who added, “For some time before his death, all his fears were calmed and absorbed by the prevalence of his faith” (Boswell 5:344-45). 198.4-5. the one in Westminster Abbey here; the other in the Calton Hill

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Churchyard of Edinburgh: Johnson was buried at Westminster Abbey on December 20, 1784 (see Boswell 5:351). Hume was buried on August 29, 1776, according to his wishes near his home in the nondenominational Calton churchyard, just northeast of the city center in Edinburgh. 198.5. Through Life they did not meet: According to Boswell, the closest that Johnson and Hume came to meeting was in 1767, when they both called on him on the same day. Boswell recalled a dispute with Hume: “Mr. Hume said he would give me half a crown for every page of his dictionary in which he would not find an absurdity, if I would give him half a crown for every page in which he did find one” (C. Rogers 103). 198.6. ‘like in unlike’: Carlyle refers back to his earlier assertion that they are “unlike in likeness” (197.20). 198.14. worthy to tie the shoe-latchets of these: See Mark 1:7.

Notes to “Corn-Law Rhymes” 199.title. Corn-Law: The Corn Law of 1815 (revised in 1828) had been intended to maintain high prices for British cereals and to prevent a depressed agricultural market by restricting the import of foreign grains following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The laws were regarded by many as serving to protect the interests of wealthy landowners and as bringing hardship on the poor because they made their basic foodstuff expensive. While resistance to the laws grew throughout the 1830s, the laws were not repealed until 1846. The present essay is Carlyle’s first major public comment on the Corn Laws, and he later became a proponent of repeal. To Elliott (see note to 200.18), the measure amounted to a grant of monopoly to landowners who could then control the cost of bread; agitation for repeal of the law became the guiding passion of his life: “Whoever does not oppose the corn law, is a patron of want, national immorality, bankruptcy, child-murder, incendiary fires, midnight assassination, and anarchy. Therefore, every supposed moral or religious man—every schoolmaster—every teacher of religion especially—should oppose the corn law; or he cannot possibly be either moral or religious, and the devil would be more fit to be a teacher than he” (Corn Law Rhymes 98). 199.1-5. 1. Corn-Law Rhymes. Third Edition. . . . 12mo. London: 1831. Carlyle apparently borrowed these volumes from John Stuart Mill, as

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indicated by his promise, upon completing his review, to have “Your three little Volumes  .  .  .  sent round by Edinr, and forwarded thro’ the Bookseller to your India House” (Letters 6:154-55). Although Carlyle uses a hyphen, Elliott’s volume has Corn Law Rhymes. 199.7. Smelfungus Redivivus: Latin: “Smelfungus born again.” Smelfungus was Laurence Sterne’s caricature in A Sentimental Journey (1768) of the ill-humored Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) as he appeared in Smollett’s own Travels through France and Italy (1766). As in other essays, Carlyle cites a fictitious persona (see Sauerteig in “Biography,” above 135 and Historical Essays note to 307.21-22; see also next note). Carlyle would use Smelfungus (without the “Redivivus”) again in Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850) and Frederick (1858-1865). 199.9-200.2. ‘The end having come, it is fit that we end. . . . to the verge of insolvency’: Carlyle’s invention, ascribed to the fictitious Smelfungus Redivivus (see preceding note). 199.11-12. Lake Schools, and Border-Thief Schools, and Cockney and Satanic Schools: The Lake School is the name given to the group of poets—in particular Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and William Wordsworth—who resided in the Lake District; the term was apparently first used by Francis Jeffrey in a review of Coleridge that appeared in the Edinburgh Review 28 (1817): 501. “Border-Thief Schools” refers to Walter Scott and his imitators who wrote historical romances of the Scottish border, such as Scott’s Rob Roy (1817). “Cockney School” is a derisive term for the group of London-based poets including Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, and John Keats; it derives from “The Cockney School of Poetry,” a series of articles by John Gibson Lockhart and his associates that began to appear in Blackwood’s Magazine 2 (1817): 38. “Satanic School” is Robert Southey’s name for Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their circle, from the preface to Southey’s poem A Vision of Judgment (1821). 199.17-18. Green-sick, or New-Sentimental, or Sleep-Awake School: These schools that, in Carlyle’s fiction, succeed to the Lake School and others mentioned above (199.6-7) are Carlyle’s own inventions, all suggesting an emphasis on emotionalism. On greensickness, see note to 196.27-28. “New-Sentimental” would presumably be a new form of eighteenth-century sentimentality, associated in Britain with writers such as Laurence Sterne and in Germany with Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young

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Werther (1774). “Sleep-Awake” suggests a mystic state between sleeping and waking. 200.18. Corn-Law Rhymer: Ebenezer Elliott (1781-1849). The title pages of the books Carlyle is reviewing do not give his name, and Carlyle was apparently uncertain of it. He does not name Elliott in his review and refers to him only, as here, as “the Corn-Law Rhymer” or just “the Rhymer”; elsewhere he refers to him as the “Sheffield Radical” (Two Note Books 255, 263; Letters 6:146). In a letter of June 22, 1832, submitting the proofs of the article, he reports to Macvey Napier, editor of the Edinburgh Review, “Mr Southey, I hear, is about reviewing this same Rhymer in the Quarterly Review; and has entered into some correspondence with him. The man is named Reuben Elliott, was bred an actual hammerman or something of the sort, and now, rather improved in circumstances, keeps some little hardware shop” (Letters 6:177). The editors of the Letters explain that “Mill in his letter of 29 May had mistakenly said that the author of Corn Law Rhymes was ‘a real working man, named Reuben Elliott’” (6:177n4). Elliott was engaged, as his father had been, in the iron trade as master founder and as a merchant of iron and steel. Elliott blamed the financial problems he experienced on the Corn Laws (see note to 199. title). In 1819, he moved to Sheffield, where he participated in agitation for the Reform Bill and in the founding, in 1831, of the first anti-cornlaw society in Britain. 200.21. seven-striped, gold-crimson border: Rainbows show the colors of the spectrum as light refracts and reflects through water droplets to appear as a band of seven colors, with gold (or orange) at one end and red at the other. 200.29. ‘ghost-defunct’: Not identified, but “ghost” here presumably means spirit generally. 201.2. ‘one of the lower, little removed above the lowest class’: In his preface to Corn Law Rhymes, Elliott describes himself as “a man of the middle class—hardly raised above the lowest” (vii). 201.7. It used to be said that lions do not paint, that poor men do not write: Not identified, but presumably a variant of the commonplace saying that we tend to see only paintings of humans defeating lions because lions do not paint.

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201.8. Cyclopean forges: See note to 42.29. 201.9-10. beats with his thousand hammers ‘the red son of the furnace’: James MacPherson, Fingal (1762): “The field echoes from wing to wing, as a hundred hammers that rise, by turns, on the red son of the furnace” (Poems of Ossian 1.21-22) and “Shields sound, and warriors fall. As a hundred hammers on the red son of the furnace, so rose, so rung their swords!” (Poems of Ossian 4.79). 201.16-17. ‘Uneducated Poets’: The enthusiasm for natural genius, further idealized by the Romantics, had been established for nearly a century by 1832, but Carlyle may have in mind Robert Southey’s “Introductory Essay on the Lives and Works of Uneducated Poets,” published in Attempts in Verse, by John Jones, an Old Servant (1831). 201.18-19. Genius, which the French lady declared to be of no sex: The saying “Genius has no sex” was attributed to Madame de Stael (17661817), but it seems to have been in general circulation. 201.20. ‘the spark of Nature’s fire’: From stanza 13 of Robert Burns’s “Epistle to J. L[apraik], An Old Scotch Bard”: Gie me ae spark o’ Nature’s fire, That’s a’ the learning I desire; Then tho’ I drudge thro’ dub an’ mire At pleugh or cart, My Muse, tho’ hamely in attire, May touch the heart. (Works 3:238) 201.29. Cobbett’s Prose, and Burns’s Poetry: An influential Tory-turned-radical critic of the government, William Cobbett (1763-1835) was a political writer, farmer, and member of Parliament. He was also, like Burns and Elliott, self-educated. Like many people of his generation, Carlyle read Cobbett and discussed him with his friends and acquaintances, adopting, for example, Cobbett’s epithet for London, the “wen” (e.g., Letters 3:232). Writing to John Stuart Mill on January, 12 1833, he described “The Radicals” as a “rabid, distracted, avoidable set of men, of the Hunt and Cobbett sort” (Letters 6:301). It is not clear whether he refers here to Leigh Hunt or Henry Hunt, both of whom were involved in radical politics; in any case, writing to Leigh Hunt on March 21, 1833, he acknowledged: “Cobbett, as you say, does hit the nail on the head. ‘Gen-

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tlemen you [can] make what pretty Laws you like, and produce bursts of parliamentary eloquence till your tongues weary: but the melancholy fact is, the people cannot get any victuals, and cannot (and also will not) do without some’” (Letters 9:393). For Burns, see Carlyle’s essay in the present volume. Both were popular, and Carlyle’s audience would have regarded them as self-taught voices of the common people. 202.15. where there is a will, there is a way: Proverbial at least from the time of Menander (342?–292? b.c.). 202.19-23. few Fredericks or Napoleons, indeed none since the Great Alexander,  .  .  .  destitution and contradiction: All three were highly successful monarchs and generals. For Frederick II, the Great (17121786), see note to 83.36-37; on Napoleon, see note to 78.6; Alexander the Great of Macedon (356-323 b.c.). As a young man, Frederick the Great followed literary pursuits, leading his authoritarian father Friedrich Wilhelm I (1688-1740) to treat him harshly; this conflict would become a major theme in Carlyle’s Frederick the Great. Napoleon attended a military academy, where he was teased for his Corsican accent. By contrast, Alexander the Great was instructed in statecraft by his father, King Philip II of Macedon (382-336 b.c.), tutored by Aristotle, and given early opportunities to exercise independent leadership. Ancient accounts reported that his death was precipitated by a bout of drinking. 202.24-26: a Byron and a Burns: . . . six-and-thirty years: On Carlyle’s view of Byron in relation to Burns, see above “Burns” 55. After Goethe’s and Shakespeare’s, no names occur more frequently in Carlyle’s works than do those of Byron and Burns. Burns lived to age thirty-seven (1759-1796) and Byron to thirty-six (1788-1824). Often, as in the present instance, Byron and Burns are given as examples of highly gifted individuals—one born into poverty, the other into wealth and privilege—who died at a young age before they were able to overcome their individual failings and fulfill their potential as poets. Carlyle’s judgment here that Burns was more successful than Byron is consistent with his views of the two poets throughout his career. 202.29-31. ‘it is only the artichoke that will not grow except in gardens: the acorn is cast carelessly abroad into the wilderness, yet on the wild soil it nourishes itself, and rises to be an oak’: Carlyle quotes himself from “The Life of Heyne,” where he makes a point similar to that of the present essay:

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Let no man doubt the omnipotence of Nature, doubt the majesty of man’s soul; let no lonely unfriended son of genius despair! Let him not despair; if he have the will, the right will, then the power also has not been denied him. It is but the artichoke that will not grow except in gardens. The acorn is cast carelessly abroad into the wilderness, yet it rises to be an oak; on the wild soil it nourishes itself, it defies the tempest, and lives for a thousand years. (Essays 1:353-54) Carlyle also quotes part of this passage in the reminiscence of his father that he wrote in January 1832 (Reminiscences 6), just a few weeks before he began work on this essay. 202.38. ‘abiding by the stuff ’: Apparently Carlyle’s own phrasing, the sense of which is staying behind with the gear, out of harm’s way. 202.38-203.6. an observer, not without experience of our time, has said: Had I a man . . . I should look for him: The observer is probably Carlyle himself , who had made a similar observation in a journal entry written between November 2 and 4, 1831, just a little over a month before, according to that journal, he began reading Corn Law Rhymes (Two Note Books 230): The best-educated man you will often find to be the Artizan, at all rates the man of Business. For why? He has put forth his hand, and operated on Nature; must actually attain some true insight or he cannot live.—The worst-educated man is usually your man of Fortune. He has not put forth his hand upon anything, except upon his Bell-rope. Your scholar proper, generally too your socalled man of Letters, is a thing with clearer vision—thro’ the hundredth part of an eye. A Burns is infinitely better educated than a Byron. (Two Note Books 223) In January 1832 Carlyle wrote in his reminiscence of his father, “Alas! such is the miseducation of these days, it is only among what are called the uneducated classes (those educated by Experience) that you can look for a man” (Reminiscences 10). 203.21. one Book: The Bible.

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203.27. ‘In Books lie the creative Phœnix-ashes of the whole Past’: The quotation is untraced, but the mention of phoenix ashes evokes the “World-Phœnix” of Sartor Resartus, which he had drafted by July 1831; in it, Teufelsdröckh makes the following observation: “As palpable life-streams in that wondrous Individual, Mankind, among so many life-streams that are not palpable, flow-on those main-currents of what we call Opinion; as preserved in Institutions, Polities, Churches, above all in Books. Beautiful it is to understand and know that a Thought did never yet die; that as thou, the originator thereof, hast gathered it and created it from the whole Past, so thou wilt transmit it to the whole Future” (3.7.182). Carlyle would write similarly of books in On Heroes (139-41), where he concludes, “The true University of these days is a Collection of Books” (140). On the image of the phoenix, see note to 176.2-3. 203.35-36. Foolish Pedant, that sittest there compassionately descanting on the Learning of Shakspeare!: As there are few records of Shakespeare’s life, scholars have long debated the extent of his education, which included classical learning in a grammar school but no attendance at a university, unlike contemporaries such as Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson. See, for example, Richard Farmer’s “Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare” in Isaac Reed’s edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare (1809). 203.38. Ariel Melodies, and mystic mandragora Moans: Ariel is the spirit who serves Prospero and whose song lures Ferdinand in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (see also 166.25 and note). The mandragora, or mandrake, is a plant whose forked root somewhat resembles the human form and is fabled to possess magic powers; folklore also warns that the root is hazardous to harvest and utters a cry of pain that can be dangerous to the hearer, as in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI: “Would curses kill, as doth the mandrake’s groan” (3.2.310) and Romeo and Juliet: “And shrikes like mandrakes’ torn out of the earth, / That living mortals, hearing them, run mad” (4.3.47-48). 204.1-2. kenned, which in those days still partially meant can-ned: A favorite etymology of Carlyle’s. “Kenned” comes from Old English cennan “to cause to know,” “to make known,” but it early on acquired the sense “to know,” as in Carlyle’s use here. “Can” is a form of Old English cunnan, with the sense “‘to know, know how, be mentally or intellectually able,’ whence ‘to be able generally, be physically able, have the power’” (oed). Thus, although they are two different words, Carlyle is correct to suggest that they have similar meanings. In Sartor Resartus, which he had drafted

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a few months before writing this essay, Teufelsdröckh writes: “The only Title wherein I, with confidence, trace eternity, is that of King. König (King), anciently Könning, means Ken-ning (Cun-ning), or which is the same thing, Can-ning. Ever must the Sovereign of Mankind be fitly entitled King” (3.7.183; see also On Heroes 169). In this case, Carlyle’s etymology is faulty. 204.3-4. from the Dame Quickly of modern Eastcheap to the Cæsar of ancient Rome: Both are characters in Shakespeare’s plays; they represent the range of society from the lowly commoner Mistress Quickly, who keeps the Boar’s Head Tavern in Eastcheap (a section of London) in Henry IV Parts I and II, to the Roman emperor in Julius Caesar. 204.12-205.5. And now, when kenning and can-ning have become two altogether different words  .  .  .  a finger will pull the bell!: This passage aligns with Carlyle’s various statements about the importance of action, or doing, over knowing or thinking, and consequently the importance of work. He advanced this idea in Sartor Resartus, the draft of which he had completed the preceding summer: “Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it in God’s name! ’Tis the utmost thou hast in thee; out with it then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today, for the Night cometh wherein no man can work” (2.9.146; see also note). In the reminiscence of his father, written in January 1832, he had observed, “This great maxim of Philosophy he had gathered by the teaching of nature alone: That man was created to work, not to speculate, or feel, or dream” and, later in the same reminiscence, “We were all practically taught that work (temporal or spiritual) was the only thing we had to do; and incited always by precept and example to do it well” (Reminiscences 8, 32). He would sum up this view in Past and Present (see next note). 204.26-29. Truly, a boundless significance lies in work: whereby the humblest craftsman comes to attain much, which is of indispensable use, but which he who is of no craft, were he never so high, runs the risk of missing: Carlyle quoted this sentence, with variation, in Past and Present: “It has been written, ‘an endless significance lies in work;’ a man perfects himself by working” (3.9.195). 204.32-33. The honourable Member can discover that ‘there is a reaction’: Carlyle alludes to the public agitation for the Reform Bill (see note to 176.11-12). As discussed in the introduction, Carlyle had begun reading

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Elliott’s books in December 1831, when the third and final version of the Reform Bill had been introduced, and wrote it in the month of April just after it had once again been passed by the House of Commons and just before Lord Grey broke the impasse and obtained approval by the House of Lords. Following the rejection of the second version of the bill by the House of Lords, there were public disturbances in various places, the most serious at Bristol, which were prompted by the visit of Sir Charles Wetherell, a member of Parliament who had vehemently opposed the Reform Bill. Carlyle made his first comment on the disturbance in his journal between November 2 and November 4, 1831: “News of wild riots from Bristol: many lives lost, much mischief much scandal perpetrated. The Noodles, if they mind not, will have an old house about their ears. Sir C. Wetherell affirmed and re-affirmed that ‘there was a reaction, that the people had ceased to care for reform’ &c. &c.: argument, evidence, was of no use; the man’s brain was not to be reached that way; so the Rascality took another: that of knocking it in with clubs!” (Two Note Books 219-20). Carlyle must have heard or read reports of these events before he received the November 10 issue of the weekly Examiner (see Letters 6:37), the only paper he is known to have taken regularly at this time; it reported that Wetherell had been urged not to come to Bristol but had replied that he was there to do his duty and contending that failure to do so “would be admitting that there was not a ‘reaction’” (710). We have not been able to trace when Wetherell made this claim, but a number of his fellow opponents of reform had claimed that after first embracing it, there was now a public reaction against it. Carlyle repeated in a letter of November 13 that the people of Bristol used their disturbances as their “method of convincing that there was not a ‘reaction’ (in regard to Reform)” (Letters 6:51-52). 204.34. his wine and his oil will not fail him: Figurative for earthly blessings, as in Numbers 18:12: “All the best of the oil, and all the best of the wine, and of the wheat, the first fruits of them which they shall offer unto the Lord, them have I given thee.” 204.34-35. the sooty Brazier, who discovered that brass was green-cheese: A brazier is someone who works on brass; green cheese is freshly made, not yet ripe, cheese. 205.2-3. Necessity, moreover, which we here see as the mother of Accuracy, is well known as the mother of Invention: “Necessity is the mother of invention” was a well-known proverb, derived ultimately from

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an anonymous Latin saying. Carlyle employs the saying in several letters of 1830-1831 (Letters 5:74-75, 82, 242, 264). 205.7-8. bray him in a mortar: Proverbs 27:22: “Though thou shouldest bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him.” Carlyle repeated the quotation in a letter later that year (Letters 6:198; see also 7:260 and French Revolution 2:1.2.12). 205.14. Printer’s chapel: The group of employees in a publishing house responsible for putting books in print. 205.16-17. the former shall come out a Dr. Franklin, the latter a Dr. Parr: Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) and Dr. Samuel Parr (see note to 170.21). In this context, Carlyle is referring to Franklin’s work as a printer and publisher as well as intellectual and diplomat. While Parr was an erudite scholar, the general consensus was that his writings were less than distinguished, being marred by pompous dogmatism and verbosity. This view accords with Carlyle’s previous allusion to him in “Boswell’s Life of Johnson” (above 170); see also “The Life of Heyne,” Essays 1:350, and Reminiscences 198, where Carlyle characterizes him as “this Trismegistus of the then Pedants.” 205.19. sing misereres: See note to 97.38. 205.20. ‘world in its dotage’: Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766): “Ay, Sir, the world is in its dotage, and yet the cosmogony or creation of the world has puzzled philosophers of all ages” (4:14.74; see 4:25.142). 205.25. abundance of the heart: Luke 6:45: “A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil: for of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh.” See also Matthew 12:4. 205.26-27. By the grace of God: See 1 Corinthians 15:10: “But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.” 205.34-35: Let us be thankful, were it only for the day of small things: Zechariah 4:10: “For who hath despised the day of small things?”

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206.10. He has used his eyes for seeing: Matthew 13:15-16: “For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them. But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear.” 206.17. is he not stale, unprofitable: See Hamlet: “How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, / Seem to me all the uses of this world!” (1.2.137-38). 206.17-18. a weariness of the flesh: Ecclesiastes 12:12: “And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” 206.20-21. hewing of wood and drawing of water: See note to 181.38. 206.22. palabra: “Talk, esp. of an unnecessary, profuse, or idle nature” (oed). The word is related to “palaver,” though the latter also carries connotations of dispute and argument. Both are derived from Portuguese words and are associated with Portuguese trade in West Africa. Carlyle had begun using the word “palabra” as early as 1821 (Letters 1:367), and his usage always indicates idle chatter as in “inane palabra” (Letters 3:154). He first used “palaver” in 1823 (Letters 2:308), and it eventually appears far more frequently. Both words appear in later works, including French Revolution 2:1.4.26, 2:5.1.198, 3:5.6.237. 206.23-24. has worked himself loose from cant: Samuel Johnson: “Clear your mind of Cant”; the phrase is cited by Carlyle in his essay on Boswell’s Life of Johnson (above 191.21-22 and note). 206.26. ‘a workman born’: Not identified; perhaps a commonplace. 206.37. a Seer’s eye: Carlyle’s fundamental requirement for a hero is that he have the capacity to see beneath surface appearances into underlying realities, as later articulated in On Heroes: “A Hero, as I repeat, has this first distinction, which indeed we may call first and last, the Alpha and Omega of his whole Heroism, That he looks through the shews of things into things” (48.3-6). See also note to 39.24. 207.2. Commercial Restrictions: The Corn Law “monopoly”; see note to 199.title.

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207.4-31. These, O ye quacks, these are your remedies: . . . . Disturb the Sepulchre of all below: “The Ranter” 4.169-96 (Corn Law Rhymes 15-16, where part 4 is misnumbered as part 5 in the 3rd ed.). Carlyle’s version has variations in italics, capitalization, spelling, punctuation, and once in wording (“Loxley’s waters cold” for Elliott’s “Loxley’s chrystal cold” at 147.10), but perhaps the only significant difference is in the second line of the quotation, which in Elliott’s text is in italics. 207.5 bread-tax: The premium on the price of bread as a result of the Corn Laws (see note to 199.title). 207.34-35. theatric phantasmagoria: See note to 48.37-38. 208.18. a Reformer: A supporter of the Reform Bill that was at this time nearing passage (see note to 176.11-12) and of reform in general. 208.18-19. Radical to the core: See note to 177.35-36. Many radicals supported the Reform Bill, but some also favored more extensive social change; the latter were more likely to belong to the working classes. 208.21. Hope long deferred: Proverbs 13:12: “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick; but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life.” 208.25-27. He says, in Vulcanic dialect, his feelings have been hammered till they are cold-short; so they will no longer bend; ‘they snap, and fly off,’—in the face of the hammerer: Vulcan is the Roman god of fire, including the fire of the forge, and therefore is often depicted holding a hammer; cold-short metal is brittle in its cold state. The preface to Corn Law Rhymes has the following: “But when suicidal anti-profit laws speak to my heart from my children’s trenchers—when statutes for restricting the industry of a population which is only superabundant because it is oppressed, threaten to send me to the treadmill, for the crime of inflicted want—when, in a word, my feelings are hammered till they are ‘coldshort’—habit can no longer bend them to courtesy; they snap—and fly off in sarcasm” (vii). 208.36. Self-interest: See note to 126.8. 209.1-3. when the Rich, as the utmost they could resolve on, had ceased to govern, and the Poor, in their fast-accumulating numbers, and ever-widening complexities, had ceased to be able to do without governing: This

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would become a key element of Carlyle’s analysis of industrial capitalism and democracy in “Chartism” (e.g., Essays 4:156) and Past and Present (3.3.152, 3.8.213). The failure to govern is linked for him to the principle of laissez-faire (see next note). Carlyle refers here also to the Malthusian principle that population would grow faster than the supply of food. 209.4. ‘Competition’ and ‘Laissez-faire’: Basic principles of classical political economy as they had been articulated by Adam Smith and his successors, including Malthus (see preceding note). They held that competition would always determine the price of goods and the cost of labor, and, because no intervention could change this fact, governments should leave the economy alone, hence the principle of laissez-faire, meaning “allow to do” or “leave alone.” Although Elliott is zealous in defense of the principle of laissez-faire competition (which opposed tariffs like the Corn Laws), Carlyle is sensitive to the exploitative abuses that the philosophy can be used to legitimize. The preceding autumn, on October 22, 1831, he had written in his journal: “The principle of Laissez-faire fast verging, as I read the symptoms, to a consummation. Let people go on, each without guidance, each striving only to gain advantage for himself, the result will be this: Each, endeavouring by ‘competition’ to outstrip the others, will endeavour by all arts to manufacture an article (not better) only cheaper and showier than his neighbor” (Two Note Books 206). As discussed in the preceding note, Carlyle would further develop this critique in “Chartism,” notably in chapter 6, “Laissez-Faire,” and chapter 7, “Not Laissez-Faire,” as well as in Past and Present, where he characterizes it as a feature of the “Mammon-Gospel” (3.9.184), of “the Gospel of Despair” (3.9.185), and as “Every man for himself ” (3.13.208). 209.13. the one thing needful: See note to 54.21. 209.16-17. Law-Reform, Legislative Reform, Poor-Laws, want of PoorLaws, Tithes, Game-Laws: All were subjects of recent debate. “Law reform” refers to efforts to modernize and eliminate waste and abuse in the court and legal systems, which were largely governed by a complex of common law and legal precedent. Legislative reform has to do with the eligibility of voters and apportionment of representation taken up in the Reform Bill of 1832 (see note to 176.11-12). Poor laws, which provided financial relief to the unemployed and disabled, were the subject of debate and study including by the Royal Commission of Enquiry on the Poor Laws in 1832, which would eventually result in passage of the New Poor Law of 1834. The campaign in Ireland known as the “Tithe Wars”

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(1830-1833) protested the requirement that Irish Catholics pay tithes to the Protestant Church of Ireland, and there was resistance to tithes in England as well, which would lead to the Tithe Act of 1836. On Game Laws, see note to 30.6; they had been revised by the 1831 Game Act as well as the Night Poaching Act of 1828. 209.21. sons of Adam: The descendants of the first human, thus the human race (see Matthew 3:38 and note to 222.28). 209.23. Promised Land: The land promised to the descendants of Abraham (Genesis 15:18-21), figuratively an idealized world. 209.24-25. in poor Mr. Shandy’s fashion, must we ‘shift from trouble to trouble, . . . and unbutton another’: Walter Shandy in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-1767): “What is the life of man! Is it not to shift from side to side?—from sorrow to sorrow?—to button up one cause of vexation!—and unbutton another!” (4.31.268). Froude quotes a letter of January 1, 1814, to Carlyle from his college friend John Edward Hill in which Hill refers to Carlyle’s quoting this passage from Sterne (First Forty Years 1:30). 209.27. smoke-pillar: The pillar of smoke and fire that guided the Israelites to the promised land (see notes to 180.30 and 209.23). 209.32. ‘on the scantier trenchers of his children’: See 208.25-27 and note. Elliott writes similarly in “Patched Elbows Petition,” an appendix to Corn Law Rhymes (1831) addressed to “The Honourable the Commons’ House, in Parliament assembled”: “Your petitioner is fearfully aware how little he had to do with your decisions, but to obey them:—That your petitioner having ten children dependent upon his unaided exertions for support, has a particular aversion to any blessings conferred up him by your Honourable House, which have a tendency to take money out of his pocket, or the bread from his children’s trenchers” (110). 209.35. ‘bread-taxed drudge’ . . . ‘satrap bread-tax-fed’: These are Carlyle’s own coinages, suggestive of characterizations scattered throughout Elliott’s texts, some representative examples of which are “drudge,” “bread-tax’d labour,” “bread-tax’d misery,” “bread-tax’d slave,” “bread-tax’d vermin,” and “Corn-law’d bipeds” for the former; and “satrap,” “pauper Satraps,” “merciless satrapy,” “bread-tax eaters,” “breadtax-eating thief,” “tax-fed knave,” “Dey of Starvation,” “bashaw,” “thane of corn laws,” “pamper’d

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son of sloth,” “sultan-like,” and “haughty drones” for the latter. A satrap was a provincial governor in ancient Persia and by transference “a subordinate ruler; often suggesting an imputation of tyranny or ostentatious splendor” (oed). 209.36-37. by such simple hellebore-dose, be healed: Medicinal qualities have been ascribed to hellebore since ancient times. It is not clear whether Carlyle has in mind black hellebore, which was used to treat various ailments, or white hellebore, which Hippocrates used as a purgative. The latter would accord with Carlyle’s use of the figure of a purgative that cleans out social ills, as in the recently drafted Sartor Resartus, which he described itself as an emetic (see Sartor Resartus note to 6.15). 209.37-38. world lying in wickedness: 1 John 5:19: “And we know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness.” 209.38. alcahest: The “universal solvent” sought by alchemists. A letter of February 16, 1835, together with the context here (see also note to 209.36-37), suggests that Carlyle means by it a universal remedy or “panacea” (Letters 8:48). 210.2. Royal-College Books: The Annals or other publications of the Royal College of Physicians, the oldest medical organization in England, founded in 1518. 210.6. trample under foot: Psalms 91:13: “Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet.” 210.7. ‘landed pauper in his coach-and four’: Elliott, The Village Patriarch (1.13.10). 210.8-9. ‘Rockinghams and Savilles’ of the past, with ‘the Lansdowns and Fitzwilliams,’ many a ‘Wentworth’s lord,’ still ‘a blessing’ to the present: ‘Rockinghams and Savilles’ is from the following lines: “And ye—once guardians of the fainting state, / Shades of Rockinghams, and Savilles! Ye / Who liv’d when paupers did not dine on plate!” (Village Patriarch 3.10.51). “‘Wentworth’s lord,’ still ‘a blessing’” comes from the lines “Or be like Wentworth’s lord, a blessing here!” (Village Patriarch 3.5.40). In a note to book 8, Elliott returns to “Rockinghams and Savilles” as well as “the Lansdowns and Fitzwilliams”:

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I think I can remember the time when the agricultural labourers of this country were not paupers. If I am mistaken, I beg pardon of “the gentlemen of England, who live abroad at ease;” for they cannot have degenerated from their ancestors, who, it would seem, watched over the interests of the poor with the same paternal solicitude which distinguishes their most Christian successors. Still—though the Rockinghams and the Savilles might be, like the Landsdowns and the Fitzwilliams, exceptions to a general rule—I am unwilling to believe that ‘the famous roast beaf [sic] of Old England,’ was always translatable into sixpence a day, with bread at an average of about forty pence per stone. (Village Patriarch 184) Elliott probably refers to Charles Watson-Wentworth (1730-1782), second Marquis of Rockingham, a Whig statesman and prime minister, and Sir George Savile (1726-1784), who served in Rockingham’s government. Charles William Wentworth Fitzwilliam (1786-1857), third Earl Fitzwilliam and descended from Charles Watson-Wentworth, was an early supporter of repeal of the Corn Laws, and the Fitzwilliam family did good works in their neighborhood—building cottages for their workers in Wentworth and giving money to establish the mechanics’ institute and a girls’ school for the benefit of their tenants. Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice (1780-1863), third Marquis of Lansdowne, was another Whig statesman, supporting the abolition of the slave trade, the principle of free trade and expanded foreign commerce, the Reform Bill, and government-assisted education for the poor. 210.10. has in him the root of all reverence,—a principle of Religion: See note to 88.3-4 and next note. 210.12-13. ‘reveals Himself in Parents, in all true Teachers, and Rulers’: Carlyle paraphrases the Three Reverences passage (chapters 10-11) from his translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Travels: “That posture, the arms crossed over the breast, the look turned joyfully towards Heaven: that is what we have enjoined on young children; requiring from them thereby a testimony that there is a God above, who images and reveals himself in parents, teachers, superiors” (2:265; Wanderjahre 169). Carlyle had quoted this passage in “Goethe,” Essays 1:236, and he would return to it in “Chartism,” Essays 4:103; “Inaugural Address at Edinburgh,”

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Essays 4:472-76; and “Shooting Niagara: And After?,” Essays 5:29, 42. See also preceding note. 210.14-17. Our Rhymer, it would seem, is no Methodist: . . . The Hundred Popes of England’s Jesuitry: In his sermon, Miles Gordon speaks as follows: Ask ye, if I, of Wesley’s followers one, Abjure the house where Wesleyans bend the knee? I do—because the spirit thence is gone; And truth, and faith, and grace, are not, with me, The Hundred Popes of England’s Jesuitry. (Corn Law Rhymes 4.9 [part 4 is misnumbered as 5 in the 3rd ed.]) Elliott’s note to the line explains: “Certainly the most zealous ally of tyranny in England is Old Methodism, sometimes called New Popery” and refers to “the cunning with which the modern Loyolas seek the conservation of wrongs in the holy name of Jesus” (21). Methodism was a movement within the Church of England founded by Charles Wesley (1707-1788); a long anti-Catholic tradition in post-Reformation England portrayed the Jesuits as especially devious in their efforts to seek converts to Roman Catholicism. 210.20-22. ‘this baneful corporation,’ ‘dismal as its Reign of Terror is, . . . all nuisances go’: As Carlyle indicates, this passage is from Elliott’s note to the line Carlyle has quoted above. The first quotation comes from Elliott’s first sentence: “This baneful corporation may have reclaimed half a dozen drunkards; but it is a dear police, if, for every brawl prevented, it has made fifty thousand worse than Spanish serviles.” The second passage comes from the end of the note, as follows: “Though dismal their Reign of Terror, and long-armed their Holy Inquisition, they must condescend to learn and teach what is useful, or go where all nuisances go. The conjuror is gone already; the quack doctor, and the quack parson, remain” (Corn Law Rhymes 21). 210.22. ‘Cadi-Dervish’: Elliott uses variations of this compound to suggest an English clergy that is characterized by despotism, decadence, and theatrical priestcraft rituals in “Cadi-Dervise” (The Village Patriarch 7.1.108) and “The Ranter” (Corn Law Rhymes 4. 11 [part 4 is misnumbered as part 5 in 3rd ed.]). A “Cadi” (or qadi) is a civil judge among the Turks,

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Arabs, Persians, and so on, and a dervish is an Islamic religious teacher and ascetic. 210.28. the weary and heavy-laden: Matthew 11:28: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” 210.33. land of bondage: See Exodus 20:2: “I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage,” a formula repeated many times in the Old Testament. The land of bondage is Egypt, where the Israelites lived in exile and from which they fled in search of the promised land (see 209.23 and note). 211.7-11. This deep mystery of ever-flowing Time;  .  .  .  into the poetic mind: Carlyle conflates chronos (time) with Cronus (Roman Saturn), the Titan who in Greek myth devoured his children in an attempt to prevent his predestined overthrow by one of them. In the recently drafted Sartor Resartus, Carlyle repeats and expands this observation about time when he has Teufelsdröckh say, “‘It continues ever true,’ says he, ‘that Saturn, or Chronos, or what we call Time, devours all his Children: only by incessant Running, by incessant Working, may you (for some threescore and ten years) escape him; and you too he devours at last’” (2.4.98; see also Letters 7:97). Elsewhere Teufelsdröckh links this idea about time to art: “Of this latter sort are all true Works of Art: in them (if thou know a Work of Art from a Daub of Artifice) wilt thou discern Eternity looking through Time; the Godlike rendered visible” (3.3.165). 211.13-31. The bee shall seek to settle on his hand,  .  .  .  and heavenly tears!: The Village Patriarch 10.7.175-76, with variations in capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. Carlyle’s “One day” (211.28) replaces “Ere long” in Elliott’s text. 211.35. ‘inspired thinker’: In “Historic Survey of German Poetry,” written and published a year before he wrote this essay, Carlyle had asserted that the “true Poet,  .  .  .  is but the inspired Thinker” (Essays 2:369). The same phrase appears in “Death of Goethe,” which was written just before Carlyle wrote this essay (Essays 2:369). 212.1-3. We are such stuff / As Dreams are made of . . . rounded with a Sleep: From Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep” (4.1.156-58). The words are spoken by Prospero, who is a magician, hence Carlyle’s association

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of the poet with the “miraculous and magical” in the preceding sentence (211.38); in Sartor Resartus, similarly, after quoting this passage, Carlyle continues on the following page to call Shakespeare himself a “Magician” before citing another speech by Prospero (3.9.196). The quotation is a favorite of Carlyle’s, appearing also in Sartor Resartus (3.8.195), drafted by this time, as well as On Heroes 32 and Past and Present 2.5.67. His interest seems to have been drawn to the passage by Jean Paul, as his first use of the quotation was in his 1830 essay “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter Again” (Essays 2:154), where he quoted Jean Paul quoting it (Wahrheit aus Jean Paul’s Leben 2:3; see also 212.6-7 and note). As here, Carlyle substitutes “made of ” for the reading in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, that is, “made on” ( Jean Paul had quoted the folio version). It is possible that Carlyle knew the line through the edition of George Steevens (1793) as well as later editions based on his, which emended on to of; as indicated in the note to 203.35-36, Carlyle may have been familiar with Richard Farmer’s “Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare” (1767), which is reprinted in Steevens’s edition. We note finally, however, that the 1761 Edinburgh edition of Shakespeare’s works at the Carlyle House follows the folio text. 212.5. Arabian Tales: The Thousand and One Nights (also known as Arabian Nights) is an anonymous fourteenth-century anthology of Oriental tales, many of which depict magicians, genies, sorcerers, and such. Carlyle owned the 1802 edition of the Arabian Nights translated by Edward Foster (Sotheby and Co. 2). 212.6-7. ‘Rounded with a sleep (mit Schlaf umgeben)!’ says Jean Paul; ‘these three words created whole volumes in me’: Carlyle quotes a passage from Jean Paul’s autobiography, Wahrheit aus Jean Paul’s Leben (2:37), which he translated in “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter Again” (Essays 2:154), where the concluding phrase is “whole books in me.” See note to 212.1-3. 212.15. Circulating Libraries: See note to 183.12. Although Carlyle associates Elliott with circulating libraries, Elliott contends in the preface to Corn Law Rhymes that The Village Patriarch may not suit “the circulating libraries for adult babies; but it is the earnest product of experience, a retrospect of the past, and an evidence of the present” (vi). 212.15-16. as in Sancho’s wine, with its key and thong, there was a tang of iron and leather: In Cervantes’s Don Quixote part 2 (1615), Sancho Panza tells the story of two of his kinsmen who were famous wine tasters. When given some wine from a cask to taste, one kinsman said that the

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wine had a little flavor of iron, and the other said that he tasted a little taint of leather. When the wine had finally all been sold and the cask was cleaned, a small key on a leather thong was found at the bottom of the cask (chapter 13). 212.16-17. To be reminded of Crabbe: George Crabbe (1754-1832), English poet whose poem The Village (1783) depicts a rural life not of pastoral innocence but, as in Elliott, of poverty. Carlyle is reminded not only by the similarities in their poetry, but by Elliott himself, who discusses Crabbe in the preface to The Village Patriarch, where he imagines a reviewer, Francis Jeffrey, accusing him of ineptly attempting to imitate Wordsworth and continues: “I am, I suspect, still more unfortunate in my attempts to imitate Crabbe, that most British of poets; not that my imitation is servile, or that I have failed to stamp my individuality upon it; but my pencil wants force, though it is dipped in sadness, and familiar with shadow” (vi). 212.18. the fair tuneful Hemans: Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793-1835), a prolific and popular English poet, beloved especially for her sentimental and inspirational lyrics. 212.19. what have we to do with Byron: See note to 37.4. Carlyle probably refers to book 4 of The Village Patriarch, in which Byron’s Manfred is recited. 212.20-21. King Cambyses’ vein: In Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, Falstaff says: “Give me a cup of sack to make my eyes look red, that it may be thought I have wept, for I must speak in passion, and I will do it in King Cambyses’ vein” (2.4.384-87). Thomas Preston’s play A Lamentable Tragedie Mixed Ful of Pleasant Mirth, Conteyning the Life of Cambises King of Percia (1569?) had become a touchstone for ranting bombast. In his translator’s preface to Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Carlyle writes, “Those in particular, who take delight in ‘King Cambyses’ vein,’ and open Meister with the thought of Werter in their minds, will soon pause in utter dismay, and their paroxysm of dismay will pass by degrees into unspeakable contempt” (1:6). The phrase appears also in a letter of 1817 (Letters 1:117) and, later, in French Revolution 3:3.8.156, 3.9.158, 6.7.278. 212.23-24. ‘It is too bad to exalt into a hero the coxcomb who would have gone into hysterics if a tailor had laughed at him’: The Village Patriarch 182; Carlyle substitutes “bad to exalt into” for “bad when they exalt.”

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212.26-27. ‘Dream of Enoch Wray’: Book 7 of The Village Patriarch, “Enoch Wray’s Dream,” a vision of the ills of England; Carlyle may have in mind section 6, which is replete with images of fire. 212.33. He has little or no Humour: Carlyle often cites a sense of humor as a defining characteristic of his literary heroes—including Shakespeare, Swift, Sterne, Cervantes, Goethe, Richter, and Burns as well as the fictional Teufelsdröckh (see Essays 1:16-18, 283; Sartor Resartus 1.4.25). In “Schiller” he had written, “Humour has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius” (Essays 2:200). 213.1. ‘soot is soot’: “If my composition smell of the workshop, and the mechanic, I cannot help it; soot is soot” (The Village Patriarch viii). 213.15. ‘uneducated Poet’: See 201.16-17 and note. 213.20. where there is a will there is a way: See note to 202.15. 213.22-24. If Alfieri (also kept busy enough, with horse-breaking and what not) learned Greek after he was fifty: Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803), Italian poet and dramatist, was a passionate horseman who acquired a taste for learning in his late twenties and spent the latter years of his life in the study of Greek literature. The “what not” keeping Alfieri busy would include the estranged wife of Charles Edward Stuart (“Bonny Prince Charlie”), the Countess of Albany with whom Alfieri was in love. In August 1822, Carlyle had written in his journal, “As to this metaphorical talent, it is the first characteristic of genius—tho’ not the only or an indispensable one, see Alfieri” (Two Note Books 30), and he had contrasted Schiller and Alfieri in Life of Schiller (80-81). He quotes a phrase from Alfieri in “Voltaire,” above 96.26-28. 213.30-214.2. Where toils the Mill by ancient woods embraced, . . . are his bosom friends: The Village Patriarch 5.4.74, with variants in punctuation, spelling, and capitalization. Carlyle’s “Blind Enoch” in 213.32 is “But Enoch” in Elliott’s text. 214.4-13. Behold his failings! Hath he virtues too? . . . meets his doom!: The Village Patriarch 5.4.74-75, with variants in capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. 214.15-31: ‘of Jem, the rogue avowed’  .  .  .  . emulates the squire’s!: The

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Village Patriarch 3.9.49-50, with variants in capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. 214.33-37. Jem rises with the Moon; but when she sinks, . . . . with all he steals!: The Village Patriarch 3.9.50, with variants in capitalization and punctuation. 214.35. boroughmongering: Trafficking in the sale of parliamentary seats for borough representation; the term was in frequent use in the debates on the Reform Bill that were taking place at this time (see notes to 176.11-12 and 204.32-33). 215.2. Arcadia: See note to 34.27. 215.2-3. toil-grimed sons of Tubalcain: In Genesis, Tubalcain, a descendent of Cain, is “an instructer of every artificer in brass and iron” (4:22), and thus can be seen as being an ironworker like Elliott. In a letter of 1824 Carlyle had referred to Birmingham as “this City of Tubalcain” (Letters 3:121). See also Sartor Resartus 2.8.128, 3.7.182; “The Diamond Necklace,” Historical Essays 114.3; and “Chartism,” Essays 4:183. 215.7-216.19. Light! All is not corrupt, for thou art pure, . . . with infant rivers, ere began—: The Village Patriarch 3.2.36-3.3.38, with variants in capitalization, spelling, and punctuation; Carlyle omits the section number between these stanzas and the line “Light! we may cloud thy beams, but not defile,” which should be between 215.10 and 11. 216.21. ‘King-humbling’ Bread-tax, ‘blind Misrule’: This line follows after the last line just quoted and concludes section 3: “King-humbling blind misrule his wolfish sway” (The Village Patriarch 3.33.38, with variants in punctuation, capitalization, and spelling). 216.25-27. ‘the good actor soon makes us forget the bad theatre,  .  .  .  a theatre of peculiar excellence’: Carlyle quotes loosely from his translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, where Wilhelm observes, “A good actor makes us very soon forget the awkwardness and meanness of paltry decorations; but a splendid theatre is the very thing which first makes us truly feel the want of proper actors” (1:132; Werke 18:159). 216.30. Workhouse: While workhouses became especially notorious after passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 two years after the

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appearance of this essay, they had been in use in England since the seventeenth century, and Elliott shows that they already were places of dread: “I to the Workhouse? I!” the widow cried, And from her shoulders ript the kerchief thin, Displaying to the tyrant, elder-eyed, A breast that might have tempted saints to sin, While all th’ impassion’d woman rag’d within; “I! to the Workhouse?” and her forehead burn’d, And swell’d the tortur’d heart that would not break, And her neck thicken’d, and her visage turn’d Black, and she gasp’d, long impotent to speak: “I! to the Workhouse? rather will I seek The welcome grave.” (The Village Patriarch 129; 8.2.26-36) 216.35. ‘God would shield them from the bitterness of Parish Pay’: “Yet thee we bless, that he can proudly say / He eats the hoarded bread of industry, / And that he hath not, in his evil day, / Tasted the bitterness of parish-pay” (The Village Patriarch 1.19.14-15). There are numerous other references to parish pay in the poem. “Parish pay” refers to money collected by the local parish for payments to the unemployed. 217.6. a sickly and sulky Byron, or Byronlet: On Carlyle’s view of Byron, see note to 37.4; see also note to 202.24. In a letter of April 28, 1832, responding to Macvey Napier’s request that Carlyle write an encyclopedia article on Byron, while he was writing “Corn-Law Rhymes,” Carlyle writes of Byron: His fame has been very great, but I see not how it is to endure; neither does that make him great. No genuine productive Thought was ever revealed by him to mankind; indeed no clear undistorted vision into anything, or picture of anything; but all had a certain falsehood, a brawling theatrical insincere character. The man’s moral nature too was bad, his demeanour, as a man, was bad. What was he, in short, but a huge sulky Dandy; of giant dimensions, to be sure, yet still a Dandy; who sulked, as poor Mrs Hunt expressed it[,] “like a school-boy that had got a plain bunn given him instead of a plum one.” His Bunn was nevertheless God’s Universe with what Tasks

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are there; and it had served better men than he. I love him not; I owe him nothing; only pity, and forgiveness: he taught me nothing that I had not again to forget. (Letters 6:148-49) Carlyle also gives the anecdote concerning Marianne Hunt in the next essay he wrote, “Goethe’s Works” (Essays 2:397). 217.9. Sheffield Blacksmith: Elliott himself, who was a blacksmith (see note to 200.18). 217.12-13. Most persons, who have had eyes to look with: See Deuteronomy 29:4: “Yet the Lord hath not given you an heart to perceive, and eyes to see, and ears to hear, unto this day.” 217.14-16. ‘from their own knowledge and observation fearlessly declare . . . twenty-five years ago’: The Village Patriarch: “But whatever may have been the former state of our agricultural labourers, I can fearlessly declare, from my own knowledge and observation, that the little master manufacturers of the district around Sheffield, are in a much worse condition than they were twenty-five years ago” (184). 217.23-24. a Tragedy, less famous than that of the Sons of Atreus: Agamemnon and Menelaus, the sons of Atreus, king of Mycenae, were the subject of tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca, as well as modern treatments such as Alfieri’s Agamemnon and Orestes (both 1777) and Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris (1787). 217.24-25. if no ‘kingly house,’ yet a manly house, went to the dust, and a whole manly lineage was swept away!: In Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Serlo describes as essential to Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet “the great idea, that here a kingly house by internal crimes and incongruities goes down to ruin” (1:336; Werke 19:166). 217.27. ‘brave Peasantry’: A stock phrase, perhaps expressive of false admiration and condescending sentimentality toward the lower classes. 217.36. Gehenna of Manufacturing Radicalism: Elliott’s home of Sheffield, as a modern version of hell. Gehenna as a name for hell comes from the Vulgate Bible (Matthew 5:22, 29); Carlyle refers to Gehenna in Sartor Resartus 2.3.83 and On Heroes 83.

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218.5. ‘The Pariahs of the Isle of Woe’: The Village Patriarch has “Plead for the pariah of the isle of woes” (3.10.52). 218.12-13. Seven thousand that have not bowed the knee to Baal: 1 Kings 19:18: “Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him.” “Baal” means “false god” and is denounced as such by Hebrew prophets. 218.15-16. For it has been often said, and must often be said again, that all Reform except a moral one will prove unavailing: Carlyle probably refers to contemporary discussions of the Reform Bill (see note to 176.11-12), but this is also a view often repeated in his writings. From the period of “Corn-Lawn Rhymes,” his journal records for May 16, 1832: “The only Reform is in thyself. Know this O Politician, and be moderately political” (Two Note Books 274). In “Goethe’s Works,” published the month following “Corn-Law Rhymes,” Carlyle writes that the deeper significance of his subject is remote from Reform Bill politics, tending “neither for the Reform Bill nor against it, but quietly through it and beyond it; nowise to prescribe this or that mode of electing members, but only to produce a few members worth electing” (Essays 2:401). See also note to 218.28-31. 218.18-19. it leaves the ground empty,—ready either for noble fruits, or for new worse tares!: Carlyle alludes to the Parable of the Tares, in which, when his servants ask if they should uproot the tares sown by his enemy among his wheat, the householder replies, “Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them” (Matthew 13:29). 218.20-21. that more and more Good Men are, by a bountiful Providence, sent hither to disseminate Goodness: In Carlyle’s unfinished novel Wotton Reinfred, one of the characters says of the poet, “His spirit is a spirit of goodness and brotherhood; anger, hatred, malignity may not abide with him, will not consort with his nature” (135). A few pages later, still on the subject of poetry and the poet’s function, another character observes, “In our view it has much to do with moral goodness  .  .  .  with the poet who is the interpreter and shadower forth of goodness” (140). 218.27-28. Diogenes would now need two lanterns in daylight: Diogenes the Cynic (412-323 b.c.?) was the Greek philosopher who taught that the virtuous life was the simple life and lived in a tub to illustrate this lesson. Condemning the perceived laxity of his fellow citizens, he is said to have wandered the streets carrying a lantern and looking for an honest man.

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218.28-31. over the Time thou hast no power;  .  .  .  thy life and labour not in vain: Carlyle had written similarly in “Signs of the Times”: “To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself ” (Essays 2:82). See also note to 218.15-16. 218.37. Puffery: See note to 173.31. 218.38-219.1. these Volumes carry ‘Third Edition’ marked on them,—on all of them but the newest: Carlyle implies that they have been popular enough that two new editions have been called for. As indicated at the head of the essay, Carlyle was reviewing the third editions of Corn Law Rhymes and Love, so by “the newest” he means The Village Patriarch. He probably was not aware that the 1831 edition he was reviewing was not the first edition, as it had first been published in 1829. It should be noted that while the Corn Law Rhymes that Carlyle reviewed calls itself the third edition, we have not been able to locate a second edition, and the only earlier edition extant is Corn Law Rhymes: The Ranter (1830), which contains only “The Ranter.” Love had been published in 1823 with Elliott’s name on the title page, unlike the editions Carlyle was reviewing. Further adding to the confusion is the fact that a “third edition” had already been published in 1824. 219.5-7. The Rhapsody of ‘Enoch Wray’ is, in its nature, and unconscious tendency, Epic; a whole world lies shadowed in it: On Carlyle’s view of epic as portraying a world—a society and its beliefs—see 135.19-20 and note. See also “On History Again,” Historical Essays 22. 219.11. Ilion had he destroyed: Ilion (also known as Troy) is the city destroyed by the Greeks in Homer’s epic the Iliad. 219.12-13. the Mill stands noisy by its cataract, making corn into bread for men, it was Enoch that reared it: The Village Patriarch: But, lo, tow’rds Albert’s mill the patriarch wends! (His own hands rear’d the pile; the very wheels Were made by him; and where the archway bends, His name, in letters of hard stone, appeals To time and memory.) (9.9.152-53)

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By this point in Elliott’s poem, however, the mill is no longer making corn into bread: Albert has been ruined, and “Alas, the wave / Runs all to waste, the mighty wheel is still!” (9.9.153). 219.14-15. it was Enoch’s cunning that spanned it with that strong Arch, grim, time-defying: The Village Patriarch: “The one-arch’d bridge—thy glory, and thy pride; / Thy Parthenon; the triumph of thy skill; / Which still bestrides, and long it shall bestride, / The discontented stream, from hill to hill” (4.9.67). Carlyle may be drawn to this image by the recollection of his father’s part in building Auldgarth Bridge, which he had recently recounted (Reminiscences 26-28). See also Carlyle’s “Drumwhirn Bridge” (Poems 47-48). 219.16-17. Where Enoch’s hand or mind has been, Disorder has become Order; Chaos has receded some little handbreadth: Here, as elsewhere, Carlyle evokes the moment of creation in Genesis when God forms order out of Chaos: “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light” (1:2-3). In Sartor Resartus, which he had recently drafted, Teufelsdröckh asserts: “Divine moment, when over the tempest-tost Soul, as once over the wild-weltering Chaos, it is spoken: Let there be Light! . . . instead of a dark wasteful Chaos, we have a blooming, fertile, Heaven-encompassed World” (2.9.146). 219.18-20. Enoch too has seen his followers fall  .  .  .  raised sandstone memorials: The one-hundred-year-old Enoch Wray hears the church bell, and “It calls our father to the lone church-yard; / Ah, many, many of his friends are there / And age, at five score years, hath few to spare!” (Village Patriarch 10.3.165). He then recalls his wife, Mary, and proceeds “To bid his old remembrances adieu”: Now, on the tomb-stones which of old he laid, (Pages with silent admonition fraught,) He kneels—and in the twilight of thy [church] shade, Reads, with his fingers, what his chisel wrought. Perchance, th’ effusions of his pensive thought, Full oft’ recited in his soul, with pride. (10.4.167) 219.20. Abiit ad Plures: Petronius, Satyricon: Cena Trimalchionis 42.5,

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which Carlyle had translated in his journal as “he hath gone to the greater number” (Two Note Books 68), a euphemism for “he has died.” 219.24-25. Not ‘Arms and the Man;’ ‘Tools and the Man,’ that were now our Epic: “Arma virumque cano” (Arms and the man I sing) are the opening words of Virgil’s Aeneid (1.1). On the poem as epic, see Carlyle’s earlier comments (219.5-7) and the note to 135.19-20. Carlyle here for the first time applies his idea of humans as tool-using animals to his ideas about epic. Between January 18 and 21, 1832, just before writing this essay, he had written in his journal: “Franklin, I find twice or thrice in Boswell, defines man as ‘a Tool-making Animal’. Teufelsdreck therefore has so far been anticipated” (Two Note Books 245). The passage from Sartor Resartus to which he refers contains the following: “‘But on the whole,’ continues our eloquent Professor, ‘Man is a Tool-using Animal (Handthierendes Thier). Weak in himself, and of small stature, he stands on a basis, at most for the flattest-soled, of some half squarefoot, insecurely enough.  .  .  .  Nevertheless he can use Tools, can devise Tools: . . . Nowhere do you find him without Tools; without Tools he is nothing, with Tools he is all’’’ (1.5.31). Carlyle returned to this idea in French Revolution 3:2.1.68; Letters 13:289, 16:39-40; and Past and Present 3.12.207, 4.1.245, 247. 219.25-27. What indeed are Tools, from the Hammer and Plummet of Enoch Wray to this Pen we now write with, but Arms, wherewith to do battle against Unreason: Carlyle had anticipated this idea of the pen as a tool in the recently drafted Sartor Resartus: “Tools? Hast thou not a Brain, furnished, furnishable with some glimmerings of Light; and three fingers to hold a Pen withal? Never since Aaron’s Rod went out of practice, or even before it, was there such a wonder-working Tool: greater than all recorded miracles have been performed by Pens” (2.10.148). 220.6. Courtship of the sharp-tempered, oft-widowed Alice Green: This comic episode occurs in book 6 of The Village Patriarch, when Enoch Wray visits the octogenarian, five-times-widowed, cunning woman “Alice Green,— / The shrewish village quack, and ever sooth / Interpreter of dreams” (6.1.90) to share his versified dream “And have some harmless fun with Alice Green” (6.1.91). The only courtship involved is owing to Alice’s own dreams: Last night, she dream’d that Enoch came to woo The five-times wedded, non aged eighty-two,

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With fifty guineas sew’d in his left sleeve. . . . He comes!—she laughs and winks, like one bewitch’d, And feels already married, and enrich’d. (6.7.95) And was she not a beauty in her youth? Still she hath eyes—one red and blind, one green; And in her upper jaw is yet a tooth, Which, when she laughs or yawns, may well be seen, With two below, and bluish stumps between. (6.7.96) 220.14. ever in their great Taskmaster’s eye: From the concluding lines of Milton’s Sonnet 7 (“How Soon Hath Time”): “All is, if I have grace to use it so, / As ever in my great task-Master’s eye.” The “great Taskmaster’s eye” also appears in Wotton Reinfred 27, On Heroes 183, and in Past and Present 3.12.205. Variants of the phrase also appear in Carlyle’s letters from the period of the present essay (e.g., Letters 6:47, 105, 113, and 345) as well as in his journal for March 31, 1833 (Froude, First Forty Years 2:345). 220.17. Egyptian bondage: See note to 210.33. 220.25-26. if all parties are to love and help one another, the first step towards this, is that all thoroughly understand one another: For the biblical injunction to “love one another” see note to 68.20-21. A belief in the interdependency of love and knowledge is a constant in Carlyle’s writings, though usually he gives priority to a loving heart, as in “Burns” 45.16 and note. Carlyle repeats his point that the upper classes need to understand the working class in “Chartism,” where part of the specific passage is as follows: “For, as is well said, all battle is misunderstanding; did the parties know one another, the battle would cease” (Essays 4:122-23). 220.32-33. Manchester Detrosier: Rowland Detrosier (1800?–1834), active primarily in Manchester, was a radical leader, popular lecturer, and secretary of the National Political Union founded in 1831 to support the First Reform Bill. Like Elliott, he was a self-educated member of the working classes. Carlyle apparently was introduced to him by Mill on or about January 22, 1832 (Letters 6:94, 101, 128), and in a letter of January 26, 1836, would describe him as “a poor goodish kind of man” (Letters 8:289-90). In his journal for Friday, December 23, 1831, Carlyle had written: “Reading Corn-Law Rhymes. ‘Balaam’s Ass has not only

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stopt, but begins to speak!’ Witness Detrosier too” (Two Note Books 230). Balaam and his ass appear later in this paragraph. 220.35. as Napoleon was wont to say, ‘in a new position’: Unidentified. The editors of the Carlyle letters suggest that this may be a version of a saying Carlyle is reported to have mentioned in conversation: “The Emperor once said, ‘je me trouve dans une fausse position’” (Letters 8:127); the expression became part of the Carlyles’ coterie speech (Letters 15:34). 220.38. In the Book of Numbers: the case of Balaam the son of Beor: Numbers 22:5: “Balaam the son of Beor.” Numbers 22-24 portrays the wanderings of the Israelites as they seek the promised land (see 209.23 and note; see also note to 210.33). 221.2-3. The Midianitish Soothsayer (Truth-speaker, or as we should now say, Counsel-giver and Senator): Balaam was a diviner and later sojourned with the Midianites, who were hostile toward the Israelites. Carlyle’s parenthetic interpretation and subsequent characterization create a Balaam who is a caricature of a member of Parliament during the period of the Reform Bill. “Counsel-giver” probably alludes to a later passage in Numbers in which Moses lists offenses of the Israelites, including “through the counsel of Balaam,” sinning against God (31:16; see also Revelation 2:14). 221.5. ‘curse the people of the Lord’: Numbers 22:6. Balak, king of Moab, alarmed because of the presence of the wandering Israelites who had settled in his kingdom, sends messengers for Balaam to ask him to curse them, but, upon God’s command, he instead blesses them. Note, however, that, as discussed in the preceding note, Balaam is depicted as later providing evil counsel to the Israelites and being slain by them (Numbers 31:8, 16). 221.8. a curse or a blessing: See preceding note. 221.10-11. he is, has been, and will be, respectable: For Carlyle on respectability, see 72.10 and note. 221.17-18. schemes for the Suppression of Vice, and the Cause of civil and religious Liberty all over the world: A Society for the Suppression of Vice had been founded in 1802, but Carlyle probably refers here to such schemes in general; similarly, the phrase “the cause of civil and religious

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liberty all over the world” had been in wide circulation for well over a decade. In “Life and Writings of Werner,” he had characterized a “secret association” in Werner’s Die Söhne des Thals (1801-1802) as an “all-powerful Brotherhood” that “forwards, we suppose, ‘the cause of civil and religious liberty all over the world’” and then adds: “Such a magnificent ‘Society for the Suppression of Vice’ may well be supposed to walk by the most philosophical principles” (Essays 1:106-7). In the 1869 edition of the essays, “the Preservation of Game” has been added at the head of this list (see Historical Collation). 221.20-21. when his Ass not only on the sudden stood stock-still, defying spur and cudgel, but—began to talk: As they travel toward Balak, Balaam’s ass is stopped by angels visible to the ass but not Balaam. Balaam strikes the ass three times, and each time it refuses to go, after which “the Lord opened the mouth of the ass, and she said unto Balaam, What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times?” (Numbers 22:28). On Rowland Detrosier as Balaam’s ass, see note to 220.32-33. 221.24-25. the spirit-stirring Vote, the ear-piercing Hear; the big Speech: References to activities in the House of Commons; see note to 221.2-3. 221.25. that makes ambition virtue: “Farewell the plumèd troops and the big wars / That makes ambition virtue!” (Othello 3.3.401-2). 221.25: Palm-greasing: Bribery, which evokes general political corruption and election bribery, both contemporary concerns. In characteristic fashion, Carlyle turns an existing expression, in this case “greasing a palm” as a description of bribery, into a noun; no earlier instance has been located. 221.26. sphere-music: See note to 32.36. 221.30-31. do honestly whatsoever his hand shall find to do: Ecclesiastes 9:10: “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.” This is another favorite quotation of Carlyle’s, recorded in his journal as early as March 4, 1823: “Goethe says it is always wrong to spend time in looking back at the road we have travelled over; it either disheartens us vainly, or puffs us up with a conceit as vain: the best plan is whatever our hand findeth to do, to do it quickly” (Two Note Books 31). It also appears in Sartor Resartus, which he had drafted the previous summer (2.9.146).

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221.33. ‘clearing his mind of Cant’: See note to 206.23-24. 221.34-36. Whether Rhyme is the only dialect he can write in; whether Rhyme is, after all, the natural or fittest dialect for him?: Despite his own early attempts to write verse, Carlyle by this time considered nonfictional prose the best medium for serious thought. Between March 1 and April 12, 1830, he had written in his journal: “What is Poetry? Do I really love Poetry? I sometimes fancy almost, not. The jingle of maudlin persons, with their mere (even genuine) ‘sensibility’ is unspeakably fatiguing to me. My greatly most delightful reading is, where some Goethe musically teaches me” (Two Note Books 151). Later in the 1830s, he distinguishes between verse and poetry, as when he counseled Robert Browning, “But unless poetic faculty mean a higher-power of common understanding, I know not what it means. One must first make a true intellectual representation of a thing, before any poetic interest that is true will supervene” (Letters 13:155-56). In the 1840s he would counsel a number of correspondents—among them Tennyson and the Brownings—to write prose rather than verse (for other examples, see Letters 17:278, 22:16, 188). In the case of the Brownings and Tennyson, he did not press the issue. In 1856, for example, he decided that poetry was Browning’s natural “dialect” (Letters 15:216-217). For a discussion of Carlyle’s advice to the Brownings, see Sanders. 221.37. a Waverley Novel: See note to 12.34-36. 222.4. timber-toned: In Scottish dialect, timber tones are unmusical, “wooden” tones. 222.6-7. disobedient Rhyme,—who would ride on it that had once learned walking!: Carlyle alludes to Pegasus, the fractious winged horse from Greek myth associated with the Muses and a symbol for poetic inspiration. When his master Bellerophon attempted to ride him to heaven, Pegasus arrived safely, but Bellerophon was thrown off and injured in the fall, spending the rest of his life lamed and lonely. Carlyle would emphasize the happier side of the Pegasus and Bellerophon story in his next essay, “Goethe’s Works” (Essays 2:418-19). 222.8. He takes amiss that some friends have admonished him to quit Politics: “One of my warm-hearted critics, he of the Athenæum, in his kindness and zeal for my welfare, (which cannot but be sincere, and for which I will never cease to be grateful,) advises me to rhyme no more

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politics. Poetry, he thinks, is thrown away on such subjects. I think differently, and I will tell him why” (Corn Law Rhymes iii). 222.10. Socrates’-Demon: A guiding spirit or conscience, as described in Xenophon’s Memorabilia of Socrates. Teufelsdröckh mentions his own “guiding Genius (Dämon)” in Sartor Resartus (2.5.107). 222.13-15. what, in his own sphere, could be done,  .  .  .  and slashing asunder the False: An idea often expressed by Carlyle, and central to the recently drafted Sartor Resartus, in which Teufelsdröckh complains that utilitarianism is “admirably calculated for destroying, only not for rebuilding!” (3.5.173); while the old must be destroyed, he implies throughout, what is most important is rebuilding. As early as the introduction to Wilhelm Meister, Carlyle had asserted: “Goethe is all, or the best of all, that Voltaire was, and he is much that Voltaire did not dream of. . . . He is not a questioner and a despiser, but a teacher and a reverencer; not a destroyer, but a builder-up; not a wit only, but a wise man” (1:28); accordingly, in the conclusion of his obituary notice on Goethe, the writing of which delayed work on this essay, he commended his readers to emulate Goethe: “To live, as he counselled and commanded, not commodiously in the Reputable, the Plausible, the Half, but resolutely in the Whole, the Good, the True” (Essays 3:384). 222.25. ‘Boroughmongering gowls’: From the verses quoted above 214.35. 222.25. the rage of the Heathen imagining a vain thing: Psalms 2:1: “Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?” 222.28. what will there, or can there be for the son of Adam but Work: Before casting him out of paradise, God sentenced Adam, and his descendants (“sons”), to the necessity of working for a living (Genesis 3:19). In “Characteristics” Carlyle had written, “Is not labour the inheritance of man?” (Essays 3:28). See the earlier discussion of work 204-5. 222.32. Be diligent in business, then; fervent in spirit: Proverbs 22:29: “Seest thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings; he shall not stand before mean men,” which Paul echoed in Romans 12:1011: “Be . . . not slothful in business; fervent in spirit; serving the Lord.” Carlyle uses this passage as an encouragement to friends and family in letters beginning in 1829 and through most of the 1830s (Letters 5:16, 96, 189; 6:93, 273, 293, 321; 7:10, 115; 9:123, 336).

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222.36-37. For it well beseemeth kings, all mortals it beseemeth well, To possess their souls in patience, and await what can betide: Carlyle modifies a passage from his translation of one of Helen of Troy’s speeches from Goethe’s Helena: “Yet it well becometh queens, all mortals it becometh well, / To possess their hearts in patience, and await what can betide” (“Goethe’s Helena,” Essays 1:175; Werke 4:242). In this translation Carlyle echoes a phrase from the King James Bible: “In your patience possess ye your souls” (Luke 21:19) that he had used in “Life and Writings of Werner” (Essays 1:106; see also Letters 6:356, 13:142 and “The Diamond Necklace,” Historical Essays 113.12).

Notes to “Diderot” 223.7. The Acts of the Christian Apostles: The New Testament book recounting the early Christian church. 223.9. the French Philosophes: See note to 99.17. 223.13. Four quite new Octavos: The four volumes, in the standard octavo format, of Mémoires under review and listed in item 1 above. 223.14-15. it is but a year or two since a new contribution on Voltaire: Carlyle probably refers to Mémoires sur Voltaire, et sur ses Ouvrages (1826), which he had reviewed in “Voltaire” (above 223). 223.15-16. Jean Jacques had a new Life written for him: Carlyle probably refers to Victor Conatien de Mussett, Histoire de la vie et des ouvrages de J.-J. Rousseau (1825). On Rousseau, see note to 91.20. 223.16. Feuilles de Grimm: Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, adressée à un souverain d’Allemagne Depuis 1770 Jusqu`en 1782, Par le Baron De Grimm et Par Diderot (1812); it was edited by Frédéric Melchior Grimm (1723-1807), a friend of Diderot and Rousseau. Carlyle’s copy is at the Carlyle House, Chelsea (Tarr 200). 223.16-17. what incalculable masses may yet lie dormant in the Petersburg Library: Presumably materials acquired by the Empress Catherine (on Catherine, see note to 83.36-37; on this episode, see 258.11 and note). Carlyle may have in mind the copy of the Encyclopédie in which Diderot restored material cut by Lebreton (see note to 243.9-10), which, accord-

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ing to his daughter’s account, is in a Russian library (Mémoires 1:32; see below 253 and note to 253.31-32). 223.18-19. Thomas Parr might begin reading  .  .  .  hundred and fiftieth year: Parr, who claimed to have been born in 1483, lived until 1635, which, by this accounting, would have made him 152 years old when he died. 224.4-5. cast into the oven: Matthew 6:30: “Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?” (see also Luke 12:28). 224.10. ‘Poetic Fiction’: Not identified, but presumably a commonplace phrase. 224.20-21. The Thinker is the Poet, the Seer: See 206.37 and note. 224.25. the magic web of Universal History: See note to 133.30. Carlyle would use the same figure a few months later in “On History Again,” Historical Essays 21. 224.32-34. The Bourbons, indeed, took . . . the Philosophes: The Bourbon dynasty, which had been overthrown during the French Revolution, was restored in 1814 and continued to reign until the Revolution of 1830. There was a rumor that Voltaire’s remains were removed from the Pantheon after their 1814 restoration, but we have found no evidence that any of the graves of the philosophes were hidden. 225.25. Vivats: Cries of “Long live the king/queen.” 225.28. Voltaire: See Carlyle’s “Voltaire,” above and note to 75.title. 225.29-31. ‘not only the greatest man of this age, but of all past ages, and perhaps the greatest that Nature could produce’: Carlyle has adapted this from “Je dirais que ce fut le plus grand homme que la nature ait produit, que je trouverais des approbateurs; mais si je dis qu’elle n’en avait point encore produit, et qu’elle n’en produira peut-être pas un aussi extraordinaire, il n’y aura guère que ses ennemis qui me contrediront” (Œuvres 11:403). 225.35. Siècle de Louis Quinze: The “century of Louis XV,” that is, the eighteenth century, during the reign of Louis XV of France (1710-1774).

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226.18. ‘Loom of Time’: From Carlyle’s translation of Goethe’s Faust 1.508–9: “So schaff ich am sausenden Webstuhl der Zeit. / Und wirke der Gottheit lebendiges Kleid” (Werke 12:32; emphasis added). Carlyle had translated the passage (given in the German original also) in “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter’s Review of Madame de Stael’s ‘Allemagne,’” Essays 1:484: “Thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply, / And weave for God the Garment thou seest him by” (see also Sartor Resartus 1.8.55, 2.10.205, 3.9.268). 226.29-30. Journal de Trevoux: A Jesuit review of contemporary literature, published from 1701 to 1782. On its attacks on the philosophes, see Diderot, Œuvres 1:xiii–xiv. 226.30. Sorbonne: The theology faculty of the University of Paris, which opposed the philosophe movement. 226.30-31. foreign presses, at Kehl: Carlyle compares Diderot’s circumstances to those of Voltaire, whose works were published in Kehl, which was just across the French border from Strasbourg. 226.34. Sibyl’s leaves: The Cumaean Sybil was supposed to have written prophecies on leaves that she refused to reassemble when they were strewn about by the wind. 226.36-38. Two spurious, surreptitious Amsterdam Editions, ‘or rather formless, blundering Agglomerations,’ . . . during his life: The editors of the edition of the Œuvres that Carlyle is reviewing record a six-volume edition published in Amsterdam in 1772 and a five-volume edition of 1773. They describe them as “mauvaises compilations” (bad compilations) that are “remplies de fautes” (full of faults) (1:xxvii). 227.1. ‘with peals of laughter’: “Toutes ces bévues n’excitèrent de sa part qu’un grand éclat de rire” (Œuvres 1:xxvii). 227.1-4. Of the four that have since been printed  .  .  .  on any system: The four are Naigeon’s fifteen-volume edition of 1798, a reprinting of it in 1800, Belin’s seven-volume edition of 1818 (Œuvres 1:xxxi), and the edition of Brière, which Carlyle is reviewing (see next note). 227.4. Brière’s: J. L. J. Brière was the publisher as well as nominal editor of the edition. See preceding note.

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227.8-10. Brière seems, indeed, to have hired some person,  .  .  .  the plural number: The preface is signed by “des nouveaux éditeurs” (Œuvres 1:xxv), and as Carlyle indicates, some of the notes are signed “Éditeurs” (e.g., Œuvres 1:ii). 227.21-22. sought out and printed . . . by Naigeon: Discussed in Œuvres 1:xxxii–xxxiii; the Life itself is reprinted in vol. 22. See also next note. 227.24. Naigeon, the beloved disciple of Diderot: Jacques-André Naigeon (1748-1810) was a contributor to the Encyclopédie and Diderot’s literary executor. 227.27. Denis the Fatalist: A play on the title of Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste et son maître (1796). On its publication history see Œuvres 1:xxx. 227.28. ‘Light-Street’: In “Goethe’s Portrait,” written a few months before “Diderot,” Carlyle had written ‘Lichtstrasse, lightstreet, or galaxy” (Essays 2:371). As Carlyle’s gloss indicates, the German word translates literally as “light-street,” but more generally as galaxy or Milky Way (the latter formerly being regarded as a term for galaxy). The word is no longer in general use in German, but examples contemporary with Carlyle may be found; see, for example, Johann Gottfried Herder’s statement: “Die Lichtoder sogenannte Milch-straße zeigt sich uns als ein Zusammenhangendes, ein sternbesetzter Goldreif ” (The Light or so-called Milky Street is shown to us as a connected gold-rimmed star) (Sämmtliche Werke 15:53-54). 227.29-30. ‘the most encyclopedical head that perhaps ever existed’: From the editors’ preface: “c’était la tête la plus naturellement encyclopédique qui ait peut-être jamais existé” (Œuvres 1:xxv; also in Biographie universelle 11:322). 227.30. Practical Encyclopædia: See note to 241.37-242.1. 227.31-32. three score and ten Years, or Volumes: Diderot lived to be seventy-one. The collected works are only twenty-six volumes, but they contain many works, which may add up to something like seventy altogether. 227.33-34. all that Boswell, . . . made of Johnson: See Carlyle’s description of James Boswell, biographer of Samuel Johnson, and Johnson’s renown as a conversationalist in “Boswell’s Life of Johnson,” above.

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228.8. the zeal of the devil’s house hath eaten Naigeon up: John 2:17: “And his disciples remembered that it was written, The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up.” 228.10-11. ‘Gowkthrapple,’ or ‘precious Mr. Jabesh Rentowel’: Covenanting preachers in Scott’s Waverley (1814), chapter 29. 228.14. weep by the streams of Babel: Robert Burns, “The Ordination” (1786): “Nae mair by Babel’s streams we’ll weep” (55). 228.14-15. he is wooden; thoroughly mechanical, as if Vaucanson himself had made him: Jacques de Vaucanson (1709-1782), French inventor, was famous for his automatons. See “Signs of the Times”: “Vaucanson did indeed make a wooden duck, that seemed to eat and digest” (Essays 2:65). 228.18. odium theologicum, working quite demonologically: “Odium theologicum” is hatred resulting from theological disputes, but here, as Carlyle goes on to suggest, arising from the study of demons, rather than God. 228.19. the Everlasting Nothing: See “The Everlasting No,” Sartor Resartus 2.7.120-26; Carlyle had drafted Sartor Resartus about a year before writing this essay. 228.22. Philosophic-Atheistic Logic-Mill: Carlyle first used the term “Logic-Mill” in “Signs of the Times,” where he complained, “Our favourite Philosophers have no love and no hatred; they stand among us not to do, nor to create anything, but as a sort of Logic-mills, to grind out the true causes and effects of all that is done and created” and elsewhere that “the voice of a certain modern ‘closet-logic,’ which called itself, and could not but call itself, Philosophy, had gone forth, saying, Let there be darkness, and there was darkness. No Divinity any longer dwelt in the world” (Essays 2:74, 64). See also the term “closet-logic” below (266.4). For similar statements associating logic with a mechanistic view of a world evacuated of divine presence, see “Historic Survey of German Literature,” Essays 2:359; “Goethe’s Works,” Essays 2:424. There may also be a pun on the name of James Mill, who, along with Jeremy Bentham, developed the utilitarian philosophy that derives all morals from a calculus of pleasure and pain (see note to 75.11-14). 228.23-27. An Amateur reporter  .  .  .  ‘dashing his nightcap against the wall’: Not identified.

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228.30. ‘Paulin, Publishing-Bookseller’: Jean-Baptiste-Alexandre Paulin (1796-1859), publisher of the Mémoires that are here under review. 228.33. tendresse, sensibilité: Tenderness and sensibility or sensitivity. As Carlyle implies, both words occur frequently in the letters to Voland. 229.4. ‘noble sentiment’: Not identified. 229.7. preternuptial: Carlyle’s own coinage, on analogy, as the following parenthesis indicates, with preternatural, and meaning beyond or outside of the marital, in this case relationships with women other than one’s wife. 229.8. ‘indigestions’: See 255.11-12; see also Œuvres 12:410. 229.10. a lively Memoir of him by Mademoiselle Diderot: “Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la vie et des Ouvrages de Diderot, par Madame De Vandeul, Sa Fille” (Mémoires 1:1-64). Marie-Angélique de Vandeul (1753-1824), daughter of Diderot. 229.11-12. in one large Volume, his Dream of d’Alembert: Le Rêve de d’Alembert (1769), Mémoires 4:103-239; as the pagination indicates, this volume is not entirely taken up with Le Rêve. 229.17. camera-lucida picture: A picture created with an optical instrument (named in distinction from the camera obscura) for projecting the image of a distant object on paper so that it can be copied. In this prephotographic era, it is a metaphor for a precise, literal copy. 229.26. In the ancient Town of Langres, in the month of October, 1713: These biographical details come primarily from Vandeul (Mémoires 1:1-64). Naigeon’s memoir (Œuvres 22:1-30) repeats much the same history, but some of the details given here are found only in Vandeul. 229.31-230.15. In this French Sheffield, Diderot’s Father . . . deducted from it: Didier Diderot (1675-1759). This description of Diderot’s father resonates strongly with Carlyle’s description of his own father, who died January 22, 1832, as recorded in the “Reminiscence” he composed between that date and January 29; Carlyle had agreed to write the review on January 13, though he did not begin writing until later that year. Both men were artisans ( James Carlyle was a mason), and both represent for him a kind of honesty and simplicity that, as he indicates in this passage, is

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“now, alas! nearly departed from the earth, and sought, with little effect, by idyllists, among the ‘Scottish peasantry,’ and elsewhere” (229). In Carlyle’s time Sheffield was renowned as a center for steel production. 229.34. ‘Scottish peasantry’: Carlyle here uses quotation marks to indicate this is a contemporary commonplace. 230.3. ‘with apron and grinder’s-wheel, and spectacles pushed up’: Diderot expresses the wish to have a portrait of his father “à son établi, dans ses habits d’ouvrier, la tête nue, les yeux levés vers le ciel, et la main étendue sur le front de sa petite-fille qu’il aurait bénie” (at his workbench, in the clothes of a workman, head bare, eyes raised to heaven, and hand extended before him blessing his grand-daughter) (Mémoires 1:100). In this passage and elsewhere he describes the existing paintings as poorly executed (see 1:113). 230.8. ‘follow him with tears to his long home’: “J’ai vu, depuis que je suis ici, tous les fermiers de mon père, et je n’en ai pas vu un seul sans les larmes aux yeux” (Since I have been here I have seen all the farmers of my father, and not one of them did not have tears in his eyes) (Mémoires 1:95). 230.9-11. ‘Ah, Monsieur Diderot,  .  .  .  your father’s equal’: “Monsieur Diderot, vous êtes bon; mais si vous croyez que vous vaudrez jamais votre père, vous vous trompez” (Mémoires 3:133). 230.15. The Mother: Angélique Diderot, née Vigneron (1677-1748). 230.19. ‘tonsured’: Mémoires 1:2. 230.24-231.2. ‘He had chanced to have a quarrel  .  .  .  thought of complaining’: Mémoires 1:2-3. 231.3-9. ‘One of the sweetest moments of my life,’. . . falling to weep!’: Mémoires 1:335. 231.13-14. said ‘one morning’ to his father,  .  .  .  “With all my heart”: Mémoires 1:3. 231.22-24. Here, in some minds,  .  .  .  will suggest itself: On the English view of the duplicity of the Jesuits, see note to 210.14-17. The

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government of France dissolved the order in France in 1763, well after Diderot’s school days. 231.33. Dermody, Hazlitt, Heron, Derrick: Thomas Dermody (1775– 1802), child prodigy and poet. William Hazlitt (1778–1830), essayist and political writer. Robert Heron (1764–1807), journalist and author. Samuel Derrick (1724–1769), author associated with Samuel Johnson. All made their living by writing and frequently encountered financial difficulties. 231.37-38. instead of the seven corporate selfish spirits, we have the four-and-twenty millions of discorporate selfish: Presumably the seven spirits of the book of Revelation (1:4, 3:1, 4:5, 5:6) and the population of England respectively. Carlyle uses “corporate” here in the sense of a group that is united as one body, with a play on embodiment as the preceding phrase, “Corporations of all sorts have perished (from corpulence),” makes clear; thus the spirits were one body, whereas the English nation is fragmented. 231.38. rule, Man, mind thyself: Proverbial. 232.8-31. ‘The Jesuits,’ thus sparkles Mademoiselle, . . . with his pupil’: Mémoires 1:3-5. 233.3. Entretien d’un Père avec ses Enfans: Œuvres 2:427-69. 233.8-9. a Brother, who became a clergyman; and a truehearted, sharpwitted Sister: The brother is Didier-Pierre Diderot (1722–1787); see Naigeon’s memoir (Œuvres 22:32-33) and Mémoires 1:18. The sister is Angélique (1720-1749); see Mémoires 1:23-24. Diderot’s siblings are discussed in Mémoires 1:58. Carlyle may also recall the passage he had cited above, in which Diderot remarks that his parents had left behind, upon his father’s death, a philosophe (himself ), a daughter who remained unmarried, and a son who was a clergyman (3:133). 233.22. the Abbé Bernis: François-Joachim de Pierre de Bernis (17151794). 233.22-24. ‘They used to dine together, . . . of these repasts’: Mémoires 1:6. 233.26-234.5. ‘His studies being finished,’ . . . want nothing else’: Mémoires 1:6-7.

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234.21-22. reigning, like other kings, ‘by the grace of God’: The introductory part of the full style of a monarch considered to be ruling by divine right. 234.29. ‘cleanness of teeth’: Starvation, from Amos 4:6: “And I also have given you cleanness of teeth in all your cities, and want of bread in all your places: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the Lord.” 234.31-235.2. ‘One Shrove Tuesday . . . day as painful’: Mémoires 1:15-16. 235.7-8. brillante and pétillante: Brilliant and sparkling. 235.18-21. ‘was his scholar lively,  .  .  .  it was quite the same’: Mémoires 1:9; see also Œuvres 22:13. 235.21-22. as the Devil is said to quote Scripture: Antonio, speaking of Shylock, says “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose” (Merchant of Venice 1.3.98). Antonio presumably is alluding to the New Testament passages in which the devil cites scriptures to tempt Christ (Matthew 4:6, Luke 4:10). 235.26-34. “I am come, Monsieur, . . . keep from dying”: Mémoires 1:10-11. 235.35. ‘drunk with gaiety’: “ivre de gaieté” (Mémoires 1:9). 235.37-38. ‘gold mines’: Carlyle quotes himself from above 234.24. 236.6. Samaritan: Giving aid, after the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37). 236.7-9. ‘I saw her .  .  .  her sensibility’: Mémoires 1:8-9. 236.10-11. ‘sometimes good, . . . not to say bad’: Mémoires 1:9. 236.13. subterranean shades: The darkness of the abode of the dead, Hades, in classical literature, with possible reference, given the allusion discussed in the next note, to the journey to Hades in Homer’s Odyssey. 236.14. Circe-goblets: In Homer’s Odyssey, Circe is the sorceress who offers a cup or goblet containing a potion that turns men into swine. See also preceding note.

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236.15-16. ‘sorely flamed on from the neighbouring hell’: This phrase seems to have originated with Jane Welsh Carlyle, who used it twice, with variations, in letters to Thomas written August in 1831, about a year before Carlyle began writing this essay (Letters 5:314, 345). Carlyle himself repeated it in a letter of 1841 (see 13:316); its association with Jane is indicated by his use of the phrase in his reminiscence of her, written after her death (Reminiscences 81). The editors of the Letters suggest that it is based on Paradise Lost 1:60–66, but it is only loosely parallel to it (13:316n9). 236.16-17. In some of his fictitious writings, a most intimate acquaintance with the nether-world of Polissons, Escrocs, Filles de Joie, Maroufles, Maquerelles: The latter words are French slang for, respectively, rascals, crooks, prostitutes (women of joy), clowns, madams. See Jacques le fataliste, “escroc” (Œuvres 6:435), “femme de joie” (6:300), “maroufle” (6:48, 271, 405, 448); and Le Neveu de Rameau, “polisson” (Œuvres 21:96), “maroufle” (21:52). “Nether-world” continues the series of allusions to the classical underworld. 236.20. ‘raising the wind’: To raise the wind is to procure ready money by some temporary expedient. 236.22. ‘sneered at the dupe, and paid’: Mémoires 1:15. 236.25-26. the gudgeon-fisher hook some shark of prey: A gudgeon is a small fish that is easily caught by inexperienced anglers. 236.32-33. Translations from the English: Mémoires 1:21-22. See below 240. 236.33. free-hospital: The London Free Hospital was founded in 1828 to provide care free of charge. 236.34. Refuge for the Destitute: There were refuges for the destitute in various locales; the London Refuge for the Destitute was founded in 1806 as a reformatory for young convicts. 236.38. Packwood and Warren: George Packwood (d. 1810?), seller of shaving tackle who pioneered print advertising in the late eighteenth century, and Robert Warren (1784-1849) who in the same years became famous for the advertisements for his shoe-blacking products.

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236.38. Panckoucke and Colburn: Charles-Joseph Panckoucke (17361798) was the publisher of editions of the Encyclopédie and other works. Henry Colburn (1784-1855) was the publisher of various weeklies and fashionable novels (see note to 81.2). 237.9-20. ‘I had given a poor devil . . . taught it me.’ Mémoires 2:117-18. 237.22-23. Denis, . . . in love: The woman was Anne-Antoinette Champion (1710-1796). 237.30-238.18. ‘Act I.—Scene VII. . . . carried for them’: Père de Famille (written in 1758 and first performed in 1761), Œuvres 4:271-73. 238.24-34. ‘Yesterday I came as usual: . . . with my tears’: Œuvres 4:274-75. 238.38. ‘sempstress one in laces and linens’: Mémoires 1:17. 239.5-10. ‘learnt that his room . . . married at midnight (1744)’: Mémoires 1:20. 239.10. the Sophie whom he had wedded: Carlyle apparently confuses the names of Diderot’s future mistress, Sophie Volland (see note to 240.27) and his wife, Anne-Antoinette (see note to 237.22-23). Mémoires gives only her family name, Champion. 239.12. ‘tall, beautiful, pious, and wise’: Mémoires 1:17. 239.16-240.12. ‘My father was . . . agreeable to her.’ Mémoires 1:21, 22-24. 239.28-29. the History of Greece in three volumes’ (by the English Stanyan): Temple Stanyan (1675-1752), The Grecian History (1707). About March 15, 1832, Carlyle visited the British Museum to consult the article on Diderot in the Biographie universelle 11:314-323 (Two Note Books 253). From it he learned of Diderot’s translation of this history as well as several other items mentioned below. 240.17-18. ‘This journey,’ writes Mademoiselle, ‘cost my mother many tears’: Mémoires 1:24. 240.19. Madame de Puisieux: Madeleine d’Arsant de Puisieux (17201798), author.

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240.21-22. ‘made two journeys to Langres, and both were fatal to her peace’: Mémoires 1:24. 240.27. one Voland, the un-maiden Daughter of a ‘Financier’s Widow’: Mémoires 1:35. Louise-Henriette Volland (1716-1784), known primarily for her correspondence with Diderot. 240.29-30. ‘parting his time between his study and her’: Mémoires 1:35. 240.34-35. cœur sensible, cœur honnête, ame tendre et bonne: For “cœur sensible” see Mémoires 1:360. We do not find the other phrases in the form given here, but there are many similar expressions, such as “ame honnête et tendre” (3:302) and “ame sensible” (3:431; 4:61, 77). 241.9. Stanyan’s History of Greece: See note to 239.28-29. 241.9-10. Medical Dictionary: Dictionnaire de médicine (1748). See Mémoires 1:22, Œuvres 22:34-35. See also Two Note Books 253. 241.11-12. Essai sur le Mérite et la Vertu, rendered or redacted out of Shaftesbury’s Characteristics: Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), author of Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711). As Carlyle suggests, this 1745 volume was basically a translation of Shaftesbury’s work (see Mémoires 1:25; Œuvres 22:30-34). When Carlyle says that it was adapted “out of ” Characteristics, he is indicating that it is just one part of that work, which incorporated several of Shaftesbury’s previous treatises, the original here being An Inquiry Concerning Virtue (1699). In his journal, Carlyle mentions Essai sur le Mérite et la Vertu as “half-translated out of Shaftesbury” (see note to 239.28-29). 241.15-16. in Shaftesbury’s famed Book there lay, . . . circumvolution and lubricity: Carlyle’s depiction here accords, for example, with that of the influential Scottish rhetorician Hugh Blair in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), a book Carlyle had acquired in 1815 (Letters 1:55): All this gives so much elegance and pomp to his language, that there is no wonder it should have been highly admired by some. It is greatly hurt, however, by perpetual stiffness and affectation.  .  .  .  His Lordship can express nothing with simplicity. He seems to have considered it as vulgar, and beneath the dignity of a man of quality, to

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speak like other men. Hence he is ever in buskins; and dressed out with magnificent elegance. In every sentence we see the marks of labour and art; nothing of that ease, which expresses a sentiment coming natural and warm from the heart. Of figures and ornament of every kind, he is exceedingly fond; sometimes happy in them; but his fondness for them is too visible; and, having once laid hold of some metaphor or allusion that pleased him, he knows not how to part with it. What is most wonderful, he was a professed admirer of simplicity; is always extolling it in the ancients . . . though he departs from it himself as far as any one modern whatever. (2:19.44) Carlyle would use similar language in “Count Cagliostro,” where he describes the count’s speech as “only babble in long-winded diffusions, chaotic circumvolutions tending nowhither” (Historical Essays 60). 241.18-19. Shaftesbury was not only a Sceptic but an Amateur Sceptic . . . swallowed and abolished: Carlyle shares with many contemporaries the view that Shaftesbury was a religious skeptic, though strictly speaking he was a deist. This may account for why Carlyle regards him as only an amateur skeptic, though he may also refer to the fact that he was not a professional philosopher, as he held no academic posts. Among the more thoroughgoing skeptics who followed after would be David Hume (see note to 52.2-4) and the utilitarians (see note to 228.22). 241.21. war of Titans: In Greek myth, the Titans were gods who were defeated, and then succeeded, by the Olympian gods who fought a war with them for domination of the world. 241.23.Hades: In Greek myth, the world of the afterlife, and, in common understanding, hell. Hades, along with his brothers Zeus and Poseidon and sisters Hestia, Demeter, and Hera, were the Olympians who defeated the Titans (see preceding note and note to 236.13). 241.25. Pensées Philosophiques: Published 1746. See Mémoires 1:25; Œuvres 22:40-44. In his journal Carlyle records that it “made much noise” (Two Note Books 253; see note to 239.28-29). 241.26. Metaphysico-Baconian phantasmagories: On the phantasmagoria, see note to 48.37-38. Baconian refers to Francis Bacon’s (1561–1626)

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Novum Organum (1620), which revolutionized the methods of science. Naigeon discusses the influence of Bacon on Diderot (Œuvres 22:162-69). 241.26. Interprétation de la Nature: Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature (1753). See Mémoires 1:25; Œuvres 22:162-69. 241.28. Scarlet-woman: Figure of evil from Revelations 17:1–5; more generally, a prostitute. 241.29-30. the beastliest of all past, present, or future dull Novels: Les bijoux indiscrets (1748). See Mémoires 1:25, Œuvres 22:35-40. In his journals Carlyle reports that the novels in volumes 10-12 of Naigeon’s edition are “very obscene it is said” (253-54; see also note to 239.28-29). 241.31-33. let him bathe himself in running water, put on change of raiment, and be unclean until the even: A reference to the process of ritual cleansing required in various circumstances in Leviticus, esp. chapter 15. However, “change of raiment” is not included, though the phrase “changes of raiment” appears elsewhere in the Old Testament. 241.33-34. Lettre sur les Sourds et Muets, and Lettre sur les Aveugles: In his journal, Carlyle makes a note of “Lettre sur les aveugles for the use of those that see (1749)” (Two Note Books 253; see note to 239.28-29). See Mémoires 1:26, Œuvres 22:129-30, 22:152-60. 241.34-35. three months’ lodging in the Castle of Vincennes: Mémoires 1:27-30, Œuvres 22:131. In his journal, Carlyle records that Diderot was “sent to Vincennes in consequence” of his Lettre sur les Aveugles (Two Note Books 253). 241.37. Abbé Gua: Jean Paul de Gua de Malves (1713-1785), mathematician; see Œuvres 22:45. 241.37-242.1. Chambers’s Dictionary of Arts, and convert it  .  .  .  for Editors: L’Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751-1772), which Diderot edited with Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1717-1783). It originated as a translation of Ephraim Chambers’s (1680?–1740) Cyclopedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1728). In his journal, Carlyle noted, “Encyclopéd. (1751) the two first vol.—and excited attention—1752 it was suspended (de par le roi) for

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18 months. Stopt again in 1759 when d’Alemb. retired” (Two Note Books 253; see note to 239.28-29). 242.7-8. Ark of the Deluge: The ship that God commanded Noah to build in anticipation of the great flood (see Genesis chapters 6-9). 241.10. an Ararat: The mountain on which Noah’s ark landed after the floodwaters receded (see preceding note). 242.14-15. the Tassos and older or later Racines,  .  .  .  of court-jester: Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), Italian poet, who was dependent upon the patronage of aristocrats, and Jean Racine (1639-1699), dramatist, who when he stopped writing plays depended on the patronage of Louis XIV. 242.17. Pullus Jovis: “Chick of Jove,” from a legend that the consul Fabius Maximus had been struck by lightning in the buttocks and thus acquired the nickname Pullus Jovis, meaning plaything or favorite, because he had been raped by a god. Carlyle also uses this phrase in Two Note Books 85. 242.18-19. Shakspeares and Molières: Like their contemporaries, the dramatists William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (Molière; 1622-1673) relied on royal or aristocratic patronage to support their performances, but they were also supported by theater patrons. 242.21-22. Saumaises, now bully-fighting ‘for a hundred gold Jacobuses,’ now closeted with Queen Christinas: Charles II reputedly paid the French classical scholar Claude Saumaise (1588-1653) one hundred Jacobuses to write a defense of Charles I. Saumaise later became embroiled in a controversy over the New Testament and accepted an invitation of refuge from Queen Christina of Sweden. 242.25. the Laws of Copyright: The first Law of Copyright, the Statue of Anne, was enacted in 1710. In the early nineteenth century there were various proposals to modify the law, but the first major revision was not made until 1842. 242.25-26. the Quarrels of Authors, the Calamities of Authors: Isaac Disraeli, Calamities of authors; including some inquiries respecting their moral and literary characters (1812) and Quarrels of authors; or, Some memoirs for our literary history, including specimens of controversy to the reign of Elizabeth (1814).

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242.26. Heynes dining on boiled peasecods: Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729-1812), classical scholar. See Carlyle’s “The Life of Heyne”: “in regard to board, he gathered empty pease-cods, and had them boiled; this was not unfrequently his only meal” (Essays 1:333). 242.26. the Jean Pauls on water: See Carlyle’s “John Paul Friedrich Richter Again”: “He was often in danger of starving. ‘The prisoner’s allowance,’ says he, ‘is bread and water, but I had only the latter’” (Essays 2:120). 242.27. the Johnsons bedded and boarded on fourpence-halfpenny a-day: See Carlyle, “Boswell’s Life of Johnson”: “It is known that he once lived on fourpence halfpenny a-day” (above 148). 242.28. confusion worse confounded: See note to 185.6-7. 242.29. Fourth Estate: See note to 182.13. 242.32. a Pharaoh’s lean-cow,—of whom let the fat-kine beware!: In Genesis 41, the pharaoh dreams that seven lean cows ate seven fat cows (kine), a dream that Joseph interprets as predicting seven years of plenty followed by seven of famine. 242.34. Eusebius and Mosheim: Eusebius (260?–344) and Johann Lorenz Mosheim (1693-1755), church historians; Carlyle extends the comparison between the history of literature and church history. 242.38. Proto- and Deutero-martyrs: A protomartyr is the earliest martyr for any cause or in any particular place or period. “Deutero-martyr,” or second martyr, appears to be Carlyle’s coinage on analogy with the distinction between the biblical protocanon (earliest accepted books) and deuterocanon (secondary canon). See preceding note. 243.1. Simon Magus: A Samaritan who converted to Christianity, in some traditions depicted as a sorcerer and the source of all heresies. 243.1. Apollonius with the golden thigh: Apollonius of Tyana (first century b.c.) claimed that Pythagoras proved his divinity by showing that he had a golden thigh. 243.8-9. Dodsley and Miller could risk capital in an English Dictionary: Robert Dodsley (1704-1764) was a leader of the consortium that

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proposed and funded publication of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755); Andrew Millar (1707-1768) was a member of the consortium and was principally responsible for seeing the dictionary through the press. 243.9-10. Lebreton and Briasson could become purveyors and commissariat officers for a French Encyclopédie: André François le Breton (1708-1779) and Antoine-Claude Briasson (1700-1776), two of the four publishers of the Encyclopédie. 243.13. Puffery: See note to 173.31. As Carlyle indicates in “Boswell’s Life of Johnson” (above 173), puffery did not become significant until the nineteenth century. 243.19-20. Timber-headed: Wooden headed, thus dense or obtuse. See “timber-toned” (222.4 and note). 243.30. Valhalla, drank wine out of the sculls of Authors: A variation on Mallet’s rendering of the “Ode of King Regner Lodbrog,” in which Lodbrog claims that they will drink beer “out of the sculls of our enemies” (2:232); Carlyle probably was not aware that “sculls” (skulls) is a mis-translation. 243.32. a Rowland for their Oliver: Accounts of the exploits of Oliver and Roland, the most famous of Charlemagne’s knights and the subject of Chanson de Roland, were so extravagant that giving a Rowland for an Oliver was proverbial for exchanging one incredible tale for another. 243.32. Johnson can knock his Osborne on the head: See 174.22 and note. 243.33. Bull of Bashan: A threatening enemy: “Many bulls have compassed me: strong bulls of Bashan have beset me round” (Psalms 22:12). 243.33-34. Panckouke to “leave the room and go to the devil: allez au diable, sortez de chez moi!”: Charles-Joseph Panckoucke (1736-1798), author and publisher. Carlyle condenses the original: “Allez au diable vous et votre ouvrage; je n’y veux point travailler. Vous me donneriez vingt mille louis, et je pourrais expédier votre besogne en un clin d’œil, que je n’en ferais rien. Ayez pour agréable de sortir d’ici, et de me laisser en repos” (Go to the devil, you and your work; I do not want to work on it. You would give me twenty thousand louis, and I could dispatch your task in

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the blink of an eye, that I would do nothing of the sort. Be so good as to leave here, and let me rest) (Œuvres 23:69). 243.37. Trevoux Journalist: A writer for the Journal de Trévoux (see note to 226.29-30). 244.3. Baron d’Holbach: Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (1723-1789), author, philosopher, and contributor to the Encyclopédie. 244.3-4. blue-light sederunts: A “blue-light” is a pyrotechnical device that burns with a blue flame; sederunts are minute books of a deliberative body, here the transactions of this purported “Association.” 244.6. Pandemonium: “Abode of all demons,” the capital of hell in Paradise Lost (1.756–57). Carlyle would again conjoin “blue-light” (see preceding note) with pandemonium in “Parliamentary History of the French Revolution,” Historical Essays 232. 244.16-18. Fontenelle said, he wished  .  .  .  would turn to: Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657-1757), author and philosopher. See Mélanges de literature et de philosophie: “Fontenelle, témoin des progrès de l’incrédulité, dit: Je voudrais bien y être dans soixante ans, pour voir ce que cela deviendra; il ne voulait qu’y être. On ne veut pas mourir; et l’on finit toujours un jour trop tôt. Un jour de plus, et l’on eût découvert la quadrature du cercle” (Fontenelle, the witness of the progress of unbelief, said: I should like to be there in sixty years, to see what will become of it, only to be there. One does not want to die; and one always comes to an end one day too soon. One day more, and one would have discovered the squaring of the circle) (Œuvres 3:171). 244.26. Universal History: See note to 133.30. 245.11-12. ‘to produce at once, . . . most excelled in’: Not identified. 245.13. ‘crush the Abomination, écraser l’Infame’: Voltaire frequently signed his letters with the phrase “Ecraser l’infame!” in reference to his wish to crush abuses by the church and state. 245.14. his Jesuit-hunt: Although he had been educated by the Jesuits, Voltaire frequently criticized them and he satirized them in Candide (1759).

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245.19-20. the Patriarch must address him a friendly admonition on his Atheism, and make him eat it again: Carlyle may recall Biographie universelle 11:317, in the article he had consulted (see note to 239.28-29). 245.27. Mélanges: Mélanges de littérature, d’histoire et de philosophie (17531767) includes items not incorporated in d’Alembert’s (see note to 241.37-242.1) collected works; Carlyle quotes from it earlier (244.16-18). 245.29. Espinasse: Jeanne Julie Éléonore de Lespinasse (1732-1776), leader of a salon and associate of d’Alembert, who for a time lived with her. 245.32. ‘consideration’: There is no exact equivalent in the original, which reads: “M. d’Alembert voulait que son traitement fût plus considérable” (M. d’Alembert wanted a more considerable payment) (Mémoires 1:33). 245.33. sea-krakens: Sea monsters in Norse mythology. 245.35. ‘once in the two years’: Mémoires 1:33. 245.36. “My friend,” said the latter . . . gone out”: From Naigeon’s memoir: “Mon ami, voilà une grande lumière éteinte, et une grande intelligence de moins” (Œuvres 22:44). 245.38. Rousseau: See note to 91.20. 246.3. Tiresias: The blind prophet of Greek myth. 246.7-8. Burke, in the name of another, class him with the offscourings of the earth: Edmund Burke criticized Rousseau in A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791) and other writings. The latter phrase derives from 1 Corinthians 4:14, which biblical commentaries frequently link to Psalms 119:119, though it more directly echoes Lamentations 3:45. 246.13-14. ‘harden themselves against . . . them with’: Not identified. 246.15-16. the Prince of the Power of this lower Earth and Air: Satan; see Ephesians 2:2. 246.19. Strumpetocracy: Government by strumpets, that is by unchaste women or prostitutes. Carlyle here uses the word for the first time; he would return to in the French Revolution 1:6.1.165, 2:5.5.396.

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246.23-24. ‘Oh, my friend, let us continue virtuous, for the state of those who have ceased to be so makes me shudder’: “Adieu, mon ami; soyons et continuons d’être honnêtes gens: l’état de ceux qui ont cessé de l’être me fait peur” (Œuvres 12:278). 246.26-27. ‘which,’ says Mademoiselle . . . could not understand’: Mémoires 1:62. 246.30. ‘Tyran le Blanc’: French version of the Valencian romance Tirant lo Blanch (1490), which concerns the adventures of the knight Tirant. 246.31. ‘extremely impressionable’: Mémoires 1:77. 246.33-34. who would be a pipe, which not Fortune only, but any Sycophant may play tunes on?: From the proverb “He dances well to whom Fortune pipes.” 246.37. the thread-bare German Bursch quitted Ratisbon: A Bursch is young man, here a university student. Grimm (see note to 223.16) was born in Regensburg (Ratisbon) and studied at the University of Leipzig. 246.38. ‘Tragedy, Banise’: At the age of nineteen, Grimm produced Banise: Ein Trauerspiel (1743). 247.1-3. ‘a young man described as seeking  .  .  .  soon finding one!’: In Les Confessions, Rousseau writes that Grimm served as a reader to another German “en attendant qu’il trouvât quelque place, et dont l’équipage très mince annonçoit le pressant besoin de la trouver” (book 8, p. 6). 247.5. D’Epinay: Louise d’Épinay (1726-1783), an author who had affairs with Rousseau and Grimm and was a friend of Diderot. 247.9. Hyperborean: Of the extreme north, from the Greek myth in which the Hyperboreans are the people who lived beyond the north wind. The Hyperborean kings are presumably the royalty of northern and eastern Europe who subscribed to Grimm’s Correspondance (see next note). 247.10. ‘Grimm’s Leaves,’ copied ‘to the number of twenty’: Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique (1753-1773); see Œuvres 22:403.

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247.11. lives at his ease: A possible echo of Amos 6:1, which Carlyle quoted elsewhere (see “Sir Walter Scott,” below 287): “Woe to them that are at ease in Zion, and trust in the mountain of Samaria, which are named chief of the nations, to whom the house of Israel came!” 247.13. Börne, the new German Flying-Sansculotte: Karl Ludwig Börne (1786-1837). After the July Revolution (1830), Börne went to Paris in hopes of finding an improved social order, then expressed his disappointment in Briefe aus Paris (1834). The original sansculottes were members of the working classes who took part in the French Revolution of 1789. 247.16. ‘Lunar Versailles’: Not identified. 247.17. Uriel stationed in their Sun: In Milton’s Paradise Lost Uriel is the archangel in charge of the sun. 247.18. Tophet: See note to 48.35. 247.26. ‘hero-worship’: See note to 154.3-4. 247.29. ‘horrors of the French Revolution’: A commonplace of the era. Carlyle would use the phrase again in a letter discussing details of “The Diamond Necklace” and in The French Revolution (Letters 7:21; French Revolution 1:6.1.212). The context in both cases makes it clear that he is referring to the executions that took place during the Terror. 247.31. M. le Chevalier de Saint-Lambert: Jean François de Saint-Lambert (1716-1803), a poet who had famous affairs with Emilie du Châtelet and Sophie d’Houdetot and fought in the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War. He also contributed to the Encyclopédie. 247.34. Jaucourt: The Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt (1704-1779) was the most prolific contributor to the Encyclopédie. 247.36-38. Helvetius  .  .  .  De l’Homme and De l’Esprit: Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715-1771), philosopher and man of letters, who held the post of farmer-general, a collector of taxes. His De l’esprit (1758) influenced Diderot and his circle. De l’homme (1818) was a posthumously published supplement to De l’esprit. 248.2. Preserver of the Game: See note to 30.6.

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248.4-25. ‘This Madame de Nocé,’ . . . adored like him.’ Mémoires 3:148-50. 248.29. Rome was once saved by geese: In the Battle of the Allia (390? b.c.) the Gauls were victorious, but Rome was ultimately saved by the quacking of geese sacred to the goddess Juno, which alerted Roman guards. 248.30-31. Eve, who bartered Paradise for an apple: Genesis 3:1-6. 248.32-34. Marmontel  .  .  .  the Mercure: Jean-François Marmontel (see note to 100.12-13), another contributor to the Encyclopédie, especially on literature. He became the manager of Le Mercure, in which he published his Contes moraux. See Mémoires 3:441. 248.35. Abbé Morellet: André Morrelet (1727-1819) was an economist and contributor to the Encyclopédie; he wrote a reply to the economist Galiani’s Commerce des blés (see Œuvres 13:174 and note, 248.37-38 below and note). 248.36. ‘as if to get nearer himself, pour être plus près de lui-même.’ “L’abbé, dont notre bonne baronne a dit qu’il allait toujours les épaules serrées en devant pour être plus près de lui-même” (Œuvres 3:365; see also 13:174). 248.38. ‘forever settled the question of the Corn Laws’: Ferdinando Galiani’s (1728-1787), Commerce des blés (1770). See Œuvres 23:31 and Diderot’s “Lettre à Monsieur * * * sur L’abbé Galiani” (Œuvres 3:116-21). 249.1. Lazzarone: “One of the lowest class at Naples, who lounge about the streets, living by odd jobs, or by begging” (oed). 249.1. gesta: Italian equivalent of gest, feat. 249.3. evaporated, leaving no result behind: An allusion to Prospero’s description of his dispersal of the scene he has conjured in The Tempest, which “leave[s] not a rack behind” (4.1.173; see note to 158.6). 249.5-6. two or three score volumes of Atheistic Philosophism: Baron d’Holbach (see note to 244.3) wrote a series of volumes attacking Christianity and articulating a purely materialistic philosophy. 249.12. heaven’s last gift to man: Woman, from Adam’s address to Eve

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upon first seeing her in Milton’s Paradise Lost: “Heaven’s last, best gift, my ever-new delight!” (5.19). 249.13. Châtelets, Epinays, Espinasses, Geoffrins, Deffands: Intellectual women. Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet (1706-1749), mathematician, translator of Newton, and lover of Voltaire. On Epinay, see note to 247.5. On Espinasse, see note to 245.29. Marie Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin (1699-1777), leader of a salon and associate of the encyclopedists. Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise du Deffand (1697-1780), leader of a salon but not as closely associated with the encyclopedists as her rival Geoffrin. 249.18. traités, bouts-rimés: Traité is French for treatise. A bout-rimé is a poetic game in which lists of words that rhyme with one another are given to a poet who must make a poem using the rhymes in the order they are listed. 249.25. little band of Philosophes: See “Burns” 56.7: “little band of brethren,” and, in turn, the possible echo of Henry V’s St. Crispin speech in Henry V: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers” (4.3.60). 250.1. sick unto death: Upon hearing of the illness of Lazarus, Jesus says: “This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby” ( John 11:4). 250.11. Fréron: Élie Catherine Fréron (1719-1776), known chiefly for his attacks on Voltaire and the encyclopedists. 250.13-14. Voltaire, in the Ecossaise: Voltaire satirized Fréron in L’Ecossaise (1760), which was a response to Palissot’s Les Philosophes (see note to 250.13-14). 250.15-16. Empecedor: A person who hurts another (see entry on empecedor in Baretti). 250.16-17. Palissot  .  .  .  Les Philosophes: Charles Palissot de Montenoy (1730-1814), dramatist most famous for his satire on Diderot and the encyclopedists, Les Philosophes (1760). 250.20-21. gall and copperas: To dip one’s pen in gall is to write spitefully.

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“Copperas” is also called vitriol, and was used for making ink; because of its corrosive qualities it is also figuratively associated with spiteful writing. 250.23-24. Rameau’s Nephew, wherein Palissot . . . mauled and mangled: Le Neveu de Rameau ou La Satire seconde (written 1761-1772), a satirical dialogue that, among other things, attacked the critics of the Encyclopédie; it is probably for this reason that the novel was not published in Diderot’s lifetime. 250.28-29. In Prussia there is a Philosophe King; in Russia a Philosophe Empress: Frederick the Great (see note to 83.36-37) aspired to be a philosopher and corresponded with Voltaire. Catherine the Great (see note to 83.36-37), an author and patron of the arts, also corresponded with Voltaire. 250.36-37. Voltaire had tried it in the asylum-shape, and found it unsuitable: Frederick invited Voltaire to Potsdam in 1750, but after a couple of years their relationship deteriorated and Voltaire returned to France. 250.37. D’Alembert and Diderot decline repeating the experiment: Naigeon recounts Frederick’s invitation in Œuvres 22:181-82. 251.1. Josephs: Joseph II (1741-1790), Holy Roman Emperor, much influenced by Voltaire and the encyclopedists. 251.1-2. the Holy Alliance in conference at Laybach: An alliance of Austria, Prussia, and Russia created in 1815 after the defeat of Napoleon as a way to assert the divine right of kings. At the Conference of Laibach (1821) these powers reasserted their right to suppress revolutionary movements. 251.3. seraphic doctors: Saint Bonaventure (1221-1274), known as the Seraphic Doctor. 251.8-9. hatching a cockatrice: To hatch a cockatrice—a mythical serpentine dragon with the head of a cock—is to give birth to a monster. Carlyle may allude to the Duchess of York’s reference to her son Richard: “O my accursed womb, the bed of death! / A cockatrice hast thou hatch’d to the world, / Whose unavoided eye is murtherous” (Richard III 4.1.53-55). He may also have in mind its ultimate source in Isaiah 59:

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5: “They [evildoers] hatch cockatrice’ eggs, and weave the spider’s web” (see also 14:19). 251.17-18. Louis Quinze, from his Parc aux Cerfs: Louis XV (1710-1774) kept his mistresses at the Parc aux Cerfs at Versailles. Carlyle would return to it in French Revolution 1.1.3.16. 251.19. ‘peaceable soul’: Translation of “âme paisible.” See “Voltaire” 96.34 and note. 251.30. M. de Malesherbes: Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes (1721-1794), chancellor, among whose duties was oversight of the press. In 1752, the courts ordered publication of the Encyclopédie suspended. As Carlyle recounts, Malesherbes ordered a public search for seditious materials in Diderot’s home but hid Diderot’s papers in his own home. See next note. 251.32. juste ciel!: “Good heavens!” The incident is recounted in Mémoires 1:31 and Œuvres 22:430, but this phrase does not appear in these accounts. Carlyle may recall an episode a few pages later in which this expression occurs (Mémoires 1:30). 251.36. The Encyclopédie was set forth first ‘with approbation and Privilège du Roi’: Œuvres 13:xi. 252.3. Choiseul: Étienne-François, Comte de Stainville, Duc de Choiseul (1719-1785), officer, diplomat, and foreign minister. 252.8-253.4. ‘One of Louis Fifteenth’s domestics . . . not your Majesty see”: Voltaire, “Sur L’Encyclopédie,” Œuvres 46:506-8. 253.19. ladder of ropes: In conventional parlance, a means of eloping, with a rhyming play on ropes/elopes. See the reference to marriage in the next note. 253.25. like Ezra, come to strange extremities: In the Old Testament, Ezra leads the Jewish exiles back to Jerusalem and there seeks to purify them from the sin of marrying non-Jews. 253.26. Tiglaths: Tiglath-Pileser III (d. 727 b.c.), a king of Assyria who took Jews into captivity. See preceding note.

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253.31-32. the Goth, Lebreton loving, as he says, his head better even than his profit: “Effrayé de la hardiesse de ces idées, il avait imaginé, pour en adoucir l’effet, d’ôter et de supprimer tout ce qui paraissait trop fort à la faiblesse de sa tête” (Frightened by the boldness of these ideas, he had imagined that he could soften the effect by removing and suppressing all that appeared too strong to his feeble head) (Mémoires 1:32). On Lebreton, see note to 243.9-10. “Goth” here is used in the sense of barbarian; see next note. 253.37. Hun! sacrilegious Attila: Like the Goths, the Huns and their leader Attila were regarded as barbarians. 253.38. the hottest of Dante’s Purgatory: The Purgatorio is the second part of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Carlyle is perhaps referring to the final circle, in which Dante must pass through fire to reach the earthly paradise; Carlyle is here referring to punishment for treason, which takes place not in the Purgatorio but the Inferno cantos 32-33. 254.15. Asmodeus’ view: See note to 76.1-4. 254.21. generals disabled at Quebec: See Mémoires 1:399. 254.22. Abbés, such as Galiani, Raynal, Morellet: On Galiani and Morellet see above 248.35-38 and notes. Guillaume Thomas Raynal (1713-1796), French author, appears several times in the Mémoires. 254.24. rather as butts than as bowmen: As targets (butts) rather than archers or bowmen who shoot at them; here figuratively, the object of a witticism. 254.27-28. Hoop (Hope), whom they call Père Hoop: Hoop appears numerous times in the Mémoires (see 1:164-65). 254.31-32. dozes there, however, with one eye open.  .  .  .  the warmest corner: Mémoires 1:313-14; see 384. 255.3-4. Father Hoop’s reminiscences . . . battle of Prestonpans: Mémoires 1:405, which describes the highlander as wearing not a “gold ring,” but a diamond ring (“une bague de diamant”). 255.11-12. ‘indigestion of bread’: Mémoires 3:101, Œuvres 12:414.

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255.14-15. neither remonter nor descendre; . . . prisse: Mémoires 3:101-2. 255.17-18. Clysterium donare, / Ensuita purgare: “Clysterium donare, / Postea seignare, / Ensuitta purgare” (Give an enema, next bleed, then purge). Medical treatment as described in Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire (1682), third interlude. 255.24. ‘stuffed’: Mémoires 3:102. 255.33-34. Swift, . . . ‘Against abolishing the Christian Religion’: Swift’s satiric defense of Christianity, published 1708-1711. 255.38. Virtus (properly manliness the chief duty of man): Middle French vertu means power as well as valor and moral excellence; as Carlyle indicates, it derives from the Latin virtus, meaning manliness, valor, worth. He contrasts it with the modern Roman definition of manliness as connoisseurship, or taste in art, and the Scottish concern with thrift. The “chief duty of man” appears in various catechisms, that duty being to glorify God. 256.5-6. The Samoeids (according to Travellers) have few double meanings: Samoyeds are speakers of the Samoyedic languages, mainly in northern Russia; they were a nomadic, nonliterate people. We have not been able to locate the “Travellers” Carlyle has in mind. 256.8. ‘Burn not thy bed’: Not identified. 256.9. ‘daily household epochs’: Carlyle on several occasions used this phrase or the shorter “household epochs.” The latter first appears in his translation of Wilhelm Meister’s Travels (2:282); there is no equivalent for “daily” in the original: “alle häuslichen Epochen wurden mit der grössten Gemütlichkeit durchlebt” (the various household epochs were gone through in high cheerfulness) (Wanderjahre 209). He uses this shorter phrase in quotation marks in a letter of August 31, 1832 (6:221), and it appears without quotation marks in Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches (1:69). Carlyle also uses the full phrase, without quotation marks, in the posthumously published Historical Sketches (297). 256.22-23. the clack of their pretty tongues, tittle-tattle ‘like their pattens when they walk’: “Hear the pretty ladies talk, / Tittle-tattle, Tittle-tattle, / Like their pattens when they walk, / Piddle-paddle, piddle-paddle.”

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These verses have been attributed to Erasmus Darwin but were in circulation before his time. Jane Carlyle quoted the verses in her journal (Letters 30:211). 256.27-31. ‘He had much to do . . . another came’: Mémoires 1:35. 256.34-35. he once wrote the dedication (to a pious Duc d’Orléans): Mémoires 1:36-37. 256.38. La Pièce et le Prologue: Reprinted in Œuvres 4. 257.3-13. ‘Rivière well contented’ . . . at this adventure’: Mémoires 1:40-41. 257.15. vexation of spirit: This phrase occurs a number of times in the Old Testament, in particular in Ecclesiastes (e.g., 1:14, 17). 257.19-20. not numbered among the Academical Forty: Carlyle refers to the following: “Mon père n’a jamais été possédé du démon des Académies, cependant il s’est présenté il y a quarante ans à l’Académie Française; il fut agréé par tous ses membres et refusé par le roi, dont le mot fut: Il a trop d’ennemis. Il n’y a jamais pensé depuis” (My father never was possessed by a desire to belong to Academies, but for forty years he presented himself to the French Academy. All the members approved, but the king refused, saying, He has too many enemies. He never thought about it since) (Mémoires 1:61). 257.25. Philidor the Chess-player: François-André Danican Philidor (1726-1795). See Mémoires 3:101 and Le Neveu de Rameau (Œuvres 21:6). 257.26. Buffons, Eulers: Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (17071788), naturalist. Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), mathematician. Both appear in the letters to Voland in Mémoires. 257.26-27. Falconnets, Vanloos, Riccobonis, Garricks: Étienne Maurice Falconet (1716-1791), sculptor; Louis-Michel van Loo (1707-1771) and Charles André van Loo (1705-1765), painters; Marie-Jeanne Riccobon (1713-1792), dramatist and novelist; David Garrick (1717-1779), actor. Like Buffon and Euler (see preceding note), Diderot mentions them in the letters collected in Mémoires. 257.31. burning marle: One of the torments of hell in Paradise Lost 1:296.

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257.35. the Religieuse: La Religieuse (1796). See Œuvres 22:307-12. 258.2-3. earnest-bilious temperaments, but sanguineous-lymphatic: In accord with the ancient system describing human psychology in terms of the four humors, in which the predominance of one humor determined one’s moods and outlook. Bilious tempers were melancholic, while sanguineous tempers were optimistic. 258.5-6. the Siege of Troy: Carlyle compares the thirty years of writing the Encyclopédie to the ten-year siege of Troy by the Greeks. 258.11. Northern Cleopatra: The Empress Catherine the Great of Russia (see note to 250.28-29), who purchased Diderot’s library to help him with his financial difficulties (see Mémoires 1:44); she is compared to the last great Egyptian monarch, Cleopatra (69-30 b.c.). 258.27. Polisson: See note to 236.16-17. 258.27-28. ‘hail fellow well met’: A traditional English saying indicating an individual who is hearty and good-natured. 258.27. every Son of Adam: See note to 209.21. 258.32. the Abbé Raynal’s History: Raynal (see note to 254.22) was the author of L’Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (1770), a portion of which is purported to have been written by Diderot. 258.34-35. “But who dare stand for this?”  .  .  .  by De Meister): Œuvres 22:415. Jacques-Henri Meister (1744-1826), À la mémoire de M. Diderot, better known under the title Aux mânes de Diderot (1786). 258.37-39, 259.32-38. ‘Happily these perverse instructors’  .  .  .  lit de mort)’: Raynal 8:74-75; on his History, see note to 258.32. 259.2. in the Tyrtæan way: In a martial way, after Tyrtaeus, a Greek poet best known for military elegies. 259.4-5. Ses mains (the freeman’s) ourderaient  .  .  .  les rois: “His hands would tie up the entrails of the priest, / For lack of a rope for strangling kings.” From Diderot’s Poésies Diverses (Œuvres 7:469), but Carlyle had

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copied the lines from the Biographie universelle 11:321 into his journal (Two Note Books 254), and that is probably his source. There he correctly gives “ourdiraient” rather than “ourderaient.” 259.24. the Seven Wonders: A commonplace indicating great wonders of ancient civilization such as the Great Pyramid at Giza. 259.39. ‘kings have poor times of it, to be run foul of by the like of thee!’: Not identified. 260.3. Vie de Sénèque: L’Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron (1770). Diderot began by using the writings of Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 b.c.–65 a.d.) and contemporaries but felt the need to study the emperors of Seneca’s time, hence the title. 260.5. Nero: Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (37-68 a.d.), Roman emperor. Seneca, who was his tutor and advisor, wrote a justification of Nero’s murder of his mother. 260.8-9. Bishop Dogbolt: Apparently a Carlylean invention. Dogbolt is “a term of contempt or abuse: (prob. originally) a person who is at someone else’s command, a menial, a dogsbody; (in later use) a worthless person, a wretch, a knave” (oed). This character had appeared in “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter Again,” Essays 27:129, and would appear again in a letter of 1849 (Letters 23:226, where the conjectural identification refers to events of that era). We have not found any other references to this obviously fictitious person. 260.9. Apostle Paul: St. Paul (5?–67 a.d.), the author of the New Testament epistles, in contrast to the fictitious Dogbolt. Paul was martyred during Nero’s reign, and Carlyle frequently juxtaposes them. See Sartor Resartus 2.7.121; “Count Cagliostro,” Historical Essays 42. 260.10-12. Seneca (though surely erroneously, for the origin of the thing was different) has been called, in this generation, ‘the father of all such as wear shovel-hats’: Not identified, but given the qualifications, possibly Carlyle himself. A shovel hat is a style of hat worn by clergymen. For Carlyle, it is almost always pejorative (e.g., Letters 5:427). In February 1829, he had written in his journal: “Does not the very sight of a shovel-hat in some degree indispose me to the wearer thereof ?” (Two Note Books 133).

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260.15-19. He once quotes from Montaigne . . . require peculiar precepts’: Diderot quotes this passage from Montaigne’s Essais (3.9) in L’Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néroni, Œuvres 11:375-76: “Je me plonge stupidement et tête baissée dans cette profondeur muette qui m’engloutit et m’étouffe en un moment, plein d’insipidité et d’indolence. La mort, qui n’est qu’un quart d’heure de passion sans conséquence et sans nuisance, ne mérite pas des préceptes particuliers.” The editors note that Diderot does not quote Montaigne exactly word for word. 260.16. viaticum: Communion given to the dying. 260.20. ‘stupidity’: Presumably a reference to “stupidly” above (from Montaigne’s “stupidement”). 260.21-22. “Mais quelle diable de mal . . . hurt me?)”: Mémoires 1:56. 261.19. hodman: Carlyle’s name, derived from Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrte (1805), for a secondary author, who, like the hodman who carries mortar for the actual mason or builder, only prepares the way for the literary genius. In “State of German Literature,” Carlyle had written: If without possessing it or striving after it, he abide diligently by some material practical department of knowledge, he may indeed still be (says Fichte, in his rugged way) a ‘useful hodman;’ but should he attempt to deal with the Whole, and to become an architect, he is in strictness of language, ‘Nothing;’—‘he is an ambiguous mongrel between the possessor of the Idea, and the man who feels himself solidly supported and carried on by the common Reality of things; in his fruitless endeavour after the Idea, he has neglected to acquire the craft of taking part in this Reality; and so hovers between two worlds, without pertaining to either.’ (Essays 1:59; see Fichte, On the Nature of the Scholar 213; Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrte 11) In a letter of August 31, 1830, he asks, “Till one knows that he cannot be a Mason, why should he publickly hire himself as Hodman!” (Letters 5:152). See also “Life of Heyne,” Essays 1:331; Sartor Resartus 2.3.82;

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“Memoirs of Mirabeau,” Historical Essays 210; On Heroes 136; Two Note Books 144; Letters 4:271. 261.35. the Mechanical Era: See “Signs of the Times,” in which Carlyle contrasts the present “Mechanical Age” with “Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age[s]” (Essays 2:59). 262.19-22. as the most original, resolute, and self-directing of all the Moderns has written:  .  .  .  shall be different’: Goethe, Aus Meinem Leiben: Wahrheit und Dichtung: “dergestalt, daß man wohl sagen kann, ein jeder, nur zehn Jahr früher oder später geboren, dürfte, was seine eigene Bildung und die Wirkung nach außen betrifft, ein ganz anderer geworden seyn” (Werke 24:7-8). 263.2-6. David Hume, dining once in company where Diderot . . . think of it”: Mémoires 2:283. 263.12-17. ‘sailed through the Universe . . . Death’s Eye-socket’: Carlyle had translated this passage of the first chapter, or Blumenstück (Flower Piece), of Jean Paul’s Siebenkäs in “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter Again,” Essays 2:157. His translation there follows Jean Paul closely, whereas this quotation varies from it in many details, suggesting that Carlyle is quoting from memory. The original is Ich ging durch die Welten, ich stieg in die Sonnen und flog mit den Milchſtrassen durch die Wüsten des Himmels; aber es ist kein Gott. Ich stieg herab, so weit das Sein seine Schatten wirft und schauete in den Abgrund und rief: Vater, wo bist du? aber ich hörte nur den ewigen Sturm, den niemand regiert, und der schimmernde Regenbogen aus Westen stand ohne eine Sonne, die ihn schuf, über dem Abgrunde und tropfte hinunter. Und als ich aufblickte zur unermeßlichen Welt nach dem göttlichen Auge, starrte sie mich mit einer leeren bodenlosen Augenhöhle an; und die Ewigkeit lag auf dem Chaos und zernagte es und wiederkäuete sich. (Sämmtliche Werke 12:158) 263.20. Ernulphus’-cursing: Ernulf (1040–1124), bishop of Rochester (1114–1124), whose ecclesiastic curse is recorded in Tristram Shandy

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3.10.134-3.11.143. See also Sartor Resartus 2.8.175 and “Sir Walter Scott,” below 304.23. 263.28. the French System of Thought (called also the Scotch: Carlyle indicates systems that account for all things in materialist terms and that were associated not only with the French philosophes but also with Scottish philosophy, especially Hume. Carlyle would equate French and Scottish philosophy in a letter of April 26, 1840 (Letters 12:120–21). 263.38.-264.1. Metaphysical Speculation, by nature, whirls round in endless Mahlstroms, both ‘creating and swallowing—itself ?’: Carlyle had expressed a similar sentiment in “Characteristics,” which he had written a year earlier: “Metaphysical Speculation, as it begins in No or Nothingness, so it must needs end in Nothingness; circulates and must circulate in endless vortices; creating, swallowing—itself ” (Essays 3:27). 264.3. Eternal No: In Sartor Resartus, which Carlyle had drafted a year before writing this essay, the chapter “The Everlasting No” (2.7) depicts the period of pure negation that leads eventually to the “Everlasting Yea” (2.9). 264.8. it lives, and moves, and has its being!: See note to 159.12. 264.17-18. Natural Theology: As opposed to revealed theology based on sacred texts, natural theology seeks to derive theological tenets from ordinary experience and nature. Although there is a long tradition of natural theology, in the eighteenth century it became associated with deism and the “watchmaker” God. The most famous work taking up this view was William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802), which sought to prove that the complex mechanics of the world could only be the result of the deliberate intention of a deity. See next note for Carlyle’s quotation of Paley. 264.29. ‘marks of design’: Carlyle quotes William Paley’s Natural Theology: Or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1802): “Upon the whole; after all the struggles of a reluctant philosophy the necessary resort is to a Deity. The marks of design are too strong to be got over. Design must have had a designer. That designer must have been a person. That person is God” (473). 264.33-34. Evidences of the Christian Religion: See the subtitle of Paley’s Natural Theology, preceding note.

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265.2-3. the Universe being ‘a Machine,’ and then of an Architect, who constructed it, sitting as it were apart: Another tenet of deism (see note to 82.27-28; see also note to 264.17-18). See also Sartor Resartus 2.3.88, 3.8.188. 265.5-6. ‘Think ye,’ says Goethe, ‘that God . . . (am Finger laufen liess)?’: “Was wär ein Gott, der nur von außen stieße, / Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen ließe!” (Gott und Welt, “Proömion,” Werke 3:73). 265.11. ‘faint possible Theism’: Carlyle quotes his “State of German Literature”: “Should Understanding attempt to prove the existence of God, it ends, if thorough-going and consistent with itself, in Atheism, or a faint possible Theism, which scarcely differs from this” (Essays 26:82; see also Letters 8:38). 265.19-20. If there is no God, as the fool hath said in his heart: Psalms 14:1: “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” 265.22. Mammon: See note to 154.11-12. 265.31-33. ‘of the æther make a gas,  .  .  .  ‘little better than a kind of vermin’: Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Levana; oder Erziehungslehre (1807): “aus der Welt wurde uns ein Weltgebäude, aus dem Aether ein Gas, aus Gott eine Kraft, aus der zweiten Welt ein Sarg” (1:109). Carlyle quotes his own translation from “Novalis”: “‘The day will come,’ said Lichtenberg, in bitter irony, ‘when the belief in God will be like that in nursery Spectres’; or, as Jean Paul has it, ‘Of the World will be made a World-Machine, of the Æther a Gas, of God a Force, and of the Second-World—a Coffin’” (Essays 2:54). The final phrase—“little better than a kind of vermin”—does not appear in Levana or in Carlyle’s earlier translation. 266.4. ‘rush-light of closet-logic’: A rushlight is a candle using the pith of a rush as the wick; rushlights cast a faint light, the implication being that such logic provides little illumination. On “closet-logic” and Carlyle’s earlier use of this phrase, see note to 128.26. 266.5. ‘the Highest cannot be spoken of in words’: A paraphrase of Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, as translated by Carlyle: “Words are good, but they are not the best. The best is not to be explained by words. The spirit in which we act is the highest matter” (2:76; Werke 20:126).

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266.8-9. ‘thin rind of the Conscious’: Carlyle frequently expresses a similar sentiment, notably in “Characteristics”: “Were not experiments enough of this kind tried before all Europe, and found wanting, when, in that doomsday of France, the infinite gulf of human Passion shivered asunder the thin rinds of Habit” (Essays 3:41-42; see also Letters 6:302). Although Carlyle here refers to habit rather than consciousness, elsewhere in “Characteristics” he associates the conscious mind with habitual thinking. 266.15. ‘Divine Idea of the World, which lies at the bottom of Appearances’: Carlyle first translated and quoted this passage from Fichte’s Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrte (1806) in “State of German Literature” (Essays 1:58). He returned to it several times (see “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter Again,” Essays 2:159; “Characteristics,” Essays 3:31; On Heroes 135). He is implying that Diderot is not fulfilling the most important role of the literary man, discerning this divine idea; his earlier claim that Diderot is a literary “hodman” (261.19 and note) comes from the same source. Carlyle probably has in mind the following passage, to which he alludes elsewhere: Die ursprüngliche göttliche Idee von einem bestimmten Standpunkte in der Zeit läßt größtentheils sich nicht eher angeben, als bis der von Gott begeisterte Mensch kommt, und sie ausführt. Was der göttliche Mensch thut, das ist göttlich. Im Allgemeinen ist die ursprünglich und rein göttliche Idee,—das, was der unmittelbar von Gott begeisterte soll, und wirklich thut,—für die Welt der Erscheinung schöpferisch, hervorbringend das neue—unerhörte, und vorher nie da gewesene. Der Trieb des bloßen natürlichen Daseyns geht auf das Beharren beim Alten; selbst wo die göttliche Idee sich mit ihm vereinigt—auf die Aufrechthaltung des bisherigen guten Zustandes, und höchstens auf kleine Verbesserungen desselben: wo aber die göttliche Idee rein und ohne Beimischung des natürlichen Antriebes ein Leben gewinnt, da baut sie neue Welten auf, auf die Trümmern der alten. Alles Neue, Große und Schöne, was von Anbeginn der Welt an in die Welt gekommen, und was noch bis an ihr Ende in sie kommen wird, ist in sie gekommen, und wird in sie kommen durch die göttliche Idee, die in einzelnen Auserwählten theilweise sich ausdrückt” (4041). (The original Divine Idea of any particular point of

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time remains for the most part unexpressed, until the God-inspired man appears and declares it. What the Divine Man does, that is divine. In general, the original and pure Divine Idea—that which he who is immediately inspired of God should do and actually does—is [with reference to the visible world] creative, producing the new, the unheard-of, the original. The impulse of mere natural existence leads us to abide in the old, and even when the Divine Idea is associated with it, it aims at the maintenance of whatever has hitherto seemed good, or at most to petty improvements upon it; but where the Divine Idea attains an existence pure from the admixture of natural impulse, there it builds new worlds upon the ruins of the old. If All things new, great, and beautiful, which have appeared in the world since its beginning, and those which will appear until its end, have appeared and will appear through the Divine Idea, partially expressed in the chosen ones of our race). (On the Nature of the Scholar 140-41) 266.33. ‘proselytising Atheism’: See 263.10. 266.37. Mullah, Bonze, or Talapoin: A mullah is a Muslim theologian; bonzes and talopoins are, respectively, Japanese and Peguan Buddhist monks, but the terms had been westernized and were often applied generally to all Buddhist monks. 267.8-10. ‘Thou makest a vow,’ says he, twice or thrice, as if the argument were a clencher, ‘thou makest a vow of eternal constancy under a rock, which is even then crumbling away.’ When Carlyle researched Diderot at the British Museum, he noted the following: “In the fidélité conjugale ne voit qu’un entêtement et un supplice. Supplem. to the voyage of Bougainville” (Two Note Books 253). He refers to the following from Supplément au voyage de Bougainville in Dialogues: Rien, en effet, te paraît-il plus insensé qu’un précepte qui proscrit le changement qui est en nous: qui commande une constance qui n’y peut être, et qui viole la liberté du mâle et de la femelle, en les enchaînant pour jamais l’un à l’autre; qu’une fidélité qui borne la plus capricieuse des jouissances à un même individu; qu’un

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serment d’immutabilité de deux êtres de chair, à la face d’un ciel qui n’est pas un instant le même, sous des antres qui menacent ruine; au bas d’une roche qui tombe en poudre; au pied d’un arbre qui se gerce; sur une pierre qui s’ébranle? (Nothing, in fact, seems more foolish than a law that prohibits a change in us, that demands a constancy that cannot be, and that violates the freedom of the male and the female, chaining one to the other forever; a loyalty that confines the most fanciful pleasures to a single individual; an immutable oath between two beings made of flesh, in the face of the heavens that are always changing, in lairs that threaten ruin; at bottom, it is a rock collapsing into powder, the trunk of a tree that cracks, a stone that splinters). (Œuvres 2:381-82) 268.4. magister morum: Master of morals, moral principle. 268.5. public Stews: Brothels. 268.6. Macte virtute: Literally “increase in merit,” used as a form of praise. 268.10. sansculottic-samoeidic. On sanscullottic, see note to 247.13; for samoeidic, see 256.5-6. 268.12-13. ‘indecent exposure’: The Vagrancy Act of 1824 had made it an offense to “expos[e] to view, in any Street, Road, Highway, or public Place, any obscene Print, Picture, or other indecent Exhibition” or to “wilfully, openly, lewdly, and obscenely expos[e one’s] Person in any Street, Road, or public Highway, or in the View thereof, or in any Place of public Resort, with Intent to insult any Female.” 268.14. Natural History: The study of plants, animals, and other natural phenomena. 268.21-22. the depth, significance, divineness of Silence: See 161.38.162.4 and note; also next note. 268.22. ‘Secrets known to all’: See Wilhelm Meister’s Travels: “Certain secrets, even if known to everyone, men find that they must still reverence by concealment and silence, for this works on modesty and good morals”

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(2:260; Wanderjahre). This passage is cited in the recently drafted Sartor Resartus just after the passage cited in the note to 161.38.-162.4. 268.33. Mahomet’s Paradise with all its houris: George Sale, in his Preliminary Discourse to his 1734 translation of the Koran, describes the Houris as “the resplendent and ravishing girls of paradise, called, from their large black eyes, Hûr al oyûn, the enjoyment of whose company will be a principal felicity of the faithful” (133). 268.36-37. the Divine Man, expiring with agony of bloody sweat on the accursed tree: The crucifixion of Jesus Christ. 269.2-3. ‘the chief of sinners’  .  .  .  . ‘of all men the most miserable?’: From the epistles of St. Paul: “This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief ” (1 Timothy 1:15) and “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable” (1 Corinthians 15:19). 269.4-5. Eudoxia, and Eusebeia, and Euthanasia  .  .  .  Eubosia and Eupepsia: These words employ the Greek root eu, indicating good or well. Eudoxia is a female name meaning good faith. “Eusebeia” means good reverence, and in the New Testament came to mean godliness. “Euthanasia” means good death (in Carlyle’s time it did not indicate intentional premature death). “Eubosia” is a goddess associated with fertility (goodness) of the soil. “Eupepsia” is good digestion, as opposed to dyspepsia, or indigestion, a complaint from which Carlyle suffered throughout his life (see Kaplan 59, 63–64, 87, 120, and next note). 269.7. ‘Career of Indigestions?’: In French, “carrière des indigestions.” The phrase appeared in the Almanach des gourmands (1807), which reported that after using emetic “Pilules Gourmands” (gourmand pills) “vous pouvez vaquer à vos affaires, diner comme de coutume, et recommencer à courir la carrière des indigestions, pendant plusieurs mois et sans aucune inquiétude” (you can go about your business, eat as accustomed, and recommence your career of indigestions for several months without any concern) (Coste, Reynière, and Laurent 5:138; see also 8: 311). The phrase was also cited in the Edinburgh Review 32 (1819): 370. See preceding note on eupepsia and Diderot’s problems with indigestion (255.10-11). 269.9-10. admit, with Grimm, that there are ‘two justices’: “Il n’a que deux juges infaillibles, Dieu après sa mort, et lui-même pendant sa vie”

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(He has only two infallible judges, God after his death and himself during his life) (Œuvres 21:xxiv). However, the statement is made by Goethe, not Grimm (see 21:iii). 269.13. court-toad-eater: A toady, or flatterer. 269.14-15. ‘assert louder and louder’: See line 268.35. 269.15. a Philosophe-Sentimentalist: Sentimentalism was a widespread eighteenth-century phenomenon emphasizing the development of a moral sentiment and a literary mode emphasizing emotional sensibility. Carlyle often disparages the cult of sentimentality, which he associated with the Goethe of The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and with Byron (see, e.g., “Goethe,” Essays 1:218). 269.25. ‘thankfully stretch out the hand?’: Possibly an allusion to Christ’s command to the man with a withered hand: “Stretch forth thine hand. And he stretched it forth; and it was restored whole, like as the other” (Matthew 12:13). 269.25-26. ‘it was necessary that the logical  .  .  .  made available’: Not identified. 269.30. ‘Annihilation of Self,’ be the beginning of all moral action: From Novalis’s Fragmente, which Carlyle translated in “Novalis”: “The true philosophical Act is annihilation of self (Selbsttödtung); this is the true real beginning of all Philosophy” (Essays 2:39). Sartor Resartus, in which he writes that “Annihilation of Self ” is “the first preliminary moral Act,” brings the phrasing closer to what we find here (2.9.139). Although the term is from Novalis, some commentators suggest that Carlyle’s idea is closer to Goethe’s Entsagen (Wilhelm Meister 2:334, Wanderjahre 332; see also the subtitle of the novel, “die Entsagenden” [the Renunciants]) or the Christian ideal of giving one’s life to save others (see Matthew 16:24–25). 270.3. Vauxhall: The Vauxhall Gardens, a popular pleasure resort on the south bank of the Thames. 270.7-8. the Omnipotent ‘maketh the wrath of the wicked,’ the folly of the foolish ‘to praise Him’: Variants of the “lord maketh the wrath of the wicked to praise him” occur often in biblical commentaries in reference to

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Psalm 76:10: “Surely the wrath of man shall praise thee: the remainder of wrath shalt thou restrain.” 270.17. ‘mouth of gold’: Saint John Chrysostom (347?–407), the “golden-mouthed” preacher of the early Greek church to whom Carlyle also refers in Sartor Resartus 1.10.51 and “Count Cagliostro,” Historical Essays 63. 270.28. Johnson: Samuel Johnson, the subject of Carlyle’s “Boswell’s Life of Johnson,” above. He was renowned as a conversationalist, and Boswell records many conversations with him. 270.29-30. that Duel of Cœur-de-Lion with the light, nimble, yet also invincible Saladin: Richard I of England the Lion-Hearted (1157-1199) won battles against Saladin (1137?–1193), Sultan of Egypt and Syria, during the Third Crusade but failed to achieve his aim of retaking Jerusalem. 270.37. stans pede in uno: Literally standing on one foot, a figure for effortless action. From Horace, Satires 1.4.10. 271.1-2. ‘he wrote good pages but could not write a good book’: The notice that prefaces Supplément aux œuvres complètes de Diderot reports that Jean-François Marmontel had commented “Diderot a su écrire de bonnes pages, mais que jamais il n’a su faire un livre” (xxi). 271.5. Richardson or Defoe: Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) and Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), among the earliest novelists, were noted for their depiction of everyday life. 271.10-11. ‘he skips deftly along the radii, . . . misses it’: Not identified. 271.14. ‘age of specialties’: A contemporary commonplace. 271.37. Belus’ Tower: The tower of the Babylonian god Belus associated with, and reportedly on the site of, the tower of Babel. 272.1-2. Helepolis (City-taker): A movable siege tower, the most famous being the tower used to lay siege to Rhodes. 272.2. Philosophus Policaster: Possibly an allusion to Giordano Bruno’s De umbris idearum (1582), which is dedicated to “Phonascus Grandonius Policaster.”

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272.10. Doctor Spurzheim: Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776-1832), an early proponent of phrenology, in which character traits are identified through the shape of the skull. See next note. 272.10. Jeremy Bentham: Jeremy Bentham (1743–1832), political philosopher and writer on ethics and jurisprudence, whose Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) contains a fundamental statement of the doctrine of utilitarianism. Carlyle classes Diderot along with Spurzheim and Bentham as materialists. He refers here specifically to Bentham’s “doctrine of motives”: “A motive is substantially nothing more than pleasure or pain, operating in a certain manner” (Bentham 1:48). In September 1830, Carlyle had written in his journal: “What is Jeremy Bentham’s significance? Altogether intellectual, logical. I name him as the representative of a class, important only for their numbers; intrinsically wearisome, almost pitiable and pitiful. Logic is their sole foundation, no other even recognized as possible; wherefore their system is a Machine and cannot grow or endure; but after thrashing for a little (and doing good service that way) must thrash itself to pieces, and be made fuel” (Two Note Books 171-72; see also Letters 12:200). 272.22-23. ‘Le temps, la matière et l’espace ne sont peut-être qu’un point (Time, Matter and Space are perhaps but a point)!’: From the Lettre sur les aveugles (Œuvres 1:332). Diderot refers to Nicholas Saunderson (1682-1739), English scientist and mathematician. 272.26. the Fils Naturel, the Père de Famille: Le Fils naturel (1757) and Père de Famille (1758), included in Œuvres 4. 272.29. Salons ( Judgments of Art-Exhibitions): These are reprinted in Œuvres 8-10. 273.7. Essay on Painting: Essai sur la peinture, reprinted in Œuvres, vol. 8. 273.7-9. has been judged worth translation by the greatest modern Judge of Art, . . . in Goethe’s Works: Goethe’s translation of Diderot’s essay (“Diderots Versuch über die Mahlerey”) is reprinted in volume 36 of Werke along with Goethe’s translation of Le Neveu de Rameau (see 250.23-24). For Goethe’s introduction, see 36:210-13. 273.11-12. stole Promethean fire: The Greek god Prometheus created

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man out of clay and water, then stole fire from the gods to make him self-sufficient. 273.15. Jacques le Fataliste: Jacques le fataliste et son maître (1796), reprinted in Œuvres 6; see also 22:312-16. 273.16. the Neveu de Rameau: See note to 250.23-24. 273.16. blueness: Indecency. 273.19-20. ‘from the height of luxurious elegance to the depths of shamelessness’: Not identified. 273.23. Hogarthian humour: William Hogarth (1697–1764), English engraver and painter, best known for his grotesque satirical works. 273.24-25. La Fontaine: Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695), author of fables. 273.25. La Bruyère: Jean de La Bruyère (1645-1696), philosopher and moralist. 273.26. Don Quixote: The satirical masterpiece of Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616). 273.27-28. a sunny Elysium  .  .  .  a sulphurous Erebus: In Greek myth Elysium is the idyllic place of happiness, while Erebus is one of the infernal regions near Hades. 273.34. Satire on Palissot: See 250.16-17 and note. 273.36. came out first in the masterly version of Goethe: As indicated in the note to 250.23-24, Diderot wrote Le Neveu de Rameau about 1761 to 1772 but did not publish it. It was thus first published in Goethe’s translation; see Werke 36. 273.37. re-translation by a M. Saur: The French original translated by Goethe had disappeared; de Saur’s translation from Goethe appeared in 1821. However, the version given in the Œuvres, which Carlyle was reviewing, was based on the original manuscript. 274.6. con la bocca dolce: With a sweet taste in the mouth.

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274.11-12. ‘the speculative principles are often . . . manner of life’: Not identified. 274.14-15. Lavater traced in his physiognomy ‘something timorous: “Le grand physionomiste Lavater croyait y reconnaître quelques traces d’un caractère timide, peu entreprenant” (The great physiognomist Lavater believed he recognized some traces of a timid character that was not very enterprising) (Œuvres 22:411). Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801) was known for his studies of physiognomy. 274.30-31. All the virtues, says M. de Meister, which require not ‘a great suite (sequency) of ideas’ were his: “Toutes les vertus, toutes les qualités estimables qui n’exigent pas une grande suite dans les idées, une grande constance dans les affections, étaient naturelles à Diderot” (Œuvres 22:417). On Meister see note to 258.34-35. 275.5. Est-il bon? Est-il méchant?: Œuvres 22:418. 275.7-8. passion vive: Lively passion. Possibly a reference to “mais ses pensées le passionnaient tour à tour si vivement, qu’elles semblaient plutôt s’emparer de son esprit, que son esprit ne semblait s’emparer d’elles” (but his thoughts excited him so vividly, that they seemed rather to take possession of his mind, rather than his mind seeming to take possession of them) (Œuvres 22:416). 275.8-10. ‘with more of softness than of true affection,  .  .  .  of goodnatured simplicity’: “Il avait en effet plus de douceur que de véritable bonté, quelquefois la malice et le courroux d’un enfant, mais surtout un fonds de bonhomie inépuisable” (Œuvres 22:418). 275.27. ‘Juifs misérables’: In his Encyclopédie article, “Sarrasins” (Saracens), Diderot mentions “les Juifs misérables et méprisés” (the miserable and despised Jews) among the various groups in relation to which Muhammad developed his teachings (Œuvres 19:249). 275.27-28. War-song of a Deborah and Barak, the rapt prophetic Utterance of an unkempt Isaiah: Deborah, the Old Testament prophet who appears in Judges, enlisted Barak to help relieve her fellows Jews from oppression. Isaiah is likewise an Old Testament prophet. 275.34-276-3. ‘The special, sole and deepest theme of the World’s and

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Man’s History,’ says the Thinker of our time, . . . study of the unfruitful’: “Das eigentliche, einzige und tiefste Thema der Welt- und Menschengeschichte, dem alle übrigen untergeordnet sind, bleibt der Conflict des Unglaubens und Glaubens. Alle Epochen, in welchen der Glaube herrscht, unter welcher Gestalt er auch wolle, sind glänzend, herzerhebend und fruchtbar für Mitwelt und Nachwelt. Alle Epochen dagegen in welchen der Unglaube, in welcher Form es sey, einen kümmerlichen Sieg behauptet, und wenn sie auch einen Augenblick mit einem Scheinglanze prahlen sollten, verschwinden vor der Nachwelt, weil sich niemand gern mit Erkenntniß des Unfruchtbaren abquälen mag” (Goethe, “Israel in der Wüste,” in Noten und Abhandlungen zu besserem Verstandniß des West-östlichen Divans, Werke 6:159).

Notes to “Sir Walter Scott” 277.3-4. American Cooper asserts,  .  .  .  become distinguished’: James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), American novelist. In England, with Sketches of Society in the Metropolis (1837), Cooper describes an 1806-1807 incident that occurred as he wandered the streets of London with a customhouse officer named Swinburne: “‘Did you ever hear of such a man as John Horne Tooke,’ he inquired. ‘Certainly; what of him?’ ‘Why that is he who has just passed—the fellow who looks like a half and half parson.’ I turned in my tracks incontinently, and gave chase, for, at that early age I was not insensible to the pleasure of looking at a celebrated man” (193). 277.6. Nebuchadnezzar to Old Hickory: Nebuchadnezzar II (630-562 b.c.), Babylonian ruler mentioned in the book of Daniel. “Old Hickory” is a nickname for Andrew Jackson (1767-1845), the seventh president of the United States. 277:7. improved-drop at Newgate: Newgate was London’s main prison and the site of public executions by the late eighteenth century, around which time a trapdoor was added to the gallows that “dropped” the condemned twelve to eighteen inches. This “improvement” was intended to reduce the amount of suffering that the condemned routinely experienced in the traditional manner of having the cart in which they were delivered to the gallows simply drive off. Carlyle had previously referred to “improved-drop” in “Schiller,” Essays 2:193, and the recently completed “The Diamond Necklace,” Historical Essays 85. 277.8. Greenacre’s: James Greenacre was executed at Newgate on May

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2, 1837—about six months before Carlyle began writing “Scott”—for murdering and dismembering Hannah Brown, to whom he was engaged to be married. 277.10. blue men and women: The context—e. g., references to cabriolets and “a soirée of lions”—indicates that Carlyle uses “blue” here in the sense of “bluestocking,” a term ordinarily referring only to women. This usage is not recorded in the oed, which lists only the sense “A black man; an African,” which is unlikely to be Carlyle’s meaning. For a meaning related to bluestocking, see, for example, “The Blue Man,” London Magazine 17 (1827): 244-48, which begins: “And why should not there be a blue man as well as a blue woman? If there be a blue stocking in one sex, why should there not be a blue gaiter in the other? Blue is an epithet hitherto always applied to women; but when did nature ever confine a species to one sex? if there be a female blue, of course there must be a male blue, and they generally herd together, and are always to be found together; and every body is acquainted with a blue man, though no one as yet has known him by that name” (244). 277.11-12. Mrs. Rigmarole, . . . Mr. Rigmarole: Carlyle adopts a name Scott had used in his The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), in which the hero Nigel Olifaunt and his future wife, Margaret, disguise themselves for a river journey, during which they are mistakenly identified “as a grocer’s wife upon a party of pleasure with her eldest apprentice—as an old woman carrying her grandson to school—and as a young strapping Irishman, conveying an ancient maiden to Dr. Rigmarole’s” (3:34). The name, of course, invokes the meaning of “rigmarole” as an unduly protracted, involved, or diffuse piece of speech or writing; Carlyle used the word in this sense in describing the essay itself as a “long rigmarole” (Letters 9:378). Carlyle would later use the character “Rigmarole” in “Memoirs of Mirabeau,” Historical Essays 167; Past and Present 4.2.252; Cromwell 3:285; and Latter-Day Pamphlets 256. 277.13. soirée of lions: A party held in honor of celebrities of the day. After Scott’s fame was assured with the publication of Marmion, he traveled in April 1809 to London, where he was celebrated at numerous dinner parties. Carlyle generally regards lionization of authors as tending to corrupt them. 278.9. star-and-garter: The emblem for the Order of the Garter, the highest order of chivalry in Britain.

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278.10. respectability of gig or no gig: Carlyle refers to an incident he first recounted in “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter Again”: “In Thurtell’s trial (says the Quarterly Review) occurred the following colloquy: ‘Q. What sort of person was Mr. Weare? A. He was always a respectable person. Q. What do you mean by respectable? A. He kept a gig.’—Since then we have seen a ‘Defensio Gigmanica, or Apology for the Gigmen of Great Britain,’ composed not without eloquence, and which we hope one day to prevail on our friend, a man of some whims, to give to the public” (Essays 2:130n1). Thurtell was tried and hanged for murder in January 1824. Carlyle had followed the trial and written a week and half after the execution, “Thurtell being hanged last week, we grew duller than ever” (Letters 3:16). For Carlyle’s previous use of this motif see especially “The Diamond Necklace,” Historical Essays 86-87, 109, 111, 144, 149-50; see also “Goethe’s Works,” Essays 2:406; “Count Cagliostro,” Historical Essays 27; “Memoirs of Mirabeau,” Historical Essays 195. For Mill’s and Emerson’s criticisms of Carlyle’s repeated use of the motif, especially by the time of “Mirabeau,” see Historical Essays xlix. 278.14-16. ‘as dim-eyed animals do, towards any glittering object, were it but a scoured tankard, and mistake it for a solar luminary’: See “Boswell’s Life of Johnson”: “Sheep can in fact see nothing; in a celestial Luminary, and a scoured pewter Tankard, would discern only that both dazzled them, and were of unspeakable glory” (above 163). In “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter,” he had stated that “weak eyes are precisely the fondest of glittering objects” (Essays 1:1). In “German Playwrights” he had referred to the public as “dim-eyed animals” (Essays 1:362). He refers to sun as the “solar luminary” in Sartor Resartus 1.11.60. The metaphor of the scoured tankard had appeared in a letter to his mother: “My heart  .  .  .  will be bright as a new-scoured tankard,  .  .  .  and I shall see all things clearly as I was wont” (Letters 2:6). See also the next note, which indicates that the next quotation is also self-quotation. 278.16-17. ‘sheep-like, to run and crowd because many have already run!’: “Goethe’s Works,” in which the putative speaker is Diogenes Teufelsdröckh of Sartor Resartus: “of one idolater, sheep-like, running after him, because many have already run” (Essays 2:392). 278.25-26. ‘the perpetual fact of hero-worship’: Carlyle had been developing his idea of hero worship since the early 1830s, its first appearance in his published works occurring in “Boswell’s Life of Johnson” (see note to 154.3-4 above).

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278.26-27. Not the gilt farthing, . . . but the gold guinea: The farthing, valued at one-quarter of a penny, was the lowest denomination of British coins; the guinea, worth one pound and one shilling, was the standard measure for the pricing of professional services. 278.30-34. ‘it remains a blessed fact, so cunningly . . . down and worship’: Carlyle conflates two passages from Sartor Resartus 3.7.185, quoting himself exactly except for the introductory clause, “it remains a blessed fact.” He would return to the quotation in Past and Present 4.6.282. 279.24. ‘instinctive tendency’: A commonplace phrase. 279.26. Life ‘by his Son-in-law and literary executor’: John Gibson Lockhart (see note to 29.18), who was married Scott’s eldest daughter, Charlotte Sophia (1799-1837). 279.35-37. wait till the Work were finished:  .  .  .  a Seventh, which will not for some weeks yet see the light: Volumes 1-5 of Lockhart’s biography were published in roughly monthly installments in March, May, June, July, and October 1837. Carlyle agreed to write the review on November 10 (Letters 9:350) and began writing a few days later, completing it on December 6 (Letters 9:357). Volume 6 was published on December 30, just in time for him to include extracts from Scott’s diary (see 325-26 below). Volume 7 was published in February 1838, a month after the review appeared, and there is no evidence that Carlyle received or responded to that volume. For details on the writing and publication of the essay, see the introduction xxvi. 279.37-280.1. the editorial powers, . . . this opening of the year: The editor of the London and Westminster Review was John Robertson. Although Mill had urged Carlyle to write the review in September, Carlyle did not commit to writing it until November (see Letters 9:311, 350-51). While he wrote to Mill on October 30, 1837, that Robertson “seems very anxious that I should write upon it for next Number” (Letters 9:337), there is no indication that the deadline was urgent. Upon completing the essay, Carlyle remained uncertain whether it would be published in the next number ( January) or the one to follow (Letters 9:357); as it turns out, it did appear in January. For more details on the publication of the essay, see the introduction xxvi. 280.3-4. man who has written some two hundred volumes of his own:

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Carlyle does not mean that Scott published two hundred discrete works; this figure would include multivolume works, such as his novels, which were published in three-volume format. 280.18. from that of the Odyssey down to Thomas Ellwood: Carlyle contrasts the epic poem the Odyssey by Homer, which depicts the life of Odysseus and is a masterpiece of classical literature, with The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood (1714), the prose autobiography of the minor religious writer Thomas Ellwood (1639-1713). 280.19. there is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography: On biography as epic poem, see “Biography,” above 135-36. 280.24. One paper of Pickwick: The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836-1837), the first novel of Charles Dickens (1812-1870), which was published serially in monthly numbers (what Carlyle here calls papers) beginning in March 1836 and concluding in November 1837, just as Carlyle was beginning work on this essay. It was a spectacular success, making Dickens the most popular novelist since Scott himself. On July 18, 1837, Carlyle reported that, on the basis of Bulwer Lytton’s praise in the same issue of the London and Westminster Review in which John Stuart Mill’s review of his own French Revolution had just appeared, he had sent for copies of the novel (Letters 9:256). His first response to Pickwick, on July 28, 1837 after reading at least a portion of the first five installments, reflected his general bias against fiction: “I did read—Pickwick! what of it I could get; one whole day; . . . Thinner wash, with perceptible vestige of a flavour in it here and there, was never offered to the human palate” (Letters 9:268; see 264-65). However, he seems, if somewhat diffidently at first, to have enjoyed Dickens; his description of him upon their first meeting in March 1840 is appreciative (Letters 12:80-81), and they were to become friends. 280.32-33. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time: See note to 161.38.-162.4. 281.1. hogshead of thin wash, which sours in a week ready for the kennels: “Wash” here seems to be hogwash—refuse used to feed swine—thus the play on hogshead; kennels are street gutters. 281.3. Natty Leatherstocking: Natty Bumppo, or “the Leather-stocking,” was the hero of five of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, beginning with

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The Pioneers (1823); they were set in upstate New York, which at that time was considered the American west. On Cooper, see note to 277.3-4. 281.4-5. Saint-Pierre did for the Islands of the East: Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737-1814), author of the novel Paul et Virginie (1789), set in the Caribbean isles. In the recently completed French Revolution Carlyle had written that one hears in Saint-Pierre’s novel “melodiously, as it were, the wail of a moribund world: everywhere wholesome Nature in unequal conflict with diseased perfidious Art” (1:2.8.49). 281.6. Colburn and Company: British publishers of Cooper’s novels; on Colburn, see note to 81.2. 281.8. Moloch; and souls pass through the fire to him: Ancient Ammonite god associated with idolatry and in particular with child sacrifice by fire: “And thou shalt not let thy seed pass through the fire to Molech” (Leviticus 18:21). 281.11. railwaying, knowledge-diffusing: Rapid development of the railway system followed the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester passenger railway in 1830. Founded in 1826, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge published a series of inexpensive pamphlets designed to spread knowledge of science and scientific subjects, especially to the newly literate. 281.14-15. “Io Pæan! the Devil is conquered”: In Greek antiquity an IoPæan was a hymn or chant in praise of the gods; the term later came to denote any song of victory. “The Devil is conquered” comes from the anonymous fourteenth-century Theologia Germanica, which Luther translated in 1518 as Theologia Teütsch: “Und das ist die allerböseste und schadlichste Betrügung: darum ist Teüfel und Natur eins. Und wo Natur überwunden ist, da ist auch der Teüfel überwunden. Wo Natur nicht überwunden ist, da ist auch der Teüfel nicht überwunden.” (And this is the most evil and damaging deception: the devil and nature are one. Conquer nature and the devil also is conquered. Where nature is not conquered, the devil is not conquered) (chapter 51; Grell 69). 281.26-27. the Life and Correspondence of Hannah More: William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah Moore (1834). Hannah More (1745-1833), author and philanthropist, was a leading promoter of evangelicalism. There was a general consensus that Roberts’s memoir had done little for More’s reputation. For example, in his April

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1838 review of Lockhart’s Life of Scott in the North American Review, William H. Prescott claimed that “the unfortunate Hannah More is done to death by her friend Roberts” (46 [1838]: 433). 282.15-22. he has been too communicative, indiscreet, . . . ‘sanctities of private life’: Lockhart’s account of Scott’s many troubles, both personal and professional, and in particular his business relationship with James and John Ballantyne, led to outraged public responses. Carlyle was writing before the entire biography was complete and so there had been no fullscale review, but a number of periodicals reviewed the volumes as they appeared. Carlyle may have in mind comments such as that of a reviewer in the Examiner, to which he subscribed, that Lockhart manifested “bad taste . . . in the introduction of one or two utterly unnecessary passages,” one of which relates a story that is “absolutely indecent—coarsely indecent” (1562 [ Jan. 7, 1838]: 6). See also notes to 284.11-12, 284.24. James Anthony Froude would use this passage to preface his own biography of Carlyle (see First Forty Years ix–x). 282.23. Damocles’ sword: According to the Greek legend, Damocles switched places with Dionysius II, the ruler of Syracuse, and enjoyed the resulting royal treatment until he noticed a razor-sharp sword hanging above his head by a single horsehair. 282.25-27. Thus it has been said, ‘there are no English lives . . . Respectability good-day’: Carlyle quotes, with variation, his own “The Diamond Necklace”: “In our England especially, which in these days is become the chosen land of Respectability, Life-writing has dwindled to
the sorrowfullest condition;  .  .  .  Thus too, strangely enough, the only Lives worth reading are those of Players” (Historical Essays 87); on Carlyle’s reading of such lives, see the corresponding note. On Carlyle’s view of respectability, see note to 278.10. 282.31: the fear not of God before his eyes: See the allusion to Psalms 36:1 below at 284.5. 283.17. accept the omen: An allusion to the commonplace Latin phrase “accipio omen” (I accept the omen). 284.5. the fear of God before his eyes: See 282.31 and note. 284.11-12. As to the accuracy or error of these statements about the

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Ballantynes and other persons: Scott entered into a secret partnership with the printer James Ballantyne (1772-1833), whom Scott had known since their childhood days, and in 1809, because of Scott’s popularity, they decided to form their own publishing house and named James’s brother John Ballantyne (1774-1821) as its manager. During the financial crisis of 1825 the business failed. Lockhart’s account of Scott’s partnership with the Ballantynes and the resultant financial troubles was one of the objects of criticism of the biography (see, for example, Lockhart 2:37-43, 3:55-61, 4:17-18, 5:78, 6:103-7, 109-21, 174-77). The Literary Gazette objected that while the tone of Lockhart’s account of Scott’s relationship with the Ballantynes was of “much literary interest  .  .  .  we must again reclaim against the disparaging tone in which the Messrs. Ballantyne are frequently spoken of by the biographer” (4 [May 6, 1837]: 286; see also 267, 335-36). John Alex Ballantyne wrote a letter that appeared in the Literary Gazette declaring: “What motives have induced Mr. Lockhart to adopt the very unkind, and certainly unexpected tone in which he has thought proper to speak of my late father and uncle, I do not know”; in another piece, he claimed that the “offensive passages” had “deeply wounded the feelings of many” (4 [May 13, 1837]: 308). 284.24. Scott being made unheroic: A reviewer in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine (August 1837) begins by articulating the diminished personal reputation of Scott in Lockhart’s biography: “The world ought, perhaps, to be thankful that, holding the Iliad and the Odyssey, little remains of Homer save the shadow of a name. . . . We, who never thought to have coincided in opinion with Lord Chesterfield, now begin to fear that many great authors may be seen to most advantage in their books. Alas, that Scott should be no exception.  .  .  .  Mr. Lockhart’s memoir cannot deteriorate the unequalled beauty of Scott’s romances, but it does dispel much of the charm with which imagination invested their author” (469). 284.28-29. That Mr. Lockhart at heart has a dislike to Scott: Andrew Lang later reported that the accusation was made by the poet Samuel Rogers (1763-1855). Lang writes that the sentiment “might have made Rogers blush, if he really said that ‘I always thought Lockhart hated Scott, and now I know it’” (2:70). A contemporary published source for the comment has not been identified. Lang also gives Carlyle credit for “demolish[ing] the absurd theory” (2:120). 284.32-33. “That there are things at which one stands struck silent, as

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at first sight of the Infinite”: Not identified, but see Carlyle’s statements on silence (note to 161.38.-162.4). 284.38. Does not the patient Biographer dwell on his Abbots, Pirates: Carlyle alludes to Lockhart’s discussion of Scott’s The Abbot (1820) and The Pirate (1822). See Lockhart 5:19-23, 150. 285.2-3. The Novel-manufactory, with its 15,000l. a-year: Scott offered to write a work for Constable that might “add another L.4,000 per annum to the L.10 or L.15,000, on which all parties counted as the sure yearly profit of the three-deckers in fore” (Lockhart 5:168-69). 285.33. caput mortuum: See note to 124.6. 285.34. ‘series of years’: See Lockhart 2:333, 6:120. 285.38-286.1. Profane Princesses cried out, “One God, one Farinelli?’: According to legend, upon hearing the popular castrato Farinelli, the stage name of Carlo Maria Broschi (1705-1782), an English noblewoman (not identified) exclaimed “One god, one Farinelli.” 286.3. Lope de Vega: Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio (1562-1635), Spanish playwright and poet. He was criticized for being overly prolific and sacrificing quality, and much of his work did not sustain its popularity. Nonetheless, he was a major literary figure, and his reputation had not declined to the degree Carlyle implies. Carlyle would discuss Lope and Cervantes in his sixth lecture on literature (History of Literature 113-20). 286.10-11. writing his Don Quixote in prison: Miguel de Cervantes (see note to 67.38) implied in the opening of part 1 of Don Quixote (1605, 1615) that he had written the book while in prison. Though he did spend time in prisons, his claim is disputed. 286.15. he had to creep into a convent, into a monk’s cowl: Late in life, after many love affairs and periods of exile, Lope became a priest with the aim of reforming himself, though he continued to have love affairs. 286.18-19. August Kotzebue: August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue (1761-1819) was a popular and prolific German playwright. In “German Playwrights,” Carlyle had compared his output to Scott’s, stating that he could “manufacture Plays with a speed and felicity surpassing even

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Edinburgh Novels.  .  .  .  O ye Playwrights, and literary quacks of every feather, weep over Kotzebue, and over yourselves! Know that the loudest roar of the million is not fame; that the windbag, are ye mad enough to mount it, will burst, or be shot through with arrows, and your bones too shall act as scarecrows” (Essays 1:360). 286.22-23. the most iron visages weeping with him, in all theatres from Cadiz to Kamtchatka: Cadiz to Kamchatka covers Europe and Asia, from southwest Spain to eastern Russia. Carlyle echoes his “German Playwrights”: “Were not these Plays translated into almost every language of articulate-speaking men; acted, at least, we may literally say, in every theatre from Kamtschatka to Cadiz? Nay, did they not melt the most obdurate hearts in all countries; and, like the music of Orpheus, draw tears down iron cheeks?” (Essays 1:360). 286.23. ‘astonishing genius’: A contemporary commonplace. 286.25. out into Night and Orcus: Orcus, Roman god of the underworld, a personification of death, stands beside Night in Milton’s Paradise Lost (2:960-64). See also French Revolution 3:5.3.223. 286.36. of the earth earthy: 1 Corinthians 15:47: “The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven.” 287.2. in extenso  .  .  .  in intenso: Medieval Latin for “at full length” and “concentratedly.” 287.5-6. It has been said, ‘no man has written as many volumes with so few sentences that can be quoted’: Unidentified. See William Hazlitt’s assessment of Scott’s poetry in The Spirit of the Age: “It wanted character. It was poetry of ‘no mark or likelihood.’ It slid out of the mind as soon as read, like a river; and would have been forgotten, but that the public curiosity was fed with ever-new supplies from the same teeming liquid source” (125). 287.10. ‘dark region to slay monsters for us’: Not identified. Carlyle may be alluding to Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596), in which the Redcrosse Knight leaps into a cave to kill the monster Error (1.13). 287.18-19. ‘Wo to them that are at ease in Zion’: Amos 6:1; Zion is a

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place-name often used for Jerusalem. Carlyle alludes to this passage as early as 1821 (Letters 1:323). 287.19-20. Babel . . . Domdaniel: Babylon was the capital of the ancient kingdom of Babylonia (see Genesis 11:1-9). Domdaniel is the dreaded underwater cave hall of the ruler Zatanai (Satan) and the evil magician Maugabry in The Thousand and One Nights. 287.23-26. Brother Ringletub, the missionary, inquired of Ram-Dass, . . . sins in the world: Samarth Ramdas (1608-1681), a Hindu poet-saint and follower of Rama, the human reincarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. Ringletub is the Reverend Sydney Smith’s (1771-1845) satirical pseudonym for the Reverend John Styles (1770-1860), a missionary who sought to make conversions in India even at the cost of many English lives. In his attack “Indian Missions,” Smith quotes an account of one missionary’s encounter with “Ram Dass”: “I then asked him in what way the sins of these his followers would be removed. . . . After much evasion, he replied that he had fire in his belly, which would destroy the sins of all his followers!” (Edinburgh Review 12 [1808]: 167). The next year, in an article entitled “Styles on Methodists and Methodism,” a review of works by Styles, Smith again attacked the work of missionaries in India: “It is not only the loss of India that is in question,—but, how will it be lost?—by the massacre of ten or twenty thousand English, by the blood of our sons and brothers, who have been toiling so many years to return to their native country. But what is all this to a ferocious Methodist. What care Brothers Barrel and Ringletub for us and our colonies?” (Edinburgh Review 14 [1809]: 47). Note that Carlyle conflates the two articles; Smith did not identify the missionary who encountered Ramdas as Ringletub. 287.31. ‘friend of humanity’: See “Count Cagliostro,” Historical Essays 67; “Memoirs of Mirabeau,” Historical Essays 166. 287.33. All greatness is unconscious: See “Characteristics,” Essays 3:16; see also notes to 155.4-5, 161.28 above. 287.36-37. A great man is ever, as the Transcendentalists speak, possessed with an idea: Carlyle alludes to Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) and his concept of the “divine idea” (see note to 88.15-16). 288.2-3. ‘the armed Soldier of Democracy’: Carlyle had quoted this phrase

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in “Mirabeau,” Historical Essays 159, and French Revolution 3:7.3.297, but the source of the quotation is untraced. 288.4-5. ‘La carrière ouverte aux talens, The tools to him that can handle them’: Napoleon Bonaparte as reported by Barry O’Meara: “I have always been of opinion, that the sovereignty lay in the people. In fact, the imperial government was a kind of republic. Called to the head of it by the voice of the nation, my maxim was la carrière ouverte aux talens, (the career open to talents,) without distinction of birth or fortune, and this system of equality is the reason that your oligarchy hate me so much” (1:405). Carlyle had first quoted this maxim in Sartor Resartus 2.8.133. See also “Mirabeau,” Historical Essays 159; On Heroes 205; History of Literature 204. 288.23-25. Samson-like, carrying off on his strong Samson-shoulders the gates that would imprison him: See Judges 13-16; see also 169.1112 and note. 288.34-37. that humorist in the Moral Essay  .  .  .  doffing hat to the healthy: Not identified. 289.1. For does not health mean harmony: One of the key ideas of Carlyle’s “Characteristics,” in which he writes, “So long as the several elements of Life, all fitly adjusted, can pour forth their movement like harmonious tuned strings, it is a melody and a unison. . . . Thus, too, in some languages, is the state of health well denoted by a term expressing unity; when we feel ourselves as we wish to be, we say that we are whole” (Essays 3:2). 289.12-14. Walker the Original, . . . attain to a dirty face: Thomas Walker (1784-1836), author and publisher of a weekly periodical entitled the Original (May 1835–December 1836). Although intended as political commentary, the Original was better known for Walker’s essays on health and manners. In the second installment of a ten-part essay entitled “The Art of Attaining High Health,” Walker explained the reasons for his astonishingly good health: “It seems from the surface of an animal in perfect health, there is an active exhalation going on, which repels impurity; for when I walked on the dustiest roads, not only my feet, but even my stockings, remained free from dust. By way of experiment, I did not wash my face for a week, nor did any one see, nor I feel, any difference” (4 [ June 10, 1835]: 52).

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289.18-19. as Goethe says of himself, ‘all this ran down from me like water from a man in wax-cloth dress’: Carlyle alludes to Goethe’s Italianische Reise (1816-1817): “Ihre Ceremonien und Opern, ihre Umgänge und Ballette, es fließt Alles wie Wasser von einem Wachstuchmantel an mir heruntor” (Their ceremonies and operas, their processions and ballets, all of that runs off me like water off an oilcloth coat) (Werke 27:247; Italian Journey 128). Carlyle had also cited this passage in the recently published “The Diamond Necklace,” Historical Essays 120. 289.27. William Cobbett: See note to 201.29. 289.29. John Bull: See note to 195.21. 289.32-33. Werterism, Byronism, and other Sentimentalism: Werterism and Byronism are for Carlyle forms of sentimentalism, the latter being, in his view, an excessive focus on one’s feelings or sentiments. On Werterism, see note to 97.32; on Byronism, see note to 37.4; on sentimentalism, see note to 199.17-18. 289.33: (fruit of internal wind): The produce of intestinal gas. The figure implies not only that sentimentalism is nothing more than gas but also that it is the result of too much focus on one’s interior life. See preceding note. 290.2-3. Borderer of prior centuries: The area in southern Scotland between the River Tweed and the Solway Firth was known as the Borders. For centuries, until the unification of Scotland and England in 1603, the area suffered from perpetual raids by border reivers, or borderers, both English and Scottish, who rustled cattle, robbed houses, took prisoners for ransom, and created general havoc in the area. 290.5. Beardie of Harden’s: Scott’s great-grandfather, also known as “Tutor of Raeburn” (see Lockhart 1:3-4). 290.6. terræ filius: A man about whom nothing is known. In Persius’s sixth satire, the speaker states that if one traces one’s ancestors back far enough, one will eventually come to an individual who can be called only a “son of the earth” (terrae est iam filius) (59). 290.8-10. He too could have fought at Redswire, . . . in Tynedale: Carlyle alludes to the July 7, 1575, border skirmish between the English and the Scots in the Cheviot Pass, near Redesdale, which was commemorated in a

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famous border ballad, “The Raid of the Redeswire,” that Scott published in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (see 1:157-64). The Tynedale robbers were part of a group of English and Scottish “reivers” who terrorized the border area between England and Scotland from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. 290.13. valde stalwartus homo!: Latin for “very stalwart man.” 290.15-16. Perhaps our greatest poets are the mute Miltons: Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751): “Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest” (59). 290.17-19. had not want, discomfort, and distress-warrants been busy at Stratford-on-Avon, Shakspeare himself had not lived killing calves or combing wool: After Shakespeare’s father fell into financial difficulties in the 1570s, he began to deal in wool illegally and was prosecuted for usury. For a similar remark, see “Burns,” above 30.7-8. 290.19-20. Had the Edial Boarding-school turned out well, we had never heard of Samuel Johnson: In 1736, Johnson opened a boarding school at Edial, near Lichfield, but, according to Boswell there were few pupils and the school closed within a year and a half (1:66-77). Carlyle had recounted this episode in “Boswell’s Life of Johnson,” above 148. 290.21. gerundgrinder: A derisive name for a pedantic teacher of Latin. Carlyle had used it earlier in “Goethe’s Faust,” Collectanea 73; “The Life of Heyne,” Essays 1:325; and Sartor Resartus 2.3.82. 291.24-26. ‘Nature gives healthy children much; how much! Wise education is a wise unfolding of this; often it unfolds itself better of its own accord’: A paraphrase of Wilhelm Meister’s Travels: “‘Well-formed, healthy children,’ replied the Three, ‘bring much into the world along with them: Nature has given to each whatever he requires for time and duration; to unfold this is our duty; often it unfolds itself better of its own accord’” (2:264-65; Wanderjahre 168). 291.27. Presbyterian Scotland: Under the leadership of John Knox, whom Carlyle mentions below, the Scottish Church adopted generally more Calvinist principles than the Church of England (the Episcopalians). This meant both a greater emphasis on human sinfulness and less centralized church governance. See also note to 291.30-31.

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291.28-30. ‘There is a country accent,’ says La Rochefoucault, . . . forsakes a man’: François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac (1613-1680), French author of Maximes et réflexions morales du Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1665): “L’accent du pays où l’on est né demeure dans l’esprit et dans cœur, comme dans le langage” (maxim 342). 291.30-31. Scott, we believe, was all his days an Episcopalian Dissenter: Sixteenth-century struggles between post-Reformation elements of the Scottish church resulted in the 1582 division into the Church of Scotland, which adopted a Presbyterian model of government by panels of elders, and the Scottish Episcopal Church, governed by bishops. James Hay contends that “there is no proof that Scott ever abandoned the Church of Scotland in which he was an Elder; or was ever confirmed as an ‘Episcopalian Dissenter in Scotland,’ as Lockhart and Carlyle would have us to believe” (284-85). 291.35. ‘made a step from which it cannot retrograde’: Carlyle alludes to a passage of his translation of Wilhelm Meister’s Travels: “And this being now attained, the human species cannot retrograde; and we may say, that the Christian religion having once appeared cannot again vanish” (2:267; Wanderjahre 175). Carlyle had also quoted this passage in “Voltaire,” above 122.22-23. 292.2. ‘the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding’: Job 32:8. 292.3. Knox: John Knox (1514?–1572), leader of the Scottish Reformation (see also note to 291.27). Carlyle had a long-standing interest in Knox as a fellow Scot whose religious teachings closely accorded with those of his family. He even shared with his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, the belief that she was one of Knox’s descendants (see Letters 5:263). He undoubtedly read Knox as part of his general education, and in 1822 we find him sending some of Knox’s writings to one of his brothers (Letters 2:123). In November 1832, he “resume[d]” his study of “the History of our Church of Scotland” with a course of reading that included, in January 1833, Knox’s History of the Reformation of Religioun within the realme of Scotland (1644) (Letters 6:260, 303). On January 20, 1834, he wrote John Stuart Mill that “for years” he had contemplated writing an essay on Knox, which he was willing to do for the Westminster Review (Letters 7:71). In May of that year, casting about for a subject for a book, he conjectured it would be “either on the French Revolution, or John Knox

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and our Scottish Kirk” (Letters 7:196). He did not write on Knox at that time, but he would later write about him in “The Hero as Priest” in On Heroes and in “Portraits of John Knox.” 292.6. “Let the people be taught”: Although we have not identified a source of this specific quotation, Carlyle dramatizes a fundamental tenet of Knox’s argument for reform, that the people should be taught without the mediation of ritual and the priesthood as in his contention in “A Vindication that the Sacrifice of the Mass Is Idolatry”: “Suld not all be taught by the plane Word?” (Works 3:67). 292.8-10. His message, in its true compass, was, “Let men . . . through eternity”: As Carlyle implies, he is summing up Knox’s principles, not directly quoting him. 292.11. patent digesters: See note to 148.16. 292.21. the colossal Scepticism of a Hume: On Hume, who was Scottish, see note to 52.2-4. Carlyle early on rejected the “bigotted skepticism” and “specious sophisms” that reflected Hume’s “blind prejudice in favour of  .  .  .  infidelity” (Letters 1:30). At the same time, he also appreciated Hume’s writing and reasoning skills: “I like his essays better than any thing I have read these many days. He has prejudices, he does maintain errors—but he defends his positions, with so much ingenuity, that one would be almost sorry to see him dislodged” (Letters 1:47-48). 292.24. the inspired Melody of a Burns: On the Scottish poet, see Carlyle’s “Burns,” above. 292.37-38. Edinburgh Writer to the Signet’s son: Scott’s father, Walter (1729-1799), became a Writer to the Signet in 1755. 293.30. in the attempt: Lockhart has “in this kindly attempt” (1:16). 294.1. ‘Liddesdale raids’: The “Liddesdale raids” was Scott’s name for the several trips he took with Robert Shortreed in search of ballads and stories (Lockhart 1:195). 294.3. Border Cheviots: A series of hills between Scotland and England. 294.4. on his stout galloway: A compact horse, originally bred in the

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Galloway district of southern Scotland; it was a favored breed of Scott’s. See Lockhart 1:181, 193. 294.5. Flodden and other fields: At the battle of Flodden Field, September 9, 1513, English forces defeated the Scottish forces of King James IV. Lockhart recounts Scott’s first visit to Flodden by including a letter in which Scott describes the ride through the Cheviot hills to Flodden (1:181). 294.11. Arcadian: See note to 34.27. 294.15-295.32. ‘During seven successive years,’ writes Mr. Lockhart . . . out o’ gude humour”’: Lockhart 1:195-96, 197, 197-98. The asterisks in this quotation indicate Carlyle’s elisions. We here provide more specific references than the citation given by Carlyle for this and the following quotation. 294.24-25. “routh of auld knicknackets” as Burns ascribes to Captain Grose: An abundance of old knickknacks; see Burns’s “On the Late Captain Grose’s Peregrinations thro’ Scotland” (1789) 31. 294.26. Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border: A collection of border ballads published by Scott (1802-1803). 295.6. Dandie Dinmont: A character in Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815). 295.32. fou: Scottish word for “drunk.” 295.39. Loud tune: German, lallen: The oed defines the word “lilt,” which this footnote glosses, as a Scottish term for song or tune but also as the “rhythmical cadence or ‘swing’ of a tune or of verse,” which fits the context. Its etymology does not link it to lallen but to Middle English, “perhaps cognate with Dutch, Low German lul, pipe.” 296.4-24. ‘On reaching, one evening,  .  .  .  closed the book’: Lockhart 1:298-99; on page references to this passage see note to 294.15-295.32. 296.9. ‘Burns’s Saturday Night’: Robert Burns, “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” (1785). 296.33. Monk Lewis: Matthew Gregory “Monk” Lewis (1775-1818),

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novelist and playwright, called Monk after his most famous work, a gothic novel entitled The Monk (1796). 296.34. Goethe’s Götz with the Iron Hand: Goethe’s play Götz von Berlichingen (1773), Scott’s translation of which was published in 1799. 297.4-6. The uttered part of a man’s life, let us always repeat, bears to the unuttered, unconscious part a small unknown proportion: On the spoken versus the silent in relation to the conscious and the unconscious, see 155.4-5, 161.38-162.4, and notes; see also next note. 297.11-19. Philosopher Fichte took comfort in this belief, . . . a silent latent manner: As the footnote to this passage indicates, Carlyle is drawing on Fichte’s concept of the “divine idea” in Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrten, to which he has already alluded above (287.36-37). In a passage that he had translated in “State of German Literature” (Essays 1:60) and quoted in “Voltaire” and elsewhere (see above 88.15-16 and note), he had focused on Fichte’s “divine idea” as manifested by the artist or intellectual. Here Carlyle refers in particular to Fichte’s claim that the “Divine Idea” seeks “to assume a definite form” within the scholar: “In this effort he is seized with a presentiment of truth still unknown to him, of which he has as yet no clear conception; he feels that every new acquisition which he makes is still not the full and perfect truth.  .  .  .  This effort of the Idea within him becomes henceforward his essential life—the highest and deepest impulse of his being” (On the Nature of the Scholar 145; Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrte 49-50). In a later passage, Fichte writes: “The only way to retain any respect for the age, any desire to influence it, is this,—to assume that those who proclaim their opinions aloud are inferior men, and that only among those who keep silence some may be found who are capable of teaching better things” (On the Nature of the Scholar 216; Ueber das Wesen des Gelehrte 204-5). 297.16. ‘taxes on knowledge’: Carlyle links Fichte’s suggestion that the amount of unoriginal and therefore useless knowledge be curtailed (see preceding note) to the slogan “taxes on knowledge,” adopted by advocates for a free press who sought repeal of newspaper taxes that were intended in part to suppress press freedom. The campaign against these taxes reached a peak in the 1830s, culminating in the abolition of the stamp tax on pamphlets in 1834 and a reduction of the tax on newspapers in 1836, about a year before Carlyle wrote this essay.

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297.21-22. gained and lost several hundred thousand pounds sterling by Literature: By the time Carlyle wrote his review, the approximate amount of money that Scott had made and lost was widely known. McKinstry and Fletcher calculate Scott’s total debt at the time of his 1826 bankruptcy at nearly £131,000 (84). Lockhart relates at various points the vast amounts of money Scott received for his novels. For example, he reports that “Messrs Constable . . . agreed to give for the remaining copyright of the four novels published between December 1819 and January 1821—to wit, Ivanhoe, the Monastery, the Abbot and Kenilworth—the sum of five thousand guineas.  .  .  .  By these four novels, the fruits of scarcely twelve months’ labour, he had already cleared L.10,000” (Lockhart 5:147-48). On Scott’s bankruptcy, see below 323-24. 297.24-25. an age at once destitute of faith and terrified at scepticism: Carlyle’s general and oft-stated opinion of the eighteenth century and the tenets of philosophical skepticism; see, for example, Sartor Resartus 2.3.87-88. 297.34-35. Metrical Romances (which in due time pass into Prose Romances): Scott famously made the shift from long narrative poems to novels with the publication of Waverley (1814). His last long poem to be published in a separate volume was Harold the Dauntless (1817). 298.4-8. El Dorado . . . Cockaigne . . . Paradise of Donothings . . . Lubberland: Mythical lands of plenty where one could acquire wealth without working. 298.9-10. The Lays, the Marmions, the Ladyes and Lords of Lake and Isles: Scott’s greatest narrative poems: The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion (1808), The Lady of the Lake (1810), and The Lord of the Isles (1815). 298.20-21. ‘Health, wealth, and wit to guide them’: Scottish proverb often offered at toasts. 299.20. Nemesis: The Greek goddess of retribution. 299.20-21. In thy mouth it shall be sweet as honey, in thy belly it shall be bitter as gall!: Revelation 10:10: “And I took the little book out of the angel’s hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter.”

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299.27. Circe-draught: See note to 236.14. 299.29. under the sun!: A phrase repeated many times in the book of Ecclesiastes. 299.30. Life of Byron, by Moore: Thomas Moore (1779-1852), poet and friend of Byron, who provided Moore with the manuscripts that became Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: With Notices of His Life (1830). In November 1830, prompted by the imminent publication of the second of Moore’s two volumes, Carlyle suggested he might write an essay on Byron (Letters 5:196; see also 6:148-49). Carlyle may refer here to the various scandals that led Byron into self-imposed exile from England, but more generally he refers to the attitude exhibited in Byron’s poetry. On Carlyle’s generally negative assessment of Byron and Byronism, see 37.4 and note; see also 55, 202.24-26 and note, 217.6 and note. 299.34. in foggy Babylon: While Babylon was a place of exile for the Jews in the Old Testament, Carlyle here refers to Babylon’s reputation as a great fallen city in the New Testament book of Revelation and in general as an evil great city; here, as the adjective “foggy” indicates, the city is London. 299.34. pitifullest whipster: An insignificant or contemptible person, often used with reference to the epithet punie whipster in Shakespeare (e.g., Othello 5.2.244). 299.36. galvanic wire stuck into the Byron’s spinal marrow: A galvanic wire is an electrified wire, after Luigi Galvani (1737-1798), who discovered that applying such a wire to a frog would make its muscles twitch; according to legend, these experiments began when he accidentally touched a frog’s sciatic nerve, which begins in the spine. 299.37. one had rather be a kitten and cry mew: 1 Henry IV: “I had rather be a kitten and cry mew / Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers” (3.1.127-28); see also “Miss Baillie’s Metrical Legends,” 12.31 and note. 299.37. O, son of Adam: A human being, all humans being, according to the Old Testament, descendants of Adam (see Deuteronomy 32:8). See also “Corn-Law Rhymes,” above 222.28; “The Diamond Necklace,” Historical Essays 87.

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300.2. as like as I to Hercules: A relative commonplace, as in Critical Review 31 (1771): 131. On Hercules, see note to 94.37-95.1. 300.8-9. ‘The Golden Calf of self-love,’ says Jean Paul,  .  .  .  and worshipper’: See note to 70.26-27. 300.9-10. Ambition, the desire of shining and outshining, was the beginning of Sin in this world: A reference to the sin of Adam and Eve, who succumb to Satan’s claim that if they eat the forbidden fruit they will “be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). In Christian tradition, Satan himself is an angel who sins and falls because of his ambition to challenge the supremacy of God. 300.11-13. The man of letters who founds upon his fame, does he not thereby alone declare himself a follower of Lucifer (named Satan, the Enemy), and member of the Satanic school?: On the Satanic School, see note to 199.11-12; see also Sartor Resartus 2.6.112-13. “Satan” derives from a Hebrew word that means, as Carlyle indicates, enemy. 300.16. Vates to signify Prophet as well as Poet: See note to 39.24. 300.24. contradiction of sinners: See Hebrews 12:3: “For consider him that endured such contradiction of sinners against himself, lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds.” 300.25-26. Voltaire,  .  .  .  made much money by the war-commissariat: According to Longchamp, whose Mémoires sur Voltaire Carlyle reviewed in “Voltaire” (above), Voltaire earned 600,000 francs through his connection with the financier Joseph Pâris-Duverney, who held this concession (Mémoires 2:331-32). 300.27-28: Saint George himself, they say, was a dealer in bacon in Cappadocia: Edward Gibbon had argued in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) that the myth of Saint George of England (d. 303) was derived from the life of George of Cappadocia (d. 361), who, he says, procured “a lucrative commission, or contract, to supply the army with bacon” (2:23.496). 300.31. Iago: Put money in thy purse: Othello 3.3.339-40. 301.17. daemon: Carlyle indicates what he means by daemon in a letter

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of 1833: “The thing that is given me to do, or to speak, that my inward Daemon as the old times called it, commands of me, that I cannot forbear doing or speaking, that thing let me do and speak” (Letters 6:414; see also 9:225). 301.29-30. ‘last infirmity of noble minds’: Milton, Lycidas 70. 301.33. Tartarus: See note to 132.27. 302.4. Della-Cruscan: Affecting an artificial style; derived from the Accademia della Crusca, which sought to purify the Italian language. 302.6. Hayley: William Hayley (1745-1820), prolific, popular writer, whose didactic poem Triumphs of Temper (1781) was published in fourteen editions during his lifetime and, along with Triumphs of Music (1804), was derided in Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). 302.7-8. Loves of the Plants, and even the Loves of the Triangles: Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), physician and natural philosopher, The Loves of the Plants (1789), a didactic epic poem in which Darwin describes the world of plants metaphorically in terms of human sexuality. The poem was parodied by George Canning, Hookham Frere, and George Ellis, who collaborated on The Loves of the Triangles: a Mathematical and Philosophical Poem, Inscribed to Dr. Darwin (1798), in which the same passionate drives that Darwin had ascribed to plants are given to triangles. 302.17. buff and iron: See The Fortunes of Nigel 3:1.15. 302.17. oak and triple brass: Horace, Odes 1.3.9-12: “Illi robur et æs triplex / circe pectus erat, qui fragilem truci / commisit pelago ratem / primus” (That man had oak and triple brass around his breast who first entrusted his frail raft to the savage sea). 302.32-34. ‘The rude man,’ says a critic, ‘requires only  .  .  .  to reflect’: Carlyle quotes from his translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship with some alterations of wording: “The rude man is contented if he see but something going on, the man of more refinement must be made to feel, the man entirely refined desires to reflect” (1:119; Werke 18:138). 302.37-38. Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand: See note to 296.34.

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303.5-28. ‘The works just mentioned . . . of its fruit’: Carlyle quotes his introductory essay on Goethe, which had appeared in his translation of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1:15-16). 303.5. Werter: See note to 97.32. 303.14. view-hunting: Carlyle’s term for the romantic practice of seeking picturesque landscapes, which Teufelsdröckh satirized in Sartor Resartus: “‘Some time before Small-pox was extirpated,’ says the Professor, ‘there came a new malady of the spiritual sort on Europe: I mean the epidemic, now endemical, of View-hunting’” (2.6.116; see also “Characteristics,” Essays 3:24; “Goethe,” Essays 1:218). 303.26. Truly a grain of seed that has lighted in the right soil!: A reference to the parable of the sower in Matthew 13:18-23. 303.32. the Author of Waverley: Scott’s novels appeared anonymously, beginning with Waverley, or ’Tis Sixty Years Since (1814); thereafter, the novels appeared as the work of the “author of Waverley.” Scott had told his secret only to his printers the Ballantynes and his friends William Erskine and John Morritt, though many of his close friends suspected that he was the author. Lockhart cites a letter in which Scott explains why he kept up the fiction of anonymity even as the authorship became widely known: “My chief reason is that it would prevent me of the pleasure of writing again.  .  .  .  In truth I am not sure it would be considered quite decorous for me as a Clerk of Session to write novels” (3:133). 303.38. buff-belted: An unusual construction apparently unique to Carlyle, who had used it previously in “State of German Literature” (Essays 1:69). The context indicates he uses “buff ” in the sense of military attire. 304.1. our Byron: See note to 289.32-33. 304.6. ‘Literature of Desperation’: Goethe described Victor Hugo’s The Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) as an example of “die Litteratur der Verzweiflung” (the literature of despair) in a letter of June 10, 1831 (Goethe’s Briefe 484). The phrase came into general usage as a way to describe the heightened romanticism of such works as his own Sorrows of Young Werther, as well as the works of Byron and Georges Sand. On August 2, 1833, John Stuart Mill wrote to Carlyle promising discussion of various topics, including Paris: “My notion of it is chiefly taken from its recent

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literature, which is exactly what Goethe called it, the literature of despair, ‘die Litteratur der Verzweiflung’” (Letters of Mill 1:62). See Letters 6:439, 7:53, and Froude, Life in London 1:208. 304.8. Chateaubriand: François-René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand (17681848), politician, diplomat, writer, and father of French romanticism. 304.17-21. ‘class of feelings deeply important to modern minds; feelings which arise from passion incapable of being converted into action, which belong to an age as indolent, cultivated, and unbelieving as our own!’ The ‘languid age without either faith or scepticism’: Carlyle returns to the introduction to his translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, which he had cited above (see 303.5-28). He omits a portion of the original and adds the final sentence. The original reads: “They are feelings, deeply important to modern minds; but for which our elder poetry offered no exponent, and perhaps could offer none, because they are feelings that arise from passion incapable of being converted into action, and belong chiefly to an age as indolent, cultivated, and unbelieving, as our own” (1:16). 304.23. Ernulphus’ curse: See note to 263.20. 304.37-38. In the spring of 1814 appeared Waverley; an event memorable in the annals of British Literature: The publication of Waverley on July 7, 1814, met with great success and led to widespread and fascinated speculation as to the identity of the anonymous author (see note to 303.32), which made the new novel even more of a sensation. Lord Byron wrote to John Murray, “Waverley is the best and most interesting novel I have redde since—I don’t know when” (Lockhart 3:290n). The novel not only served as the foundation for Scott’s subsequent success; it also established a new genre of fiction, the historical novel. 304.38-304.1. in the annals of British Bookselling thrice and four times memorable: Lockhart provides a detailed accounting of the financial success of Waverley, which made Scott the best-selling novelist of the era. He reports that the first printing of one thousand copies, published on July 7, 1814, “disappeared within five weeks; an occurrence then unprecedented in the case of an anonymous novel.” Constable had offered Scott £700 for the copyright to Waverley, which Scott, who wanted £1,000, had turned down (see Lockhart 3:124). After noting it sold more than fifty thousand copies in collected editions, Lockhart closes: “Well might

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Constable regret that he had not ventured to offer L.1000 for the whole copyright of Waverley!” (3:296-97). 305.3. Don Juan: Byron’s first major poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), was followed by a series of similar poems culminating in his satiric masterpiece, Don Juan (1819-1824). Although it would become Byron’s most celebrated poem, initial sales were hampered by a reluctant publisher, critical outrage, the expense of the volume, and the pirated versions that quickly became widely available in inexpensive and bowdlerized forms. 305.8-10. Sir Walter Scott, Baronet,  .  .  .  the favourite of Princes: The Prince Regent (the future George IV ) granted Scott the title of baronet in December 1818. 305.14. the author though known was unknown: See note to 303.32. 305.19-20. ‘clear proof at last’: Not identified, presumably a commonplace. 305.23-25. Gustaf or Kaiser Joseph but he mingles in their meetings without cumber of etiquette or lonesome ceremony, as Chevalier du Nord, or Count of Lorraine: Carlyle probably has in mind Gustav I of Sweden (1496-1560), who reportedly disguised himself to escape captors, though prior to his reign as king of Sweden. Alternatively, he may refer to King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden (1594-1632), whom Carlyle favored as “about the best specimen of a hero in modern times” (Letters 2:241). Kaiser Joseph II (1741-1790), Holy Roman Emperor and reformer, visited his sister Marie Antoinette incognito as “Count Falkenstein” (see Campan 170-80) and the following year succeeded to the title Duke of Lorraine. Carlyle had referred to him in “Count Cagliostro,” Historical Essays 36; Sartor Resartus 3.3.164; and “Diderot,” above 251. In 1782, the Grand Duke, later Tsar Paul I of Russia, and his wife traveled to France to visit Antoinette under the titles of the “Comte and Comtesse du Nord” (see Campan 236-39). 306.7. Royalty or Prince-Regentship: George IV (1762-1830), who would assume the throne in 1820, served as Prince Regent on behalf of his father, George III (1738-1820), from 1811 to 1820. 306.9. Mr. Croker: John Wilson Croker (see note to 145.9), whose edition Carlyle had reviewed in “Boswell’s Life of Johnson,” above.

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307.11-14. Tom Moore’s description . . . Morning Post?: Thomas Moore (see note to 299.30), “The Insurrection of the Papers: A Dream.” 307.35. birtheve of a Waverly Novel: Guy Mannering; or the Astrologer (1815) was published on February 24 in Edinburgh. 308.4. John Kemble: John Philip Kemble (1757-1823), one of the greatest actors of his day and the author of a treatise on the character of Macbeth. 308.7-8. “Fill full! / I drink to the general joy of the table!”: Macbeth 3.4.87-88. 308.22-23. “In his Lord Burleigh look, serene and serious, / A something of imposing and mysterious”: William Stewart Rose, The Court and Parliament of Beasts Freely Translated from The Animali Parlanti of Giambattista Casti: A Poem in Seven Cantos (1819) 2.10.2.4. 308.31. Aldiborontiphoscophornio: Scott’s name for James Ballantyne in later years when he became more corpulent (see Lockhart 4:22). 308.33. Jedediah: Jedediah Cleishbotham, the imaginary editor of Scott’s Tales of My Landlord. 308.35-36. The Maid of Lodi, or perhaps The Bay of Biscay, oh!—or The sweet little cherub that sits up aloft: Popular songs of the day. 308.38. The Moorland Wedding, or Willie brew’d a peck o’ maut: Thomas Smith, “The Moorland Wedding,” from Poems, Moral, Humorous, and Descriptive (1806). Robert Burns, “Willie Brew’d a Peck o’ Maut” (1789); see above 50. 309.4. ore rotundo: Latin for “eloquent.” 309.9-10. the interview between Jeanie Deans, the Duke of Argyle, and Queen Caroline: The Heart of Midlothian (1818), chapter 37. 309.14. The Last Words of Marmion: One of Scott’s favorite dinner recitations, from his Marmion (1808): “He shook the fragment of his blade, / And shouted, ‘Victory!— / ‘Charge, Chester, Charge! On, Stanley, On!’ / Were the last words of Marmion” (6.32.26-29).

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309.15. contemptible rivalry of Braham: John Braham (1777-1856), operatic tenor and one of Scott’s favorite singers, had become embroiled in a controversy with another singer and her jealous husband. 309.17. Abbotsford: Scott’s house, Abbotsford, was begun in 1818 and completed in 1824. 309.22-310.36. ‘About the middle of February’ . . . in his gripe’: Carlyle gives the page range but does not account for his elisions; see Lockhart 4:349-50, 350-52, 353. 309.32-33. Mr. Constable: Archibald Constable (1774-1827), Edinburgh publisher of Scott’s works until 1809. 309.34. Jeremy Taylor’s sermons: Jeremy Taylor (1613?–1667), Church of Ireland bishop of Down and Connor, Eniautos: A Course of Sermons for All the Sundays of the Year (1651, 1653). 310.14. black-fisher: A person who poaches fish at night. 310.38. Overseer: German, graf: The oed defines a “grieve,” which Carlyle glosses here, as the governor of a town and also a sheriff. Carlyle’s derivation from German is in this case confirmed by the oed, which states, “The Scots and northern grieve (greve) is the normal repr. of Old Northumbrian grœ́fa = West Saxon geréfa.” 311.2. Ettrick: A small village in the border region of Scotland. 311.4. ‘sixteen parties’: Lockhart 5:390. 311.5. Socinian preachers: Carlyle commonly referred to Unitarians specifically, and others who questioned the divinity of Christ, as Socinians, a sect of early Unitarians. He probably refers to a visit by a “Unitarian preacher, from New England” (Lockhart 4:199). 311.6-7. Mr. Lockhart thinks there was no literary shrine ever so bepilgrimed, except Ferney in Voltaire’s time: “No other villa in Europe was ever resorted to from the same motives, and to any thing like the same extent, except Ferney; and Voltaire never dreamt of being visible to his hunters, except for a brief space of the day; few of them even dined with

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him, and none of them seem to have slept under his roof ” (Lockhart 5:2). Ferney was Voltaire’s estate on the Swiss border near Geneva. 311.8-9. what Schiller calls ‘the flesh-flies’: From a letter that Carlyle had quoted in his Life of Schiller: “It is quite a peculiar case, my friend, to have a literary name. The few men of worth and consideration who offer you their intimacy on that score, and whose regard is really worth coveting, are too disagreeably counterweighed by the baleful swarm of creatures who keep humming around you, like so many flesh-flies” (57). On Schiller, see note to 12.15-16. 311.14-31. Hear Captain Basil Hall (in a very compressed state): . . . but takes’: Basil Hall (1788-1844), naval officer, traveler, and author. As Carlyle’s parenthetical comment and the page references in his footnote indicate, Carlyle has drawn on a number of passages from Hall’s journal, in this case without employing the asterisks indicating his elisions that he has used above. Carlyle’s references to his diary are as follows: “We arrived . . . Then, &c.” (Lockhart 5:375), “Had I a hundred . . . always’” (5:375), “Entertained us all . . . anecdotes” (5:376), “came like a stream of poetry from his lips” (5:376), “path muddy . . . ravine” (5:376), “Impossible to touch . . . fit it” (5:377), “Thus we strolled . . . story” (5:378), “In the evening . . . Christabel” (5:379), “Interspersed with . . . pathetical” (5:380), “At breakfast . . . came in” (5:387), “In any man . . . world!” (5:402), “For instance,  .  .  .  takes” (5:408). 311.19-20. Spenser’s expression, “welled out always”: The Faerie Queene 1.1.34. 311.26. Christabel: Samuel Coleridge’s narrative poem “Christabel” (1816). 311.34-35. have felt the god, begun to nod, and seemed to shake the spheres: John Dryden, “Alexander’s Feast” (1697), in which the praises of Alexander the Great are such that he “Assumes the god, / Affects to nod, / And seems to shake the spheres” (39-41). Scott published the poem in volume 11 of his eighteen-volume edition of The Works of John Dryden (1808). 311.38-312.1. sugared squash (called quassia) and king’s-yellow: The tropical shrub Quassia amara yields a bitter substance used as a treatment for digestive issues, fever, and parasites and also as an insecticide. King’s yellow is a toxic pigment made from arsenic.

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312.20. Waltonians: Fishermen, after Izaak Walton (1594?–1683), author of The Compleat Angler (1653). 312.24–25. Sir Humphry Davy, Dr Wollaston, and  .  .  .  Henry Mackenzie. The Man of Feeling: Sir Humphry Davy (1778–1829), chemist, inventor, and author of Salmonia, or, Days of Fly-Fishing (1828), which was favorably reviewed by Scott; William Hyde Wollaston (1766–1828), chemist, physicist, and physiologist; Henry Mackenzie (1745–1831), writer, author of The Man of Feeling (1771), Scott’s schoolmate. All were close friends of Scott’s. 313.19-22. “What will I do . . . I was vogie!”: Robert Burns, “My Hoggie” (1788), 1-4. “Vogie” is Scottish for “vain.” 313.35. Washington Irving: American author (1783-1859) who was popular in Britain as well as America at the time. Carlyle had alluded to his Sketch Book (1820) in Sartor Resartus 1.11.58. 313.38-39, 314.7-39. On this subject let us report an anecdote . . . succeed very imperfectly!’: The correspondent to whom Carlyle refers is, presumably, Jane Welsh Carlyle, whose beloved dog “Shandy” exhibited many of the qualities referred to by Carlyle (see Letters 2:272, 278). However, Carlyle may have concocted this supposed correspondence himself, as it is not preserved among Welsh Carlyle’s letters and several passages (e.g., “like a Werterean Poet,” “His chief aversion, I should say, was to the genus quack, above all to the genus acrid-quack”) have a decidedly Thomas Carlyle ring to them. 314.26. His chief aversion, I should say, was to the genus quack: Carlyle frequently inveighs against quacks, whom he often depicts as false heroes. See, for example, “Count Cagliostro,” Historical Essays 30-31, 35, 41, 4344; “The Diamond Necklace,” Historical Essays 115; and On Heroes 8, 160. 314.31. there is more in this universe than our philosophy has dreamt of: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet 1.5.167-68). 314.34-35. Their body resembles our body, Buffon says: Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), French naturalist, who was one of the first scientists to discuss the significance of the similarities between humans and other mammals such as dogs or apes.

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315.32. a picture of Boccaccio: Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), author of The Decameron, a collection of one hundred tales told by seven men who seclude themselves during an outbreak of the plague in Florence. The variety and quality of the tales helped to establish them as a reflection of fourteenth-century Italian society. 315.36. Scott had some 2,000l. a year without writing books: Lockhart reports that “in January 1812, Scott entered upon the enjoyment of his proper salary as clerk of Session, which with his sheriffdom, gave him from this time till very near the close of his life, a professional income of L.1600 a-year” (2:388). 316.21. Napoleons, Alexanders: Napoleon Bonaparte (see note to 78.6) and Alexander the Great (see note to 202.19-23). 316.24-31. ‘The whole world was not half so wide . . . another tub’: Samuel Butler, Hudibras (1663-1664, 1678) 1.3.1020-28. Carlyle several times quoted this passage or portions of it; see Letters 1:348, 2:81; “Memoirs of Mirabeau,” Historical Essays 204. 316.33. ‘looked at from the Moon, which itself is far from Infinitude’: In the recently completed French Revolution, Carlyle had used a similar construction to describe the size of Louis XV’s kingdom: “His wide France, look at it from the Fixed Stars (themselves not yet Infinitude), is no wider than thy narrow brickfield, where thou too didst faithfully, or didst unfaithfully” (1:1.4.23). 316.35-38. As the Arabs say, there is a black speck,  .  .  .  into Night!: We have not been able to locate a source using this precise imagery, but Carlyle apparently alludes to the Muslim version of the idea that the soul is marked by original sin. A note in Sale’s translation of the Koran refers to “the black drop, or seed of original sin” (392-93), but there is no evidence that Carlyle read Sale before 1840 (see Letters 12:63-64). A more likely source is Friedrich Rückert’s Die Verwandlungen des Abu Seid von Serug, oder die Makamen des Hariri (1837), which translates the writings of al-Hariri of Basra (1054–1122), which Carlyle read just prior to starting work on this essay (Letters 9:384). Again there is no precisely parallel passage, but there is a reference to “das schwarze Korn der Leidenschast oder der Erbsünde” (the black seed of idleness, or of original sin) (213). 317.13. ‘round as the O in Giotto’: Giotto di Bondone (1267?–1337),

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Italian painter. In November 1837, while in the course of writing this essay, Carlyle had written to Leigh Hunt to determine the source of this saying: “The Italians have a saying ‘round as the O of ’—some Painter, who dashed one off very round indeed at one stroke of his brush. Can you tell me the Painter’s name? I need it in some scribble I am doing” (Letters 9:350-51). Hunt presumably supplied the passage from Vasari quoted in the note (see note to 317.31-39). 317.20-22. From Davie Deans up to Richard Cœur-de-Lion; from Meg Merrilies to Die Vernon and Queen Elizabeth!: All are characters in Scott’s novels, Davie Deans in Heart of Midlothian (1818), Richard I in Ivanhoe (1819), Meg Merrilies in Guy Mannering (1815), Die Vernon in Rob Roy (1817), and Queen Elizabeth I in Kenilworth (1821). 317.28. Bailie Jarvies, Dinmonts, Dalgettys: The characters Nicol Jarvies from Rob Roy (1817), Dandie Dinmont from Guy Mannering (1815), and Dugald Dalgetty from A Legend of Montrose (1819). 317.31-39. ‘Venne a Firenze’ (il cortigiano del Papa),  .  .  .  O di Giotto’: Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori (Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects; 1550). Carlyle quotes from the three-volume edition published by Pagliarini in Rome (1759). In the first printing of this essay the compositor obscured the pun by putting “rondo” (see Discussion of Editorial Decisions 317.39). He [the messenger of the Pope] proceeded to Florence, and repaired one morning to the workshop where Giotto was occupied with his labours. He declared the purpose of the pope, and the manner in which that pontiff desired to avail himself of his assistance, and finally, requested to have a drawing, that he might send it to his holiness. Giotto, who was very courteous, took a sheet of paper, and a pencil dipped in a red colour; then, resting his elbow on his side, to form a sort of compass, with one turn of the hand he drew a circle, so perfect and exact that it was a marvel to behold. This done, he turned, smiling to the courtier, saying, ‘Here is your drawing.’ . . . From which the pope, and such of the courtiers as were well versed in the subject, perceived how far Giotto surpassed all the other painters of his time. This incident becoming

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known, gave rise to the proverb, still used in relation to people of dull wits—‘Tu sei piu tondo che l’O di Giotto’” (1:102-3). Vasari goes on to explain the pun in this proverb: “‘tondo,’ . . . is used in the Tuscan for slowness of intellect and heaviness of comprehension, as well as for an exact circle. (1:103; see also note to 317.13). 318.11-12. Compare Fenella with Goethe’s Mignon, which it was once said, Scott had ‘done Goethe the honour’ to borrow: Scott based the character of Fenella in Peveril of the Peak (1823) on Mignon in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Johann Peter Eckermann recalls that Goethe told him after learning of Scott’s appropriation, “So auch hat er den Charakter meiner Mignon in einem feiner Romane nachgebildet; ob aber mit ebensoviel Weisheit? ist eine andere Frage” (So also he has modeled the character of my Mignon in a fine novel; but whether with as much wisdom? That is another question) (1:192). 318.23-24. Minerva Press: See note to 39.28. 318.25-27. Waverley, which was carefully written, with most of its followers, which were written extempore: This does not quite square with Lockhart’s account, which reports that Scott claimed to have completed the second and third volumes of Waverley in just three weeks (3:124, 126, 129). 319.11-12. The stuffed Dandy, only give him time, will become one of the wonderfullest mummies: See Sartor Resartus, “The Dandiacal Body” 3.10. 319.13-14. Franks and Company’s patent: Robert Franks was granted various patents for waterproof hats (Woodcroft 873). 319.14. the Stulz swallow-tail: George Stulz’s tailor shop was known for its swallowtail coat, named for the divided points at the back; a requirement of court attire, the swallowtail was also much favored by dandies, which led to the association of Stulz’s name with them (see also Past and Present 129 and note). 319.16. slashed breeches, steeple-hats, buff-belts: Antiquated fashions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Slashed breeches were short, vertically slashed, and edged with varying types of embroidery. The steeple hat was a high-crowned, broad-brimmed hat commonly worn by the

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Puritans in the seventeenth century. A buff belt was a wide belt made of buff leather that had been popular as a military accessory (see note to 303.38 and Sartor Resartus 1.7.37). 319.18. jerkins: Tight-fitting jackets usually sleeveless and worn over another tight-fitting jacket with sleeves called a doublet; like the items mentioned above, they were popular in earlier eras. 319.28. trunk-hose: Short knee-length breeches, again from an earlier era. 320.6-7. faint hearsays ‘philosophy teaching by experience’: See note to 133.17-18. 320.38. ‘soul’s travail’: See Isaiah 53:11: “He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities.” 321.4. Virgil and Tacitus: The great Roman authors of epic and history. On Virgil see note to 136.18; on Tacitus, note to 76.32-34. 321.4-5. The whole Prophecies of Isaiah are not equal in extent to this cobweb of a Review Article: Carlyle exaggerates. The sixty-six chapters and approximately thirty-seven thousand words of the book of Isaiah make it the fifth-longest book in the Old Testament. Carlyle’s “review essay,” at approximately twenty-five thousand words, is significantly shorter. 321.14-16. he did not attain Shakspeare’s faculty, one perceives, of even writing fast after long preparation, but struggled while he wrote: According to Charles Symmons in The Life of John Milton (1810), Milton “frequently composed at night, when his unpremeditated verse would sometimes flow in a torrent, under the impulse as it were of some strange poetical fury; and that in these peculiar moments of imagination his amanuensis, who was generally his daughter, was summoned by the bell to arrest the verses as they came and to commit them to the security of writing” (547-48). See also Paradise Lost, in which Milton writes of his “Celestial Patroness, who  .  .  .  dictates to me slumbering” (9.21–23). 321.16-17. he ‘had nothing sent him in his sleep’: We have not located an exact parallel. In Aus Meinem Leben, Dichtung and Wahrheit (18111833), Goethe explains: “was ich wachend am Tage gewahr wurde, bildete sich sogar öfters Nachts in regelmäßige Träume, und wie ich die Augen

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aufthat, erschien mir entweder ein wunderliches neues Ganze, oder der Theil eines schon Vorhandenen” (Objects which had occupied my attention during the day, often appeared to me at night in connected dreams. On awakening, a new composition, or a portion of one that I had already commenced, presented itself to my mind) (Werke 26:307, Memoirs 2:126). 321.18-19. Schiller, as an unfortunate unhealthy man, ‘könnte nie fertig werden, never could get done’: Carlyle quotes Johann Eckermann’s recollection of Goethe: “Sein talent war mehr desultorisch. Deshalb war er auch nie entschieden und konnte nie fertig warden” (1:145). In his Life of Schiller, Carlyle writes that in 1791 Schiller was “seized with a violent and dangerous affection of the chest. The immediate danger was now over; but his bodily health was, for the rest of his life, shattered to ruin” (246). A letter of 1836 confirms that Carlyle had read the 1835 (first) edition of Gespräche mit Goethe (9:61). 321.20. struggled not wisely but too well: Compare Othello 5.2.345. 321.21-22. did Petrarch write easily? Dante sees himself ‘growing lean’ over his Divine Comedy: Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), Italian scholar and poet, and Dante Alighieri (see note to 44.1). In the same letter in which Carlyle inquired of Leigh Hunt about Giotto’s O (see note to 317.13), Carlyle had asked: “Can you send me the passage of Dante you mentioned to me one day, where he speaks about the toil of his Divine Comedy having made him grey?” (Letters 9:351). Carlyle apparently had misremembered lines from the Paradiso: “sì che m’ha fatto per più anni macro” (and with lean abstinence, through many a year) (25:3). See also On Heroes 77, which contains the correct allusion to leanness. 321.25-26. Jove has severe pains and fire-flames in the head out of which an armed Pallas is struggling: Jove, king of the gods in Roman mythology, whose daughter Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom, was born fully armed from his forehead. 321.34-35. “Easy writing,” said Sheridan, “is sometimes d——d hard reading”: Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816), playwright and poet, Clio’s Protest; or ‘The Picture’ Varnished (1771): “You write with ease, to shew your breeding; / but easy writing’s vile hard reading” (342-43). 322.5-6. ‘and as for the invention,’ says he, ‘it is known that this costs Scott nothing, but comes to him of its own accord’: Carlyle paraphrases

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Hall: “It is well known, or at least generally, and I have reason to believe truly admitted, that Sir Walter composes his works just as fast as he can write—that the manual labour is all that it costs him, for his thoughts flow spontaneously” (Lockhart 5:413). 322.22-24. Rural Rides, Registers, Grammars, Sermons, Peter Porcupines, Histories of Reformation, ever-fresh denouncements of Potatoes and Paper-money: Carlyle alludes to the variety of works written by William Cobbett (see note to 289.27): Rural Rides (1830), the most popular of his books; Grammar of the English Language (1819), which Carlyle recommended to his family in order to help them with their composition skills (see Letters 1:347 and 12:4); History of the Protestant Reformation (1824-1826); and the newspapers the Political Register (1802-1835) and the Porcupine (1800-1801). In the third monthly installment of his Cobbett’s Cottage Economy (October 1821), entitled “Making Bread,” Cobbett attacked the potato as a substitute for bread. He denounced paper money in his pamphlet Paper against Gold (1817). 322.27. died flowing, with the pen in his hand: According to the entry on Bayle (see note to 120.24) in the Biographie universelle, “Il mourout tout habille, et, pour ainsi dire, la plume a la main” (He died fully dressed, and, so to speak, with pen in hand). 322.29. leading-articles: Editorial commentaries, usually expressing the political point of view of the newspaper in which they appeared. 323.2-5. For if once Printing have grown to be as Talk, then Democracy  .  .  .  ‘Inevitable seems it me’: Carlyle had expressed a similar view in Sartor Resartus 1.5.30; he also anticipates On Heroes, in which he would write, “Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable” (141). 323.7-14. In a lately translated Don Carlos,  .  .  .  the work of five days’: Carlyle quotes John Wyndham Bruce’s translation of Schiller, Don Karlos: A Dramatical Poem (1837). Carlyle’s quotation is substantively accurate, although he omits the phrase “for the inaccuracy in rhythm in many places” in the first sentence: “The reader will, possibly, think it an excuse for the inaccuracy in rhythm in many places, when I assure him that the whole piece was completed within the space of ten weeks” (Bruce xli). 323.17. Noah’s deluges: Genesis 5.32-10.1.

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323.20-21. Matthew Bramble in a London fog: The gouty and peevish Welsh squire in Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1777), who, on a visit to London, complains, “I breathe the steams of endless putrefaction; and these would, undoubtedly, produce a pestilence, if they were not qualified by the gross acid of sea-coal, which is itself a pernicious nuisance to lungs of any delicacy of texture” (119). 323.23. Faust of Mentz: See note to 78.7. 323.24. Cadmus of Thebes: Greek mythological figure credited with founding Thebes and introducing a sixteen-letter Phoenician or Egyptian alphabet to Greece. 323.31. Constable’s bankruptcy: On the heels of a severe economic recession in the winter of 1825-1826, the companies with which Scott had associated himself, Archibald Constable & Co. and James Ballantyne & Co., could no longer sustain their massive debt. As part of the trust established to repay the debt, Scott found himself taking responsibility for all of it and agreeing to devote his earnings from writing for the rest of his life toward retiring the debt. By 1833, thanks also to significant life insurance policies taken out by the trustees of his bankruptcy, Scott’s debts were repaid in full. 324.25-26. the Hercules’ task, of removing rubbish-mountains: Carlyle alludes to Hercules’s fifth labor, the cleaning of the Augean stables. 324.33. Napoleons, Demonologies, Scotch Histories: The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, Emperor of the French (1827), Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830), and The History of Scotland (1829-1830). Scott’s main project at the end of his life, however, was a new edition of his works, which were published at a volume per month, with sales peaking at thirty thousand copies per month. 324.35-36. The noble warhorse that once laughed at the shaking of the spear: See Job 39:21-29. 325.1. Fortune stands on a restless globe: See Henry V: “And giddy Fortune’s furious fickle wheel, / That goddess blind, / That stands upon the rolling restless stone” (3.6.27-29). 325.9. on hint from Byron’s Ravenna Journal: Like Scott’s diary, Byron’s

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journal written during his time Ravenna, from 1819-1821, reflects a remarkably productive period in spite of his continuing personal travails. On Scott’s response to it, see Lockhart 6:107-8. 325.13-326.37. ‘Abbotsford, May 11 (1826).—* * It withers . . . actually be dead’: While the note at the end of this extract indicates that it begins on p. 297, the date at its head is on p. 296; as indicated by the asterisks, Carlyle omits the first part of the entry. The passages quoted are on 6:298-300, 300, 303, 305, 306, 307. 325.21. J.B.: James Ballantyne. 325.21. a great relief from the black dog: Scott alludes to Samuel Johnson, who often referred to his own depression as the “black dog”: “What will you do to keep away the black dog who worries you at home?” (Boswell 3:470). 325.23-24. ‘Well, here I am in Arden. And I may say with Touchstone, “When I was at home I was in a better place”: As You Like It 2.4.17. 325.30. Hogg: James Hogg (1770?–1835), poet and novelist, and friend of Scott’s since he helped him with the collecting of ballads that became Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802). 327.8-10. his fine Scotch face, with its shaggy honesty, sagacity and goodness, when we saw it latterly . . . labour and sorrow: In his journal, writing nine days after Scott’s death on September 21, 1832, Carlyle reported: I never spoke with Scott (had once some small epistolary intercourse with him on the part of Goethe, in which he behaved not very courteously, I thought), have a hundred times seen him, from of old, writing in the Courts, or hobbling with stout speed along the streets of Edinburgh; a large man, pale, shaggy face, fine, deep-browed grey eyes, an expression of strong homely intelligence, of humour and good humour, and, perhaps (in later years among the wrinkles), of sadness or weariness. A solid, well-built, effectual mind; the merits of which, after all this delirious exaggeration is done, and the reaction thereof is also done, will not be forgotten. He has played

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his part, and left none like or second to him. Plaudite! (Froude, First Forty Years 2:310-11)

Notes to “Heintze’s Translation of Burns” 329.1-2. Lieder und Balladen des Schotten Robert Burns: übertragen von Heinrich Julius Heintze: This and one other volume of translations are the only works published by Heintze (1811-1860). As discussed in the introduction, Heintze sent the volume to Carlyle, who proposed to John Forster that he seek a review for the Examiner. The result was that Carlyle wrote this review himself. 329.5. murder, “will out”: Proverbial for secrets or misdeeds inevitably being discovered, as in Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale”: “Mordre wol out, certeyn, it wol nat faille” (576). Carlyle writes in a letter of 1832 that “Meditation, like Murder, will out” (Letters 6:241). 329.6-9. the old familiar face of the “Peasant Thundergod,” . . . engraved by Schwerdgeburth of Weimar!: The frontispiece to Heintze’s volume reproduces a version of the portrait that Alexander Nasmyth painted for the 1787 edition of Burns’s poems (see note to 60.9). The caption under the engraving in Heintze reads, “A. Nasmyth pinxt. 1787. Engraved on steel by Schwerdgeburth.” Under the engraving is the facsimile signature “Robert Burns—Poet” (Burns, Lieder). In his lectures On Heroes, delivered in the spring of 1840, a few months before writing this review, Carlyle compares Burns to “the old Norse Thor, the Peasant-god” (163). In a letter of September 14, 1840, thanking R. Peacock for sending him Heintze’s volume as a gift, Carlyle writes of Burns: “My brave German friends, if their honest hearts are not all changed since I used to know them as a nation, would hail with welcome this rugged Saxon brother; one of the strongest, noblest men; a Scottish Thor, as I sometimes call him,—a true Peasant-Thundergod, as the old Scandinavian was!” (Letters 12:258). He made the same comparison in Latter-Day Pamphlets 119, 197 and Frederick 1:8.4.395. 329.11. a Gauger in the little Burgh of Dumfries: See “Burns” 35.15-16 and note. 329.12-14. Goethe is drawn from his artistic height  .  .  .  he recognises for a brother: Carlyle refers to the introduction that Goethe had written in 1830 for the German translation of Carlyle’s Life of Schiller (Leben

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Schillers, aus dem Englischen; eingeleitet durch Goethe [1830]), in which Goethe comments on Burns, translates excerpts from Carlyle’s “Burns,” and concludes, “We esteem this highly-praised Robert Burns amongst the first poetical spirits which the past century has produced” (Goethe and Carlyle 319). In his introduction (xxii), Heintze quotes this passage from Goethe and also a German translation of Carlyle’s characterization of Burns as a “decisive genius” from his letter to Goethe of September 25, 1828, which is given in part in Goethe’s introduction to Life of Schiller (Goethe and Carlyle 311). Goethe’s German text is included as appendix 2 in the Centenary Edition of Life of Schiller (322-46), and Charles Eliot Norton translates Goethe’s introduction in appendix 1 of Goethe and Carlyle (299-323). 329.14-15. four versions, or select-versions, of him this summer: See 330.4-6 and note. 329.15-18. Let but any son of Adam  .  .  .  as the undoubted possession of all: In a letter of September 14, 1840, written while he was working on this review, Carlyle comments in a similar vein in regard to Heintze’s volume: “Let a poor ploughman in the dingiest slough of habitable creation, in the broken speech of mere ploughme[n] utter any wise word from him,—infallibly it flie[s] over the whole earth, and the whole earth keeps it forever!” (Letters 12:259). On Son of Adam, see note to 209.21. 330.2. thick as blackberries: Plentiful, as in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV: “Give you a reason on compulsion? If reasons were as plentiful as blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion, I” (2.4.238-40). 330.2. English Fausts: Carlyle had been tracking translations of Faust since his 1822 review of a partial translation in the New Edinburgh Review 2 (April 1822): 316-34. In “Goethe’s Helena,” he had noted that there was at that time (1828) only one full translation (Essays 1:153). In “Parliamentary History of the French Revolution” Carlyle had referred to “seven of the eight Translators of Faust” (Historical Essays 226). A year later, in June 1838, he was asking, “Besides have we not eight translations of Faust already?” (Letters 10:92). Several more had appeared since then, owing in large part to the recent publication of part II of Faust; these included translations by William Bell Macdonald (1838), Jonathan Birch (1839), Leopold J. Bernays (1839), John Hill (1840), Lewis Filmore (1840), and Falck Lebahn (1840). Among the translations he had referred to in “Parliamentary History” were those by Lord Francis Leveson Gower

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(1823), John Stuart Blackie (1834), Abraham Hayward (1833), John Anster (1835), and Robert Talbot (1835), as indicated by mentions in his letters; others include an anonymous translation (1821) and others by David Syme (1834) and Warburton Davies (1834). When Blackie sent Carlyle a copy of his translation, his reply was characteristically encouraging but scant of praise (Letters 7:134). He also expressed doubts about Hayward’s translation when it first appeared but later reversed his judgment and came to consider it the best of the English translations (Letters 6:350, 377, 378n6). He drafted a review of Hayward that denigrated Gower’s translation; this review was never published but is reprinted in the Letters (6:379; see 378–83). 330.5-6. Kaufmann’s of Berlin, this of Heintze’s from Brunswick,—both these reputed to be good; then two others, names not given: Philipp Kaufmann (1802-1846), Gedichte von Robert Burns (1839); Heinrich Julius Heintze, Lieder unde Balladen des Schotten Robert Burns (1840); Wilhelm Gerhard, Gedichte. Robert Burns (1840); and perhaps Brittenlieder, a collection edited by Wilhelm Cornelius containing translations from Burns, Thomas Moore, and Byron (1840?). 330.13. “For a’ that, and a’ that”: Burns’s “Song—For a’ that and a’ that—” (1795). 330.16-17. The rank is but the guinea-stamp / The man’s the gowd for a’ that: Carlyle quotes a version of lines 7-8 of Burns’s “Song—For a’ that and a’ that—” (see preceding note): “The rank is but the guinea’s stamp, / The Man’s the gowd for a’ that.—.” He had used the quotation in a letter of 1822 (Letters 2:215), repeats a part of it in On Heroes (166.29), and also alludes to the lines in the “Reminiscence of James Carlyle”: “I have a sacred pride in my Peasant Father, and would not exchange him even now for any King known to me. Gold, and the guinea-stamp; the Man, and the Clothes of the Man!” (Reminiscences 10-11). 330.19-20. Schmidt-Phiseldeck: Probably the German writer Konrad Friedrich von Schmidt-Phiseldeck (1770-1832). 330.32-33. The tune is always the soul of a song: Carlyle repeatedly stresses the musical qualities of the best poetry, as in his discussion of poetry as “musical thought” in On Heroes (71-72). In his letter of September 14, 1840, acknowledging receipt of Heintze’s volume, Carlyle emphasizes the same point that he makes in this essay: “Perhaps the one counsel I

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should venture to give Herr Heintze were this: In all cases to learn the tune first. . . . The tune is the soul of a true Song,—that is to say, if it be a Song at all, if it have any soul.  .  .  .  The prime root of Herr Heintze’s shortcomings, where he has come short, one might define to be this, That he had forsaken the tune, that he did not know the tune: pray tell him so, if you judge it worth while” (Letters 12:257-58). The collections that Carlyle recommends (as he does with Thomson in the present essay) are A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice, ed. George Thomson (1793-1799), and The Scots Musical Museum, ed. James Johnson (17871803); Burns had been actively involved with both collections. 330.35. Thomson’s Collection: See preceding note. 331.1. “Green grow the rashes, O”: Burns’s song “Green Grow the Rashes. A Fragment” (1787). Burns, Lieder 45-46. 331.12-16. Auld Nature swears, the lovely dears. . . Green grow the rashes O, &c.: The last stanza (16-20) and chorus of “Green Grow the Rashes. A Fragment” (see preceding note). 331.21. “Macpherson’s Farewell”: See note to 47.22; Burns, Lieder 69-70. 331.28-31. Sae rantingly, sae wantonly, . . . Below the gallows tree: Carlyle quotes the chorus of “McPherson’s Farewell” (see note to 331.23-24). 331.35-38. So ging er froh und wohlgemuth, . . . Am Galgenstamme dort: Burns, Lieder 69; the parenthetic “Ach Gott!” is Carlyle’s interpolation. 332.2. “Duncan Gray”: Burns wrote two poems with this title; Carlyle discusses the later one (1792). 332.9-333.14. Duncan Gray kam her zu frein,  .  .  .  Ha, ha, die lust’ge Freit!: Carlyle gives Heintze’s text for all five stanzas of Burns’s poem, with alterations in punctuation and substituting “konn’t” for Heintze’s “konnt’” in 105.23 (Burns, Lieder 200-201). Duncan Gray cam here to woo, Ha, ha, the wooing o’t, On blythe Yule night when we were fu’, Ha, ha, the wooing o’t. Maggie coost her head fu’ high,

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Look’d asklent and unco skiegh, Gart poor Duncan stand abiegh; Ha, ha, the wooing o’t. Duncan fleech’d, and Duncan pray’d; Ha, ha, the wooing o’t. Meg was deaf as Ailsa craig, Ha, ha, the wooing o’t. Duncan sigh’d baith out and in, Grat his een baith bleer’t an’ blin’, Spak o’ lowpin o’er a linn; Ha, ha, the wooing o’t. Time and Chance are but a tide, Ha, ha, the wooing o’t. Slighted love is sair to bide, Ha, ha, the wooing o’t. Shall I, like a fool, quoth he, For a haughty hizzie die? She may gae to——France for me! Ha, ha, the wooing o’t. How it comes let Doctors tell, Ha, ha, the wooing o’t. Meg grew sick as he grew heal, Ha, ha, the wooing o’t. Something in her bosom wrings, For relief a sigh she brings; And O her een, they spak sic things! Ha, ha, the wooing o’t. Duncan was a lad o’ grace, Ha, ha, the wooing o’t. Maggie’s was a piteous case, Ha, ha, the wooing o’t. Duncan could na be her death, Swelling Pity smoor’d his Wrath; Now they’re crouse and canty baith, Ha, ha, the wooing o’t. 333.18. “To the Daisy,” “The Mouse,” and “Man was made to Mourn”:

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For “To a Mountain-Daisy,” see note to 34.14; for “To a Mouse,” see 34.15-16; “Man Was Made to Mourn, A Dirge” (1786). 333.20-21. Letters of Burns: The Letters of Robert Burns Chronologically Arranged. Comprehending the Whole of Dr Currie’s Collection, and the Most Valuable Portion of Cromek’s Reliques (1828). Carlyle repeats a recommendation—which also includes Lockhart’s, Cunningham’s, and Currie’s biographies of Burns—from his letter of September 14, 1840 (Letters 12:258 and n. 4). 333.24-25. Lockhart’s Life: Carlyle’s “Burns” in the present volume is a review of Lockhart’s biography of Burns. 333.25-26. consulted his Goethe: See 329.12-14 and note. 333.27. Cunningham, Currie: Allan Cunningham (1784-1842), ed., The Works of Robert Burns; with His Life (1834); this edition was listed among books owned by Carlyle (Sotheby and Co. 3). For Currie, see note to 29.16.

Notes to “Preface to Emerson’s Essays” 335.1. Mr. Fraser’s and other shops: James Fraser (1805?–1841), publisher of Fraser’s Magazine, which had been a frequent venue for Carlyle’s essays during the 1830s. Beginning with The French Revolution he was also the publisher of Carlyle’s books in Britain, the most recent at the time of writing this preface being the second British edition of Sartor Resartus (1841). Like most publishers at the time, Fraser sold his books from his own shop, which was located at 215 Regent Street, London. There is a copy of this edition at the Carlyle House, Chelsea (Tarr 254). 335.3. Reprint of an American Book of Essays: Emerson’s Essays was first published in Boston by J. Munroe and Co., 1841. 335.12. ‘wanderers in the labyrinthic Night!’: Unidentified; about six months before he wrote this preface Carlyle used the phrase “labyrinthic Night” in a letter describing his visit to Julius Hare (Letters 12:371). 335.20-21. distinguished Travellers bring us tidings of such a man: Emerson often wrote letters of introduction and arranged meetings with the Carlyles for Americans traveling to England. Probably the most distinguished of the visitors during the months before Carlyle wrote

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this preface was Charles Sumner (1811-1874), later a US senator and a leading opponent of slavery (Letters 10:29, 12:91; Emerson and Carlyle 278). Other visitors mentioned in the Emerson-Carlyle correspondence from the time include George Grinnell (Emerson and Carlyle 270, Letters 12:182), Jane Tuckerman (Emerson and Carlyle 270, Letters 12:185), and James Brown of Little and Brown, one of Carlyle’s American publishers (Emerson and Carlyle 299-300, Letters 13:218). Of course, Emerson himself had been a visitor, his lifelong friendship having begun when he visited the Carlyles at Craigenputtoch in 1833. 335.37-336.1. fitful hints that there is, in New England, some spiritual Notability called Emerson, glide through Reviews and Magazines: In letters, Carlyle mentions the following examples: Harriet Martineau’s discussion of Emerson in Retrospect of Western Travel (1838) and her review of the Dartmouth College Oration in the London and Westminster Review 32 (April 1839); William Gladstone’s quotation from Emerson’s Phi Beta Kappa Oration in his The State in Its Relations with the Church (1838); Richard Monckton Milnes’s review, with Carlyle’s encouragement, of Emerson’s Nature and three orations in the London and Westminster Review 33 (March 1840). See Letters 10:51, 11:25-26, 66. The presentation copy that Emerson sent to Carlyle was in the Sotheby sale (Sotheby and Co. 9). 336.8-9. after looking at the public arena: Emerson was minister of the Unitarian Second Church in Boston from 1829 until 1832, when he resigned over matters of theological dispute. 336.13. Mammon-worship: See note to 72.25. In Past and Present, Carlyle would devote a chapter to “The Gospel of Mammonism” (3.2). 336.15-16. As Paul Louis Courrier said: “Ce qui me distingue de tous mes contemporains c’est que je n’ai pas la prétention d’être roi”: Paul Louis Courier (1773-1825), French classical scholar and political writer: “That which distinguishes me from all of my contemporaries is that I do not have the pretension to be king.” The source of Courrier’s statement is untraced; it is not to be found in the collection of his political writings, Collection complète des pamphlets politiques et opuscules littéraires (1826). 336.22. Rothschild: A prominent family of European bankers. In 1805 Nathan Rothschild (1777-1836) opened the London branch that financed Wellington’s army in Spain during the Napoleonic Wars.

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336.27-28. parti-coloured beef-eaters: “Beefeaters” is the popular name for the Yeomen of the Guard and Yeomen Warders of the Tower of London, both of whom wear colorful uniforms patterned after those of the Elizabethan period. 336.36-37. great, as the blown bladder is, which by and by will collapse: “Bladder” is used here in the sense of the prepared bladder of an animal, inflated and used as a float or windbag. 337.4-6. Pleasures of Virtue, Progress of the Species, Black Emancipation, New Tariff, Eclecticism, Locofocoism, ghost of Improved-Socinianism: Catchphrases and epithets associated with various contemporary philanthropic and reform groups, philosophies, and controversies, both in Britain and the United States. “Pleasures of Virtue” is a phrase that Carlyle often uses to ridicule sentimental self-righteousness, as when he wrote to Emerson on August 18, 1841: “By the way, have you ever clearly remarked withal what a despicable function ‘view hunting’ is. Analogous to ‘philanthropy,’ ‘pleasures of virtue’ &c, &c” (Letters 13:218). “Progress of the species” is another recurring phrase used ironically by Carlyle to characterize people who believed in the inevitable progress of society (Letters 12:43n4). In his journal for August 8, 1832, he had written another characteristic expression of his distaste for formulaic social remedies and theoretical discussion: “I am getting very weary of the ‘Nature of the Time,’ ‘Progress of the Species,’ and all that business. The Time is here; men should use it, not talk about it: while they talk and lay not hold, it is gone and returns not” (Froude, First Forty Years 2:307). “New Tarif ” probably refers to the reductions proposed by the Whigs in 1841, the year in which Carlyle wrote the preface, for changes in the Corn Law tariffs (see 199.title). “Black Emancipation” refers to the abolition campaign in the United States and to the campaign that led to the abolition of slavery in Britain through the Slave Trade Act of 1807 and the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which took full effect in 1838. In 1839, the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society was founded with the aim of suppressing the slave trade and promoting the abolition of slavery in the United States. “Eclecticism” is generally a term used to describe those who fashion a system by choosing and combining elements taken from diverse other systems. At the time of Carlyle’s preface, the term was specifically associated with the French philosopher Victor Cousin (1792-1867), who had proposed such a system (calling it “Eclecticism”) and had gained a following in New England. Emerson criticizes Cousin’s eclecticism in the Dartmouth College Oration. “Locofoco” was a name used for the radical

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“Equal Rights” wing of the Democratic Party in the United States and refers specifically to the political principles of this group. Socinianism, another frequent object of Carlylean ridicule, is the view that Christ was simply human, not divine; its name derives from the sect founded by Laelius and Faustus Socinus, two sixteenth-century Italian theologians. “Improved-Socinianism” refers to Unitarianism, which denies the Trinity in favor of a unipersonality of God (Socinianism is sometimes called “Old Unitarianism”); Emerson had been a Unitarian minister. See also 311.5. 337.8. the sixteen millions: United States census records show a population of 16,987,946 for 1840. 337.16-17. Three of those Lectures, already printed, are known to some here; as is the little Pamphlet called Nature, of somewhat earlier date: The three lectures that Carlyle mentions in letters from the period are An Oration, Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837 (1837; known from 1847 as “The American Scholar”); An Address before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, Sunday Evening, 15 July, 1838 (1838); and An Oration, Delivered before the Literary Societies of Dartmouth College, July 24, 1838 (1838; later called “Literary Ethics”). Nature was published in 1836. For specific mention of these works, see Letters 9:361, 10:51, 188, 211, 11:24-25. Carlyle circulated copies of all of the above among friends and acquaintances. 337.20. new Periodical they call The Dial: The literary periodical of the American transcendental movement, edited by Margaret Fuller (1840-1842) and then by Emerson for its final two years. Carlyle had received the first four numbers by the time he wrote this preface (see Letters 13:140). Although he here calls it “unattractive,” his comments on the first two numbers, in letters to Emerson, give it qualified approval (but see also the letter cited in the note to 338.20). Of the first he wrote: “It is an u[t]terance of what is purest, youngest in your land; pure, ethereal as the voices of the Morning! And yet—you know me—for me it is too ethereal, speculative, theoretic: all theory becomes more and more confessedly inadequate, untrue, unsatisfactory, almost a kind of mockery to me! I will have all things condense themselves, take shape and body, if they are to have my sympathy” (Letters 12:267-68; on the second number, see 12:355). 337.24-25. composed probably, in good part, from mere Lectures which already lay written: In a letter of March 18, 1840, Emerson had written to Carlyle: “I turn my face homeward tomorrow, & this summer I mean

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to resume my endeavor to make some presentable book of Essays out of my mountain of manuscript, were it only for the sake of clearance” (Emerson and Carlyle 261). 337.27. Emerson, I understand, was bred to Theology: Emerson’s father was a Unitarian minister and came from a clerical family; Emerson himself attended Harvard Divinity School for a time (withdrawing for health reasons) and was ordained a minister of the Second Church in Boston in 1829. 337.29. the ‘universal soul’: Notably in “The Over-Soul” (Essays 284). 337.29-30. bright bodiless Northern Streamers: The aurora borealis, or northern lights. 337.32-35. Whether this Emerson be ‘a Pantheist,’  .  .  .  Ists and Isms are rather growing a weariness: Carlyle is responding to criticisms that had troubled Emerson; in a letter of October 17, 1838, he had written: “The publication of my ‘Address to the Divinity College,’  .  .  .  has been the occasion of an outcry in all our leading local newspapers against my ‘infidelity,’ ‘pantheism,’ & ‘atheism.’ The writers warn all & sundry against me, & against whatever is supposed to be related to my connexion of opinion, &c; against Transcendentalism, Goethe & Carlyle” (Emerson and Carlyle 196; see also Letters 10:212n9). In his response of November 7, Carlyle wrote: “Meanwhile we will let the [tempest in a] washbowl storm itself out; and Emerson at Concord shall recognize it for a washbowl storming, and hold on his way. As to my share in it, grieve not for half an instant. Pantheism, Pottheism, Mydoxy, Thydoxy are nothing at all to me; a weariness the whole jargon, which I avoid speaking of, decline listening to” (Letters 10:211-12). In a letter of June 4, 1835, Carlyle used language similar to that which he uses here in defending himself against his friend John Sterling’s criticisms of Sartor Resartus: “Finally assure yourself I am neither Pagan nor Turk, nor circumcised Jew, but an unfortunate Christian individual resident at Chelsea in this year of Grace; neither Pantheist nor Pottheist, nor any Theist or ist whatsoever; having the most decided contem[pt] for all manner of System-builders and Sectfounders” (Letters 8:137). 337.36-37. ‘open secret of the universe’: See note to 141.22.

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338.6-7. old dialects and formulas are mostly lying dead: See Sartor Resartus 2.9.141. 338.8. galvanizing: Literally, the application of chemically produced electricity, deriving from Galvin’s experiments in which he made the muscles of a dead frog twitch by applying an electrified wire to its muscles (see note to 299.36). The word, or its derivatives, is common in Carlyle to indicate a false appearance of life in dead matter, as in the following from a letter of May 21, 1841, to Emerson: “All copies of your Essays are out at use. . . . As for me I love the Book and man, and their noble rustic hero-hood and manhood:—one voice as of a living man amid such jabberings of galvanized corpses: ach Gott!—” (Letters 13:142). 338.13-15. Man’s Soul is still alive, that God’s Universe is still godlike, that of all Ages of Miracles ever seen, or dreamt of, by far the most miraculous is this age in this hour: The idea is pervasive in Carlyle’s works, perhaps most famously in the “Natural Supernaturalism” chapter of Sartor Resartus (3.8). A decade prior to the present preface, he had written in “Characteristics”: “Remarkable it is, truly, how everywhere the eternal fact begins again to be recognized, that there is a Godlike in human affairs; that God not only made us and beholds us, but is in us and around us; that the Age of Miracles, as it ever was, now is” (Essays 3:42). 338.17-18. Benthamisms, Socialisms, Fourrierisms: Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was the founder of utilitarianism (see note to 75.11-14). A relatively new term at the time of Carlyle’s preface, socialism describes a political and economic theory of communal or governmental ownership and control of means of production, property, and so forth, mainly associated with Robert Owen (1771-1858), a pioneer in the cooperative movement. Charles Fourier (1772-1837) was a French social philosopher who envisioned communities established on principles of communal living and division of labor according to personal inclinations; Brook Farm, founded by American Transcendentalists in the year of Carlyle’s preface, was a Fourier community. 338.19. monstrous mooncalves: A mooncalf is a deformed animal, a monster. In The Tempest Stephano and Trinculo repeatedly refer to Caliban both as a monster and a mooncalf, but do not use this phrase. 338.20. ‘twelfth hour of the night’: From Carlyle’s translation of a passage from Jean Paul’s Hesperus (1795): “But as yet struggles the twelfth-hour

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of the Night: nocturnal birds of prey are on the wing, specters uproar, the dead walk, the living dream” (“Jean Paul Friedrich Richter Again,” Essays 2:154; Sämmtliche Werke 7:xxviii). Carlyle had used the passage in “Characteristics” (Essays 3:32), used the phrase in Goethe’s “The Tale” (Essays 2:471n3) and “Count Cagliostro” (Historical Essays 41), and reportedly concluded his 1838 series of lectures on literature with the full quotation (History of Literature 214-15); he would later use the passage as one of the mottos on the title page of Latter-Day Pamphlets and repeat it in the text (41, 191). See also Letters 5:138n6. 338.20. Puseyisms: “Puseyism” was a synonym for the Oxford Movement, or Tractarianism, an Anglo-Catholic movement within the Church of England favoring a liturgy and ritual similar to that of the Roman Catholic Church. The term derives from the name of one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement, Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882). Carlyle followed up his comments about the second number of the Dial (see note to 337.20) by asking Emerson if he was familiar with “Puseyism” (12:268). In a letter of December 18, 1841, Carlyle wrote to John Sterling: I should like to know in full your deliberate opinion about Emerson: he is becoming a phenomenon worth forming a theory about. Did you ever see any numbers of that strange magazine of his called the Dial. . . . You will be far from entertained in reading there: it is to me the most wearisome of readable reading; shrill, incorporeal, spirit like,—I do not say ghastly, for that is the character of your Puseyism, Shelleyism, &c; real ghosts of extinct obsolete Laudisms, Robespierrisms; to me extremely hideous at all times. (Letters 13:321)

WORKS CITED The following list identifies all works referred to by page number in this volume. Citations of the Bible are to the King James Version, and those of Shakespeare are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton, 1974). Works and Writings by Carlyle Titles that do not give publication data are cited from the Centenary Edition of Carlyle’s works: The Works of Thomas Carlyle. Ed. H. D. Traill. 30 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1896–1899. Cromwell

Oliver Cromwell ’s Letters and Speeches with Elucidations. 4 vols.

Emerson and Carlyle

The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle. Ed. Joseph Slater. New York: Columbia UP, 1964.

Essays

Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. 5 vols.

French Revolution

The French Revolution: A History. 3 vols.

Frederick

History of Friedrich II. of Prussia Called Frederick the Great. 8 vols.

German Literature

Carlyle’s Unfinished History of German Literature. Ed. Hill Shine. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1951.

German Romance

German Romance. 2 vols.

Collectanea

Collectanea Thomas Carlyle, 1821-1855. Ed. Samuel Arthur Jones. Canton, PA: Kirgate Press, 1903.

Goethe and Carlyle

Correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle. Ed. Charles Eliot Norton. London: Macmillan, 1887.

Historical Essays

Historical Essays. Ed. Chris R. Vanden Bossche. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.

Historical Sketches

Historical Sketches of Notable Persons and Events in the Reigns of James I and Charles I. Ed. Alexander Carlyle. London: Chapman and Hall, 1898. 621

622

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History of Literature

Lectures on the History of Literature. Ed. J. Reay Greene. New York: Scribners, 1892.

Latter-Day Pamphlets

The Latter-Day Pamphlets.

Letters

The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. Ed. Charles R. Sanders et al. 46 vols. to date. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1970–.

Life of Schiller

The Life of Friedrich Schiller.

Life of Sterling

The Life of John Sterling.

On Heroes

On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. Ed. Michael K. Goldberg, Joel J. Brattin, and Mark Engel. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.

Past and Present

Past and Present. Ed. Chris R. Vanden Bossche, Joel J. Brattin, and D. J. Trela. Berkeley: U of California P, 2005.

Poems

The Collected Poems of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. Ed. Rodger L. Tarr and Fleming McClelland. Greenwood, FL: Penkevill, 1986.

Reminiscences Reminiscences. Ed. K. J. Fielding and Ian Campbell. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Sartor Resartus

Sartor Resartus. Ed. Rodger Tarr and Mark Engel. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000.

Wilhelm Meister

Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels. 2 vols.

Two Note Books

Two Note Books of Thomas Carlyle, from 23d March 1822 to 16th May 1832. Ed. Charles Eliot Norton. New York: Grolier, 1898.

Wotton Reinfred

The Last Words of Thomas Carlyle: Wotton Reinfred, a Romance; Excursion (Futile Enough) to Paris; Letters. New York: Appleton, 1892.

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EMENDATIONS OF THE COPY-TEXT All departures of the present edition from the copy-text are listed below. For details on the choice of copy-text, see the Note on the Text. All variant readings found in the collated versions of the text are reported in the Historical Collation. Because the two lists serve distinct purposes, the variants reported below in the list of emendations are repeated in the Historical Collation. In both lists, each item is keyed to the text by the number of the page and line on which the variant begins (essay titles are not counted as lines, but the titles of chapters within essays and the blank lines that separate some paragraphs are counted). The top line of each item gives the copy-text reading, followed by the symbol of the version serving as copy-text at that point. In the list of emendations, the second line in each item gives the variant reading adopted in the present edition, followed by the symbol of the version in which that reading first appeared (in cases where variants are adopted from more than one edition all are listed). Some entries in the historical collation contain more than one variant; the list of emendations gives only those variants that are adopted in the present edition. In both lists, variant readings adopted in the present edition are printed in boldface, and items treated in the Discussion of Editorial Decisions are marked with an asterisk. Words enclosed in brackets are editorial comments; note in particular that [footnote] means a footnote begins here and [«»] signifies that a character or punctuation mark is absent at that point, but that there is extra blank space, suggesting lost or broken type. The symbol “¶” indicates that a new paragraph begins at that point. The symbol “/” is used when relevant to indicate the end of a line. The placement of a footnote marker is taken to be part of Carlyle’s text, but the marker itself, whether a number or a symbol such as an asterisk, is not taken to be part of the text because the decision about which system to use in the various editions was not made by Carlyle. In the this listing, therefore, footnote numbers are always represented by a dagger, no matter what symbol was used in the particular text. Symbol Version MSS Manuscript of the essay where relevant. 28 et al. The first appearance of the essay in a serial publication; the date is the date of this first appearance. 33Y Bound volume of essays as first published with corrections by Carlyle. 38 or 39 Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. First Edition. Boston: James Munroe, 1838-1839. 40 Second Edition. London: James Fraser, 1840. 47 Third Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1847. 57 Volumes 2-5 of the Uniform Edition. 16 vol. London: Chapman and Hall, 1857–58. 69 Volumes 6-11 and 34 of the Library Edition. 34 vol. London: Chapman and Hall, 1869–71. 41 Emerson’s Essays. London: James Fraser, 1841. 53 Emerson’s Essays. London: Chapman and Hall, 1853. Strouse Emendations made on editorial authority. 635

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“Miss Baillie’s Metrical Legends” [21] 3.1 exalted 21 Exalted Strouse “Burns” [28, 38, 40, 47, 57, 69] 29.0 29.0 Burns. 28 BURNS. 38 29.10 nature, 28 Nature, 40 29.18 ¶Mr 28 ¶Mr. 38 30.9* laws! 28 laws; 33Y 40 → 69 30.10 Mr 28 Mr. 38 30.21 biographers 28 Biographers 40 30.22 Dr 28 Dr. 38 30.22 Mr 28 Mr. 38 30.25 Dr 28 Dr. 38 30.32 Mr 28 Mr. 38 31.1 ¶Mr 28 ¶Mr. 38 31.12 Mr 28 Mr. 38 31.16 Mr 28 Mr. 38 31.36 biography. 28 Biography. 40 32.5 those for whom they 28 those they 40 32.5 intended. 28 intended for. 40 32.6 ¶Burns 28 [extra leading between paragraphs] ¶Burns 40 32.20 desert, 28 desert moor, 40

32.29

for ever 28 forever 47 33.2 eagle 28 lynx 40 33.4 irrepressible 28 expansive 40 33.4 inward spirit, 28 own irrepressible soul, 40 33.30 race with whom 28 class of men with whom, for most part, 40 34.7 own was 28 own life was 40 34.35 peasant 28 Peasant 40 36.11 scenes he 28 scenes that he 40 36.15 it, too, with 28 it with 40 37.3 success, and he 28 success; he 40 37.15 humours, 28 humour, 40 37.19 false, and affected, 28 false, affected, 40 37.19 otherwise powerful 28 otherwise so powerful 40 37.33 ¶It is necessary, however, to mention, that it 28 ¶Here, however, let us say, it 40 37.33 poetry 28 Poetry 40 38.18 Mrs 28 Mrs. 38 38.19 poetry. 28 Poetry. 40 38.19 sincerity, 28 Sincerity, 40 38.20 foregoing. It 28 foregoing: this 40 38.23 for ever 28 forever 40

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38.26

conventional world, 28 conventional heroic world, 40 38.26 resides for him; 28 resides; 40 38.28 novels 28 Novels 40 38.28 epics, 28 Epics, 40 39.3 out of 28 beyond 40 39.9 cannot but think, 28 imagine, 40 39.18 tho’ 28 though 38 39.25 decipher? 28 decipher, 33Y decipher; 40 → 69 39.37 all other things, 28 all things, 40 39.38 an eye 28 eyesight 40 40.1 eyes, 28 eyesight, 40 40.1 hard. But 28 hard. The blind or the purblind man ‘travels from Dan to Beersheba, and finds it all barren.’ But 40 40.15 soon after 28 about 40 40.38 tender, and he 28 tender, he 40 41.2 in him 28 that in this man there was 40 41.8 prompt and eager 28 fierce prompt 40 41.20 Retsch 28 Retzsch 38 41.20 exact. ¶This 28 exact. [passage inserted 41.20 to 43.4.] ¶This 40

41.35*

637

upchock’d, 40 upchok’d 69 41.36* whirl, 40 swhirl, 69 41.37* lock’d, 40 bock’d, 57 43.4 may call 28 have called 40 43.20 scene. Our 28 scene. We hear of ‘a gentleman that derived his patent of nobility direct from Almighty God.’ Our 40 43.22 forward, he says, ‘red-wat shod:’ giving in 28 forward ‘red-wat-shod:’ in 40 43.33 extreme 28 a weak-eyed maudlin 40 43.34 pervading 28 random 40 44.2 poet 28 Poet 40 44.2 to all men, 28 to men, 40 44.7 for it dwelt 28 it had to dwell 40 44.7 objects, 28 objects; 40 44.7 philosophy, and 28 Philosophy, 40 44.8 except for 28 except by natural effort and for 40 44.9 sufficient indication 28 sufficient indication, if no proof sufficient, 40 44.21 Mr 28 Mr. 38 45.6 probably require this; 28 so require it; 40 45.10 poetry 28 Poetry 40

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45.16 ‘love 28 ‘Love 40 45.29 ‘I 28 I 38 45.35 ‘Ilk 28 Ilk 38 46.2 ee?’ 28 ee? 38 46.10 ‘But 28 But 38 46.15 sake!’ He did not know, probably, that Sterne had been beforehand with him. 28 sake! [sentence omitted] 40 46.17 ‘He 28 “He 40 46.17 lies,’ 28 lies,” 38 46.17 Dr 28 Dr. 38 46.17 ‘and 28 “and 38 46.18 already.’—‘I 28 already.”—“I 38 46.18 it,’ 28 it,” 38 46.18 ‘A 28 A 40 46.18 poet 28 Poet 40 46.19 impossibility.’ 28 impossibility. [passage inserted 46.19 to 47.9.] 40 47.11 know it, 28 know of it, 40 47.14 Mr 28 Mr. 38 47.21 song, 28 Song, 40 47.32 Free-will; 28 Freewill; 40, 54 47.37 ‘Sae 28 Sae 38

48.2

tree.’ 28 tree. 38 48.4 lighter and thinner disguise, 28 lighter disguise, 40 48.17 poetry, 28 Poetry, 40 48.19 writings, 28 Writings, 40 48.30 for ever 28 forever 47 48.30 silent, 28 silent now, 40 48.37 phantasmagoria, painted 28 phantasmagoria, or manycoloured spectrum painted 40 49.11 poet’s 28 Poet’s 40 49.14 airy, and soft 28 airy, soft 40 49.19 night 28 Night 40 49.19 ruddy, and flaming 28 ruddy, flaming 40 49.25 cheer. It 28 cheer. Apart from the universal sympathy with man which this again bespeaks in Burns, a genuine inspiration and no inconsiderable technical talent are manifested here. There is the fidelity, humour, warm life, and accurate painting and grouping of some Teniers, for whom hostlers and carousing peasants are not without significance, It 40 49.29 significance, 40 significance. 47 49.37 with the least 28 with least 40

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49.38

brief and simple 28 brief simple 40 50.2 The 28 Yet the 40 50.9 ‘speech’ in 28 speech ‘in 40 50.10 Bishop, 28 Bishop,’ 40 50.14 debateable land 28 debateable-land 40 50.15 outside 28 outskirts 40 50.27 plays, 28 Plays, 40 51.2 song-writers; 28 Song-writers; 40 51.8 songs 28 Songs 40 51.10 all the ends 28 all ends 40 51.11 the 28 many-coloured 40 51.11 name, the voice 28 name, the voice 40 51.36* John 28 Thomas 33Y 52.3 attempt, and a tolerably clumsy one, at 28 attempt at 40 52.26 structure 28 Structure 40 53.12 song, 28 Song, 40 53.13 his most toilsome 28 his toilsome 40 53.19 ——‘a 28 ——a 38 53.28 dear.’ 28 dear. 38 53.31 long, we cannot but think that 28 long. Far more interesting than any of his written

639

works, as it appears to us, are his acted ones: 40 53.33 men, 28 men. 40 53.33 is both more interesting and instructive than any of his written works. These 28 These 40 54.4 poems, 28 Poems, 40 54.6 life, 28 Life, 40 54.25 more or 28 more completely or 40 54.33 steady himself 28 gird himself up 40 54.34 fixed or systematic pursuit, 28 worthy well-calculated goal, 40 55.9 wonderful, therefore, that 28 wonderful that 33Y 55.28 ever 28 never 40 56.20 ——‘in 28 ——in 38 56.22 side!’ 28 side! 38 56.22 ¶We know, 28 ¶We ourselves know, 40 56.34 them; 28 them, 40 56.36 service, 28 Devil’s-service, 40 57.3 ‘for 28 for 40 57.4 doing.’ 28 doing. 40 57.5 begins, at all events, 28 begins even 40 57.38 by the red 28 by red 40 58.8 ‘Farewell, 28 Farewell, 38

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58.11 Ayr!’ 28 Ayr! 38 58.15 in triumph, 28 in a triumph, 40 58.26 Mr 28 Mr. 38 59.10 themselves.’—P. 131. 28 themselves.’ 40 59.14 Mr 28 Mr. 38 59.22 Mr 28 Mr. 38 59.27 Mr 28 Mr. 38 60.9 Mr 28 Mr. 38 60.38 any thing 28 anything 38 60.38 since.’—Pp. 112-115. 28 since.’ 40 61.18 clear enough to 28 clear to 40 61.21 for ever 28 forever 40 61.26 learned 28 Learned 40 61.38 of mere worldly 28 of worldly 40 62.5 wisest: and it 28 wisest. It 40 62.5 question which 28 question, too, which apparently 40 62.9 one; and that 28 one; that 40 62.10 Some 28 Certain 40 62.10 admirers, indeed, are 28 admirers have felt 40 62.11 apparently lie still 28 lie 40 62.12 should stir 28 stirred 40

62.12

and then heal 28 that so, 40 62.12 plunge 28 friendly plunge, 40 62.13 his worldly sorrows! We fear such counsellors knew but little of Burns; and did not consider that happiness might in all cases be cheaply had by waiting for the fulfilment of golden dreams, were 28 his sorrows might be healed. Unwise councellors! They know not the manner of this spirit; and how, in the lap of most golden dreams, a man might have happiness, were 40 62.13 councellors! 40 counsellors! 47 62.15 the dreamer 28 he 40 62.15 hunger. 28 hunger! 40 62.23 think then 28 reckon 40 62.27 any thing. 28 anything. 38 62.31 his 28 the 40 62.36 more! the 28 more! The 40 63.21 for ever. 28 forever. 40 63.26 guide, 28 loadstar 40 64.24 work 28 Work 40 64.24 Mr 28 Mr. 38 64.33 ‘Nay, 28 “Nay, 38

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64.33 now;’ 28 now;” 38 65.4 O 28 “O 38 65.9 ‘It 28 It 38 66.4 for ever. 28 forever. 40 66.35 not really believe 28 not believe 40 68.12 strengthened. The 28 strengthened, the 33Y 68.37 right therefore to 28 right to 40 69.25 any thing, 28 anything, 38 69.26 verse-monger, 28 Verse-monger, 40 69.32 repel or resist; 28 cast aside, or rightly subordinate; 40 69.35 have lost 28 lose 40 69.35 them here. 28 them. 40 71.14 it 28 it 40 71.17 for ever 28 forever 69 72.5 a muck 28 amuck 40 73.11 are for 28 are fit for 40 73.38 not, 28 not 40 74.6 them. 28 them! 40 74.9 damaged; and the 28 damaged; the 40 74.9 is therefore 28 is 40 “Voltaire” [29, 38, 40, 47, 57, 69]

75.0

641

Voltaire. 29 VOLTAIRE. 38 77.26 conquerors 29 Conquerors 40 77.26 revolutionists 29 Revolutionists 40 78.2 whirlwind 29 whirlwind’ 38 78.2 for ever; 29 forever; 47 78.25 Institute. ¶We 29 Institute. [extra leading between paragraphs] ¶We 40 78.27 volumes 29 Volumes 40 78.34 is, perhaps, 29 is perhaps, 40 79.30 flood 29 Flood 40 79.34 secretaries: 29 Secretaries: 40 79.35 two 29 Two 40 79.35 octavos 29 Octavos 40 80.6 further 29 farther 40 80.19 Voltaire†; 29 Voltaire;† 38 80.27 nature 29 Nature 40 80.39 character,) 29 character) 38 81.18 further 29 farther 40 82.12 nay, perhaps, 29 nay perhaps 40 83.6* Runnymede; 29 Runnymead; 40 83.9 war, 29 War, 40

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83.34 ‘We 29 “We 40 83.34 Poets.’ 29 Poets.” 40 84.10 sum†. 29 sum.† 38 84.11 b[«»]siness, 29 business, 38 85.2 gone†. 29 gone.† 38 85.7 strong-hold; 29 stronghold; 40 85.12 low†; 29 low;† 38 85.23 widow 29 Widow 40 85.34 work, 29 Work, 40 85.37 Memnon. 29 Memnon, 38 87.14 pot,’—which 29 pot’ (which 40 87.14 and 29 but 40 87.14 begrime,—must 29 begrime), must 40 87.16 and may not always, when considering the 29 nor perhaps will it always, when the 40 87.17 Metropolis, escape 29 Metropolis comes to be debated, escape 40 87.25 and who 29 and now, who 40 87.28 or take 29 or to take 40 88.20 thousand-fold 29 thousandfold 40 89.2 that, 29 who, 40 89.9 Chatelet, 29 Châtelet, 40

89.11 ‘Vous 29 “Vous 40 89.12 mourir?’ 29 mourir?” 40 89.32 decrepid 29 decrepit 40 89.36 passing away from 29 passing from 40 90.2 no where 29 nowhere 38 90.3 every where 29 everywhere 38 90.5 sizes 29 sides 38 90.10 Never, perhaps, 29 Never perhaps 40 91.28 can 29 Can 40 92.16 they not 29 not they 40 92.22 a true Delphic 29 a Delphic 40 92.37 (cavern) 29 (Cavern) 40 93.4 compeer 29 compear 40 94.16 upon 29 before 40 94.19 further 29 farther 40 94.21 Disabilities’, 29 Disabilities,’ 38 95.3 rule, also, 29 rule also, 40 95.27 injustice.’—Vie de Voltaire, p. 32. 29 injustice.’† [footnote inserted] † Vie de Voltaire, p. 32. 40 96.20 or, perhaps, 29 or perhaps 40 97.8 this 29 his 40

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98.28 Rosbach, 29 Rossbach, 69 98.37 Doctor 29 Dr. 40 98.37 Doctor 29 Dr. 40 99.2 this, too, 29 this too 40 99.21 old-coquetish, 29 old-coquettish, 38 99.23 niece, 29 Niece, 40 100.6 Chatelet. 29 Châtelet. 40 100.15 gayety, 29 gaiety, 38 100.27 of night, for it is always at night; 29 of night; 40 101.6 Chatelet, 29 Châtelet, 40

101.10 (poussait des cris aigus); 29 (poussait des cris aigus); 47 101.17 ground.’—vol. ii. p. 166. 29 ground.’† [footnote inserted] † Vol. ii. p. 166. 40 101.19 Kitchener, 29 Kitchiner, 40 101.22 is it 29 it is 40 101.22 an 29 a 40 101.23 chateau, 29 château, 40 101.30 perivate 29 private 38 101.35 Chatelet, 29 Châtelet, 40 102.4 lady, too, 29 lady too 40 102.10 towards 29 to 40

643

102.15 thousand-fold 29 thousandfold 40 102.31 that 29 the 40 102.34 Chatelet 29 Châtelet 40 102.35 Chatelet, 29 Châtelet, 40 103.11 the 29 a 40 103.14 sorrow.’—Vol. ii. p. 250. 29 sorrow.’† [footnote inserted] † Vol. ii. p. 250. 40 103.24 Ces 29 Les 38 104.4 Chamouni-needles 29 Chamouni-Needles 40 104.13 that 29 but 40 105.17 ancients 29 Ancients 40 105.21 lured 29 lures 40 105.22 ‘O 29 “O 40 105.23 you;’ 29 you;” 40 105.25 further 29 farther 40 106.10 ‘Va 29 “Va 40 106.11 Voltaire.’ 29 Voltaire.” 40 106.16 gentlemen,” 29 gentlemen, 40 106.16 (Mafoi, 29 Ma foi, 40 106.16 Messieurs,) 29 Messieurs,” 40 106.22 pleased.’—vol. i. p. 121. 29 pleased.’—Vol. i. p. 121. 38 pleased.’† [footnote inserted] † Vol. i. p. 121. 40

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106.36 further, 29 farther, 40 107.3 Hotel, 29 Hôtel, 40 107.8 Paris.’—vol. ii. p. 353. 29 Paris.’—Vol. ii. p. 353. 38 Paris.’† [footnote inserted] † Vol. ii. p. 353. 40 107.19 ‘C’est 29 “C’est 40 107.19 Calas.’ 29 Calas.” 40 107.21 XV., 29 Quinze, 40 107.21 ‘Here, 29 “Here, 40 107.22 gentlemen,’ 29 gentlemen,” 40 107.22 ‘is 29 “is 40 107.24 all!’ 29 all!” 40 107.36 figure 29 visage 40 108.4 men.’—vol. ii. p. 466. 29 men.’—Vol. ii. p. 466. 38 men.’† [footnote inserted] † Vol. ii. p. 466. 40 108.6 head—this 29 head,—this 40 108.7 XIV.—was 29 XIV.,—was 40 108.26 a going, 29 a-going, 40 109.4 Chartres, 29 Chartres,† [footnote inserted] † Afterwards Egalité. 40 109.8 Bedchamber†, 29 Bedchamber,† 38 109.12 then?” 29 then? 40 109.13 mourir!) 29 mourir!)” 40

109.14

Belle-et-bonne†: 29 Belle-et-bonne:† 38 110.4 donne†! 29 donne!† 38 110.23 gone.’—vol. ii. 29 gone.’ 40 110.26 March, 29 March 40 110.26 (1778,) 29 (1778), 40 110.27 and on 29 and that on 40 111.1 Adieu, 29 “Adieu, 40 111.1 meurs 29 meurs, 38 111.1 (Adieu, 29 Adieu, 40 111.1 gone). 29 gone.” 40 111.2 Voltaire†.’ 29 Voltaire.’† 38 111.16 further 29 farther 40 111.3 ‘Let 29 “Let 38 111.35 peace!’ 29 peace 40 111.35 (Laissez-moi 29 (Laissez-moi 40 111.35 paix!) 29 paix)!” 40 112.24 Here, too, 29 Here too 40 112.27 here, too, 29 here too 40 112.31 for ever 29 forever 40 114.16 further 29 farther 40 115.3 as of talent; 29 as talent; 40

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115.30 Those 29 These 40 117.7 cameleon 29 chameleon 40 117.16 than 29 from 40 118.7 and 29 and 40 118.21 detail.’—Œuvres, t. xlvii. p. 300. 29 detail.’* [footnote inserted] * Œuvres, t. xlvii. p. 300. 40 118.36 platitudes).’— 29 platitudes).’† 471 119.6 jugglery; and 29 jugglery; which nevertheless swell up round him, irrepressible, higher, ever higher; and 40 119.7 ‘Dégoûtantes 29 ‘dégoûtantes 40 120.20 religion, 29 Religion, 40 121.8 further 29 farther 40 121.18 any thing 29 anything 38 121.19 for ever. 29 forever. 40 121.29 this 29 the 40 122.12 in 29 of 40 123.36 There, too, 29 There too 40 124.3 social system, 29 Social System, 40 124.10 those 29 these 40

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126.5

some such celestial 29 some celestial 40 126.8 ‘Enlighten Self-interest!’ 29 “Enlighten Self-interest!” 40 126.8 ‘Do 29 “Do 40 126.8 it!’ 29 it!” 40 127.26 faith 29 Faith 40 128.26 closet-logic. 29 Closet-Logic. 40 129.8 anger, 29 angry, 40 129.8 that 29 but 40 129.13 Superstition. 29 Superstition! 40 129.16 return. He 29 return. It was a most weighty service. Does not the cry of “No Popery,” and some vague terror or shamterror of ‘Smithfield fires,’ still act on certain minds in these very days? He 40 129.31 truth, 29 Truth, 40 “Biography” 131.19 Free-will 32 Freewill 40 132.20 Art, too, 32 Art too, 40 132.36 every where 32 everywhere 39 132.37 every where 32 everywhere 39

1 1840 inserts the citation “De la Littérature Allemande. Berlin, 1780,” which in 1829 appeared in the body of the text to the footnote that followed it. This change is adopted in the present edition.

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133.3

for ever; 32 forever; 40 133.13 biographic? 32 Biographic? 40 134.17 metropolis, 32 Metropolis, 40 134.27 for ever 32 forever 40 134.38 canst, as 32 canst, even as 40 139.13 for ever. 32 forever. 40 139.20 incident (if 32 incident, if 40 139.20 presented) 32 presented, 40 139.25 heavy unmanageable 32 heavy and unmanageable 40 140.2 generations, 32 generations 39 140.5 ‘No, 32 “No, 40 140.5 do;’ 32 do;” 40 141.25 for ever 32 forever 40 141.30 any thing; 32 anything; 39 141.31 any thing, 32 anything, 39 142.2 Selbourne? 32 Selborne? 39 142.5 Selbourne, 32 Selborne, 39 142.23 that 32 who 40 “Boswell’s Life of Johnson” 145.0 boswell’s life of johnson.† 32 BOSWELL’S LIFE OF JOHNSON.† 39

145.18 chanting 32 chaunting 47 146.29 every where 32 everywhere 39 148.15 ‘What 32 “What 40 148.15 it,’ 32 it,” 40 148.15 ‘when 32 “when 40 148.21 “a 32 ‘a 39 148.22 sides,” 32 sides,’ 39 148.22 “Is 32 ‘Is 39 148.25 Ed.?” 32 Ed.?’ 39 148.28 “When 32 ‘When 39 148.30 so?” 32 so?’ 40 148.30 short,’ 32 short,” 40 148.31 ‘should 32 “should 40 148.32 all?’ 32 all?” 40 149.20 ‘where 32 Where 40 149.20 knoweth!’ 32 knoweth! 40 149.21 ‘There 32 There 40 149.21 lip;’ 32 lip; 40 149.22 is it 32 it is 40 149.25 Brewers 32 Brewer’s 39 150.6 enough! ¶We 32 enough! [extra leading between paragraphs] ¶We 40

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150.19

any where 32 anywhere 39 151.10 ‘took 32 “took 40 151.10 Paoli,’ 32 Paoli,” 40 151.11 ‘the 32 “the 40 151.11 landlouper,’ 32 landlouper,” 40 151.12 ‘ane 32 “ane 40 151.12 academy:’ 32 academy:” 40 151.18 such 32 such 40 151.124 ‘Your 32 Your 40 151.24 Laird,’ 32 Laird, 40 151.25 ‘may 32 may 40 151.25 known.’ 32 known. 40 151.26 temper, 32 temper; 40 151.27 Heraldry; 32 Heraldry, 40 151.25 dull 32 dull-snuffling 40 151.36 ‘I, 32 “I, 40 151.37 Scotland.’ 32 Scotland.” 40 153.25 ‘for 32 “for 40 153.26 Bear.’ 32 Bear.” 40 154.7 witness (or 32 witness, or 40 154.7 martyr) 32 martyr, 40

154.15

647

concealing (from 32 concealing, from 40 154.16 others) 32 others, 40 155.2 here, too, 32 here too, 40 155.4 was (as 32 was, as 40 155.4 is) 32 is, 40 155.12 All, 32 All, 40 155.35 any thing 32 anything 39 156.26 for ever 32 forever 47 156.38 chanted 32 chaunted 47 157.18 Johnsoniad (such 32 Johnsoniad, such 40 157.19 imprisoned), the 32 imprisoned,—the 40 157.37 waiter, that 32 waiter who, 47 157.38 smiles, wont 32 smiles, was wont 47 157.38 “supper 32 supper 40 158.1 gods,” 32 gods, 40 158.27 Shelburn, 32 Shelburne, 39 158.29 Taxation’? 32 Taxation?’ 40 158.37 specific-levity (as 32 specific levity, as 40 158.37 horse-dung), 32 horse-dung, 40 159.24 ‘Robertson,’ 32 “Robertson,” 40 159.24 ‘Robertson 32 “Robertson 40

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159.24 world.’ 32 world.” 40 160.25 back-ground, 32 background, 39 → 69 161.20 indubitable 32 indisputable 40 162.5 black-lead 32 blacklead 40 162.34 log-book 32 logbook 40 162.35 log-book 32 logbook 40 163.5 figure (itself 32 figure, itself 40 163.5 original) 32 original, 40 164.11 ‘imitate!’ 32 imitate! 40 164.13 Wolstrop, 32 Woolsthorpe, 39 164.27 (in 32 in 40 164.27 kind) 32 kind 40 164.27 teach (to 32 teach, To 40 164.28 alive),—are 32 alive,—are 40 165.1 ‘Shows 32 Shows 40 165.1 things,’ 32 things, 40 165.29 man, that 32 man, so that 40 165.30 ‘Man 32 “Man 40 165.32 “Announcer 32 ‘Announcer 40 165.32 Freedom;” 32 Freedom;’ 40 165.33 “the 32 ‘the 40

165.33 Nature!”’ 32 Nature!’” 40 168.26 (or locked) 32 or locked 40 169.7 no where 32 nowhere 39 169.38 actually 32 actual 40 170.2 pounds;’ 32 guineas;’ 47 170.8 ‘This 32 “This 40 170.9 with;’ 32 with;” 40 170.23 ‘ane 32 “ane 40 170.24 schule,’ 32 schule,” 40 170.24 by a: ‘Cromwell 32 by a ‘Cromwell 39 by a “Cromwell 40 170.25 neck!’ 32 neck!” 40 170.38 ‘D—n 32 “D—n 40 170.38 poor!’ 32 poor!” 40 171.6 Writers (being Monks) 32 Writers, being Monks, 40 171.20 was about 32 was at about 47 171.23 nation 32 Nation 40 172.11 gratified.’—Hawkins, 46—50. 32 gratified.’† [footnote inserted] † Hawkins, 46-50. 40 173.10 ‘I 32 “I 40 173.12 means?’ 32 means?” 40 174.38 word (and 32 word, and 40

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174.39 it); 32 it; 40 175.28 any thing 32 anything 39 176.2 ‘poured, 32 poured, 40 176.3 ear:’ 32 ear: 40 176.7 no where, 32 nowhere, 39 176.14 part (for 32 part, for 40 176.15 come): 32 come: 40 176.26 dimmer and dimmer-burning fixed-star (uncertain 32 dim fixed-star, burning ever dimmer, uncertain 40 176.26 meteor) 32 meteor, 40 176.35* children of 32 children almost of 47 176.35* year. 32 year.† [footnote inserted] † Johnson, September, 1709; Hume, April, 1711. 47 177.22 and half. 32 and a half. 47 177.28 half-ness, 32 halfness, 40 178.1 now (ever 32 now, ever 40 178.1 Stuarts) 32 Stuarts, 40 178.9 Half-ness 32 Halfness 40 178.9 Whole-ness 32 Wholeness 40 179.17 while the life 32 while life 40 179.26 Pillory (that 32 Pillory, that 40 179.27 ‘character’),—would 32 ‘character,’—would 40

180.12

649

wise, in 32 wise, and in 40 180.13 also, 32 too 40 180.18 (out 32 out 40 180.19 Tophet), 32 Tophet, 40 180.28 for ever 32 forever 57 181.17 actual 32 Actual 40 182.35 ‘He 32 “He 40 182.35 Scholar:’ 32 Scholar:” 40 183.32 ‘I 32 “I 40 183.32 then,’ 32 then,” 40 183.33 ‘here, 32 “here, 40 183.33 garden’ 32 garden” 40 183.34 ‘where 32 “where 40 183.35 Bedrooms’ 32 Bedrooms” 40 183.35 ‘were 32 “were 40 183.36 in!’ 32 in!” 40 183.37 ‘I 32 “I 40 183.38 me.’—’To 32 me.”—“To 40 183.38 also,’ 32 also,” 40 184.5 you to 32 you also to 40 184.11 ‘will 32 “will 40

650

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184.11 country,’ 32 country,” 40 184.15 any thing 32 anything 39 184.29 ‘by 32 by 40 184.29 review;’ 32 review; 40 184.30 ‘If 32 If 40 184.31 done.’ 32 done. 40 184.35 any thing, 32 anything, 39 184.36 ‘Sir, 32 “Sir, 40 184.37 starve.’ 32 starve.” 40 184.38 man 32 Man 40 184.38 Letters. 32 Letters! 40 186.11 ‘Your 32 “Your 40 186.11 Shonson!’ 32 Shonson!” 40 186.13 ‘Sir, 32 “Sir, 40 186.13 society!’ 32 society!” 40 188.2 nation, 32 Nation; 40 188.3 nation 32 Nation 40 188.13 every where 32 everywhere 39 188.34 nation 32 Nation 40 189.31 poorfigure 32 poor figure 39 189.33 fifteen-pence! 32 fifteen pence! 40

191.13

no where 32 nowhere 39 191.14 every where 32 everywhere 39 191.18* Whitfield, 32 Whitefield, 47 192.19 good, 32 good 40 192.27 such-like 32 such like 40 193.14 interment! 32 funeral! 40 193.17 Tragedy’ (though unrhymed) 32 Tragedy,’ though unrhymed, 40 193.21 for ever 32 forever 40 193.24 for ever; 32 forever; 40 194.24 ‘Repentance! Repentance!’ 32 Repentance! Repentance! 40 194.26 for ever. 32 forever. 47 194.33 for ever 32 forever 40 195.15 (‘Renny dear’), 32 (Renny dear), 40 195.20 Brummellian 32 Brummellean 40 196.15 ‘Have 32 “Have 40 196.16 immortality?’ 32 immortality?” 40 196.16 ‘I 32 “I 40 196.16 more.’ 32 more.” 40 196.28 of (for 32 of, for 40 196.28 sake) 32 sake, 40

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196.32 ‘Monsheer Nongtongpaw!’ 32 “Monsheer Nongtongpaw!” 40 197.1 century, 32 Century, 40 197.6 children of 32 children nearly of 47 197.18 any where 32 anywhere 39 “Corn-Law Rhymes” 199.0 Corn-Law Rhymes. 32 CORN-LAW RHYMES. 39 202.13 germs, too, 32 germs too, 40 203.1 ‘Had 32 Had 40 203.6 him.’ 32 him. 40 203.12 and a so 32 and so 40 203.12 sumptuous Art 32 sumptuous an Art 40 204.31 it, or 32 that, to extract 40 204.32 it, if you will! 32 that! 40 205.3 every thing, 32 everything, 39 205.16 Dr 32 Dr. 39 205.17 Dr 32 Dr. 39 205.17 Parr!—¶However, 32 Parr!— [extra leading between paragraphs] ¶However, 40 206.31 originality; 32 Originality; 40 207.4 ‘These, 32 These, 40

651

207.31 below.’ 32 below. 40 208.5 tames into 32 tames it into 40 208.19 heart: 32 core: 40 209.24 Mr 32 Mr. 39 209.26 ‘the Bread-tax,’ 32 the ‘Bread-tax,’ 40 209.35 ‘it, 32 it, 40 209.35 satrap 32 ‘satrap 40 209.37 ‘world 32 world 40 209.38 wickedness,’ 32 wickedness, 40 210.17 ‘The 32 The 40 210.17 Jesuitry;’ 32 Jesuitry; 40 210.22 being 32 seems 40 210.34 for ever. 32 forever. 40 211.7 ‘bringing forth,’ 32 bringing forth, 40 211.8 ‘devouring’ 32 devouring 40 211.13 ‘The 32 The 40 211.13 tears!’ 32 tears! 40 212.1 ¶’We 32 ¶We 40 212.3 Sleep!’ 32 Sleep! 40 213.10 snappish seldom 32 snappish dialect seldom 40 213.30 ‘Where 32 Where 40

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214.2* ‘Debauch 32 Debauch 39 214.2* friends.’ / 32 friends. / [centered] * * * * * 40 214.13 doom!’ 32 doom! 40 214.15 avowed, 32 avowed,’ 40 214.17 ‘Whose 32 Whose 40 214.31 squire’s!’ / ‘Jem 32 squire’s! / [centered] * * * * * Jem 40 214.36 feels;’ 32 feels; 39 215.7 ‘Light! 32 Light! 40 215.21 tho’ 32 though 40 215.33 [indent] ‘Hail 32 [no indent] Hail 40 216.1 Thro’ 32 Through 40 216.21 bread-tax, 32 Bread-tax, 40 216.21 enough else. ¶And 32 several other crabbed things! [extra leading between paragraphs] ¶And 40 217.17 this state 32 this mad state 40 217.25 ‘lineage 32 lineage 40 217.25 away.’ 32 away! 40 217.28 hopes 32 hope 40 219.4 chant 32 Chaunt 47 219.10 do 32 do 40 219.17 must 32 had to 40

219.18

his realm. 32 his ancient realm. 40 220.4 gayety; 32 gaiety; 40 220.24 itself; to 32 itself,—to 40 221.8 or anything 32 or indeed be anything 40 221.15 Herein 32 Herein 40 221.17 suppression 32 Suppression 40 221.29 this,—Well 32 this, “Well 40 221.29 better? 32 better?” 40 222.1 and not 32 instead of 40 222.2 former. 32 former! 40 222.7 it 32 it 40 222.7 walking? 32 walking! 40 222.32 kings, of 32 kings, is king of 40 “Diderot” 223.0 Diderot. 33 DIDEROT.* 39 223.2 Paris. 33 Paris (Paulin, LibraireEditeur), 40 223.4 precédées 33 précédées 69 223.5 Paris. 33 Paris (Brière), 40 224.13 must (in 33 must, in 40 224.13 generation) 33 generation, 40 f 224.17 for ever 33 forever 47

E M E N D AT I O N S O F T H E C O P Y-T E X T S

225.15 centuries, 33 centuries 40 225.16 do,) 33 do), 40 226.28 generally 33 generally, 40 226.28 (on 33 on 40 226.28 Accident) 33 Accident, 40 227.2 printed, 33 printed 40 227.3 original,) 33 original), 40 227.28 ‘Light-street’ 33 ‘Light-Street’ 40 227.30 such 33 such, 40 227.30 in, the 33 in—the 40 227.31 Life—in 33 Life, in 40 228.23 amateur 33 Amateur 40 229.4 sentiment’ (and 33 sentiment,’ and 40 229.4 things) 33 things, 40 229.9 (who 33 who 40 229.9 it), 33 it, 40 229.13 Memoir is 33 Memoir by Mademoiselle is 40 229.14 Unfortunately, as 33 Unfortunately, indeed, as 40 229.37 do 33 do 40 230.16 always (and sometimes 33 always, were it 40

653

230.17 empresses) 33 empresses, 40 231.13 “one morning” 33 ‘one morning’ 39 231.13 “that 33 ‘that 39 231.14 school!” 33 school!’ 39 231.18* college,’—and 33 college,—and 39 231.37 one-and-thirty 33 four-and-twenty 40 232.34 resided 33 residing 40 233.22 poet 33 Poet 40 234.14 own-hired 33 own hired 40 234.38 any thing, 33 anything, 39 235.1 fellow creatures 33 fellow-creature 40 235.21 Sermons (to order); 33 Sermons, to order; 40 235.23 paid them 32 paid for them 39 235.26 ‘I 33 “I 40 235.27 longer.’—‘But, 33 longer.”—“But, 40 235.30 you.’—‘Monsieur, 33 you.”—“Monsieur, 40 235.34 dying.’ 33 dying.” 40 236.17 Joye, 33 Joie, 40 236.38 Panckoucke, and Ladvocat, 33 Panckoucke 40 237.19 Hyancinthe 33 Hyacinthe 39

654

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238.16 neighbours—as 33 neighbours,—as 40 238.20 ‘I 33 “I 40 238.22 serpent.’ 33 serpent.” 40 239.27 Regence, 33 Régence, 40 240.29 life, ‘parting 33 life,—‘parting 40 240.37 it is, 33 is this, 40 240.37 scoundrelism 33 Scoundrelism 40 241.11 Merite 33 Mérite 47 241.13 Orthodoxy (and 33 Orthodoxy, and 40 241.13 it), 33 it, 40 241.16 for ever 33 forever 40 241.26 metaphysico-Baconian 33 Metaphysico-Baconian 40 241.33 metaphysico-Atheistic 33 Metaphysico-Atheistic 40 241.36 sanguineous, 33 sanguine 40 242.38 Proto 33 Proto- 40 243.1 Appolonius 33 Apollonius 39 243.11 for ever 33 forever 40 243.11 part its 32 part with its 47 243.34 ‘leave 33 “leave Strouse 243.34 devil:’ 33 devil: 40 243.34 moi! 33 moi!” 40

243.37 that 33 the 40 244.19 phenomenon, perhaps, 33 phenomenon perhaps 40 244.26 enacted (a 33 enacted, a 40 244.27 eternity); and, 33 eternity;—and, 40 244.37 picture (that 33 picture, that 40 244.37 life-picture) 33 life-picture, 40 244.38 but can 33 but we can 40 245.9 inconsistencies, as the 33 inconsistencies, the 33Y 245.13 Abomination’ (écraser 33 Abomination, écraser 40 245.13 l’Infame), 33 l’Infame,’ 40 245.21 D’Alembert, too, 33 D’Alembert too 40 245.22 he 33 him 40 245.30 Evangile 33 Evangel 40 245.36 ‘My friend,’ 33 “My friend,” 40 245.36 ‘a 33 “a 40 245.36 out.’ 33 out.” 40 246.14 for ever 33 forever 40 246.31 ‘continually virtuous’ 33 continually virtuous 40 246.38 Banise,’ 33 Banise,’ 40 247.13 flying Sansculotte, 33 Flying-Sansculotte, 40 247.27 milch-cow, 33 milk-cow, 40

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248.36

himself ’ (pour 33 himself, pour 40 248.36 lui-même). 33 lui-même.’ 40 248.38 ‘for ever 33 ‘forever 47 248.38 Laws;” 33 Laws;’ 39 249.8 gain him him a 33 gain him a 39 249.20 rest, 33 rest 40 249.20 remarked,) 33 remarked), 40 250.11 Frèron, 33 Fréron, 69 250.15 Wasp, 33 Wasp 40 250.15 Frèlon). 33 Frelon). 47 250.15 Empecenador, 33 Empecedor, 40 250.28 foreign 33 Foreign 40 251.25 govern (what is still called governing) 33 ‘govern’ 40 251.26 prevent (in 33 prevent, in 40 251.26 degree) 33 degree, 40 251.28 devil take 33 Devil govern 40 251.36 approbation’ 33 approbation 40 251.36 Privilége 33 Privilège 40 251.36 Roi; 33 Roi;’ 40 251.38 proceed; 33 proceed; 39 252.8 king 33 King 40

252.12

655

be but one 33 be one 40 252.21 majesty 33 Majesty 40 252.32 ancients; that 33 ancients; and that 40 253.3 majesty 33 Majesty 40 253.23 up (not 33 up, not 40 253.24 one, 33 one 40 253.24 Paris): 33 Paris: 40 254.4 get the 33 get entirely the 40 254.5 it. 33 it while he lived. 40 255.4 Hoop, 33 Hoop’s, 40 255.8 further 33 farther 40 256.2 for ever. 33 forever. 40 256.8 “Burn 33 ‘Burn 39 256.8 bed”; 33 bed’; 39 256.8 it 33 it 40 256.9 “daily 33 ‘daily 39 256.9 epochs” 33 epochs’ 39 256.23 “like 33 ‘like 39 256.23 walk;” 33 walk;’ 39 256.35 d’Orleans) 33 d’Orléans) 69 257.15 digesting (better 33 digesting, better 40

656

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257.15 worse); 33 worse; 40 257.21 nay (highest 33 nay, highest 40 257.21 glories), 33 glories, 40 258.5 endeavour (to 33 endeavour, to 40 258.6 parallel), 33 parallel, 40 258.15 not (we find) 33 not, we find, 40 258.19 (rather husky) 33 rather husky 40 258.34 ‘But 33 “But 40 258.34 this?’ 33 this?” 40 258.34 ‘I will! I!’ 33 “I will, I!” 40 258.35 ‘Do 33 “do 40 258.35 proceed.’ 33 proceed.” 40 258.37 instructors (of Kings) are 33 instructors’ of Kings ‘are 40 259.1 announcement (surpassing 33 announcement, surpassing 40 259.2 uttered, 33 uttered 40 259.2 utterable, 33 utterable 40 259.2 way) 33 way, 40 259.8 here (could 33 here, could 40 259.9 them); 33 them; 40 259.24 conquered (for 33 conquered, for 40

259.24 behoof ) 33 behoof, 40 259.38 déséspoir 33 désespoir 47 260.1 Seneca (on 33 Seneca, on 40 260.1 Works) 33 Works, 40 260.3 Sénéque; 33 Sénèque; 57 260.9 a 33 some 40 260.13 Sénéque, 33 Sénèque, 57 260.21 Mais 33 “Mais 40 260.22 me?) 33 me?)” 40 260.25 Saint-Benôit. 33 Saint-Benoît. 57 261.27 further 33 farther 40 262.12 said the Circumstances 33 said Circumstances 40 262.17 thought 33 thoughts 40 263.4 ‘Count us,’ 33 “Count us,” 40 263.5 ‘Well,’ 33 “Well,” 40 263.5 ‘it 33 “it 40 263.6 it.’ 33 it.” 40 263.30 Divinty; 33 Divinity; 39 263.30 ‘intellect, 33 intellect, 40 263.32 communicating,’ 33 communicating, 40 263.33 either (if 33 either, if 40

E M E N D AT I O N S O F T H E C O P Y-T E X T S

263.33 spirit, 33 spirit 40 263.34 case) 33 case, 40 263.34 else (if 33 else, if 40 263.35 spirit) 33 spirit, 40 263.36 further, 33 farther, 40 264.5 further. 33 farther. 40 264.6 itself (that 33 itself, that 40 264.6 say, 33 say 40 264.7 itself ) 33 itself, 40 264.17 Natural-theology, 33 Natural Theology, 40 264.21 them (if 33 them, if 40 264.21 them) 33 them, 40 264.31 surely, 33 surely one would think, 40 264.32 home, in 33 home,—in 40 264.33 Natural-theologies, 33 Natural Theologies, 40 264.35 an indubitable 33 a certain 40 265.7 hurly-burly (of 33 hurlyburly, of 40 265.8 Time) 33 Time, 40 265.9 here: 33 here; 69 265.17 further 33 farther 40 265.21 Creed, 33 greed, 33Y

657

265.21 galfness 33 halfness 33Y 265.27 it (and 33 it, and 40 265.27 us), that 33 us, That 40 267.29 further 33 farther 57 268.4 morum: 33 morum: 69 268.12 may (especially 33 may, especially 40 268.13 cognized 33 cognizable 40 268.13 police-offices) 33 police-offices, 40 268.16 philanthropy; 33 philanthropy, 40 268.25 (as 33 as 40 268.26 known) 33 known, 40 268.26 must assert 33 must needs assert 40 269.2 (bounded 33 if bounded 40 269.2 alone) 33 alone, 40 269.6 Vice (Denis 33 Vice, Denis 40 269.7 judge) 33 judge, 40 269.12 binding. 33 binding! 40 269.18 sublime: ‘In 33 sublime:—In 40 269.19 it!’ 33 it! 40 269.30 Self, 33 Self,’ 40 269.30 action:’ 33 action: 40

658

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269.32 knows 33 knows, for example, 40 269.33 before (for example) the 33 before the 40 270.8 wicked’ (the 33 wicked,’ the 40 270.8 foolish) 33 foolish 40 270.12 (think 33 think 40 270.12 admirers,) 33 admirers, 40 270.28 and (with 33 and, with 40 270.28 submissiveness) 33 submissiveness, 40 271.2 not; 33 not; 39 271.2 is some truth 33 is truth 40 271.16 stem (bearing 33 stem, bearing 40 271.17 round); 33 round; 40 272.22 Le 33 ‘Le 40 272.23 a point)! 33 a point)!’ 40 272.35 genius (which only cannot manipulate), 33 genius, which wants nothing but a hand, 40 272.38 originator (almost 33 originator, almost 40 273.1 country) 33 country, 40 273.5 seen (in 33 seen, in 40 273.5 Art) 33 Art, 40 273.35 enough, too, 33 enough too, 40

273.38 otherwise,) 33 otherwise) 40 273.38 public, 33 public 40 274.4 meet 33 properly suffice for 40 274.27 imagined (poor man) 33 imagined, poor man, 40 275.19 ‘web’? 33 web? 40 275.20 matter (as 33 matter, as 40 275.20 all) 33 all matters, 40 275.27 miserables,’ 33 misérables,’ 47 275.28 now (with 33 now, with 40 275.29 significance) 33 significance, 40 275.31 which 33 what 40 275.33 for ever; 33 forever; 47 275.34 result[«»] 33 result. 39 “Sir Walter Scott” 277.0 Memoirs of the Life of Scott. 38 SIR WALTER SCOTT.† 40 277.1 i—vi. Cadell. Edinburgh, 38 i.—vi. Edinburgh, 40 277.3* ‘an 38 ‘an 40 277.4 distinguished.’ 38 distinguished.’ 40 277.7 improved drop 38 improved-drop 40 277.11 Mrs 38 Mrs. 39

E M E N D AT I O N S O F T H E C O P Y-T E X T S

277.12 Mr 38 Mr. 39 278.31 nature 38 Nature 40 279.26* “Life by 38 Life ‘by 40 279.26* executor” 38 executor’ 39 279.30 periodical publication 38 Periodical Publication 40 279.35 work 38 Work 40 279.35 six promised volumes, 38 Six promised Volumes, 40 279.36 seventh, 38 Seventh, 40 279.37* light. It will tell us, say they, little new and nothing pleasing to know. But 38 light. But 39 280.2 the seventh volume; 38 that Seventh Volume; 40 280.3 six 38 Six 40 280.7 “Life” 38 Life 40 280.7 Mr 38 Mr. 39 280.13 ‘There 38 “There 40 280.15 us:’ 38 us:” 40 280.16 Mr 38 Mr. 39 280.18 “Odyssey” 38 Odyssey 40 280.18 “Thomas Ellwood” 38 Thomas Ellwood 40 280.23 “Odyssey,” 38 Odyssey, 40 280.24 “Odyssey,” 38 Odyssey, 40

659

280.24 “Pickwick;” 38 Pickwick; 40 280.26 “Odyssey” 38 Odyssey 40 280.26 “Pickwick” 38 Pickwick 40 280.27 literature, 38 Literature, 40 280.32 eternity; 38 Eternity; 40 280.33 time. 38 Time. 40 281.4 man and nature 38 Man and Nature 40 281.4 Saint Pierre 38 Saint-Pierre 40 281.5 islands 38 Islands 40 281.5 incoherences, 38 Incoherences, 40 281.12 other-wise 38 otherwise 39 281.14 Io 38 “Io 40 281.14 Pæan, 38 Pæan! 40 281.15 conquered; and 38 conquered;”—and, 40 281.19 ¶Mr 38 ¶Mr. 39 281.23 work, 38 Work, 40 281.26 “Life and Correspondence of Hannah More,” 38 Life and Correspondence of Hannah More, 40 281.27 “Life of Scott,” 38 Life of Scott, 40 281.28 seven volumes, 38 Seven Volumes, 40 281.31 Mr 38 Mr. 39

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281.34 that 38 but 40 282.1 has call 38 has a call 40 282.15 Mr 38 Mr. 39 282.19 hero 38 Hero 40 282.20 biography 38 Biography 40 282.23 biography, 38 Biography, 40 282.24 for ever 38 forever 40 282.24 life-writer 38 Life-writer 40 282.24 life 38 Life 40 283.6 spirit, 38 spirit 40 283.15 Mr 38 Mr. 39 283.18 work, 38 Work, 40 283.24 Let it be so. Several 38 Several 39 283.24 ‘See, 38 “See, 40 283.24 me!’ 38 me!” 40 284.1 him, but also 38 him; but 40 284.19 Mr 38 Mr. 39 284.28 Mr 38 Mr. 39 284.32 silence, ‘that 38 silence,—“That 40 284.33 Infinite.’ 38 Infinite.” 40 284.33 Mr 38 Mr. 39

284.38 biographer 38 Biographer 40 285.2 novel-manufactory, 38 Novel-manufactory, 40 285.4 heaven. 38 Heaven. 40 285.7 “Lockhart’s Life of Scott,” 38 Lockhart’s Life of Scott, 40 285.12 or the 38 or purchase the 40 285.13 life: 38 Life; 40 285.38 princesses 38 Princesses 40 286.2 literature 38 Literature 40 286.11 Don Quixote 38 Don Quixote 40 286.17 bye-/standers 38 by-standers 39 287.7 mystery of existence 38 Mystery of Existence 40 287.36 nature. 38 Nature. 40 288.2 soldier 38 Soldier 40 288.4* ‘la 38 ‘La 40 288.4 carriere 38 carrière 40 288.4* the 38 The 40 289.4 nature, 38 Nature, 40 289.9 nature 38 Nature 40 289.32 literature 38 Literature 40 289.33 sentimentalism, 38 Sentimentalism, Strouse 289.38 healthy.—Or, 38 healthy. ¶Or, 40

E M E N D AT I O N S O F T H E C O P Y-T E X T S

291.5 literature, 38 Literature, 40 291.14 ‘Let 38 “Let 40 291.15 body,’ 38 body,” 40 291.33 Presbyterianism, too, 38 Presbyterianism too 40 291.36 universe, 38 Universe, 40 291.36 eternity, 38 Eternity, 40 291.28 heavenly behest, of duty 38 Heavenly Behest, of Duty 40 292.6 ‘Let 38 “Let 40 292.6 taught:’ 38 taught:” 40 292.8 ‘Let 38 “Let 40 292.10 eternity.’ 38 eternity.” 40 292.21 scepticism 38 Scepticism 40 292.24 melody 38 Melody 40 292.24 is and continues in 38 is there, and continues to manifest itself, in 40 292.25 voice 38 Voice 40 292.25 work 38 Work 40 292.25 nation 38 Nation 40 292.37 ‘So 38 “So 40 292.38 century,’ 38 century,” 40 293.2 autobiography 38 Autobiography 40

661

293.18 further 38 farther 40 293.19* as 38 so 39 293.29 M‘Dougal 38 M’Dougal 39 293.30 M‘Dougal 38 M’Dougal 39 293.37 M‘Dougal 38 M’Dougal 39 293.38 period.’—Vol. i, pp. 15—17. 38 period.’† [footnote inserted] † Vol. i. pp. 15-17. 40 294.2 advocate: 38 Advocate: 40 294.5 debateable 38 Debateable Strouse 294.5 land, 38 Land, 40 294.15 Mr 38 Mr. 39 294.15 autobiography 38 Autobiography 40 294.16 Mr 38 Mr. 39 294.24 nicknackets” 38 knicknackets” 39 294.26 “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border;” 38 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border; 40 294.30 Mr 38 Mr. 39 294.35 Elliott’s, 38 Elliot’s, Strouse 294.36 Mr 38 Mr. 39 295.4 Elliott 38 Elliot 39 295.5 Mr 38 Mr. 39

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295.7 Elliott’s 38 Elliot’s 39 295.7 Mr 38 Mr. 39 295.7 “half-glowring,” 38 “half-glowrin,” 39 295.8 Dr 38 Dr. 39 295.8 Elliott’s 38 Elliot’s 39 295.8 Cloughhead, 38 Cleughhead, 39 295.8 where the two travellers (‘for,’ 38 where (“for,” 39 295.9 were not 38 were na 39 295.9 days,”) 38 days,”) the two travellers 39 days”) the two travellers 40 295.11 Dr 38 Dr. 39 295.11 Elliott, 38 Elliot, Strouse 295.12 of 38 o’ 39 295.14 Tuzzilhope,” 38 Tuzzilehope,” 39 295.14 Elliott, 38 Elliot, 39 295.15 Cowe. 38 Cow. 39 295.16 had taken, 38 had, 39 295.17 two, 38 twae, 39 295.18 Tuzzilhope; 38 Tuzzilehope; 39 295.20 and moreover 38 and, moreover, 39 295.22 liquor, 38 spirits—though 39 spirits,—though 40

295.24 wisdom, 38 “Wisdom,” 39 295.27 brawly 38 brawlie 39 295.28 rest 38 lave 39 295.29 any 38 ony 39 295.29 in company. 38 in the company. 39 295.32 gude humour.” 38 gude-humor.”’ 39 296.11 Mr 38 Mr. 39 296.18 Elliott 38 Elliot Strouse 296.24 book.’—Vol. i, pp. 195—9. 38 book.’† [footnote inserted] † Vol. i. pp. 195-199. 40 296.30 advocate 38 Advocate 40 296.32 sheriff, 38 Sheriff, 40 296.134 “Goethe’s Götz with the Iron Hand;” 38 Goethe’s Götz with the Iron Hand; 40 Goethe’s Götz with the Iron Hand; 47 296.35 “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,” 38 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 40 296.36 nature and circumstance 38 Nature and Circumstance 40 297.7 infinite 38 Infinite 40 297.21 lost, say a 38 lost several 40 297.22 literature; 38 Literature; 40

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297.31

outer parliament-house 38 Outer Parliament-house 40 297.33 “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border” 38 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border 40 297.34 romances 38 Romances 40 297.35 prose romances); 38 Prose Romances); 40 297.39 Fichte: 38 Fichte, 40 298.3 literature; 38 Literature; 40 298.5 paradise 38 Paradise 39 298.9 literature; 38 Literature; 40 298.14 seven volumes, 38 Seven Volumes, 40 298.21 proverb 38 Proverb 40 299.13 nature, 38 Nature, 40 299.26 and is 38 and, alas, is 40 299.30 “Life of Byron,” 38 Life of Byron, 40 299.33 universe; 38 Universe; 40 299.34 pittifullest 38 pitifullest 39 300.8 golden calf 38 Golden Calf 40 300.9 bull, 38 Bull, 40 300.10 sin 38 Sin 40 300.16 vates 38 Vates 40 300.16 prophet 38 Prophet 40

663

300.16 poet, 38 Poet, 40 300.17 incoherent. 38 incongruous. 40 300.31 Put money in thy purse. 38 Put money in thy purse. 40 300.32 that, perhaps, 38 that perhaps 40 301.1 vates 38 Vates 40 301.8 But, indeed, 38 Be this as it may, surely 40 301.10 speaking. 38 speaking as Walter Scott. 40 301.20 universe 38 Universe 40 301.36 time, the 38 time, we may remark, the 40 302.12 langour, 38 languor, 39 302.120 ‘O, 38 “O, 40 302.22 alive!’ 38 alive!” 40 302.24 hand 38 land 40 302.35 “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border” 38 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border 40 302.37 “Götz von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand;” 38 Götz von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand; 40 303.3 “Götz” 38 Götz 39 303.3 “Werter,” 38 Werter, 39 303.18 “Berlichingen with the Iron Hand,’ 38 Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, 39

664 303.23

E M E N D AT I O N S O F T H E C O P Y-T E X T S

‘Götz von Berlichingen:’ 38 Götz von Berlichingen: 39 303.25 “Marmion” 38 Marmion 39 303.25 “Lady of the Lake,” 38 Lady of the Lake, 39 303.30 “Götz von Berlichingen” 38 Götz von Berlichingen 40 303.34 doubt but 38 doubt, that 40 303.37 past; 38 Past; 40 304.3 chivalry literature 38 Chivalry Literature 40 304.15 ¶But, however, leaving 38 ¶But leaving 40 304.38 “Waverley;” 38 Waverley; 40 304.38 literature; 38 Literature; 40 305.1 bookselling 38 Bookselling 40 305.3 “Don-Juan” 38 Don Juan 40 305.5 “Waverley,” 38 Waverley, 40 305.9 fortune 38 Fortune 40 305.16 “Waverley” 38 Waverley 40 305.20 Mr 38 Mr. 39 305.22 author, 38 Author, 40 305.28 “Waverley”’ 38 Waverley’ 40 305.37 considerations 38 consideration 40 306.6 Mr 38 Mr. 39 306.9 Mr 38 Mr. 39

306.12 levee, 38 levee, 39 306.13 Mr 38 Mr. 39 306.15 Mr 38 Mr. 39 306.17 Mr 38 Mr. 39 306.20 Mr 38 Mr. 39 306.22 remarkable 38 delightful 39 306.24 all subsequent 38 all his subsequent 39 306.28 story 38 story, 39 306.35 day-break; 38 daybreak; 39 306.35 said, 38 said,— 39 306.36 over 38 ower 39 307.10 “i’faith, 38 “I’faith, 39 307.13 “The 38 “‘The 39 307.14 Morning Post?” 38 Morning Post?’” 39 307.30 songs.’—Vol. iii, pp. 340—3. 38 songs.’† [footnote inserted] † Vol. iii. pp. 340-343. 40 307.34 street, 38 Street, 39 308.1 phrases, 38 epithets, 39 308.2 with suitable 38 with the suitable 39 308.12 Mr 38 Mr. 39 308.14 for 38 to 39

E M E N D AT I O N S O F T H E C O P Y-T E X T S

308.14 Mrs 38 Mrs. 39 308.15 their 38 the 39 308.18 Waverley!” The 38 Waverley!”—The 39 308.28 circumstaace, 38 circumstance, 39 308.30 attempts 38 attempt 39 308.35 “The Maid of Lodi,” 38 The Maid of Lodi, 39 308.36 “The Bay of Biscay, O,” or 38 The Bay of Biscay, oh!—or 39 308.36 “The sweet little cherub that sits up aloft.” 38 The sweet little cherub that sits up aloft. 39 308.37 Thompson, 38 Thomson, 39 308.38 “The Moorland Wedding,” 38 The Moorland Wedding, 39 308.38 “Willie brew’d a peck o’ maut;” 38 Willie brew’d a peck o’ maut; 39 309.13 “One 38 one 39 309.13 Cleishbotham” 38 Cleishbotham 39 309.134 “The Last Words of Marmion,” 38 The Last Words of Marmion, 39 309.15 Braham.’—Vol. iv, p. 166—8. 38 Braham.’† [footnote inserted] † Vol. iv. p. 166168. 40 309.22 February 38 February’ 39

665

309.22 (1820),’ 38 (1820), 40 309.22 Mr 38 Mr. 39 309.25 ofter 38 often 39 309.27 his 38 the 39 309.30 way 38 weigh 39 309.32 hunting box 38 hunting-box 39 309.32 Mr 38 Mr. 39 309.32 Constable 38 Constable, 39 310.13 orginally 38 originally 39

310.14

black-fisher; 38 black-fisher; 39 310.22 “scratching 38 scratching 39 310.33 as he did with 38 as with 39 310.36 gripe.’—Vol. iv, p. 349—53. 38 g ripe.’† [footnote inserted] † Vol. iv. p. 349-353. 40 311.6 Mr 38 Mr. 39 311.20 “welled.out 38 “welled out 39 311.21 strain 38 stream 39 311.26 “Christabel.”’ 38 Christabel.’ 39 311.31 &c.—Vol. v, p. 375—402. 38 &c.† [footnote inserted] † Vol. v. p. 375-402. 40 312.10 Mr 38 Mr. 39 312.17 Mr 38 Mr. 39

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312.24 Dr 38 Dr. 39 312.28 Gray, 38 Grey, 39 312.30 was adjutant. 38 was the adjutant. 39 312.35 fly-hooks; 38 fly-hooks— 39 312.38 Dr 38 Dr. 39 313.1 Mr 38 Mr. 39 313.4 on 38 upon 39 313.8 Gray, 38 Grey, 39 313.9 way, 38 weigh, 39 313.36 laird.”’—Vol. v, pp. 7—10.† [footnote] † On 38 laird.”’† [footnote] † Vol. v. p. 7-10. ¶On 40 314.1 ¶‘There 38 ¶‘There’ 40 314.1 (at Chiefswood) 38 at Chiefswood 40 314.1 my 38 ‘my 40 314.9 Gray’s 38 Grey’s 39 314.10 reveillé 38 reveillée 39 315.11* ‘take 38 “take 39 315.11 at 38 in 39 315.11* inn.’ 38 inn.” 39 315.12 curs 38 ours 39 315.16 the “Pirate;” 38 The Pirate; 39

315.16 Mr 38 Mr. 39 315.21 adve/antage 38 advantage 39 315.22 littl- 38 little 39 315.22 on 38 upon 39 315.30 nothing.’—Vol. v, pp. 123-4. 38 nothing.’† [footnote inserted] † Vol. v. pp. 123, 124. 40 316.8 with 38 and 40 317.1 “Waverley Novels,” 38 Waverley Novels, 40 317.6 literature 38 Literature 40 317.7 literature; 38 Literature; 40 317.9 ‘Be 38 “Be 40 317.10 Scott!’ 38 Scott!” 40 317.18 nature and man, 38 Nature and Man, 40 317.19 nature 38 Nature 40 317.25 novels 38 Novels 40 317.31 Firenze 38 Firenze’ 40 317.31 e 38 ‘e 40 317.35 marairglia. 38 maraviglia. 39 317.36 per ciò, 38 perciò, 39 317.39* rondo, 38 tondo 39 318.9 became 38 become 40

E M E N D AT I O N S O F T H E C O P Y-T E X T S

318.25 Waverley, 38 Waverley, 40 318.29 nature 38 Nature 40 318.33 for ever, 38 forever, 40 318.33 literature 38 Literature 40 318.34 literature 38 Literature 40 318.35 literature 38 Literature 40 318.38 “Waverley Novels.” 38 Waverley Novels. 40 319.6 novels 38 Novels 40 319.11 dandy, 38 Dandy, 40 319.26 romances? 38 Romances? 40 319.27 more. 38 more! 40 319.36 historical novels 38 Historical Novels 40 320.8 imbodiment: 38 embodiment: 40 320.17 novels, 38 Novels, 40 321.1 true 38 True 40 321.1 obscure and possible, 38 Obscure and Possible, 40 321.2 false? 38 False? 40 321.5 review article. 38 Review Article. 40 321.21 grey’ 38 lean’ 40 321.34 ‘Easy writing,’ 38 “Easy writing,” 40 321.35 ‘is 38 “is 40

667

321.35 reading.’ 38 reading.” 40 322.4 “Journal,” 38 Journal, 40 322.26 journal 38 Journal 40 322.26 for ever, 38 forever, 40 322.28 editor 38 Editor 39 323.7 “Don Carlos,” 38 Don Carlos, 40 323.31 bankrunptcy 38 bankruptcy 39 323.38 “Don Carlos,” 38 Don Carlos, 40 325.9* a 38 on 39 325.10 sixth volume 38 Sixth Volume 40 325.13 ¶‘May 38 ¶‘Abbotsford, May 40 325.16 availed,—and 38 availed—and 39 325.19 that 38 which 39 325.20 Mrs 38 Mrs. 39 325.20 St 38 St. 39 325.20 street, May 38 Street—May 39 325.23 saw 38 say 39 325.23 “when 38 “When 39 325.24 place.” 38 place;” 39 325.27 Mr 38 Mr. 39 325.27 one. 38 one.’ 39

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325.28 Mr 38 Mr. 39 325.33 myself. 38 myself.’ 39 326.1 for ever 38 forever 40 326.11 my own weary 38 my weary 39 326.22 in 38 among 39 326.37

dead.’—Vol. vi, pp. 297— 307. 38 dead.’† [footnote inserted] † Vol. vi. pp. 297-307. 40 327.6 ‘when 38 When 40 327.7 him.’ 38 him. 40 327.8 time. 38 Time. 40 327.12 C. 38 [Omitted.] 39 “Heintze’s Translations of Burns” 329.0* [no title] ms Heintze’s Translation of Burns Strouse 329.2 Scotchman ms Scotchman, 40 329.2 Burns: ms Burns; 40 329.8 give) ms give), 40 329.9 facsimile ms facsimile, 40 329.13 brother: ms brother; and 40 329.14* versions ms versions, 40 329.15 select-versions ms select-versions, 40

329.21 indeed ms indeed, 40 329.22 mankind ms mankind, 40 330.6 name ms names 40 330.7 We know ms We ourselves know 40 330.7 Kaufmann; ms Kaufmann, 40 330.8 George Westermann Braunschweig;” ms George Westermann Braunschweig,” 40 330.13 that” [is] ms that,” is 40 330.14 of it! ms it. 40 330.16 “The ms The 40 330.17 that,” ms that, 40 330.17 liked!—Heintze ms liked! ¶Heintze 40 330.23 for most ms for the most 40 330.26 instances ms instances, 40 330.26 felicity ms felicity, 40 330.26 have ms have, 40 330.26 were ms were, 40 330.27 Burns ms Burns, 40 330.29 general ms general, 40 330.31 phrase ms phrase, 40 330.31 tu[ne] ms tune 40

E M E N D AT I O N S O F T H E C O P Y-T E X T S

669

331.11 no go!—— ms 330.32 in[.] ms not to the purpose: 40 2 in. 40 330.34 Burns, till the version be 331.18 Perhaps ms complete,—le[t us recom¶Perhaps 40 mend] ms 331.20 [important blunder] ms Burns, let us recommend important blunder 40 40 331.20 one[;] ms 330.36 [his head and] ms one; 40 his head and 40 331.21 Macpherson’s ms 330.37 neve[r] ms “Macpherson’s 40 never 40 331.24 “Spring” ms 330.37 [will then come dancing] ms “Spring” 40 will then come dancing 40 331.26 so ms 330.38 t[he] ms so, 40 the 40 331.28 “Sae ms 331.1 Green ms Sae 40 “Green 40 331.28 wantonly ms 331.1 rashes O ms wantonly, 40 rashes, O,” 40 331.31 tree,” ms 331.1 “Grün werden nu[n] die tree, 40 Binsen, O” ms 331.38 dort.” ms “Grün werden nun die dort. 40 Binsen, O,” 40 332.2 Duncan Gray. ms 331.3 grün wächst das Binsenkraut “Duncan Gray.” 40 ms 332.3 jovial ms “grün wächst das Binsenjovial, 40 kraut” 40 332.5 Freit ms 331.4 also have ms “Freit,” 40 have also 40 332.5 indeed ms 331.5 i[s] ms indeed, 40 is 40 332.6 wooing o’t;—but ms 331.6 significance: ms “wooing o’t;” but 40 significance; 40 332.16* Freit. ms 331.9 mädchen ms Freit! 40 “mädchen” Strouse 332.19 Freit! (p. 200) ms 331.9 weiberschen ms Freit! 40 3 “weiberchen” 40 332.20 Dunkan Heintze 331.10 better[)] ms Duncan 40 better), 40 333.7 Dunkan Heintze 331.10 lasses; ms Duncan 40 “lasses;” 40 The verses added here (see historical collation 331.11) are adopted. Additional verses adopted per the ms. note recorded in the footnote to Historical Collation 332.19. 2 3

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PREFACE TO EMER333.10 Freit. Heintze SON’S ESSAYS. Strouse Freit! 40 337.5 Tarif, 41 333.11 Dunkan Heintze Tariff, 53 Duncan 40 333.14 Freit. ms 338.6 eleswhere 41 Freit! 40 elsewhere 53 333.18 To the Daisy, the Mouse, ms “To the Daisy,” “The Mouse,” 40 333.18 Man was made to mourn, ms “Man was made to Mourn,” 40 333.20 recommend ms recommend, 40 333.20 [l]egible ms legible 40 333.20 least ms least, 40 333.20 [the Letters of Burns]. ms the Letters of Burns. 40 333.21 these; ms these, 40 333.22 history ms history, 40 333.22 shew ms show 40 333.22 no[t] ms not 40 333.23 praisewort[hy] ms praiseworthy 40 333.24 for[midably] ms formidably 40 333.24 Lockhart’s Life ms Lockhart’s Life, 40 333.26 Cunningham, Currie, ms Cunningham, Currie, 40 333.27 see, what ms see, and what 40 “Preface to Emerson’s Essays” 335.0* PREFACE BY THE ENGLISH EDITOR. 41

DISCUSSION OF EDITORIAL DECISIONS In emending the text, we follow principles established in previous volumes of this series, in particular the Historical Essays, the contents of which, like most of the essays in this volume, were republished in the Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. We discuss individual items only when they are unique; if an item is not discussed, then it has been treated in accord with the following principles, the bases of which have been discussed in the Note on the Text. • Apart from changes Carlyle ordered, the only changes we adopt from the 1838 Miscellanies are corrections of punctuation, spelling, and wording that conform to his clear preferences and anticipate changes in editions that he carefully revised (e. g. forever rather than for ever). • We generally adopt changes of wording in an edition that Carlyle carefully revised; for this volume, this applies to the essays in the 1840 Miscellanies. Nonetheless, there are compositor errors in all editions so we do not automatically accept minor changes of wording. • We generally do not adopt changes in an essay’s second or later appearance in the Miscellanies. We do, however, accept as authorial a small number of substantial changes of wording in the 1847 Miscellanies, especially, as is often the case, when they appear in the closing paragraphs of the essay. Except for essays included in them for the first time, we do not adopt changes of wording in the 1857 or 1869 Miscellanies, except in special cases discussed below. • Because they conform to his clear preference as established in previous editions, we accept the following types of punctuation change in an edition that Carlyle carefully revised: dash to comma dash and the removal of commas setting off too, also, perhaps (see Historical Essays 895, notes on 8.12 and 10.1). We also consider as most likely authorial a change from a period to an exclamation point and the removal of parentheses. • We accept changes that conform with Carlyle’s normal practice for quotation marks—double quotation marks for quoted speech and single quotation marks for other quotations, i. e. from a source text—either in 1838 (which imposed it on articles printed in journals that used the opposite rule) or in an edition he carefully revised. As explained in the Discussion of Editorial Decisions of the Historical Essays, there are some cases in which the 1838-1839 Miscellanies did not effect this reversal (893). These exceptions are the only ones reported in the Historical Collation, but the fact that they are exceptions does not affect our emendation policy, which remains the same as for all quotation marks. • We adopt the addition or dropping of quotation marks and the addition of italics in an edition Carlyle carefully revised. However, we treat the italicization of foreign language words as a regularization and do not adopt such changes. • We accept new paragraphs and the addition of extra leading between paragraphs in an edition Carlyle carefully revised. • We adopt changes that are confirmed by the text Carlyle is citing or translating when they appear in an edition Carlyle carefully revised. • We adopt capitalization, especially of abstract nouns (e. g. Universe), in an edition Carlyle carefully revised. However, we generally do not accept the capitalization of the first word of a clause that the compositor appears to have read as implied speech (e. g. in the construction, He said, that . . .). 671

672

DISCUSSION OF EDITORIAL DECISIONS

• We adopt corrections of spelling of proper names in editions that Carlyle at least nominally participated in. However, we do not adopt attempts at correction that merely change the spelling from a less to a more conventional form. • We adopt as Carlyle’s clear preference the change from the two-word spelling to the one-word form of the following: forever, anything, everything, everywhere, anywhere, nowhere. We also adopt the preferred spelling farther (over further). We apply this principle to editions that Carlyle at least nominally participated in. • We reject apparent attempts at correcting Carlyle’s preferred spelling of the past tense of words such as sink, shrink, and spring. He invariably uses the forms sunk, shrunk, and sprung, which in later editions are often changed to sank, shrank, sprang. The latter may be an attempt to distinguish the adjective from the past tense verb, but both are legitimate past tense forms, and there is no reason to believe that Carlyle changed his preference. • We reject as a regularization, rather than a correction, the elimination of a comma between a subject and verb, even in an edition Carlyle carefully revised. The frequency with which this usage appears in his writings suggests that Carlyle was punctuating rhetorically rather than grammatically and did not consider it an error. Clear evidence that Carlyle considered the practice correct is his insertion of a comma following canaille in the proofs for “Repeal of the Union”: “Not while British men walk erect in this Island can Ledru Rollins, . . . and an anarchic canaille, be left . . .” (Victoria and Albert F.48.E.18 item 200/5). • Carlyle often forms the possessive of names ending in s with just an apostrophe and without the addition of an s. Therefore we treat the addition of the s in later editions as a regularization and reject it. “Burns” 30.9 laws! 28 laws; 33Y → 69

As indicated here, Carlyle marked this change in the 1833 volume. It is likely that it was on the list he sent to editors of the 1838 edition, where the change also occurs. Carlyle marked only nine changes in the essays included in the present volume. We also adopt changes that also appeared in 1840, as Carlyle carefully prepared that edition. With the exception discussed below at 51.36, we do not adopt changes made in 1833 that never appeared in any edition of the Miscellanies. 41.35 upchock’d, 40 upchok’d 69 41.36 whirl, 40 swhirl, 69

These changes accord with the text of the edition of Burns Carlyle was citing (Currie 3.150); they vary slightly from, but are still closer to, the first edition of Burns’s poems (1787), which has “up-choked” and “swirl” (200). As indicated in the next item, the pattern of correction suggests that no one was systematically checking the text against an original, but rather simply that Carlyle or one of his assistants recognized these errors. These are the only changes from 1869

DISCUSSION OF EDITORIAL DECISIONS

673

adopted for this essay.

41.37 lock’d, 40 bock’d, 57 bock’d 69

In this instance, someone recognized in 1859 that there had been a compositor error in 1840 that had not previously been noticed (note that it repeats “lock’d” from three lines above). Once again, this change must have resulted from Carlyle or one of his assistants recognizing that “lock’d” was incorrect. The fact that Currie has “boked” (3.150) and the first edition of Burn’s poems has “bocked” (200) together with the fact that no other transcription errors were corrected in 1857 demonstrates that the corrector was not checking the text against an original.

51.36 John 28 Thomas 33Y

Given that this is the correct name, we adopt the change. It is the only instance in this volume in which we adopt a change that Carlyle made in the 1833 volume that never appeared in any edition of the Miscellanies. “Voltaire” 83.6 Runnymede; 29 Runnymead; 40 → 57

1829 gives the standard spelling, but there is ample evidence that Carlyle ordinarily used the 1840 spelling, which appears in the Printer’s Copy of Past and Present (2.1.48.10) as well the first edition of “Chartism” (108.28). The only instance in which we have found “Runnymede” is in French Revolution 1.1.5.127, where, of course, it could have been imposed by the compositor. As this change is an edition that Carlyle carefully revised, it conforms with his preference, and moves away from regularization, we adopt it.

99.14

Prussia, and where Prussia, where

29 40 → 69

In cases of transcription or translation of a text, we are guided by the original. Here 1829 accurately translates Voltaire’s text: “palais appartenant au roi de Prusse, et où ce pauvre ambassadeur demeuré douze ans” (Œuvres 92.239). As the original makes clear, moreover, removing the “and” implies that it was in Prussia, rather than at the palace, that the ambassador remained twelve years. Therefore we consider this change to be a compositor intervention and do not follow our normal practice of adopting changes of wording in an edition that Carlyle carefully revised. Note that, by the same token, we adopt the changes that accord with the French original (e. g. 103.24).

674

DISCUSSION OF EDITORIAL DECISIONS

“Boswell’s Life of Johnson”

176.35

children of 32 children almost of 47 → 69

176.35 year. 32 year.* [footnote inserted] * Johnson, September, 1709; Hume, April, 1711. 47 → 69

Although we do not ordinarily adopt changes made in 1847 for essays that had appeared in the 1840 Miscellanies, in this case Carlyle seems to have paid particular attention to errors in “Johnson.” Here he has recognized that Johnson and Hume were not born in exactly the same year, but a year and a half apart. For other corrections, see 147.35 and 170.2. 191.18 Whitfield, 32 Whitefield, 47 → 69

Carlyle apparently refers to George Whitefield (pronounced Whitfield, which might account for the spelling in 1832). Given that, as noted in the previous item, Carlyle made several corrections in 1847, we attribute this change to him. “Corn-Law Rhymes”

349.058

corporation,’ ‘dismal corporation, dismal

32 40 → 69

Either Carlyle or the printer must have thought that this was a continuous passage and so removed the quotation marks, but the quotations are separate in Elliott (Corn-Law Rhymes 21) so 1832 was correct.

214.2 ‘Debauch 32 Debauch 38 → 69



214.2

friends.’ / friends. / [centered] * * * * * 40 → 69

32

In this instance, 1832 was incorrect, as it failed to indicate that there was an ellipsis here, the one passage ending at “friends” and the next beginning at “Behold” (Elliott, Village Patriarch 74). The quotation mark before “Debauch” may be the result of the compositor’s confusion about what Carlyle had indicated on his manuscript. The editors or compositor in 1838 attempted to sort this out by removing the quotation mark before “Debauch,” but then erroneously inserted one before “Behold.” 1840 corrects these errors. A similar problem occurred at 214.31.

DISCUSSION OF EDITORIAL DECISIONS

675

“Diderot” 231.18 college,’—and 33 college,—and 39 → 69

The 1838 editors recognized that a correction was called for, as 1833 has no open quotation mark to match this close quotation mark. The quotation mark in 1833 might seem to indicate that Carlyle is, as he sometimes does in extracts, ending the direct quotation and adding his own comment before proceeding with the quotation in the next paragraph. In fact, although it is printed as an extract, the passage not only translates but also paraphrases throughout, which may explain why Carlyle did not use quotation marks. We therefore adopt the solution of 1839. “Sir Walter Scott”

277.3

‘an 38 ‘an 40 → 69

As discussed in the headnote to the Historical Collation, 1838 was printed with the system of quotation marks that reverses Carlyle’s preferred system, and we have therefore reversed all of them for the purpose of collation (i. e. 1838 actually has double quotation marks here). Whereas Fraser’s and other journals made this reversal across the board, the London and Westminster Review made a number of exceptions. In this case it gives a quotation from a text in double quotation marks whereas Carlyle normally puts them in single quotation marks.

279.26

“Life by 38 ‘Life by 39 Life ‘by 40 → 69

279.26 executor” 38 executor’ 39 → 69

This is another example of inconsistency in the treatment of quotation marks. 1838 put titles in single quotation marks and again 1839 did not reverse them. Note that 1840 removed all quotation marks from titles and used italics instead.

279.37

light. It will tell us, say they, little new and nothing pleasing to know. But 38 light. But 39 → 69

In his instructions to Emerson (Letters 11:23), Carlyle ordered the deletion of two sentences, this one and “Let it be so” (283.24).

676

DISCUSSION OF EDITORIAL DECISIONS

288.4 “la 38 ‘la 39 ‘La 40 → 69 288.4 the 38 The 40 → 69

The phrase “La carrière ouverte aux talens” and its English translation had been printed with the initial capital in Sartor Resartus (2.8.133) and “Memoirs of Mirabeau” (159); On Heroes would also print it this way (6.205). Note that 1840 also corrects the spelling of carrière. 293.19 as 38 so 39 → 69

This change follows the text of Lockhart (1.16). A number of similar changes suggests that one of the Boston editors was checking the extracts against Lockhart, a different situation than the corrections of “Burns” (see above 41.35-37). In some cases, Carlyle may have erred when transcribing the text, while in others (e. g. “curs” for “ours” at 315.12; see Lockhart 5.123) the compositor probably misread Carlyle’s manuscript transcription. As there is no reason to believe that Carlyle intended to change the wording of the extracts, we adopt changes in 1839 that restore Lockhart’s wording (including dialect words) and his spelling of proper names. However, the editors did not restore all punctuation, capitalization and spelling (other than proper names), and, therefore, we do not adopt such changes. 315.11 ‘take 38 “take 39 → 69 315.11 inn.’ 38 inn.” 39 → 69

1838 failed to indicate that this is a quotation within a quotation; 1839 makes the correction. 317.39 rondo, 38 tondo 39 → 69 325.9 a 38 on 39 → 69

Carlyle ordered these changes in a letter to Emerson (Letters 11:23). As the editors of the Letters report, Stearns Wheeler was confused about what Carlyle wanted for the rondo/tondo correction; however, Carlyle’s source, Vasari, confirms that Stearns Wheeler made the intended correction.

DISCUSSION OF EDITORIAL DECISIONS

677

“Heintze’s Translation of Burns”

329.0

[no title] Heintze’s Translation of Burns Strouse

When this review appeared in the Examiner there was no running head, and as it was never republished Carlyle did not have the opportunity to give it a title. We have provided a title that follows Carlyle’s practice for titling his other essays. 329.14 versions ms versions, 40

We take the process of transforming the manuscript into print to be collaborative. Therefore, we do not treat changes between the manuscript and the proof the same as changes between print editions. Instead, we assume that Carlyle expected, like other nineteenth-century writers, that the compositor would supply punctuation and expand abbreviations, and we take the fact that he accepted a change in proof as tacit acceptance of such changes. Note, however, that we reject changes that directly contradict Carlyle’s established preferences (e. g. capitalization of abstract nouns, the comma dash). 330.29 tune ms tune 40

The underscore indicating italics has been deleted in the manuscript, but the compositor may have missed it. 331.22 these ms those 40

We take “those” to be a misreading of the manuscript by the compositor; our reading is confirmed by the fact that “these” makes better sense in context. 332.16 Freit. ms Freit! 40 332.20 Ailsa-Craig,— ms Ailsa-Craig, 40

In both instances we are guided by Heintze (200). We take the use of the period instead of an exclamation point to be a transcription error by Carlyle (this is part of a refrain repeated three times in each stanza, always with an exclamation point). By contrast, Carlyle correctly transcribed the comma dash from Heintze (200), and so we do not adopt the omission of the dash in the published text.

678

DISCUSSION OF EDITORIAL DECISIONS

“Preface to Emerson’s Essays”

335.0

PREFACE BY THE ENGLISH EDITOR. 41 PREFACE TO EMERSON’S ESSAYS. Strouse

The title refers to the volume in which the preface appears. The preface was never republished independently; therefore, we have provided a title that follows Carlyle’s practice for titling his other essays.

L I N E - E N D S H Y P H E N S I N T H E C O P Y-T E X T

679

LINE-END HYPHENS IN THE COPY-TEXT The following are the editorially established forms of possible compounds that were hyphenated at the ends of lines in the relevant copy-text or the text from which an emendation has been adopted. A slash (/) indicates the position of the line-break in the copy-text where this is not obvious.



133.4 star-gazer 134.34 Novelwright 135.8 picklocks 136.10 Pagan-Christian 136.10 concrete-abstract 137.7 reading-world 138.33 haymow 142.4 cock-chafers 142.17 magic-rod 142.26 Springwürzel 143.10 April-/fool-day 143.13 May-day 146.24 Tombstones 148.16 Digesting-machine 149.13 art-magic 149.17 semicolon 150.31 all-pervading 152.32 swordsmen 153.26 Outer-House 155.15 Freewill 157.34 scot-and-/lot 157.34 cocked-hatted 157.35 rosy-faced 158.14 Naphtha-lamps 158.30 road-bills 158.31 game-bills 158.37 horse-dung 160.3 heath-thatched 161.32 soul-confusing 161.36 mad-making 162.15 full-length 162.34 herring-fishing 165.10 Scarecrow-apparel 165.38 death-sleep 166.11 keen-visioned 167.26 Tyrant’s-saddle 168.32 pre-eminence 170.37 Burgh-Seminary 171.3 Burgh-Seminary 171.36 Booksellers 176.26 dimmer-burning1 178.3 velvet-cushioned

23.37 burial-vault 24.23 saintlike 34.6 ill-starred 41.7 all-conceiving 44.30 wild-brier 47.19 war-ode 47.36 fellow-feeling 48.8 playmate 48.35 public-house 50.8 wine-bred 55.33 well-trained 55.36 hard-worked 58.30 black-browed 62.23 well-calculated 63.33 broadsword 64.13 wellwisher 73.12 balladmonger 73.14 idol-priests 75.9 rush-light 79.37 six-and-thirty 80.37 honest-hearted 84.25 land-locked 89.16 rock-bound 91.16 better-intentioned 96.4 steam-engine 94.19 indifferent-minded 97.37 time-keeper 98.15 ill-omened 99.19 verse-corrector 99.21 feather-brained 104.4 Chamouni-needles 106.6 Bourg-en-/Bresse 111.26 sick-room 113.1 freethinker 118.12 shop-porters 119.12 egg-dance 125.37 Fire-eaters 128.35 Spectre-dynasty 129.1 high-soaring 129.35 well-intentioned 132.35 lichen-pictures 133.2 Little-endian 679

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178.10 all-overshadowing 179.16 honest-hearted 179.35 mud-spectres 182.9 mustard-seed 182.24 ever-varying 183.31 old-fashioned 185.8 light-nimbus 185.13 star-gazers 185.17 three-times-/three 186.2 Temple-gate 186.5 Fleet-ditch 186.6 well-beloved 189.25 thirty-six 190.13 Golgotha-Death-/dance 190.20 downpressed 191.30 oyster-beds 192.2 day-labourer 192.8 West-Indian 192.38 Committee-Lady 194.27 soft-trembling 195.3 lady-visitors 195.37 Church-/of-Englandism “Corn-Law Rhymes” 199.7 assaying-balance 199.17 Sleep-Awake 200.37 school-learned 205.14 lampblack 208.7 war-music 209.2 fast-accumulating 209.7 Common-woe 209.27 smoke-pillar 213.23 horse-breaking 219.35 stone-pillar 220.7 soot-stained 220.14 Taskmaster’s 222.18 market-crosses 222.24 pleasure-ground 226.18 ever-marvellous 226.22 Private-Theatre 231.37 one-and-/thirty2 234.24 gold-mines 235.22 half-/a-dozen 242.5 Market-place 243.16 Booksellers

244.15 world-maddening 245.1 canvas-picture 245.37 stern-beckoning 247.7 jewel-rings 251.22 piebald 251.34 catchpoles 256.3 Mother-/in-law 256.15 proof-sheets 256.22 tittle-tattle 259.21 ferry-boat 260.8 charity-sermoning 264.13 tar-link 272.17 dim-struggling 273.1 many-sided 273.3 half-truth 285.2 time-defying 286.17 bye-standers 286.20 hand-clapping 287.5 commonplace 287.25 Ram-Dass 288.38 ruddy-cheeked 290.12 sound-hearted 294.20 public-house 295.7 half-glowring 297.28 comfit-maker 298.2 jackboots 298.10 ever-widening 299.22 five-and-/twenty 301.13 firework 303.20 poetico-antiquarian 304.37 rhyme-fetters 307.35 birtheve 310.5 thin-flanked 312.37 white-cord 313.2 seventy-sixth 315.4 horseleech 315.8 overnight 316.8 orange-coloured 316.35 landed-property 317.22 free-seeing 323.6 ready-writer 329.7 Thundergod 336.6 never-resting 336.13 Mammon-worship

1 This compound does not appear in present edition as it has been emended (see Historical Collation and Emendations). 2 This compound does not appear in present edition as it has been emended (see Historical Collation and Emendations).

L I N E - E N D S H Y P H E N S I N T H E C O P Y-T E X T

336.25 god-given 336.27 world-wide 337.6 Improved-Socinianism 337.11 Life-Fountain

337.34 devout-minded 338.19 heavy-laden 338.29 second-hand

681

683

LINE-END HYPHENS AND PAGE-END EXTRA LEADING IN THE PRESENT TEXT In quotations from the present edition, no line-end hyphens are to be retained except the following: 37.38 41.7 45.18 48.37 54.12 76.10 78.17 79.5 88.17 92.6 92.22 93.35 94.25 99.21 106.24 118.13 120.35 136.8 139.29 141.7 150.38 153.5 157.36 162.15 165.22 166.13 167.38 174.21 176.25 177.30 179.36 185.17 188.11 189.29 193.17 199.22

high-flown all-conceiving all-embracing many-coloured thirty-seventh well-spring baggage-waggons note-worthy anti-catholic evil-disposed fifty-fourth Haroun-Alraschid pole-star old-coquettish, Kien-Long fencing-matches long-continued heart-appalling battle-field Ship-loads bag-cheeks leisure-amusement errand-boys full-length Clothes-horse all-penetrating wild-man wooden-headedness fixed-star half-foolish Life-boat three-times-three heart-devoutness good-night death-bed net-fished

202.25 204.30 209.22 209.27 215.2 217.11 217.20 218.35 221.24 222.16 226.22 228.33 233.29 236.25 238.20 241.24 242.17 243.19 245.35 246.37 255.26 275.29 275.37 281.11 287.23 288.23 294.20 297.13 298.10 305.20 311.1 314.12 325.5 336.27 338.33

683

six-and-thirty square-root sum-total world-embracing toil-grimed wide-spread world-movement fellow-man ear-piercing death-sentence Private-Theatre long-decanted office-desk gudgeon-fisher Church-licenciate common-place king-tackle Timber-headed death-bed cat-calls caco-gastric thrice-resplendent heart-elevating march-of-intellect man-god Samson-like public-house common-place ever-widening So-and-so wonder-hunters busy-looking lodging-house beef-eaters low-voiced

684

NOTE ON EXTRA LEADING As discussed in the headnote to the Historical Collation, Carlyle indicated in the Printer's Copy where he wanted extra leading (extra white space—a line skipped) between paragraphs. Inevitably some of these fall, in our edition, at the bottom of a page. It should be understood that there is extra leading between the following pages: 19-20 22-23 41-42 104-105 117-118 118-119

128-129 214-215 292-293 306-307 310-311 326-327

A LT E R AT I O N S I N T H E M A N U S C R I P T S

685

ALTERATIONS IN THE MANUSCRIPT The following table lists all alterations in the manuscript of “Heintze’s Translation of Burns.” In this listing, we have used the following symbols. Words with a line through them (e.g., over) indicate a cancellation. Words enclosed within double slashes (e.g., //over\\) indicate a cancellation within a cancellation. Words enclosed in vertical lines (e.g., |over| ) indicate an interlinear insertion; double vertical lines indicate an insertion within an insertion. Tentative readings of words or letters are enclosed in square brackets (e.g., [over]). 329.8 here on from 329.12 then. A Goethe has commented upon him, |A polished, almost fastidious, Goethe is drawn from his artistic height to comment lovingly on this||e|| fiery Son of Nature, whom he recognises for a brother:| Goethe’s 329.15 summer! |So goes it.| Let 329.17 him a[s] genuine 329.17 all men sons 329.17 genuine, repeat it, appropriate it |and will| lay 329.19 hearts; repeated in all corners |to be| reproduced 329.20 but mankind |mankind| is 329.22 it such a word|;--it 330.1 ¶Whether1 330.1 to [run] |run|2 upon 330.1 translations |on translation| of 330.3 enough! That it is their own concern; they are [competent] to look it. What we have to say Kaufmann’s of Berlin, this of Heintze’s which we now have in a smart blue octavo from “the firm of George Westermann; Braunschweig”: // are\\ both |these| reputed to be good; then other two not

so good. Of Kaufmann we ourselves know little; of the other two nothing at all. But they |Germans| themselves 330.7 others, names of unknown name, not so good |name not given, which probably are rather bad|. We 330.7 But here clearly enough is |this| Heintze, 330.8 octavo, shape from “the first firm 330.9 Braunschweig;” whom, having read him over, |—him| we 330.11 Herr Heinz Heintze 330.13 best. We sho[uld] have liked well to see The rank is but the guinea-stamp, “For 330.13 chosen; perhaps the 330.23 evaporated|, as the risk was|: for 330.26 instances |of singular felicity| we have Burns as 330.27 Burns, brought back to us; |with all his graces and rhythms|; and always|, over and above the mere prosaic sense,| there 330.29 the tune |tune| of 330.31 have. even Every 330.31 all like a soul, shapes 330.32 a soul |soul| does

1 Carlyle has inserted a curly bracket before this word, but whereas such brackets usually indicate material that is not to be used or is to be moved, the material was used as is. 2 The insertion appears to be in another hand than Carlyle’s. Possibly the individual preparing copy felt that Carlyle’s word was hard to read and rewrote it.

685

686

A LT E R AT I O N S I N T H E M A N U S C R I P T S

330.32 the soul |soul| of 330.33 the soul song 330.33 true song |song|, and 330.34 it seems would 330.36 song, fill |fill| [his] 331.1 here;|:| “Grün 331.3 state|:| (grün 331.4 Binsenkraut), which |gives the sense, and| would 331.4 tune). However, 331.5 the mischief |worst|. Rashes, 331.6 as |such| a 331.6 it|;|. A right and [Hei] Heintze’s 331.8 word, |signifying this or that, rushes, ragweed, watercresses, it matters little,--but| rhyming 331.9 mädschen (|to| weiberschen 331.18 decidedly belw below

331.19 he stand know 331.20 of the a|rather| sad 331.25 dancing-tune|, which a man plays on his fiddle, and dancing to it|; and so has made of 331.29 dauntingly goe gaed 331.33 he |Herr Heintze| has 332.1 of fairplay, counterpoise, 332.5 Freit is |indeed is far| inferior 332.5 a rhyme to wooing o’t singing 332.6 wooing o’it;—but 332.9 Freit3 ¶Nun 333.17 Probably about |not more than| half 333.19 sample. Since Herr Heintze To 333.20 [Burns]. [Heintze] has drawn up a tolerable sketch of Burns’s Life The 333.27 he does see |does see|, what

3 Carlyle here writes “p. 200” to indicate that the compositor should insert the intervening lines from Heintze.

HISTORICAL COLLATION All variant readings found in the collated versions of the texts of the Literary Essays are accounted for in this historical collation. The standard of collation (the copy-text of the present edition) for all of the essays except “Heintze’s Translation of Burns” is the first published edition. For “Heintze’s Translation of Burns,” the standard of collation is the manuscript. The historical collation is presented as a table that lists each individual variant (two exceptions are explained below). Each item is keyed to the present edition by the number of the page and line on which the variant begins. For each item, the top line gives the copy-text reading—which for most items will be the same as the reading in the present text—followed by the symbol of the copy-text. The other lines of each item report all variant readings in chronological order. Each variant reading is followed by the symbols of all versions in which that reading occurred, as given in the table below. An arrow between two such symbols (e.g., 40 → 69) signifies that the reading in question is found in all intervening versions. Any version not accounted for in this way agrees with the copy-text reading. Words enclosed in brackets are editorial comments; note in particular that [footnote] means a footnote begins here and [«»] signifies that a character or punctuation mark is absent at that point, but that there is extra blank space, suggesting lost or broken type. The symbol “¶” indicates that a new paragraph begins at that point. The symbol “/” is used when relevant to indicate the end of a line. The existence and placement of a footnote marker is taken to be part of Carlyle’s text, but the marker itself, whether a number or a symbol such as an asterisk, is not taken to be part of the text. In the historical collation, therefore, footnote numbers are always represented by a dagger, no matter what symbol was used in the particular text. For symbols used in the transcription of manuscripts, see the table of alterations in the manuscript. The first exception to the practice of listing each individual variant involves the introduction of American spellings in the 1838 Miscellanies. In all cases, the words found in the following list, along with their variants (plurals etc.) are spelled in the British manner, with the ending “our,” in the copy-text and all editions except 1838, in which they are spelled in the American manner, with the ending “or”: ardour, armour, candour, clamour, colour, demeanour, endeavor, favour, fervour, harbour, honour, humour, labour, neighbour, parlour, rancour, rumour, splendour, valour. As the imposition of American spellings was clearly the act of the American compositors (or editors), and British spellings were restored at the first opportunity, I have not otherwise recorded these variants in the historical collation; the reader may assume, however, that 1838 always uses the “or” ending. Other spellings were Americanized in 1838 (for example, the -ise/-ize ending, sceptic/skeptic and so on), but as the pattern of Americanizing and restoring British spellings was in these cases less systematic, these variations are recorded in the historical collation. The second exception involves a change in the system of single and double quotation marks. In 1838 and all subsequent editions of the following essays, there was a global shift from using double quotation marks and single within double to single quotation marks with double within single: “Biography,” “Boswell’s Life of Johnson,” “Diderot,” “Sir Walter Scott.” Changes according to this rule

687

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N 688 are not reported in the historical collation, though the exceptions are. To avoid confusion, all quotation marks are given in the system adopted in 1838 unless it is a variant in quotation mark usage that is being reported. In other words, for the essays listed above all copy-text quotation marks are represented as their opposite (doubles for singles, and vice versa) where the variant does not involve the quotation mark. Like the editors of Sartor Resartus, which underwent the same change, I have chosen to accept this reversal of quotation marks, because it conforms with Carlyle’s usual practice. The present edition follows the copy-text reading (the top line of each item) at each crux, unless another reading is given in bold face, signaling an emendation (see Emendations of the Copy-Text). Items treated in the discussion of editorial decisions are marked with an asterisk. The following symbols are used to indicate the editions employed in the collations.

Symbol Version MSS Manuscript of the essay where relevant. 21 et al. The first appearance of the essay in a serial publication; the number is the date of this first appearance. 33Y Bound volume of essays as first published with corrections by Carlyle. 38 or 39 Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. First Edition. Boston: James Munroe, 1838-1839. 40 Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. Second Edition. London: James Fraser, 1840. 47 Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. Third Edition.London: Chapman and Hall, 1847. 57 Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. Volumes 2-5 of the Uniform Edition. 16 vol. London: Chapman and Hall, 1857–58. 69 Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. Volumes 6-11 and 34 of the Library Edition. 34 vol. London: Chapman and Hall, 1869–71. 41 Emerson’s Essays. London: James Fraser, 1841. 53 Emerson’s Essays. London: Chapman and Hall, 1853. Strouse Emendations made on editorial authority. “Miss Baillie’s Metrical Legends” [21] 3.1 exalted 21 Exalted Strouse “Burns” [28, 38, 40, 47, 57, 69] 29.0 Burns. 28 BURNS. 38 → 691 29.1 The Life of Robert Burns. 28

The Life of Robert Burns. 38 → 57 29.1 Lockhart, 28 Lockhart 38 → 69 29.4 for 28 for, 38 → 69 29.10 nature, 28 Nature, 40 → 69

1 1838 adds “[Edinburgh Review, 1828.]” under the title; 1840 and all subsequent editions change this to “[1828.]”. 1838 and subsequent editions shift the bibliographic information from the heading to a footnote. 1840 and following insert “Edinburgh Review, No. 96.—” at the beginning of the footnote.

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

29.10 living: 28 living; 38 → 69 29.11 died 28 died, 38 → 69 29.12 neglected; 28 neglected: 47 → 69 29.14 fame: 28 fame; 47 → 69 29.16 admirers, 28 admirers; 47 → 69 29.16 Life, 28 Life 47 → 69 29.18 ¶Mr 28 ¶Mr. 38 → 69 29.18 apologize 28 apologise 47 → 69 29.23 valet: 28 valet; 57 → 69 29.24 hero’s: 28 hero’s. 40 → 69 30.1 certain 28 certain, 38 → 69 30.3 nay perhaps, 28 nay, perhaps, 38 30.5 John a Combe’s, 28 John-a-Combe’s, 54 30.9* laws! 28 laws; 33Y 40 → 69 30.10 Mr 28 Mr. 38 → 69 30.11 manner 28 manner, 38 → 69 30.21 biographers 28 Biographers 40 → 69 30.21 something, no doubt, but 28 something, but 33Y 30.22 Dr 28 Dr. 38 → 69 30.22 and 28 and and 38 30.22 Mr 28 Mr. 38 → 69 30.23 both, we think, mistaken 28

689

both, as was not so unnatural at that point of time, mistaken 54 30.25 Dr 28 Dr. 38 → 69 30.27 patronising, 28 patronizing, 38 → 40 30.28 scholar, 28 scholar 47 → 69 30.31

biographers, 28 biographers 38 → 69

30.31 farther, 28 further, 54 30.32 Mr 28 Mr. 38 → 69 30.34 virtues, 28 virtues 57 → 69 30.37 Nay, 28 Nay 69 30.37 this: 28 that: 69 31.1 ¶Mr 28 ¶Mr. 38 → 69 31.7 insight, we think, into 28 insight into 54 31.11 multifarious 28 multifarious, 38 → 57 31.11 quotations, 28 quotations 69 31.12 Mr 28 Mr. 38 → 69 31.12 direct 28 direct, 38 31.14 tolerant, 28 tolerant 47 → 69 31.16 Mr 28 Mr. 38 → 69 31.27 opinion, 28 opinion 69 31.36 biography. 28 Biography. 40 → 69 31.38 read, 28 read 47 → 69

690 32.5

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

those for whom they 28 those they 40 → 69 32.5 intended. 28 intended for. 40 → 69 32.6 ¶Burns 28 [extra leading between paragraphs] ¶Burns 40 → 69 32.15 wellnigh 28 well nigh 38 well-nigh 69 32.18 little: 28 little. 40 → 69 32.20 desert, 28 desert moor, 40 → 69 32.21 say that, 28 say, that 38 → 69 32.22 hand, 28 hand 38 → 69 32.23 model; 28 model, 54 32.26 works 28 works, 38 → 69 32.29 for ever 28 forever 47 → 69 32.34 prosaic Britain 28 prosaic that Britain 54 32.36 nay, 28 nay 40 → 69 33.1 Through 28 through 40 → 69 33.2 eagle 28 lynx 40 → 69 33.3 to 28 into 38 → 69 33.4 irrepressible 28 expansive 40 → 69 33.4 inward spirit, 28 own irrepressible soul, 40  →  69 33.5 view, 28 view; 40 → 69 33.7 darksome 28 darksome, 38 → 57

33.9

ask if 28 ask, If 40 → 69 33.13 But 28 but 40 → 69 33.14 colours 28 colours, 40 → 69 33.15 on, 28 on 38 → 69 33.17 side, 28 side 38 → 69 33.20 but 28 but, 38 → 69 33.27 fear,’ 28 fear’ 69 33.28 gentler, 28 gentler 47 → 69 33.30 Death 28 death 38 → 69 33.30 race with whom 28 class of men with whom, for most part, 40 → 69 33.32 unsympathizing 28 unsympathising 47 → 69 33.32 loftiness, 28 loftiness 47 → 69 33.32 persons, 28 persons 47 → 69 33.33 best, 28 best 38 → 69 33.37 developement 28 development 38 → 69 34.1 us, 28 us; 47 → 69 34.1 death, 28 death 47 → 69 34.3 Nature 28 Nature, 47 → 69 34.3 bounty 28 bounty, 47 → 69 34.5 asunder, 28 asunder 54 34.7 own was 28 own life was 40 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

34.7

Destiny—for 28 Destiny,—for 38 → 69 34.8 speak—his 28 speak,—his 38 → 69 34.9 soared, 28 soared 47 → 69 34.11 blossom, 28 blossom; 40 → 69 34.13 Nature; 28 nature; 38 34.14 provinces, 28 provinces 38 → 69 34.16 dribble, 28 dribble 57 → 69 34.17 him: 28 him; 47 → 69 34.18 desolation; but the 28 desolation; the 54 34.23 fellow-feeling, 28 fellow-feeling; 40 → 69 34.23 love, 28 love; 40 → 69 34.31 existence, 28 existence 38 → 69 34.34 offence, 28 offence; 40 → 69 34.35 cold, 28 cold 47 → 69 34.35 peasant 28 Peasant 40 → 69 35.5 nay, 28 nay 69 35.5 arms; 28 arms, 47 → 69 35.6 intreats 28 entreats 47 → 69 35.8 unworthy; 28 unworthy: 40 35.12 Heart. 28 heart. 40 → 69 35.12 show 28 shew 47 54

35.16

691

excise dues 28 excise-dues 40 → 69 35.17 wasted; 28 wasted: 38 → 69 35.22 show 28 shew 47 54 35.23 nay, 28 nay 40 → 69 35.24 effusions, 28 effusions; 40 → 69 35.25 premeditation, 28 premeditation; 40 → 69 35.32 have: 28 have; 38 35.32 for, 28 for 69 35.36 unlettered, 28 unlettered 47 → 69 36.11 scenes he 28 scenes that he 40 → 69 36.15 it, too, with 28 it with 40 → 69 36.21 condition, 28 condition 47 → 69 36.22 heart, 28 heart; 38 → 69 36.26 rank, 28 rank 69 36.34 both, 28 both 69 36.35 deficiencies, 28 deficiencies 69 37.3 success, and he 28 success; he 40 → 69 37.9 men, 28 men; 40 → 69 37.14 contempt, 28 contempt 47 → 69 37.15 humours, 28 humour, 40 → 69 37.17 three score 28 threescore 69

692

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

37.18 minds, 28 minds 69 37.19 false, and affected, 28 false, affected, 40 → 69 37.19 otherwise powerful 28 otherwise so powerful 40 → 69 37.21 showed 28 shewed 47 54 37.23 nay, 28 nay 69 37.33 ¶It is necessary, however, to mention, that it 28 ¶Here, however, let us say, it 40 → 69 37.33 poetry 28 Poetry 40 → 69 37.38 certain 28 certain, 40 38.1 tone; 28 tone, 54 38.6 force, 28 force 69 38.15 faults 28 faults, 38 → 69 38.17 Letters 28 letters 40 → 69 38.18 Mrs 28 Mrs. 38 → 69 38.19 poetry. 28 Poetry. 40 → 69 38.19 sincerity, 28 Sincerity, 40 → 69 38.20 foregoing. It 28 foregoing: this 40 → 69 38.21 subjects, 28 subjects; 40 → 69 38.23 for ever 28 forever 40 → 69 38.26 conventional world, 28 conventional heroic world, 40 → 69 38.26 resides for him; 28 resides; 40 → 69

38.28 novels 28 Novels 40 → 69 38.28 epics, 28 Epics, 40 → 69 38.29 Earth, 28 earth, 54 38.33 yet 28 yet, 38 → 69 38.34 poets 28 poets, 38 → 69 39.3 out of 28 beyond 40 → 69 39.3 wrote of what 28 wrote what 47 → 69 39.7 men, they 28 men,—they 47 → 69 39.9 cannot but think, 28 imagine, 40 → 69 39.13 here 28 there 54 39.13 existence, 28 exist-/tence, 40 39.16 Eternity; 28 Eternity: 38 39.18 tho’ 28 though 38 → 69 39.25 decipher? 28 decipher, 33Y decipher; 40 → 69 39.28 had, 28 had 69 39.29 strength, 28 strength 69 39.30 shows 28 shews 47 54 39.35 times 28 times, 54 39.35 told, 28 told 69 39.37 all other things, 28 all things, 40 → 69 39.38 an eye 28 eyesight 40 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

40.1

eyes, 28 eyesight, 40 → 69 40.1 hard. But 28 hard. The blind or the purblind man ‘travels from Dan to Beersheba, and finds it all barren.’ But 40  → 69 40.3 world; 28 world, 38 40.6 cities, 28 cities 47 → 69 40.7 virtues, 28 virtues 47 → 69 40.9 consciousness 28 conciousness 40 40.15 soon after 28 about 40 → 69 40.17 Shakspeare, 28 Shakspeare 38 → 69 40.18 unconsciously, 28 unconsciously 47 → 69 40.22 place 28 place 54 40.22 eye. 28 eye. 54 40.29 Council of Trent, 28 Council of Trent, 54 Council of Trent 69 40.29 Jubilee; 28 Jubilee; 54 40.30 Superstition, and Hypocrisy, 28 Superstition and Hypocrisy 40 → 69 40.31 satire, 28 satire 47 → 69 40.36 written: 28 written; 69 40.36 virtue 28 virtue, 38 → 69 2

41.20 to 43.4.

693

40.37 life, 28 life 57 → 69 40.38 tender, and he 28 tender, he 40 → 69 41.2 in him 28 that in this man there was 40 → 69 41.8 prompt and eager 28 fierce prompt 40 → 69 41.18 awkward, 28 awkward 40 → 69 41.18 clear 28 clear, 38 41.20 Retsch 28 Retzsch 38 → 69 41.20 exact. ¶This 28 exact. [passage inserted 2] ¶This 40 → 69 41.33 ’Ae 40 Ae 54 41.35* upchock’d, 40 upchok’d 69 41.36* whirl, 40 swhirl, 69 41.37* lock’d, 40 bock’d, 57 bock’d 69 42.2 ¶Are 40 Are 47 → 69 42.7 prophecied 40 prophesied 47 → 69 42.14 course 40 course, 47 → 69 42.16 blustring 40 blust’ring 47 → 69 42.16 winds, 40 winds 47 → 69 42.25 ¶The 40 The 47 → 69 42.28 plough, 40 plough 47 → 69

694

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

42.33 feeling, 40 feeling 47 → 69 42.37 me 40 me, 47 → 69 43.1 friends, 40 friends! 47 → 69 43.1 Farewell 40 Farewell, 47 → 69 43.2 thee 40 thee, 47 → 69 43.4 may call 28 have called 40 → 69 43.6 itself perhaps 28 itself, perhaps, 40 → 69 43.13 ample, 28 ample 47 → 69 43.20 scene. Our 28 scene. We hear of ‘a gentleman that derived his patent of nobility direct from Almighty God.’ Our 40 → 69 43.22 forward, he says, ‘red-wat shod:’ giving in 28 forward, he says, ‘red-wat shod:’ giving, in 38 forward ‘red-wat-shod:’ in 40 → 69 43.26 as 28 and 47 → 69 43.33 extreme 28 a weak-eyed maudlin 40 → 69 43.34 pervading 28 random 40 → 69 43.37 gifts, 28 gifts 47 → 69 43.37 Poet, 28 Poet 69 43.38 developement, 28 development, 38 → 69 44.2 poet 28 Poet 40 → 69

44.2

to all men, 28 to men, 40 → 69 44.4 shown 28 shewn 47 54 44.7 for it dwelt 28 it had to dwell 40 → 69 44.7 objects, 28 objects; 40 → 69 44.7 philosophy, and 28 Philosophy, 40 Philosophy; 47 → 69 44.8 except for 28 except by natural effort and for 40 → 69 44.8 intervals, 28 intervals; 40 44.9 Nevertheless 28 Nevertheless, 38 → 69 44.9 sufficient indication 28 sufficient indication, if no proof sufficient, 40 → 69 44.11 strength, 28 strength; 47 → 69 44.17 all sufficient; 28 all-sufficient; 38 → 69 44.17 nay, 28 nay 69 44.21 Mr 28 Mr. 38 → 69 44.23 subtler 28 subtiler 38 44.29 some 28 some some 40 44.30 hare-bell, 28 harebell, 40 → 69 44.30 fox-glove, 28 foxglove, 40 → 69 44.33 grey 28 gray 57 → 69 44.34 owing. 28 owing? 38 → 69 44.36 accident? 28 accident; 38 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

45.1

woe 28 wo 40 → 69 45.6 probably require this; 28 so require it; 40 → 69 45.10 poetry 28 Poetry 40 → 69 45.10 Burns, 28 Burns 69 45.14 Love 28 love 40 → 69 45.16 ‘love 28 ‘Love 40 → 69 45.22 universe 28 universe, 38 → 69 45.22 grey 28 gray 57 → 69 45.25 that 28 that, 38 → 69 45.29 ‘I 28 I 38 → 69 45.31 war; 28 war, 57 → 69 45.35 ‘Ilk 28 Ilk 38 → 69 45.36 spring, 28 spring 38 → 69 46.2 ee?’ 28 ee? 38 → 47, 57 → 69 e’e? 54 46.5 This, 28 This 38 → 69 46.6 Mercy; 28 Mercy: 38 → 40 46.8 Devil, 28 Devil 38 → 69 46.8 orthodoxy! 28 orthodoxy: 40 → 69 46.10 ‘But 28 But 38 → 69 46.11 O 28 O, 69 3

46.19 to 47.9.

695

46.12 might 28 might, 38 → 69 46.12 ken 28 ken, 38 → 69 46.15 sake!’ He did not know, probably, that Sterne had been beforehand with him. 28 sake! [sentence omitted] 40 → 69 46.17 ‘He 28 ‘“He 38 “He 40 → 69 46.17 lies,’ 28 lies,” 38 → 69 46.17 Dr 28 Dr. 38 → 69 46.17 ‘and 28 “and 38 → 69 46.18 already.’—‘I 28 already.”—“I 38 → 69 46.18 it,’ 28 it,” 38 → 69 46.18 Toby! 28 Toby!’ 38 46.18 ‘A 28 A 40 → 69 46.18 poet 28 Poet 40 → 69 46.18 Love, 28 Love 47 → 69 46.19 impossibility.’ 28 impossibility. [passage inserted 3] 40 → 69 46.20 said 28 said, 69 46.20 that, 28 that 47 → 69 46.21 verses’? 40 verses?’ 47 54 46.37 chaunted 40 chanted 69

696 47.4

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

Dungeon 40 Dungeon, 54 47.8 curse? 40 curse! 69 47.11 Scots, 40 Scots 47 → 69 47.11 know it, 28 know of it, 40 → 69 47.14 Mr 28 Mr. 38 → 69 47.14 forbore, 28 forebore, 47 57 47.15 enough—for 28 enough,—for 38 enough, for 40 → 69 47.19 war-ode, 28 war-ode; 40 → 69 47.21 song, 28 Song, 40 → 69 47.22 co-operates. 28 coöperates. 38 57 → 69 cooperates. 47 54 47.24 treacherie,’ was 28 treacherie,’—was 69 47.28 heart; 28 heart: 40 → 69 47.29 melody, 28 melody 69 47.30 pain, 28 pain 47 → 69 47.30 despair, 28 despair 54 47.32 Free-will; 28 Freewill; 40, 54 Free-/will; 47 47.33 sunk 28 sank 40 → 69 47.34 soul; 28 soul: 40 47.37 ‘Sae 28 Sae 38 → 69 48.2 gallows tree.’ 28 gallows tree. 38 → 54 gallows-tree. 57 → 69

48.4

lighter and thinner disguise, 28 lighter disguise, 40 → 69 48.10 But 28 but 38 → 69 48.12 Poor 28 poor 47 → 69 48.13 pieces, 28 pieces 47 → 69 48.15 peculiar 28 peculiar, 38 → 69 48.17 poetry, 28 Poetry, 40 → 69 48.19 writings, 28 Writings, 40 → 69 Writings 54 48.19 adequately, 28 adequately 47 → 69 48.21 Poems; 28 Poems: 47 → 69 48.22 aerial, 28 aërial, 40 48.23 us, 28 us 69 48.24 decisively, 28 decisively 69 48.28 new-modelling 28 new modelling 38 → 40 48.30 for ever 28 forever 47 → 69 48.30 silent, 28 silent now, 40 → 69 48.34 cohere; 28 cohere: 40 → 69 48.36 nay, 28 nay 40 → 69 48.37 phantasmagoria, painted 28 phantasmagoria, or manycoloured spectrum painted 40 → 69 48.38 Farce 28 farce 38 49.4 ‘Shakspearean’ 28 ‘Shakspearian’ 38

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

49.5

nay, 28 nay 69 49.6 believe, 28 believe 69 49.9 one, 28 one 47 → 69 49.11 Nature; 28 nature; 38 49.11 shows 28 shews 47 54 49.11 poet’s 28 Poet’s 40 → 69 49.14 airy, and soft 28 airy, soft 40 → 69 49.15 portrait; 28 portrait: 38 → 69 49.16 Rag-castle 28 Rag-/castle 40 Ragcastle 47 → 69 49.17 ‘Poosy Nansie.’ 28 ‘Poosie-Nansie.’ 38 → 69 49.19 night 28 Night 40 → 69 49.19 ruddy, and flaming 28 ruddy, flaming 40 → 69 49.23 Balladmonger 28 Balladmonger, 54 49.23 soldering; 28 soldiering; 38 69 soldering[«»] 54 49.25 cheer. It 28 cheer. Apart from the universal sympathy with man which this again bespeaks in Burns, a genuine inspiration and no inconsiderable technical talent are manifested here. There is the fidelity, humour, warm life, and accurate painting and grouping of some Teniers, for whom hostlers and carousing peasants are not without significance, It 40 → 69

697

49.29 significance, 40 significance. 47 → 69 49.32 Beggar’s 28 Beggars’ 47 → 69 49.32 Beggar’s 28 Beggars’ 47, 57 → 69 49.34 degrees 28 degres 40 49.34 it. ¶But 28 it. [extra leading between paragraphs] ¶But 69 49.35 complete, 28 complete 47 → 69 49.37 with the least 28 with least 40 → 69 49.38 beauty, 28 beauty 69 49.38 brief and simple 28 brief simple 40 → 69 50.1 perfection, 28 perfection 69 50.2 The 28 Yet the 40 → 69 50.5 for 28 for, 38 → 57 50.5 indeed 28 indeed, 38 → 69 50.8 quality’; 28 quality;’ 47 → 69 50.8 wine-bred, 28 wine-bred 40 → 69 50.9 ‘speech’ in 28 speech ‘in 40 → 69 50.10 Bishop, 28 Bishop,’ 40 → 69 50.14 debateable land 28 debateable-land 40 → 69 50.15 outside 28 outskirts 40 → 69 50.16 With 28 ¶With 69 50.26 and, 28 and 69

698

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

50.26 were, 28 were 69 50.27 plays, 28 Plays, 40 → 69 50.29 sentiment, 28 sentiment 47 → 69 50.30 quality, 28 quality 47 → 69 50.33 slyest 28 sliest 47 → 69 50.34 tear!’ 28 tear.’ 69 50.35 farther 28 further 54 50.36 peck 28 Peck 40 → 69 50.38 Scots, 28 Scots 40 → 69 51.2 song-writers; 28 Song-writers; 40 → 69 51.6 Songs 28 songs 38 → 69 51.7 Laws.’ 28 laws.’ 38 → 69 51.8 Legislators, 28 Legislators 47 → 69 51.8 songs 28 Songs 40 → 69 51.9 mother-tongue 28 mother tongue, 38 mother-tongue, 40 → 69 51.10 all the ends 28 all ends 40 → 69 51.11 the 28 many-coloured 40 → 69 51.11 name, the voice 28 name, the voice 40 → 69 51.13 perhaps, 28 perhaps 47 → 69 51.15 means, 28 means 40 → 69 51.21 writers 28 writers, 38 → 69

51.27 Generalisations 28 Generalizations 38 → 40 51.30 But 28 ¶But 69 51.32 had 28 had, 38 → 69 51.36* John 28 Thomas 33Y 52.2 country; 28 country: 69 52.3 attempt, and a tolerably clumsy one, at 28 attempt at 40 → 69 52.11 philosopher: 28 philosopher; 47 → 69 52.18 writers, 28 writers 57 → 69 52.19 nay, 28 nay 40 → 69 52.25 others 28 others, 38 → 69 52.26 structure 28 Structure 40 → 69 52.31 shows 28 shews 47 54 52.31 roses: 28 roses; 38 → 69 52.32 thrashing floor 28 thrashing-floor 40 → 69 52.32 whereon 28 whereon, 54 52.32 Rent,’ 28 Rent’ 47 → 69 53.1 sympathizing 28 sympathising 47 → 69 53.1 humours, 28 humours 40 → 69 53.2 water, 28 water 47 → 69 53.10 floodgates 28 flood-/gates 38 flood-gates 40 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

53.12

him; that 28 him,—that 47 → 69 53.12 song, 28 Song, 40 Song; 47 → 69 53.12 it; 28 it, 47 → 69 53.13 his most toilsome 28 his toilsome 40 → 69 53.17 end. 28 end: 40 → 69 53.19 ——‘a 28 ——a 38 ——A 40 → 57 . . . A 69 53.19 wish, 28 wish 40 → 69 53.19 power,) 28 power), 40 → 69 53.21 breast; 28 breast,— 57 → 69 53.28 dear.’ 28 dear. 38 → 69 53.31 long, we cannot but think that 28 long. Far more interesting than any of his written works, as it appears to us, are his acted ones: 40 → 69 53.32 willed, 28 willed 69 53.32 fated 28 fated, 40 → 57 53.33 fellow men, 28 fellow men. 40 → 57 fellow-men. 69 53.33 is both more interesting and instructive than any of his written works. These 28 These 40 → 69 53.33 but like little 28 but little 54 53.37 porticoes, 28 porticos, 38 → 69

54.4

699

poems, 28 Poems, 40 → 69 54.5 it, 28 it 47 → 69 54.6 life, 28 Life, 40 → 69 54.8 nay, 28 nay 40 → 69 54.11 manhood; 28 manhood, 47 → 69 54.11 For, 28 for, 40 → 69 54.25 more or 28 more completely or 40 → 69 54.26 money, 28 money 69 54.26 higher, 28 higher 47 → 69 54.27 estimation, 28 estimation 47 → 69 54.31 passively, 28 passively 47 → 69 54.33 steady himself 28 gird himself up 40 → 69 54.34 fixed or systematic pursuit, 28 worthy well-calculated goal, 40 → 69 54.35 hope, 28 hope 47 → 69 54.36 nay, 28 nay 40 → 69 54.38 path: 28 path; 40 → 69 54.38 last, 28 last 69 55.1 clear, 28 clear 40 → 69 55.1 sphere, 28 sphere 38 → 69 55.3 Burns: 28 Burns; 47 → 69

700 55.3

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

perhaps 28 perhaps, 38 → 69 55.6 develope 28 develop 38 47 → 69 55.7 without, 28 without; 40 → 69 55.8 ‘pre-established 28 ‘preëstablished 69 55.9 wonderful, therefore, that 28 wonderful that 33Y 40 → 69 55.11 economy, 28 economy 47 → 69 55.14 too, 28 too 69 55.17 one, 28 one 47 → 69 55.18 toil-worn; 28 toilworn; 40 → 69 55.19 and 28 and, 38 → 69 55.21 fortunate: his 28 fortunate. His 47 → 69 55.23 open-minded 28 open-/minded 57 openminded 69 55.23 more; 28 more: 40 → 69 55.23 insight, 28 insight 47 → 69 55.24 heart; 28 heart: 38 55.35 made; 28 made: 47 → 69 55.26 of 28 in 38 → 69 55.28 ever 28 never 40 → 69 55.31 nursery ground 28 nursery-ground 40 → 69 55.34 Literature--for 28 Literature,--for 38 → 69

55.36

school system: 28 school-system: 38 → 69 55.37 plough-boy, 28 ploughboy, 40 → 47 57 plough-/boy, 54 69 55.38 scene, 28 scene 47 → 69 56.10 nay, 28 nay 69 56.13 pressure, 28 pressure 38 → 69 56.19 ——‘in 28 ——in 38 → 57 . . . . . . in 69 56.20 side!’ 28 side! 38 → 57 side. 69 56.22 ¶We know, 28 ¶We ourselves know, 40 → 69 56.22 date, 28 date 47 → 69 56.23 nay, 28 nay 69 56.31 mistaken; 28 mistaken: 38 → 69 56.33 meet, 28 meet 69 56.34 them; 28 them, 40 → 69 56.36 service, 28 Devil’s-service, 40 → 69 56.38 ascertained 28 ascertained, 38 → 69 57.2 world; 28 world! 38 57.3 ‘for 28 for 40 → 69 57.4 doing.’ 28 doing. 40 → 69 57.5 begins, at all events, 28 begins even 40 → 69 57.8 Necessity, 28 Necessity 38 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

57.13 broken, 28 broken 38 → 69 57.13 contrite! 28 contrite. 69 57.15 did—and 28 did,—and 38 did; and 40 → 69 57.20 clergy, 28 clergy 69 57.25 doubts, 28 doubts 69 57.29 sceptical 28 skeptical 38 57.34 peasant, 28 peasant 40 → 69 57.38 by the red 28 by red 40 → 69 58.5 solitude 28 solitude, 38 → 69 58.8 ‘Farewell, 28 Farewell, 38 69 Farewell 40 → 57 58.8 friends, 28 friends; 69 58.8 farewell, 28 farewell 40 → 57 58.11 Ayr!’ 28 Ayr! 38 → 69 58.15 in triumph, 28 in a triumph, 40 → 69 58.16 greatest, 28 greatest 47 → 69 58.17 show 28 shew 47 54 58.18 Edinburgh, 28 Edinburgh 47 → 69 58.21 transiently, 28 transiently 47 → 69 58.26 Mr 28 Mr. 38 → 69 58.29 been 28 been, 38 → 57

701

58.31 plough-tail, 28 plough-tail 47 → 69 58.32

manifested, 28 manifested 38 → 69 58.32 conversation, 28 conversation 47 → 69 58.32 conviction 28 conviction, 47 → 69 295.028 nation, 28 nation 69 58.36 bon mots 28 bon-mots 47 54 69 59.1 tremble—nay 28 tremble,—nay, 38 → 69 59.1 visibly—beneath 28 visibly,—beneath 38 → 69 59.9 had, ere long, 28 had ere long 47 → 69 59.10 themselves.’—P. 131. 28 themselves.’—p. 131. 38 themselves.’ 40 → 69 59.12 farther 28 further 54 59.14 Mr 28 Mr. 38 → 69 59.16 precious. 28 precious: 57 → 69 59.18 tantum. 28 tantùm. 40 → 69 59.20 him; 28 him: 38 → 69 59.22 Mr 28 Mr. 38 → 69 59.24 dinner, 28 dinner; 47 → 69 59.26 Fergusson’s, 28 Ferguson’s, 38 → 69 59.27 Mr 28 Mr. 38 → 69 59.28 remember 28 remember, 38 59.29 Bunbury’s, 28 Bunbury’s 40,

702

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

59.34 slain; 28 slain: 38 69 59.38 baptized 28 baptised 47 → 69 60.2 were, 28 were; 47 → 69 60.3 Langhorne’s, 28 Langhorne’s 54 → 69 60.5 present, 28 present; 47 → 69 60.5 Burns, 28 Burns[«»] 54 60.9 Mr 28 Mr. 38 → 69 60.9 picture; 28 picture: 38 → 69 60.25 Edinburgh; 28 Edinburgh: 38 → 69 60.27 remember 28 remember, 38 → 69 60.28 also, that 28 also that, 47 → 69 60.29 Ferguson, 28 Fergusson, 38 → 57 60.33 in 28 in 40 → 69 60.33 say 28 say, 38 → 69 60.34 information, 28 information 38 → 69 60.38 any thing 28 anything 38 → 69 60.38 since.’—Pp. 112-115. 28 since.’— pp. 112-115. 38 since.’ 40 → 69 61.2 manner, 28 manner 47 → 69 61.12 it 28 is 40 → 47 61.13 nay, 28 nay 40 → 69 61.14 felt, 28 felt 38 → 69

61.14

looker on, 28 looker-on, 38 → 69 61.18 clear enough to 28 clear to 40 → 69 61.21 for ever 28 forever 40 → 69 61.25 Night 28 night 40 → 69 61.26 learned 28 Learned 40 → 69 61.30 great 28 great, 38 61.30 also, 28 also 40 → 69 61.31 tables, 28 tables 40 → 69 61.36 richer: 28 richer; 38 → 69 61.37 poorer, 28 poorer; 40 → 69 61.38 of mere worldly 28 of worldly 40 → 69 62.4 might, 28 might 38 → 69 62.4 time, 28 time 38 → 69 62.5 wisest: and it 28 wisest. It 40 → 69 62.5 question which 28 question, too, which apparently 40 question too, which apparently 47 → 69 62.9 one; and that 28 one; that 40 → 69 62.10 Some 28 Certain 40 → 69 62.10 admirers, indeed, are 28 admirers have felt 40 → 69 62.11 scandalized 28 scandalised 47 → 69 62.11 gauge; 28 guage; 40

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

62.11

apparently lie still 28 lie 40 → 69 62.12 should stir 28 stirred 40 → 69 62.12 and then heal 28 that so, 40 → 69 62.12 plunge 28 friendly plunge, 40 → 69 62.13 his worldly sorrows! We fear such counsellors knew but little of Burns; and did not consider that happiness might in all cases be cheaply had by waiting for the fulfilment of golden dreams, were 28 his sorrows might be healed. Unwise councellors! They know not the manner of this spirit; and how, in the lap of most golden dreams, a man might have happiness, were 40 → 69 62.13 councellors! 40 counsellors! 47 → 69 62.15 the dreamer 28 he 40 → 69 62.15 hunger. 28 hunger! 40 → 69 62.23 think then 28 reckon 40 → 69 62.25 Nay, 28 Nay 40 62.26 internal, 28 internal 38 69 62.27 any thing. 28 anything. 38 → 69 62.31 his 28 the 40 → 69 62.34 duties 28 duties, 38 → 69 62.35 see, 28 see 69 62.36 more! the 28

703

more!—the 38 more! The 40 → 69 63.1 them, 28 them; 40 → 69 63.1 old; 28 old: 47 → 69 63.6 Mecænases, 28 Mæcenases, 54, 69 63.14 him; 28 him[«»] 38 63.15 inequality, 28 inequality 38 → 69 63.16 neighbourhood, 28 neighbourhood; 47 → 69 63.16 the ‘Rock 28 ‘the Rock 69 63.17 Independence,’ 28 Independence[«»]’ 40 63.17 air-castle, 28 air-castle 69 63.21 for ever. 28 forever. 40 → 69 63.24 nay 28 nay, 38 63.26 where, 28 where 40 → 69 63.26 guide, 28 loadstar 40 → 69 63.32 great-coat 28 greatcoat 47 → 69 63.33 broad-/sword. 28 broad-sword. 38 → 47 57 → 69 63.34 For 28 For, 47 → 69 63.35 watch-coat 28 watchcoat 47 → 69 63.35 broadsword’ 28 broad-sword’ 40, 57 → 69 broad-/sword’ 47 63.37 midriff, 28 midriff 40 → 69

704 64.5

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

shrinks 28 shrinks, 38 → 69 64.8 joy, 28 joy 47 → 69 64.13 sin, 28 sin 47 → 69 64.13 well-/wisher 28 well-wisher 38 54 → 69 wellwisher 40 64.13 of 28 to 69 64.16 Nay, 28 Nay 69 64.16 Mecænases 28 Mæcenases 54 69 64.21 Grocerdom 28 Grocerdom, 38 64.24 work 28 Work 40 → 69 64.24 Mr 28 Mr. 38 → 69 64.27 when 28 when, 38 64.33 ‘Nay, 28 “Nay, 38 → 69 64.33 now;’ 28 now;” 38 → 69 65.1 lets’t 28 lets ’t 57 → 69 65.4 O 28 “O 38 → 40 O, 69 65.4 young, 28 young 69 65.5 galloping 28 gallopping 69 65.7 light 28 light, 57 → 69 65.9 ‘It 28 It 38 → 69 65.16 side, where 28 side,—where 54

65.16 Gentility 28 gentility 38 → 69 65.27 brief, 28 brief 40 → 69 65.29 how, too, 28 how too, 47 → 69 65.34 felt, too, 28 felt too, 47 → 69 65.39 ulterius 28 ulteriùs 54 65.39 nequit.— 28 nequit. 57 → 69 65.39 Swift’s 28 Swift’s 47 → 69 66.4 them, 28 them 38 → 69 66.4 for ever. 28 forever. 40 → 69 66.20 softly, 28 softly 69 66.27 affection, 28 affection 47 → 69 66.30 individual, 28 individual 40 → 69 66.33 persuasion 28 persuasion, 38 → 69 66.34 head, 28 head 40 → 69 66.35 not really believe 28 not believe 40 → 69 67.1 society 28 society, 57 → 69 67.2 it, 28 it 40 → 69 67.5 affinity, 28 affinity; 38 67.9 inward, 28 inward 38 → 69 67.14 question, 28 question 40 → 69 67.24 heat 28 heat, 38 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

67.26 farther, 28 further, 38 54 67.27 that 28 that, 47 → 69 67.32 nay, 28 nay 40 → 69 67.37 Shakspeare, 28 Shakspeare; 38 → 69 68.1 thorns? 28 thorns; 40 → 69 68.1 fence, 28 fence 47 → 69 68.3 country?’ 28 country’? 69 68.7 adequate 28 adequate, 69 68.7 general: 28 general; 47 → 69 68.9 and 28 and, 38 → 69 68.12 strengthened. The 28 strengthened, the 33Y 38 → 69 68.13 melted, 28 melted 47 → 69 68.18 But, 28 But 40 → 69 68.24 tuneless, 28 tuneless 47 → 69 68.25 ¶Still 28 ¶Still, 47 → 69 68.26 more, 28 more 69 68.27 kindness, 28 kindness 47 → 69 68.27 shows 28 shews 47 54 68.27 shown 28 shewn 47 54 68.28 reviling, 28 revilings, 69 68.29 poison-chalice, 28 poison-chalice 47 → 69

705

68.33 dungeons, 28 dungeons; 40 → 69 68.34 madhouse, 28 mad-house, 38 madhouse; 40 → 69 68.37 right therefore to 28 right to 40 → 69 69.3 ¶Where then 28 ¶Where, then, 69 69.4 misfortunes, 28 misfortunes 47 → 69 69.5 wrecked, 28 wrecked 40 → 69 69.10 nay, 28 nay 69 69.18 Self-denial, 28 Self-denial 40 → 69 69.24 wholly; 28 wholly, 69 69.25 any thing, 28 anything, 38 → 69 69.26 hotblooded, 28 hot-/blooded, 38 69 hot-blooded, 40 → 57 69.26 verse-monger, 28 Verse-monger, 40 → 69 69.28 scepticism, 28 skepticism, 38 69.28 selfishness, 28 selfishness 47 → 69 69.31 age, 28 age 40 69.32 repel or resist; 28 cast aside, or rightly subordinate; 40 → 69 69.35 have lost 28 lose 40 → 69 69.35 them here. 28 them. 40 → 69 69.37 well, 28 well 38 → 69 70.7 drudgery, 28 drudgery 47 → 69

706 70.10

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

Understanding, 28 Understanding 47 → 69 70.11 ease, 28 ease 47 → 69 70.12 poor 28 poor, 47 → 69 70.14 soldier, 28 soldier 47 → 69 70.18 what then 28 what, then, 69 70.20 single 28 single, 69 70.22 Enjoyment 28 enjoyment 38 → 69 70.22 high 28 high, 38 → 69 70.23 Wisdom 28 Wisdom, 69 70.24 cause, 28 cause 69 70.24 shrunk 28 shrank 40 → 69 70.31 subordinated, 28 subordinated 47 → 69 70.36 likewise, 28 likewise 38 → 69 70.36 Burns again 28 Burns, again, 69 71.7 wish—like 28 wish; like 38 → 69 71.8 heart—could 28 heart; could 38 → 69 71.14 it 28 it 40 → 69 71.15 nature, 28 nature 47 → 69 71.17 for ever 28 forever 54, 69 71.19 ether, 28 æther, 40 54 71.20 Poverty, 28 poverty, 40 → 69

71.20 neglect, 28 neglect 47 → 69 71.25 poverty, 28 poverty 47 → 69 71.26 season, 28 season 47 → 69 71.31 sweeter, 28 sweeter 38 → 69 71.36 banquets, 28 banquets 47 → 69 71.38 voices, and 28 voices; 40 → 69 72.2 To-morrow 28 Tomorrow 57 → 69 72.5 a muck 28 amuck 40 → 69 72.9 perverseness: 28 perverseness; 57 → 69 72.12 Nay, 28 Nay 69 72.20 might like him 28 might, like him, 47 → 69 72.26 nay, 28 nay 69 72.28 now—we 28 now,—we 38 → 57 72.29 which, erelong, 28 which erelong 40 → 57 which ere long 69 72.31 Truth: 28 Truth; 47 → 69 72.35 Unconverted. Yet 28 Unconverted; yet 40 → 69 72.36 fellowship 28 fellowship, 38 → 57 73.4 history—twice 28 history,—twice 38 → 69 73.9 ‘He 28 ‘He, 38 → 57 73.9 poems, 28 poems 69 73.11 are for 28 are fit for 40 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

73.12 ballad-/monger; 28 ballad-monger; 38 balladmonger; 40 → 69 73.12 be-sing 28 besing 40 → 69 73.13 him—if, 28 him,—if, 38 him. If, 40 → 69 73.16 great, 28 great 47 → 69 73.26 lands: 28 lands; 47 → 69 73.7 appetites, 28 appetites 47 → 69 73.31 nay, 28 nay 40 → 69 73.38 is, 28 is 40 → 69 73.38 not, 28 not 40 → 69 74.3 nay, 28 nay 40 → 69 74.5 measured; 28 measured: 38 → 69 74.5 ginhorse 28 ginhorse, 38 → 69 74.6 them. 28 them! 40 → 69 74.7 blind 28 blind, 38 → 69 74.9 damaged; and the 28 damaged; the 40 → 69 74.9 is therefore 28 is 40 → 69 74.10 all-powerful; 28 all-powerful: 40 → 69 74.10 blame-worthy, 28 blame-/worthy, 40 69 blameworthy, 47 → 57

707

74.13 admiration, 28 admiration 47 → 69 74.18 For 28 for 40 → 69 74.19 earth 28 earth, 38 → 69 “Voltaire” [29, 38, 40, 47, 57, 69] 75.0 Voltaire. 29 VOLTAIRE. 38 → 69 4 75.1 Voltaire, 29 Voltaire 69 75.1 Longchamp 29 Longchamp 38 → 69 75.1 Wagnière, 29 Wagnière, 38 → 69 75.2 Écrits 29 Ecrits 47 → 69 75.3 Voltaire 29 Voltaire. 38 → 69 75.4 works, 29 Works, 47 → 69 75.5 pieces 29 Pieces 47 → 69 75.5 &c., 29 &c. 47 69 &c 57 75.5 Voltaire). 29 Voltaire.) 38 → 69 75.6 Tomes. 27 tomes. 47 → 69 75.8 chuse 29 choose 38 → 69 75.11 nay 29 nay, 38 → 40 75.11 recognized 29 recognised 38 → 69 75.12 enterprises, 29 enterprizes, 40

1838 adds “[Foreign Review, 1829.]” under the title; 1840 and all subsequent editions change this to “[1829.]”. 1838 and subsequent editions shift the bibliographic information from the heading to a footnote. 1840 and following insert “Foreign Review, No. 6.—” at the beginning of the footnote. 4

708

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

75.13 money-changer 29 money-changer, 38 → 47 75.16 limited 29 limited, 38 75.19 rush-/light 29 rushlight 38 → 69 75.19 which 29 which, 38 → 69 75.20 besmoked, 29 besmoked 47 → 69 75.21 and, here 29 and here, 38 and here 40 → 69 75.24 consider, 29 consider 40 → 69 76.10 well-spring 29 wellspring 40 → 69 76.16 world’s-river? 29 world-river? 40 → 69 76.16 goings forth 29 goings-forth 57 → 69 76.14 not: 29 not; 40 → 69 76.24 age, 29 age 38 → 69 76.30 civilized 29 civilised 47 → 69 76.31 Syria’! 29 Syria!’ 40 Syria.’ 47 → 69 76.32 instance, 29 instance: 40 → 69 76.34 sad, 29 sad 47 → 69 77.2 confluunt, 29 confluunt 47 → 69 77.2 celebranturque. 29 celebrant urque. 38 77.5 call 29 called 69 77.11 deeper 29 deeper, 38 → 69

77.20 ‘chain,’ 29 ‘chain’ 69 77.21 superficies 29 superfices 40 77.25 generation, 29 generation 69 77.26 conquerors 29 Conquerors 40 → 69 77.26 revolutionists 29 Revolutionists 40 → 69 77.27 persons, 29 persons 40 → 69 77.28 long run 29 long-run 47 → 69 77.36 ninepins 29 nine-/pins 47 nine-pins 57 → 69 77.39 Annal. 29 Annal. 47 → 69 78.2 whirlwind 29 whirlwind’ 38 → 40 whirlwind,’ 47 → 69 78.2 for ever; 29 forever; 47 → 69 78.6 Pennyless 29 Penniless 40 → 69 78.6 Buonaparte, 29 Bonaparte, 38 → 69 78.7 ‘moveable 29 ‘movable 38 → 69 78.7 Truly, 29 ¶Truly 69 78.9 shroud up 29 shroud-up 57 → 69 78.10 ‘canvas 29 ‘canvass 38 47 → 57 78.11 to-morrow 29 tomorrow 47 → 69 78.17 baggage-waggons, 29 baggage-wagons, 38 57 → 69 78.25 Institute. ¶We 29 Institute. [extra leading

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

between paragraphs] ¶We 40 → 69 78.27 volumes 29 Volumes 40 → 69 78.31 said, 29 said 40 → 69 78.34 is, perhaps, 29 is perhaps, 40 → 69 79.5 note-worthy 29 noteworthy 47 → 69 79.11 shows 29 shews 47 79.19 nay, 29 nay 40 → 69 79.26 read 29 read, 38 → 69 79.30 flood 29 Flood 40 → 69 79.32 documents, 29 documents 47 → 69 79.34 secretaries: 29 Secretaries: 40 → 69 79.35 two 29 Two 40 → 69 79.35 octavos 29 Octavos 40 → 69 79.37 eavesdropping, 29 eaves-/dropping, 57 eaves-dropping, 69 80.4 peculiar 29 pecular 40 80.5 anecdotic, 29 anecdotic 69 80.6 further 29 farther 40 → 69 80.6 circulation, 29 circulation 69 80.16 expostulations, 29 expostulations 47 → 69 80.19 Voltaire†; 29 Voltaire;† 38 → 69 80.20 nay, 29 nay 69

80.20

709

writings cited, 29 writings, cited 40 → 47 writings cited 57 → 69 80.27 nature 29 Nature 40 → 69 80.27 oneself 29 one’s self 38 80.29 individuality, 29 individuality 47 → 69 80.31 habitudes, 29 habitudes 47 → 69 80.32 nay, 29 nay 69 80.34 work, 29 work 69 80.36 language, 29 language 47 → 69 80.39 character,) 29 character) 38 → 69 81.4 say,—would 29 say: Would 40 → 69 81.7 profitable, 29 profitable 69 81.8 Surely, 29 Surely 69 81.10 import: 29 import; 57 → 69 81.18 further 29 farther 40 → 69 81.22 continue, 29 continue 69 81.22 time, 29 time 69 81.23 again 29 again, 47 → 69 81.34 which, 29 which 69 81.34 others, 29 others 69 81.34 inquiry, 29 inquiry 69 81.35 Tolerance 29 tolerance 57 → 69

710

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

81.36 duty, 29 duty 69 82.6 understood, 29 understood 69 82.11 mind, 29 mind 69 82.12 nay, perhaps, 29 nay perhaps 40 → 69 82.13 himself; 29 himself: 40 → 69 82.18 dog, 29 dog 69 82.18 muzzled, 29 muzzled 40 → 69 82.19 and, consequently, 29 and consequently 40 → 69 82.23 him, 29 him; 47 → 69 82.26 defended, 29 defended; 38 → 69 82.27 Deists 29 Deists, 38 → 40 82.28 Millennarians, 29 Millenarians, 38 → 40 82.28 Bishops, 29 Bishops 47 → 69 82.32 vision. It 29 vision. [extra leading between paragraphs] ¶It 69 82.33 life, 29 life 69 83.3 coronation titles 29 coronation-titles 47 → 69 83.6* Runnymede; 29 Runnymead; 40 → 57 83.9 war, 29 War, 40 → 69 83.13 history 29 history, 38 → 69 83.19 shows 29 shews 47 83.20 which, 29 which 57 → 69

83.20 case, 29 case 57 → 69 83.22 times, 29 times 47 → 69 83.32 lowest, 29 lowest 47 → 69 83.34 ‘We 29 “We 40 → 69 83.34 Poets.’ 29 Poets.” 40 → 69 83.34 after life, 29 after-life 69 84.1 pen, 29 pen; 40 → 69 84.5 philosophic 29 philosophic, 38 → 40 84.5 pre-eminence. 29 prëeminence. 38 57 → 69 84.5 Nay 29 Nay, 38 → 69 84.10 sum†. 29 sum.† 38 → 69 84.11 b[«»]siness, 29 business, 38 → 69 84.15 appropriate 29 appropiate 40 84.15 demise; by 29 demise,—by 47 → 69 84.15 applause, 29 applause; 47 → 69 84.18 presupposes, 29 presupposes 47 → 69 84.20 here: 29 here; 47 → 69 84.25 sea-monsters, 29 sea monsters, 38 → 40 84.32 keen, 29 keen 40 → 69 84.36 scent, 29 scent 47 → 69 85.2 all trace 29 all the trace 40 → 57

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

85.2

gone†. 29 gone.† 38 → 69 85.7 strong-hold; 29 strong hold; 38 stronghold; 40 → 69 85.12 low†; 29 low;† 38 → 69 85.18 characterizes 29 characterises 47 → 69 85.23 widow 29 Widow 40 → 69 85.31 fellow feeling 29 fellow-feeling 47 → 69 85.34 work, 29 Work, 40 → 69 85.37 Memnon. 29 Memnon, 38 → 69 85.38 (pp. 29 (p. 40 85.38 how 29 how, 47 → 69 86. 4 To 29 Of 47 → 69 86.9 justice: 29 justice; 47 → 69 86.9 fire-side 29 fireside 40 → 69 86.10 Loix. 29 Lois. 69 86.19 civilized 29 civilised 47 → 69 86.19 which 29 which, 38 → 69 86.24 much esteemed 29 much-esteemed 69 86.34 Nevertheless 29 Nevertheless, 38 → 69 86.37 enterprises,—enduring 29 enterprises; enduring 40 → 69 86.37 temptations, 29 temptation, 57 → 69

87.1

711

admiration 29 admiration, 38 → 69 87.3 yet 29 yet, 38 → 69 87.11 shows 29 shews 47 87.12 truth: 29 truth; 57 → 69 87.13 sound, 29 sound 57 → 69 87.14 pot,’—which 29 pot’ (which 40 → 69 87.14 and 29 but 40 → 69 87.14 begrime,—must 29 begrime), must 40 → 69 87.16 and may not always, when considering the 29 nor perhaps will it always, when the 40 → 57 nor perhaps will it always,—when the 69 87.16 Increase 29 ‘Increase 69 87.17 Metropolis, escape 29 Metropolis comes to be debated, escape 40 → 57 Metropolis’ comes to be debated again,—escape 69 87.17 Parliament. 29 Parliament as hitherto. 69 87.20 chimeras, 29 chimeras 47 → 69 87.24 laughee; 29 laughee: 40 → 69 87.25 and who 29 and now, who 40 → 69 87.27 useless; 29 useless, 38 87.28 or take 29 or to take 40 → 69 87.36 is 29 is, 47 → 69

712

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

87.38 contemned 29 contemned, 47 → 69 88.3 better, 29 better 69 88.5 of, 29 of 40 → 69 88.10 and 29 or 47 → 69 88.11 into, 29 into 40 → 69 88.13 it, 29 it 40 → 69 88.13 developements, 29 developments, 38 → 69 88.14 from 29 with 47 → 69 88.17 Seer, 29 seer, 40 → 69 88.17 Critic; 29 critic; 40 → 69 88.20 thousand-fold 29 thousandfold 40 → 69 88.28 nay, 29 nay 40 → 69 88.29 thought, 29 thought 47 → 69 88.35 tragi-comical 29 tragicomical 40 → 57 89.1 Poéshie 29 Poésie 38 89.2 that, 29 who, 40 → 69 89.8 walking, 29 walking 47 → 69 89.9 Chatelet, 29 Châtelet, 40 → 69 89.10 Philosopher, 29 Philosopher 38 → 69 89.11 last, 29 last 38 → 69 89.11 exclaiming 29 exclaiming, 40 → 69

89.11 ‘Vous 29 “Vous 40 → 69 89.12 mourir?’ 29 mourir?” 40 → 69 89.13 dependants 29 dependents 38 → 69 89.15 steadfast 29 stedfast 47 → 57 89.16 silent, 29 silent 40 → 69 89.17 World; 29 World, 38 → 69 89.20 short-coming 29 shortcoming 47 → 69 89.20 perversion 29 pervertion 69 89.25 comings on 29 comings-on 47 → 69 89.32 decrepid 29 decrepit 40 → 69 89.33 battalion, 29 battalion 57 → 69 89.35 well nigh 29 well-nigh 40 → 69 89.36 passing away from 29 passing from 40 → 69 89.37 side; 29 side, 47 → 69 90.2 no where 29 nowhere 38 → 69 90.3 every where 29 everywhere 38 → 69 90.3 self. In 29 self. ¶In 69 90.5 sizes 29 sides 38 → 69 90.7 earth, 29 earth; 40 → 69 90.10 Never, perhaps, 29 Never perhaps 40 → 69 90.13 Gracchi, 29 Gracchi 47 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

90.13 Catalines; 29 Catilines, 47 → 69 90.13 Luthers, 29 Luthers 47 → 69 90.23 nay 29 nay, 38 90.29 love, 29 love 40 → 69 90.34 hundred, 29 hundred 47 → 69 91.2 which, 29 which 69 91.6 well; 29 well: 40 → 69 91.11 half 29 half, 38 → 69 91.11 not all 29 not at all 47 → 69 91.12 nay 29 nay, 38 91.15 one, 29 one; 47 → 69 91.17 Nevertheless 29 Nevertheless, 38 → 69 91.17 deep, 29 deep 40 → 69 91.19 nay 29 nay, 38 → 69 91.23 distress, 29 distress 40 → 69 91.28 genuineness, 29 genuineness 47 → 69 91.28 can 29 Can 40 → 69 91.29 it, 29 it 69 91.29 market 29 market, 38 → 57 91.36 he, 29 he 38 → 69 91.36 degree, 29 degree 47 → 69

92.3

713

shows 29 shews 47 92.4 judgement 29 judgment 38 → 69 92.7 Fréron, 29 Fréron 57 → 69 92.14 peace: 29 peace; 40 → 69 92.16 they not 29 not they 40 → 69 92.22 a true Delphic 29 a Delphic 40 → 69 92.29 Dumèsnil, 29 Dumèsnil 47 → 69 92.37 (cavern) 29 (Cavern) 40 → 69 92.38 dark, 29 dark 47 → 69 93.4 authors 29 authors, 38 → 40 93.4 compeer 29 compear 40 → 69 93.4 disguise, 29 disguise 47 → 69 93.7 Sémiramis, 29 Sémiramis 69 93.11 bruised in. 29 bruised-in. 57 → 69 93.12 corner, 29 corner; 40 → 69 93.13 bread, 29 bread 47 → 69 93.14 gazette. 29 Gazette. 47 → 69 93.16 cause, 29 cause 69 93.18 gazette 29 Gazette 47 → 69 93.19 debate; 29 debate: 38 → 47 93.26 or 29 or, 47 → 69

714 93.31

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

any wise 29 anywise 47 → 69 93.38 power, 29 power 40 → 69 94.1 night’? 29 night?’ 47 → 57 94.2 Lost 29 Lost, 47 → 69 94.6 judgement 29 judgment 38 → 69 94.6 kind, 29 kind 47 → 69 94.10 indifferent. For 29 indifferent. ¶For 69 94.16 upon 29 before 40 → 69 94.17 like, 29 like 47 → 69 94.19 further 29 farther 40 → 69 94.19 peculiarity, 29 peculiarity 69 94.21 Disabilities’, 29 Disabilities,’ 38 → 69 94.23 Procope’s 29 Procope’s 38 → 69 94.25 nay, 29 nay 40 → 69 94.25 pole-star 29 polestar 40 → 69 94.28 but, 29 but 47 → 69 94.28 case, 29 case 47 → 69 94.33 sceptical 29 skeptical 38 95.3 bienséance. To 29 bienséance. ¶To 69 95.3 rule, also, 29 rule also, 40 → 47 rule also 57 → 69 95.12 shapes; 29 shapes: 47 → 69

95.16 has, 29 has 57 → 69 95.16 least, 29 least 57 → 69 95.13 right, 29 right 69 95.27 injustice.’—Vie de Voltaire, p. 32. 29 injustice.’† [footnote inserted] † Vie de Voltaire, p. 32. 40 injustice.’† [footnote inserted] † Vie de Voltaire, p. 32. 47 → 69 95.34 that, 29 that 40 → 69 96.1 then, 29 then 57 → 69 96.19 nay, 29 nay 47 → 69 96.20 or, perhaps, 29 or perhaps 40 → 69 96.30 est-il content? 29 est-il-content? 38 96.34 ‘âme paisible,’ 29 ‘âmepaisible,’ 40 97.2 had, 29 had 69 97.2 them, 29 them 69 97.2 success. ¶The 29 success. [extra leading between paragraphs] ¶The 69 97.5 a 29 a a 40 97.5 life 29 life, 38 → 69 97.8 this 29 his 40 → 69 97.11 meaning, thereby, 29 meaning thereby 40 → 69 97.15 copious 29 copious, 38 → 40

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

97.15 all-pervading, 29 all-pervading 47 → 69 97.20 indifference, 29 indifference 47 → 69 97.21 show 29 shew 47 97.22 degree. Without 29 degree. ¶Without 69 97.24 it, 29 it 47 → 69 97.24 him, 29 him 47 → 69 97.25 heart-rending, 29 heartrending, 40 → 57 heartrending 69 97.26 miserable, 29 miserable 40 → 69 97.28 ‘patronise 29 ‘patronize 38 → 40 97.28 though, 29 though 38 → 69 97.28 sayings as, 29 sayings, as 38 → 40 sayings as 47 → 69 97.28 pas 29 pas, 47 → 69 97.38 chaunt 29 chant 69 98.7 hard-heartedness, 29 hard-heartedness 40 → 69 98.14 long run, 29 long-run, 47 → 69 98.20 negative, as 29 negative. As 40 → 69 98.20 divisive 29 divisive, 47 → 69 98.21 nature, 29 nature; 38 → 69 98.23 afar; 29 afar: 38 → 69 98.28 Rosbach, 29 Rossbach, 69

715

98.32 been; 29 been: 40 98.33 heartburnings, 29 heart-burnings, 47 → 69 98.33 counterplottings, 29 counter-/plottings, 38 counter-plottings, 40 → 69 98.35 exploded! Yet 29 exploded! ¶Yet 69 98.36 gaiety: 29 gayety: 38 gaiety; 47 → 69 98.37 Doctor 29 Dr. 40 → 69 98.37 Akakia 29 Akakia, 38 → 69 98.37 Doctor 29 Dr. 40 → 69 99.2 this, too, 29 this too 40 → 69 99.4 malice, 29 malice 47 → 69 99.5 William, 29 William 40 → 69 99.10 King, 29 King 40 → 69 99.11 (avec 29 (avec 38 → 40 99.12 eût): 29 eût): 38 → 40 99.14 Vieille 29 Vielle 40 → 47 99.14* Prussia, and where 29 Prussia, where 40 → 69 99.15 years.’ [new line with no indent] With 29 years.’ [new line with indent] 47 → 69 99.17 himself, Voltaire 29 himself Voltaire, 40 → 57 himself Voltaire 69 99.17 while 29 while, 40 → 57

716

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

99.18 and 29 and, 38 → 69 99.20 Philosopher 29 philosopher 57 → 69 99.21 old-coquetish, 29 old-coquettish, 38 → 69 99.22 embittered 29 embittered, 38 → 40 99.23 niece, 29 Niece, 40 → 69 99.29 nay 29 nay, 38 99.32 humble, 29 humble 47 → 69 99.35 Indeed, 29 Indeed 38 → 69 100.3 judgement, 29 judgment, 38 → 69 100.3 days, 29 days 47 → 69 100.3 years, 29 years 47 → 69 100.6 Chatelet. 29 Châtelet. 40 → 69 100.10 aspect: 29 aspect; 57 → 69 100.15 gayety, 29 gaiety, 38 → 69 100.23 ill usage, 29 ill-usage, 69 100.25 postilions 29 postillions 57 → 69 100.25 gate, 29 gate 47 → 69 100.27 of night, for it is always at night; 29 of night; 40 → 69 100.28 waggon, 29 wagon, 38 57 → 69 100.29 which indeed 29 which, indeed, 38 → 69 100.29 waggons 29 wagons 38 57 → 69

100.31 bandboxes:’ 29 handboxes:’ 40 100.31 him, 29 him 69 100.32 bandboxes 29 handboxes 40 100.33 postilions 29 postillions 57 → 69 100.34 January-cold; 29 January cold; 47 → 69 100.35 hope: 29 hope; 57 → 69 100.37 hideous—but 29 hideous,—but 38 → 69 100.37 axle-tree 29 axle-/tree 38 axletree 40 → 69 101.1 bandboxes, 29 bandboxes 47 → 69 101.2 Chaos. 29 chaos. 40 → 69 101.4 half-way 29 half-/way 40 halfway 47 101.5 axle-tree 29 axletree 47 → 69 101.6 Chatelet, 29 Châtelet, 40 → 69 101.6 the 29 their 40 → 69 101.9 half suffocated 29 half-suffocated 69

101.10 (poussait des cris aigus); 29 (poussait des cris aigus); 38 (poussait des cris aigus); 40 (poussait des cris aigus); 47 → 69 101.12 postilions, 29 postillions, 57 → 69 101.12 vehicle: 29 vehicle; 47 → 69 101.15 postilion 29 postillion 57 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

101.16 leg: 29 leg; 40 → 69 101.17 ground.’—vol. ii. p. 166. 29 ground.’—Vol. ii. p. 166. 38 ground.’† [footnote inserted] † Vol. ii. p. 166. 40 → 69 101.19 Kitchener, 29 Kitchiner, 40 → 69 101.20 ground; 29 ground: 40 → 69 101.22 is it 29 it is 40 → 69 101.22 an 29 a 40 → 69 101.23 chateau, 29 château, 40 → 69 101.25 axle-tree 29 axle-/tree 40 axletree 47 → 69 101.30 perivate 29 private 38 → 69 101.35 Chatelet, 29 Châtelet, 40 → 69 102.4 lady, too, 29 lady too 40 → 69 102.6 accidental 29 incidental 38 → 69 102.9 woman? 29 woman. 38 → 69 102.9 We, ourselves, 29 We ourselves 40 → 69 102.10 towards 29 to 40 → 69 102.14 delinquencies, 29 delinquencies 57 → 69 102.15 thousand-fold 29 thousandfold 40 → 47 69 thousand-/fold 57 102.22 how 29 how, 40 → 69 102.26 Voltaire: 29 Voltaire; 40 → 69

102.26

717

de 29 De 40 102.31 aromatic-vinegar 29 aromatic vinegar 47 → 69 102.31 that 29 the 40 → 69 102.34 Chatelet 29 Châtelet 40 → 69 102.35 Chatelet, 29 Châtelet, 40 → 69 10237. cries, 29 cries 69 102.38 sorrow. 29 sorrow[«»] 57 103.8 than, 29 than 38 → 57 103.9 recognizing 29 recognising 38 → 69 103.11 exclaimed, 29 exclaimed 38 → 69 103.11 the 29 a 40 → 69 103.14 sorrow.’—Vol. ii. p. 250. 29 sorrow.’† [footnote inserted] † Vol. ii. p. 250. 40 → 69 103.24 Ces 29 Les 38 → 69 103.25 l’immortalité. [new line with indent] After 29 l’immortalité. [new line with no indent] After 40 → 69 103.27 reflecting perhaps 29 reflecting, perhaps, 38 → 69 103.34 that 29 that, 47 → 69 103.35 that 29 the 69 104.4 faultered. 29 faltered. 38 → 69 104.4 Chamouni-needles 29 Chamouni-Needles 40 → 69

718 104.5

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

Staubbach-Falls, 29 Staubbach-Falls 47 → 69 104.8 say 29 say, 38 → 69 104.9 realized 29 realised 47 → 69 104.10 deserves—that 29 deserves,—that 38 → 69 104.11 steadfastly 29 stedfastly 47 → 57 104.13 apparent, 29 apparent 47 → 69 104.13 that 29 but 40 → 69 104.15 nay 29 nay, 38 → 69 104.15 country, 29 country 47 → 69 104.17 nevertheless 29 nevertheless, 38 → 69 104.18 past; 29 passed; 40 → 47 104.24 steady, 29 steady 40 → 69 104.27 forgotten 29 forgotten, 38 → 69 104.33 For 29 For, 69 104.33 that 29 that, 38 → 69 104.33 man 29 man, 38 → 69 104.34 fellow men: 29 fellow-men: 69 104.36 appearance, 29 appearance 47 → 69 105.1 men 29 men, 38 → 69 105.1 were 29 were, 38 → 69 105.6 of. ¶It 29 of. [extra leading between paragraphs] ¶It 69

105.7

well nigh 29 wellnigh 40 → 69 105.8 character 29 character, 38 → 69 105.8 inward 29 inward, 38 → 69 105.12 he 29 he, 38 → 69 105.17 ancients 29 Ancients 40 → 69 105.21 lured 29 lures 40 → 69 105.22 ‘O 29 “O 40 → 69 105.23 you;’ 29 you;” 40 → 47 you!” 57 → 69 105.23 pleasure 29 pleasure, 38 → 40 105.23 him, is 29 him is, 47 → 69 105.25 further 29 farther 40 → 69 105.27 showiest 29 shewiest 47 105.31 princes 29 princes, 38 → 69 105.32 show 29 shew 47 105.33 show 29 shew 47 105.35 Anaxarchus, 29 Anaxarchus; 38 → 69 106.3 stupified, 29 stupefied, 57 → 69 106.9 postilion 29 postillion 57 → 69 106.10 ‘Va 29 “Va 40 → 69 106.11 Voltaire.’ 29 Voltaire.” 40 → 57 Voltaire!” 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

106.16 gentlemen,” 29 gentlemen, 40 → 69 106.16 (Mafoi, 29 (Ma foi, 38 Ma foi, 40 → 69 106.16 Messieurs,) 29 Messieurs,” 40 → 69 106.19 C’est 29 C’est, 40 → 69 106.22 pleased.’—vol. i. p. 121. 29 pleased.’—Vol. i. p. 121. 38 pleased.’† [footnote inserted] † Vol. i. p. 121. 40 → 69 106.26 service, 29 service 69 106.28 son) 29 son), 47 → 69 106.30 huddled on 29 huddled-on 69 106.33 acquaintance 29 acquaintance, 38 → 69 106.33 met 29 met, 38 → 69 106.35 politicians 29 politicians, 38 → 69 106.36 further, 29 farther, 40 → 69 107.1 off, 29 off 47 → 69 107.3 Hotel, 29 Hôtel, 40 → 69 107.4 me 29 me, 47 → 69 107.8 Paris.’—vol. ii. p. 353. 29 Paris.’—Vol. ii. p. 353. 38 Paris.’† [footnote inserted] † Vol. ii. p. 353. 40 → 69 107.11 minutes; 29 minutes: 40 107.11 wept, 29 wept 69 107.12 presentiments, 29 presentiments 69

719

107.13 levees, 29 levees 69 107.13 and his couchees, 29 and couchees, 38 → 69 107.15 abroad 29 abroad, 38 → 69 107.17 plaudits, 29 plaudits 57 → 69 107.19 ‘C’est 29 “C’est 40 → 69 107.19 Calas.’ 29 Calas.” 40 → 69 107.21 XV., 29 Quinze, 40 → 69 107.21 ‘Here, 29 Here, 38 “Here, 40 → 69 107.22 gentlemen,’ 29 gentlemen,” 40 → 69 107.22 ‘is 29 “is 40 → 69 107.24 all!’ 29 all!” 40 → 69 107.24 ridicule 29 ridicule, 57 → 69 107.30 the full possession 29 the possession 38 → 69 107.32 us:— 29 us: 40 → 69 107.36 figure 29 visage 40 → 69 108.1 had, 29 had 47 → 69 108.1 hand, 29 hand 47 → 69 108.4 men.’—vol. ii. p. 466. 29 men.’—Vol. ii. p. 466. 38 men.’† [footnote inserted] † Vol. ii. p. 466. 40 → 69 108.6 head—this 29 head,—this 40 → 69 108.7 XIV.—was 29 XIV.,—was 40 XIV,—was 47 → 69

720

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

108.10 sceptical 29 skeptical 38 108.12 style:— 29 style: 40 → 69 108.18 abbés, 29 abbés 47 → 69 108.18 ecclesiastics, 29 ecclesiastics 47 → 69 108.19 profession; 29 profession: 40 108.26 a going, 29 a-going, 40 → 69 108.30 visiter. 29 visitor. 47 → 69 108.34 voilà! 29 Voilà! 38 → 47 108.35 quarter, 29 quarter 40 → 69 108.35 acclamations, 29 acclamations. 57 109.4 Chartres, 29 Chartres,† [footnote inserted] † Afterwards Egalité. 40 → 69 109.6 showed, 29 shewed, 47 109.8 Bedchamber†, 29 Bedchamber,† 38 → 69 109.12 me 29 me, 69 109.12 then?” 29 then? 40 → 69 109.13 mourir!) 29 mourir!)” 40 mourir?)” 47 → 69 109.14 Belle-et-bonne†: 29 Belle-et-bonne:† 38 → 47 Belle-et-Bonne:† 57 → 69 109.20 show 29 shew 47 109.22 (green-room) 29 (green-/room) 40 (greenroom) 47 → 69 109.24 hands: 29

hands[«»] 57 hands; 69 109.28 follows:— 29 follows: 40 → 69 109.34 Non, 29 Non 38 109.35 l’immortalité; 29 l’immortalité! 57 → 69 110.4 donne†! 29 donne!† 38 → 69 110.6 ¶‘This 29 [new line with no indent] This 47 → 69 110.12 show 29 shew 47 110.13 so 29 as 38 → 69 110.16 hurly-burly,—a 29 hurlyburly; a 40 → 69 110.18 cried to 29 cried out to 69 110.19 unhappily 29 unhappily, 38 → 69 110.21 house. . . . 29 house. . . . . . 57 → 69 110.23 gone.’—vol. ii. 29 gone.’—Vol. ii. 38 gone.’ 40 → 69 110.26 March, 29 March 40 → 69 110.26 (1778,) 29 (1778), 40 → 69 110.27 and on 29 and that on 40 → 69 110.31 cruellest 29 cruelest 69 110.34 him, 29 him; 40 → 69 111.1 said, 29 said: 40 → 57 111.1 Adieu, 29 “Adieu, 40 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

111.1

meurs 29 meurs, 38 → 69 111.1 (Adieu, 29 Adieu, 40 → 69 111.1 gone). 29 gone.) 38 gone.” 40 → 69 111.2 Voltaire†.’ 29 Voltaire.’† 38 → 69 111.3 [extra leading between paragraphs] ¶We 29 [page break between paragraphs] ¶We 38 47 ¶We 40 57 111.3 capacity, 29 capacity; 40 → 69 111.7 On 29 ‘On 40 111.9 clergy 29 clergy, 38 → 69 111.13 fellow mortal, 29 fellow-mortal, 69 111.14 vapours 29 vapors 38 111.16 further 29 farther 40 → 69 111.16 remorse, 29 remorse 47 → 69 111.17 any wise 29 anywise 47 → 69 111.18 He, 29 He 40 → 69 111.21 logic. 29 logic[«»] 38 111.21 suffering, 29 suffering 69 111.24 it:— 29 it: 40 → 69 111.32 ‘Let 29 “Let 38 → 69 111.32 peace!’ 29 peace!” 38 29 peace 40 → 69

111.33

721

(Laissez-moi 29 (Laissez-moi 40 → 69 111.33 paix!) 29 paix)!” 40 → 69 111.34 sick nurse 29 sicknurse 40 → 69 111.35 Guatier.’—vol. 29 Guatier.’—Vol. 38 → 47 Guatier.’ Vol. 57 → 69 112.3 respects: their 29 respects,—their 57 → 69 112.9 nay, 29 nay 40 → 69 112.15 If 29 If, 40 → 69 112.21 unity—a 29 unity,—a 38 → 69 112.24 Here, too, 29 Here too 40 → 69 112.25 recognize; 29 recognise; 38 → 69 112.27 here, too, 29 here too 40 → 69 112.30 which, 29 which 40 → 69 112.31 for ever 29 forever 40 → 69 113.1 free-/thinker, 29 free-thinker, 38 freethinker, 47 → 69 113.2 Singer, 29 Singer 38 → 69 113.2 Haranguer; 29 Haranguer: 38 → 69 113.8 gigantic, 29 gigantic 47 → 69 113.9 liveliness, 29 liveliness 40 → 69 113.9 elegance; 29 elegance, 40 → 69 113.9 wit, 29 wit 40 → 69

722

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

113.10 wisdom 29 wisdom, 40 → 69 113.11 loftiness, 29 loftiness 47 → 69 113.15 long continued 29 long-continued 47 → 69 113.18 superficial, 29 superficial 40 → 69 113.21 nay 29 nay, 38 113.24 England,—a 29 England;—a 40 → 69 113.26 Nay, 29 Nay 47 → 69 113.29 civilization 29 civilisation 47 → 69 113.32 sources—from 29 sources,—from 38 → 69 113.38 show-room 29 shew-room 47 114.1 teaching: 29 teaching; 47 → 69 114.2 uses; 29 uses: 57 → 69 114.2 confusion, 29 confusion 57 → 69 114.3 instructiveness, 29 instructiveness 47 → 69 114.7 This 29 The 47 → 69 114.16 further 29 farther 40 → 69 114.23 shows 29 shews 47 114.31 strikes, 29 strikes 57 → 69 114.36 shows 29 shews 47 115.1 writing 29 writing, 38 → 69 115.2 Method, 29 Method; 40 → 69

115.3

vision—of 29 vision,—of 38 → 69 115.3 as of talent; 29 as talent; 40 → 69 115.4 Hooker 29 Hooker, 38 → 40 115.4 Shakspeare 29 Shakspeare, 38 → 40 115.9 well kept 29 well-kept 40 → 69 115.9 say 29 say, 40 → 69 115.13 polished, 29 polished 40 → 57 115.14 Tuileries; 29 Tuileries: 40 → 69 115.14 mysterious, 29 mysterious 40 → 69 115.14 Valhalla, 29 Valhalla 47 → 69 115.16 purposes, 29 purposes 47 → 69 115.23 Herein 29 Herein, 40 → 69 115.23 us 29 us, 40 → 69 115.24 Those 29 These 40 → 69 115.30 Nay 29 Nay, 38 115.37 observances,—nay 29 observances,—nay, 38 observances, nay 40 → 69 115.38 harmonies 29 harmonies, 40 → 69 116.6 imagination, 29 imagination 57 → 69 116.9 business, 29 business; 40 → 69 116.12 abundance, 29 abundance 40 → 69 116.16 spoke, 29 spoke 40 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

116.17 acuteness, 29 acuteness 40 → 69 116.19 that indeed 29 that, indeed, 38 → 69 116.21 gayety 29 gaiety 40 → 69 116.26 best, 29 best 47 → 69 116.28 cannot 29 cannot, 47 → 69 116.29 grounds 29 grounds, 47 → 69 116.34 Indeed, 29 Indeed 40 → 69 116.35 observed 29 observed, 47 → 69 116.35 French, 29 French 47 → 69 116.37 well nigh 29 wellnigh 40 → 69 117.2 shown 29 shewn 47 117.3 business-like 29 busi-/siness-like 38 117.3 well calculated 29 well-calculated 40 117.7 cameleon 29 chameleon 40 → 69 117.9 adjustments, 29 adjustments 47 → 69 117.12 recognising 29 recognizing 40 117.13 of poetical 29 of a poetical 40 → 69 117.16 than 29 from 40 → 69 117.31 rules,’ 29 rules;’ 40 → 69 118.1 head? 29 head; 40 → 69

723

118.7

Gertrude 29 Gertrude, 38 118.7 and 29 and 40 → 69 118.13 shows: 29 shews; 47 shows; 57 → 69 118.14 nay, 29 nay 40 → 69 118.21 detail.’—Œuvres, t. xlvii. p. 300. 29 detail.’* [footnote inserted] * Œuvres, t. xlvii. p. 300. 40 → 69 118.23 Here truly 29 Here, truly, 38 → 69 118.30 d’aise) 29 d’aise) 38 118.36 platitudes).’— 29 platitudes).’† 40 5 platitudes).’† 47 → 69 118.39 Allemande. 29 Allemande; 57 → 69 118.39 compilation: 29 compilation, 57 → 69 119.3 ‘Goût,’ 29 ‘Goût’ 47 → 69 119.4 appalling, 29 appalling 40 → 69 119.5 witchcraft, 29 witchcraft 47 69 wichcraft 57 119.6 jugglery; and 29 jugglery; which nevertheless swell up round him, irrepressible, higher, ever higher; and 40 → 69 119.7 ‘Dégoûtantes 29 ‘dégoûtantes 40 → 69 119.12 tune, 29 tune 47 → 69

5 1840 shifts the citation “De la Littérature Allemande. Berlin, 1780,” which in 1829 appeared in the body of the text, to the footnote that followed it. This change is adopted in the present edition.

724

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

119.13 shown 29 shewn 47 119.24 now 29 now, 38 → 69 119.26 Literature 29 literature 38 → 69 119.29 enterprise: 29 enterprise; 40 → 69 119.29 however 29 however, 38 → 69 119.29 made; 29 made: 40 → 69 119.35 has, 29 has 69 119.36 times, 29 times 69 120.4 Historian, 29 Historian 47 → 57 120.10 As 29 As, 40 → 69 120.12 highly-accomplished 29 highly accomplished 40 → 69 120.12 Trivialist,—so 29 Trivialist; so 38 → 69 120.19 discussion: 29 discussion; 40 → 69 120.20 religion, 29 Religion, 40 → 69 120.23 sceptics 29 skeptics 38 120.24 kind: 29 kind; 40 → 69 120.25 scepticism 29 skepticism 38 120.26 scepticism, 29 skepticism, 38 120.33 Religion 29 Religion, 40 → 69 120.33 himself 29 himself, 38 → 69 120.33 measure 29 measure, 38 → 69

120.33 Religious; 29 religious; 47 → 69 120.37 superficies 29 superfices 40 120.37 of what 29 what 47 → 69 121.3 involutions 29 involutions, 38 → 69 121.3 exclusively, 29 exclusively 40 121.7 freely, 29 freely 40 → 69 121.7 fro, 29 fro 40 → 69 121.7 space; 29 space: 40 → 69 121.8 further 29 farther 40 → 69 121.18 any thing 29 anything 38 → 69 121.19 for ever. 29 forever. 40 → 69 121.19 believe, 29 believe 47 → 69 121.22 recognized 29 recognised 38 → 69 121.22 divine; 29 divine, 38 → 69 121.25 body, 29 body 47 → 69 121.29 this 29 the 40 → 69 121.35 doctrine 29 Doctrine 47 → 69 121.35 senses, godlike, 29 senses godlike 47 → 69 122.6 depths 29 depths, 38 → 69 122.8 develope 29 develop 38 → 69 122.8 manner, 29 manner 47 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

122.9

men’s 29 man’s 38 → 69 122.9 parts: 29 parts; 40 → 69 122.12 in 29 of 40 → 69 122.15 that, 29 that 47 → 69 122.16 that, 29 that 47 → 69 122.25 sight, 29 sight 69 122.34 well nigh 29 wellnigh 40 → 69 123.3 widely, 29 widely 47 → 69 123.3 if 29 if, 47 → 69 123.9 one, 29 one; 40 → 69 123.11 life-time 29 life-/time 40 lifetime 47 → 69 123.11 un-built 29 unbuilt 47 → 69 123.12 deficiencies, 29 deficiencies 47 → 69 123.12 us, 29 us 40 → 69 123.19 nature: 29 nature; 47 → 69 123.32 age 29 age, 69 123.34 depravity; 29 depravity, 38 → 69 123.36 There, too, 29 There too 40 → 69 124.3 social system, 29 Social System, 40 → 69 124.6 into a caput-mortuum; 29 into caput-mortuum; 47 → 69

124.9

725

carcase, 29 carcass, 38 → 69 124.10 those 29 these 40 → 69 124.11 world’s-spectacle 29 world-spectacle 40 → 69 124.12 Napoleon’s 29 Napoleons’s 38 124.15 causes, 29 causes 40 → 69 124.16 common-wealth 29 commonwealth 38 47 → 69 common-/wealth 40 124.19 ages, 29 ages 47 → 69 124.26 vigour 29 vigor 38 124.28 God, 29 God 47 → 69 124.35 merely 29 mere 47 → 69 124.36 pleasant, 29 pleasant 47 → 69 125.2 cohere: 29 cohere; 40 → 69 125.2 infinitely expansive, 29 infinitely-expansive, 40 → 69 125.3 hemmed in 29 hemmed-in 57 → 69 125.9 be 29 be, 47 → 69 125.11 world, 29 world 69 125.13 remark also 29 remark, also, 38 → 40 remark also, 47 → 69 125.23 civilization 29 civilisation 47 → 69 125.25 say 29 say, 57 → 69 125.25 clearly, 29 clearly 47 → 69

726

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

125.26 enough, 29 enough 40 → 69 125.29 never 29 never, 40 → 69 125.29 era 29 era, 40 → 69 125.33 us, 29 us; 40 → 69 125.34 ask what 29 ask, What 40 → 69 126.1 basis; 29 basis: 40 → 69 126.5 thousand thousand 29 thousand-thousand 47 → 69 126.5 some such celestial 29 some celestial 40 → 69 126.8 ‘Enlighten Self-interest!’ 29 “Enlighten Self-interest!” 40 → 69 126.8 Philosophe, 29 Philosophe; 47 → 69 126.8 ‘Do 29 “Do 40 “do 47 → 69 126.8 it!’ 29 it!” 40 → 69 126.11 world, 29 world 57 → 69 126.14 horn-lantern, 29 horn lantern, 40 126.15 However 29 However, 38 → 69 126.16 was 29 was, 47 → 69 126.21 XV., 29 XV. 69 126.23 was 29 was, 40 → 69 126.27 Plough, 29 Plough 47 → 69 126.28 Chivalry, 29 Chivalry 47 → 69

126.28 Christianity; 29 Christianity, 47 → 69 126.29 nay, 29 nay 47 → 69 126.29 nothing; 29 nothing: 40 → 69 126.31 respects, 29 respects 47 → 69 126.34 trade; 29 trade: 38 → 69 127.1 virtues, 29 virtue, 47 → 57 virtue 69 127.2 scepticism, 29 skepticism, 38 scepticism 47 → 69 127.3 blameable, 29 blamable, 38 → 69 127.5 effect, 29 effect; 40 → 69 127.5 firebrands 29 firebrands, 40 → 69 127.9 well nigh 29 wellnigh 40 → 69 127.10 us 29 us, 47 → 69 127.14 and, 29 and 40 → 69 127.23 Forms 29 forms 40 → 69 127.26 faith 29 Faith 40 → 69 127.27 Bible; 29 Bible, 47 → 69 127.28 Nay 29 Nay, 38 → 40 127.33 properly, 29 properly 40 → 69 127.33 real, 29 real 40 → 69 128.2 who 29 who, 47 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

128.2

sake 29 sake, 47 → 69 128.3 but, 29 but 47 → 69 128.7 Holy; 29 Holy: 38 → 40 128.8 occurrences, 29 occurrences 47 → 69 128.10 modernize 29 modernise 47 → 69 128.16 while, 29 while 69 128.18 modernised, 29 modernized, 38 → 40 128.22 crystallisations 29 crystallizations 38 → 40 128.26 closet-logic. 29 Closet-Logic. 40 → 69 128.32 recognized 29 recognised 38 → 69 128.35 Spectre-dynasty 29 Spectre-dynasty, 38 → 69 128.35 universal, 29 universal 47 → 69 128.39 Novalis Schriften, 29 Novalis, Schriften, 47 Novalis Schriften 57 Novalis Schriften, 69 128.39 i., 29 i. 47 → 69 129.1 speculation 29 speculation, 47 → 69 129.6 animosity, 29 animosity 47 → 69 129.6 all, 29 all 38 → 69 129.8 anger, 29 angry, 40 → 69

727

129.8

that 29 but 40 → 69 129.13 this one little 29 this little 47 → 69 129.13 Superstition. 29 Superstition! 40 → 69 129.15 racks 29 racks, 38 → 69 129.16 return. He 29 return. It was a most weighty service. Does not the cry of “No Popery,” and some vague terror or shamterror of ‘Smithfield fires,’ still act on certain minds in these very days? He 40 → 69 129.19 fires 29 fires, 40 → 69 129.20 thumbscrews 29 thumb-/screws 40 thumb-screws 47 → 69 129.23 decades 29 decades, 38 → 69 129.27 reappear. 29 re-appear. 38 → 57 129.31 truth, 29 Truth, 40 → 69 “Biography” [32, 38, 40, 47, 57, 69] 131.1 BIOGRAPHY. 32 BIOGRAPHY. 39 → 69 6 131.3 man;’ 32 man’; 39 131.5 loath. 32 loth. 57 131.7 goings forth, 32 goings-forth, 57 → 69 131.17 therefore, 32 moreover, 39 → 69

6 1838 adds “[Fraser’s Magazine, 1832.]” under the title; 1840 and all subsequent editions change this to “[1832.]”. 1840 and subsequent editions add to the beginning of the footnote containing the bibliographic information: “Fraser’s Magazine, No. 27 ( for April).”

728

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

131.19 Free-will 32 Freewill 40 → 69 131.22 The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: including a Tour to the Hebrides: 32 The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL D.: including a Tour to the Hebrides: 40 The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL D.; including a Tour to the Hebrides: 47  →  57 The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.; including a Tour to the Hebrides. 69 131.23 Notes: By 32 Notes, by 69 131.24 LL.D., 32 LL D., 40 → 57 132.7 each; 32 each: 39 → 69 132.8 men 32 men, 47 → 69 132.9 us: 32 us; 47 → 69 132.15 Egotism, 32 Egoism, 47 → 69 132.16 such like; 32 suchlike; 69 132.20 Art, too, 32 Art too, 40 → 69 132.21 shew, 32 show, 39 57 → 69 132.23 Art 32 Art, 47 → 69 132.24 Art, 32 Art 69 132.31 Perhaps, 32 Perhaps 47 → 69 132.34 canvass, 32 canvas, 57 → 69 132.36 every where 32 everywhere 39 → 69

132.37

every where 32 everywhere 39 → 69 133.2 egg-shell 32 egg-shell, 39 → 69 133.3 for ever; 32 forever; 40 → 69 133.4 some 32 soms 40 133.4 star-/gazer 32 star-gazer 39 stargazer 47 → 57 133.5 Almanacs, 32 Almanacs; 47 → 69 133.5 thick-quilted 32 thick[«»]quilted 39 133.5 watchman 32 watchman, 39 → 69 133.13 biographic? 32 Biographic? 40 → 69 133.18 must 32 has to 47 → 69 133.19 solemnity enough, 32 such solemnity, 69 133.29 thus 32 thus, 39 → 69 133.29 Millennium 32 Millennium, 57 133.32 anticipation: alas! 32 anticipations: alas, 40 → 69 134.5 Prose, 32 Prose 69 134.13 world, 32 world 69 134.16 him? 32 him! 47 134.17 metropolis, 32 Metropolis, 40 → 69 134.18 individual, 32 individual 40 → 69 134.23 tantalizing 32 tantalising 47 → 69 134.27 for ever 32 forever 40 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

134.38

canst, as 32 canst, even as 40 → 69 135.5 Springwürzel: 32 Springwürzel; 40 → 57 Springwurzeln; 69 135.7 Springwürzel 32 Springwurzeln 69 135.8 locks up 32 locks-up 69 135.11 perusal: [extra leading between paragraphs] ¶‘The 32 perusal: ¶‘The 40 → 697 135.13 Reality, 32 Reality 47 → 69 135.26 must 32 has to 47 → 69 135.36 “Machinery;” 32 “Machinery:” 40 → 69 135.37 sweep 32 Sweep 40 → 57 136.1 Neither, for us, 32 Neither for us 39 → 69 136.2 way: 32 way; 40 → 69 136.7 kept up 32 kept-up 69 136.14 masking,—for 32 masking; for 40 → 69 136.18 comparison?—Frosty, 32 comparison? Frosty, 40 → 69 136.19 at best, 32 at the best, 47 → 69 136.22 “sacred,” 32 “sacred” 69 136.34 above-mentioned, 32 above mentioned, 69 137.2 now 32 now, 40 → 69 137.9 when, 32 when 47 → 69 7

729

137.11 prophetic, 32 prophetic 69 137.15 Soul, 32 Soul 47 → 69 137.21 Poet, 32 poet, 39 138.1 him, 32 him 40 → 47 138.5 Nay 32 Nay, 39 → 69 138.10 issue,—and 32 issue;—and 40 → 69 138.11 ‘Revelation’ 32 ‘Revelation,’ 40 → 69 138.19 Clarendon, 32 Clarendon,† [footnote inserted] † History of the Rebellion, iii. 625. 47 → 57 Clarendon,† [footnote inserted] † History of the Rebellion, iii. 625. 69 138.21 insignificant-looking 32 insignificant looking 39 138.25 off, 32 off 40 → 69 138.27 whereof 32 whereof, 69 138.27 Catholic 32 Catholic, 69 138.28 knocked up 32 knocked-up 69 138.30 butter-milk,’ 32 butter-/milk,’ 39 buttermilk,’ 40 → 69 138.31 ‘he 32 “he 40 → 69 138.32 had:’ 32 had:” 40 → 69 138.36 more.’† [footnote] † History of the Rebellion, iii. 625. 32 more’.† [footnote] † His-

In 1832 and 1838 the extract is printed in smaller type.

730

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

tory of the Rebellion, iii. 625. 40 more.’ [footnote deleted] 47 → 69 138.36 enough 32 enough, 40 → 69 138.37 This then 32 This, then, 69 139.1 butter-milk 32 buttermilk 40 → 69 139.1 field-labour; 32 field-labour: 40 → 69 139.2 hob-nailed 32 hobnailed 40 → 69 139.5 father;—toiled 32 father; toiled 40 → 69 139.6 him; 32 him: 39 → 57 139.13 for ever. 32 forever. 40 → 69 139.14 indelible, 32 indelible 69 139.14 bright, 32 bright 69 139.20 incident (if 32 incident, if 40 → 69 139.20 real, 32 real 40 → 69 139.20 presented) 32 presented, 40 → 69 139.25 heavy unmanageable 32 heavy and unmanageable 40 → 69 139.26 ethereal 32 etherial 39 139.26 God-given 32 god-given 40 → 69 139.27 shuffled off 32 shuffled-off 57 → 69 139.32 to-night, 32 tonight, 57 → 69 140.1 utterly: 32 utterly; 40 → 69

140.2

besmutched; 32 besmutched, 47 → 69 140.2 generations, 32 generations 39 → 69 140.5 ‘No, 32 “No, 40 → 69 140.5 do;’ 32 do;” 40 → 69 140.27 such! 32 such. 69 140.27 has it 32 it has 47 → 69 140.31 uttering forth. 32 uttering-forth. 57 → 69 141.1 hallucination, 32 hallucination 57 → 69 141.11 Bookbinders, 32 Book-/binders, 40 57 Book-binders, 47 69 141.13 cries: 32 cries, 40 → 69 141.17 women, 32 women 47 → 69 141.21 shut up 32 shut-up 57 → 69 141.25 for ever 32 forever 40 → 69 141.30 any thing; 32 anything; 39 → 69 141.31 any thing, 32 anything, 39 → 69 142.2 Selbourne? 32 Selborne? 39 → 69 142.5 Selbourne, 32 Selborne, 39 → 69 142.15 us, 32 us 39 → 69 142.17 magic-rod 32 magic rod 39 → 69 142.22 that 32 who 40 → 69 142.23 reward. [extra leading between paragraphs] 32

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

reward. [page break between paragraphs] 40 reward. 47 → 69 142.25 ¶But, 32 ¶But 39 → 69 142.26 Springwürzel, 32 Springwurzeln, 69 142.29 genuinely-good 32 genuinely good 39 → 69 142.30 that, 32 that 39 → 69 142.35 civilised 32 civilized 39 → 40 143.1 Pecks,—the 32 Pecks; the 40 → 69 143.4 greater 32 great 57 → 69 143.7 (shewing 32 (showing 39 57 → 69 143.10 Let 32 let 47 → 69 143.10 April-fool-day 32 April-foolday 40 → 57 April-fool Day 69 143.14 Johnson, 32 Johnson 47 → 69 143.14 Johnson, 32 Johnson 47 → 69 143.14 Johnson, 32 Johnson 47 69 57 “Boswell’s Life of Johnson” [32, 39, 40, 47, 57, 69] 145.0 boswell’s life of johnson.† 32 BOSWELL’S LIFE OF JOHNSON.† 39 → 698 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 539

731

145.11 be, 32 be 39 145.18 chanting 32 chaunting 47 → 57 145.18 Io Pæans; 32 Io pæans; 39 Io-pæans; 40 → 69 145.19 thunder, 32 thunder 69 145.19 shrew-mouse 32 shrew-/mouse 40 shrewmouse 47 → 69 145.22 The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: 32 The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.; 47 57 The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.; 53 69 145.22 including a Tour to the Hebrides: 32 including a Tour of the Hebrides: 53 including a Tour of the Hebrides. 69 145.22 By James Boswell, Esq.—A new Edition, with numerous Additions and 32 By James Boswell, Esq.—A New Edition, with numerous Additions and 53 145.23 Notes: 32 Notes; 53 Notes, 69 145.23 By 32 By 53 by 69 145. 23 John Wilson Croker, 32 John Wilson Croker, 53 145.23 LL.D. 32

8 With the exception of 1853, 1840 and following insert “Fraser’s Magazine, No. 28.—” at the beginning of the footnote that follows. 9 1853 provides the bibliographic citation not in a footnote but in a note on the facing page. Apart from the variants noted below, it also introduces the citation with the phrase, “[First printed in Fraser’s Magazine, No. 28 (May 1832), as a review of the Book entitled,”. It follows the bibliographic citation with “— Reprinted here without alteration.].”

732

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

LL.D., 39 → 47 57 → 69 LL.D., 53 145.25 F.R.S. 5 vols. London, 32 F.R.S 5 vols. London, 53 146.9 and the 32 and as the 53 146.10 manners, 32 manners 47 → 69 146.11 less;’ 32 less;” 39 146.13 society 32 society, 40 → 69 146.16 admit, 32 admit 47 → 69 146.17 perseveringly, 32 perseveringly 39 → 69 146.18 us, 32 us 39 146.22 died, 32 died 47 → 69 146.29 every where 32 everywhere 39 → 69 146.31 ways, 32 ways 40 → 69 146.37 cleanly, 32 cleanly 69 147.16 sayings, 32 sayings 47 → 69 147.19 Dissertation, of 32 Dissertation, or of 53 147.22 shew 32 show 39 → 40 57 → 69 147.35 depend 32 dépend 40 → 69 147.38 them; 32 them: 47 → 69 148.1 is 32 is, 47 → 69 148.1 guess’? 32 guess?’ 53 148.2 these, 32 these 39 → 69

148.2

deficiencies, 32 deficiencies 40 → 69 148.2 excuse, 32 excuse 39 148.3 regretable. 32 regrettable. 69 148.4 Indeed, 32 Indeed 69 148.15* ‘What 32 “What 40 → 69 148.15 it,’ 32 it,” 40 → 69 148.15 ‘when 32 “when 40 → 69 148.21 “a 32 ‘a 39 → 69 148.22 sides,” 32 sides,’ 39 → 69 148.22 “Is 32 ‘Is 39 → 69 148.25 age— 32 age.— 40 → 53 age?— 57 → 69 148.25 Ed.?” 32 Ed.?’ 39 → 53 Ed.’? 57 → 69 148.27 fourpence halfpenny 32 fourpence-halfpenny 47 → 69 148.28 “When 32 ‘When 39 → 69 148.30 so?” 32 so?’ 40 → 53 so’? 57 → 69 148.30 Why, 32 Why 39 → 69 148.30 short,’ 32 short,” 40 → 69 148.31 ‘should 32 “should 40 → 69 148.32 all?’ 32 all?” 40 → 69 149.1 fourpence halfpenny 32

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

fourpence-halfpenny 47 → 69 149.6 is 32 is, 47 → 69 149.18 page, 32 page 69 149.18 pages, 32 pages 39 → 69 149.20 ‘where 32 Where 40 → 69 149.20 are we know, 32 are, we know; 47 → 69 149.20 going 32 going, 47 → 69 149.20 knoweth!’ 32 knoweth! 40 → 69 149.21 ‘There 32 There 40 → 69 149.21 lip;’ 32 lip; 40 → 69 149.22 is it 32 it is 40 → 69 149.25 Brewers 32 Brewer’s 39 → 69 149.25 penny-swipes 32 penny-wipes 40 149.31 But 32 And 53 69 149.32 shortcomings; 32 shortcomings: 53 149.36 take 32 take, 53 149.37 welcome 32 welcome, 53 150.6 enough! ¶We 32 enough! [extra leading between paragraphs] ¶We 40 → 69 150.9 vituperation, 32 vituperation 69 150.19 any where 32 anywhere 39 → 69

733

150.23 qualities, 32 qualities 39 150.24 then, 32 then; 47 → 69 150.25 nay 32 nay, 39 → 69 150.38 snuff up 32 snuff-up 69 151.2 coarsely protruded 32 coarsely-protruded 69 151.2 chin: 32 chin; 39 → 69 151.5 flunky), 32 flunkey), 53 151.5 there. 32 there? 47 → 69 151.10 ‘took 32 “took 40 → 69 151.10 Paoli,’ 32 Paoli,” 40 Paoli;” 47 → 69 151.11 ‘the 32 “the 40 → 69 151.11 landlouper,’ 32 landlouper,” 40 → 69 151.12 ‘ane 32 “ane 40 → 69 151.12 academy:’ 32 academy:” 40 → 69 151.18 such 32 such 40 → 69 151.24 ‘Your 32 Your 40 → 69 151.24 Laird,’ 32 Laird, 40 → 69 151.25 ‘may 32 may 40 → 69 25.25 known.’ 32 known. 40 → 69 151.26 temper, 32 temper; 40 → 69 151.27 Heraldry; 32 Heraldry, 40 → 69

734

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

151.29 remember, 32 remember 47 → 69 151.35 dull 32 dull-snuffling 40 → 69 151.36 bench, 32 bench 47 → 69 151.36 ‘I, 32 “I, 40 → 69 151.36 King’s 32 king’s 39 151.37 Scotland.’ 32 Scotland.” 40 → 69 152.6 ‘gigmanity;’† 32 ‘gigmanity†;’ 53 152.16 laughing, 32 laughing 47 → 69 152.16 world. ¶It 32 world. It 39 → 69 152.22 time 32 time, 40 → 69 152.35 and sat 32 and have sat 53 152.37 “respectable?” 32 “respectable”? 69 152.37 gig.’—(Thurtell’s 32 gig.’ (Thurtell’s 47 → 69 152.38 Gigmen, 32 Gigmen 69 153.2 shone on 32 shone-on 69 153.5 leisure-amusement; 32 leisure amusement; 47 → 69 153.13 listen, 32 listen 39 → 69 153.19 golden, 32 golden 47 → 69 153.20 leaden, 32 leaden 47 → 69 153.25 ‘for 32 “for 40 → 69 153.26 Bear.’ 32 Bear.” 40 → 69

153.27 at, 32 at 39 → 47 57 → 69 153.34 Dross 32 dross 47 → 69 154.7 witness (or 32 witness, or 40 → 69 154.7 martyr) 32 martyr, 40 → 69 154.8 high, 32 high 40 → 69 154.8 time, 32 time 39 → 69 154.15 concealing (from 32 concealing, from 40 → 69 154.16 others) 32 others, 40 → 69 154.20 shew 32 show 39 57 → 69 154.24 Consider, 32 Consider 47 → 69 154.24 diligence, 32 diligence 40 → 69 154.24 vivacity, 32 vivacity 40 → 69 154.24 back, 32 back 40 → 69 154.26 picture painted by 32 picture by 39 → 69 154.31 epitomises 32 epitomizes 39 → 40 154.33 sunlit, 32 sunlit 47 → 69 154.33 likeness, 32 likeness 69 154.35 equalled: 32 equalled; 40 → 69 155.2 here, too, 32 here too, 40 → 69 155.3 figurativeness, 32 figurativeness 47 → 69 155.4 was (as 32 was, as 40 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

155.4

is) 32 is, 40 → 69 155.5 shewed 32 showed 39 57 → 69 155.12 perennially significant 32 perennially-significant 69 155.12 All, 32 All, 40 → 69 155.15 Reason, 32 Reason 47 → 69 155.18 epitomised 32 epitomized 39 → 40 155.18 or, 32 or 40 → 69 155.20 dream?’ 32 dream’? 69 155.20 man, 32 man[«»] 53 155.23 it; 32 it, 47 → 69 155.28 secret: 32 secret; 39 → 69 155.35 any thing 32 anything 39 → 69 156.4 clearness; 32 clearness: 39 → 40 156.4 hindrances, 32 hinderances, 40 156.8 shewed 32 showed 39 57 → 69 156.9 hollow, 32 hollow 40 → 69 156.14 is, 32 is 47 → 69 156.20 generation, 32 generation 47 → 69 156.24 natural-magic! 32 natural magic! 40 → 69 156.26 for ever 32 forever 47 → 69 156.35 Month, 32 month, 47 → 69

156.37

735

Odyssey 32 Odyssey, 47 → 69 156.38 chanted 32 chaunted 47 → 57 156.38 are 32 are, 69 157.1 fullest, 32 fullest 69 157.1 sense, 32 sense 47 → 57 157.1 wisdom, 32 wisdom 40 → 69 157.9 Deep, 32 Deep 40 → 69 157.10 these 32 those 69 157.18 Johnsoniad (such 32 Johnsoniad, such 40 → 69 157.19 imprisoned), the 32 imprisoned,—the 40 → 69 157.21 ‘infinitude,’ 32 ‘infinitude’ 69 157.22 word, 32 word 69 157.27 ‘that 32 ‘That 40 → 69 157.27 History 32 History, 47 → 69 157.27 all 32 all, 47 → 69 157.27 Reality 32 Reality, 47 → 69 157.27 interpreted 32 interpreted, 47 → 69 157.28 nay 32 nay, 39 → 53 157.34 potbellied 32 pot-bellied 47 57 → 69 pot-/bellied 53 157.35 rosy-faced, 32 rosy-faced 40 → 69 157.36 errand-boys 32 errand-boys, 39 → 69

736 157.37

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

waiter, that 32 waiter who, 47 → 69 157.38 smiles, wont 32 smiles, was wont 47 → 69 157.38 “supper 32 ‘supper 39 supper 40 → 69 158.1 gods,” 32 gods,’ 39 gods, 40 → 69 158.51 pocketted 32 pocketed 39 → 69 158.5 all, 32 all 40 → 69 158.5 very 32 every 69 158.12 Revocation 32 revocation 40 → 69 158.12 Edict 32 edict 40 → 69 158.15 were 32 are 39 → 69 158.17 lamp-lit 32 lamplit 40 → 69 158.18 Oblivion, for 32 Oblivion,—for 47 → 69 158.26 Walpole, 32 Walpole 53 158.27 Shelburn, 32 Shelburne, 39 → 69 158.29 Taxation’? 32 Taxation?’ 40 → 57 158.34 rayed out 32 rayed-out 69 158.37 specific-levity (as 32 specific levity (as 39 → 69 specific levity, as 40 → 69 158.37 horse-dung), 32 horse-dung, 40 → 69 158.38 eddyings, 32 eddyings 47 → 69 159.2 loud-roaring, 32 loud-roaring 40 → 69

159.12 as 32 as, 69 159.15 Sadler must still debate 32 Sadler have still to debate 53 159.24 ‘Robertson,’ 32 “Robertson,” 40 → 69 159.24 cry 32 say 47 → 69 159.24 ‘Robertson 32 “Robertson 40 → 69 159.24 world.’ 32 world.” 40 → 69 159.29 created 32 created, 40 → 69 159.37 interesting enough; 32 of lasting importance, and full of interest for us; 53 159.38 life: 32 life; 53 160.9 graceful, 32 graceful 47 → 69 160.11 Booby, 32 Booby 40 → 69 160.14 horseload 32 horse-/load 47 horse-load 57 → 69 160.25 Senate, 32 Senate 69 160. 25 Battle-field, 32 Battle-/field, 40 Battlefield, 47 → 69 160.25 back-ground, 32 background, 39 → 69 160.26 Workshop, 32 Workshop 47 → 69 160.26 Hearth, 32 Hearth 47 → 69 161.1 jottings down 32 jottings-down 57 → 69 161.10 Nay 32 Nay, 39 → 69 161.13 well nigh 32 wellnigh 47 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

161.20 indubitable 32 indisputable 40 → 69 161.34 cunning 32 cunning, 39 → 69 161.34 Heaven-made 32 heaven-made 40 → 69 162.5 black-lead 32 blacklead 40 → 69 162.5 harmless. 32 harmless? 39 → 69 162.8 burn; of 32 burn; but of 53 162.18 true 32 true, 47 → 69 162.18 ‘the 32 the 53 162.19 highest;’ 32 highest; 53 162.32 sum; 32 sum: 39 162.34 log-book 32 logbook 40 → 69 162.35 other; 32 other: 57 → 69 162.35 log-book 32 logbook 40 → 69 163.5 figure (itself 32 figure, itself 40 → 69 163.5 original) 32 original, 40 → 69 163.10 Tankard, would 32 Tankard, they would 53 163.12 Men 32 Men, 39 163.12 gregarious: 32 gregarious; 40 → 69 163.13 themselves: 32 themselves; 40 → 69 163.20 but: 32 butt: 39 → 69 163.20 truth, 32 truth 47 → 69

737

163.21 deed.—Thus 32 deed. Thus 40 → 69 163.24 always: 32 always; 39 → 69 163.27 water-courses, 32 watercourses, 53 163.28 be, 32 be 47 → 69 163.29 courageously, 32 courageously 47 → 69 163.30 heart, 32 heart 47 → 69 164.4 Man too 32 Man, too, 39 164.4 nay, 32 nay 69 164.8 present, 32 present 47 → 69 164.9 Individual. 32 individual. 39 → 69 164.11 ‘imitate!’ 32 imitate! 40 → 69 164.13 Wolstrop, 32 Woolsthorpe, 39 → 69 164.13 Savage, 32 Savage 47 → 69 164.14 Newton, 32 Newton 47 → 69 164.15 sense, 32 sense 47 → 69 164.16 nay, 32 nay 69 164.18 voice?’ 32 voice’? 69 164.19 reflex, 32 reflex 69 164.25 led, 32 led; 40 → 69 164.27 (in 32 in 40 → 69 164.27 kind) 32 kind 40 → 69

738 164.27

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

teach (to 32 teach, To 40 → 69 164.28 alive),—are 32 alive,—are 40 → 69 164.37 Hearsay 32 Hearsay, 40 → 69 165.1 ‘Shows 32 Shows 40 → 69 165.1 things,’ 32 things, 40 → 69 165.7 seventy and seven 32 seventy-and-seven 69 165.11 nay 32 nay, 39 → 57 165.29 man, that 32 man, so that 40 → 69 165.30 ‘Man 32 “Man 40 → 69 165.32 “Announcer 32 ‘Announcer 40 → 69 165.32 Freedom;” 32 Freedom;’ 40 → 69 165.33 “the 32 ‘the 40 → 69 165.33 Nature!”’ 32 Nature!’” 40 → 57 Nature.’” 69 165.36 paralysed, 32 paralyzed, 39 → 40 166.2 thee! ¶The 32 thee!—[extra leading between paragraphs] ¶The 53 166.14 must 32 had to 53 166.15 divine!’ 32 divine’! 69 166.23 King 32 king 40 → 69 166.23 Slave: 32 slave: 40 → 69 166.24 must 32 has to 53

166.37 Ruler; 32 Ruler, 47 → 69 166.38 short, 32 short 69 167.3 be: 32 be 47 → 69 167.3 A 32 à 40 → 69 167.4 capacité; 32 capacité, 47 → 69 167.5 Birmingham-lacker 32 Birmingham-lacquer 69 167.15 too, 32 too 69 167.16 Fortune, 32 Fortune 39 → 69 167.16 long. 32 long[«»] 40 167.25 arms) 32 arms), 40 → 69 167.34 brush, 32 brush 69 167.38 wild-man 32 wildman 40 → 53 69 wild-/man 57 168.3 sun-gleams, 32 sun-gleams 40 → 69 168.22 buttery books, 32 buttery-books, 40 → 69 168.24 buttery books,’ 32 buttery-books,’ 40 → 69 168.26 (or locked) 32 or locked 40 → 69 168.26 itself 32 itself, 40 168.27 ‘could not 32 could ‘not 47 57 → 69 168.31 one 32 one, 47 → 69 168.32 pre-/eminence; 32 preëminence; 39 57 → 69 pre-eminence; 40 → 53

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

168.33 polity,’ 32 polity’ 40 → 69 168.37 shame, 32 shame 47 → 69 169.1 ways, 32 ways 69 169.7 no where 32 nowhere 39 → 69 169.11 Sampson 32 Samson 39 → 69 169.19 Printer, 32 Printer 69 169.22 readers, 32 readers 47 → 69 169.26 is 32 is, 47 → 69 169.26 would,’ 32 would’ 69 169.32 impart.’ [no indent following quotation] Reader, 32 impart.’ [indent following quotation] ¶Reader, 47 → 69 169.32 Letter 32 letter 40 → 69 169.33 addresser 32 addressor 40 → 69 169.38 actually 32 actual 40 → 69 169.38 realised 32 realized 39 → 40 170.2 pounds;’ 32 guineas;’ 47 → 69 170.5 Wild-man, 32 Wild-/man, 39 53 69 Wildman, 40 → 47 57 170.6 woe-stricken, 32 wo-stricken, 40 170.8 heart, 32 heart 47 → 69 170.8 ‘This 32 “This 40 → 69 170.9 with;’ 32 with;” 40 → 69

170.15

739

noble. However, 32 noble. ¶However, 69 170.15 be this 32 be all this 69 170.19 by Samuel 32 by—Samuel 40 → 69 170.23 ‘ane 32 “ane 40 → 69 170.24 schule,’ 32 schule,” 40 → 69 170.24 by a: ‘Cromwell 32 by a ‘Cromwell 39 by a “Cromwell 40 → 47 57 → 69 by over-loud logic with a guest,—“Cromwell 53 170.25 gart 32 garr’d 53 170.25 neck!’ But 32 neck!” But 40 → 47 57 neck!”—But 53 69 170.29 time, 32 [«»]ime, 53 170.30 merely, 32 merely 57 → 69 170.30 them, 32 them 57 → 69 170.36 Townclerk 32 Town-clerk 39 170.38 ‘D—n 32 “D—n 40 → 69 170.38 poor!’ 32 poor!” 40 → 69 171.3 death, 32 death 69 171.6 Writers (being Monks) 32 Writers, being Monks, 40 → 69 171.8 hunger: 32 hunger; 47 → 69 171.13 bed, 32 bed 39 171.20 was about 32 was at about 47 → 69

740

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

171.20 ebbs, 32 ebbs 47 → 69 171.23 nation 32 Nation 40 → 69 171.23 cannon-salvoes 32 cannon-salvos 57 → 69 171.30 assumed 32 assumed, 39 → 69 171.34 it, 32 it 39 → 69 172.3 it. * * * 32 it. [new line] * * * * * * * 53 172.4 ‘He 32 “He 39 172.11 gratified.’—Hawkins, 46—50. 32 gratified.’—Hawkins, 46-50. 39 gratified.’† [footnote inserted] † Hawkins, 46-50. 40 → 69 173.10 ‘I 32 “I 40 → 69 173.12 means?’ 32 means?” 40 → 69 173.21 Mecænasship 32 Mæcenasship 53 69 173.24 Mecænasship, 32 Mæcenasship, 53 69 173.25 well nigh 32 wellnigh 39 → 69 173.28 anger 32 anger, 40 → 69 173.28 Bookseller System, 32 Bookseller-System, 40 → 69 173.31 Patronage System 32 Patronage-System 40 → 69 173.37 new road, 32 new road 40 → 69 173.37 old road, 32 old road 40 → 69 174.4 perhaps 32 perhaps, 69

174.7

still 32 even now 53 174.7 told), 32 told) 40 → 69 174.9 Lane. 32 Lane.† [footnote inserted] † Bought there by Mr. Rogers, and now in his possession, (Note of 1853.) 53 174.12 organisation, 32 organization, 39 → 40 organisation 69 174.13 Authors, 32 authors, 39 174.15 appearance, 32 appearance 69 174.16 Mecænases 32 Mæcenases 53 69 174.17 Mecænases 32 Mæcenases 53 69 174.19 were the preferable: 32 were preferable: 39 → 69 174.20 well nigh 32 wellnigh 39 → 69 174.23 Author 32 author 39 → 69 174.27 nowise 32 no wise 39 174.29 Patronage 32 patronage 40 → 69 174.38 word (and 32 word, and 40 → 69 174.39 it); 32 it; 40 → 69 175.8 obligations, 32 obligations 69 175.8 received, 32 received; 47 → 69 175.12 learning, 32 learning; 39 → 57 175.14 exultation, 32 exultation. 47 57 175.16 Johnson.’ [new line with-

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

out indent] And 32 Johnson.’ [new line with indent] ¶And 47 → 69 175.20 coat, 32 coat 57 → 69 175.25 Nay, 32 Nay 57 → 69 175.28 any thing 32 anything 39 → 69 175.29 Player 32 Playactor 53 175.29 Alas! 32 Alas 53 175.29 Johnson, 32 Johnson 47 57 → 69 Johnson! 53 175.31 must 32 has to start, and 53 175.32 learn 32 learn, 53 175.35 Truth? 32 truth? 40 175.38 ‘a meaning.’ 32 a ‘meaning.’ 39 → 69 176.1 Pilate; 32 Pilate. 40 → 69 176.1 Truth? 32 truth? 53 176.2 ‘poured, 32 poured, 40 → 69 176.3 ear:’ 32 ear: 40 → 69 176.4 well nigh 32 wellnigh 39 → 69 176.7 no where, 32 nowhere, 39 → 69 176.14 part (for 32 part, for 40 → 69 176.15 come): 32 come: 40 → 69 176.20 position, 32 position 69

176.23

741

the pole-star 32 the polestar 40 → 69 176.23 fixed pole-star 32 fixed polestar 40 → 69 176.26 dimmer and dimmer-burning fixed-star (uncertain 32 dim fixed-star, burning ever dimmer, uncertain 40 → 69 176.26 meteor) 32 meteor, 40 → 69 176.29 Speculation 32 speculation 40 → 69 176.32 Tolands, 32 Tolands 57 → 69 176.32 sceptical 32 skeptical 39 176.35* children of 32 children almost of 47 → 69 176.35* year. 32 year.† [footnote inserted] † Johnson, September, 1709; Hume, April, 1711. 47 → 69 176.37 them? Was 32 them; was 40 → 69 176.37 alas! 32 alas, 40 → 69 177.2 must 32 has to 69 177.11 Johnson: 32 Johnson; 47 → 69 177.13 Politics 32 politics 39 177.16 then, 32 then 40 → 69 177.19 and 32 and, 47 → 69 177.21 it, 32 it 69 177.22 and half. 32 and a half. 47 → 69 177.23 canvass 32 canvas 53 → 69

742

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

177.28 half-ness, 32 halfness, 40 → 69 177.34 Sidney 32 Sydney 40 → 69 178.1 now (ever 32 now, ever 40 → 69 178.1 Stuarts) 32 Stuarts, 40 → 69 178.2 Person 32 Person, 47 → 69 178.2 to, 32 to; 47 → 69 178.9 Half-ness 32 Halfness 40 → 69 178.9 Whole-ness 32 Wholeness 40 → 69 178.27 not, 32 not 39 → 69 178.28 Falsehood; 32 Falsehood: 40 → 69 178.35 Sceptic, 32 Skeptic, 39 178.37 nay 32 nay, 40 57 179.1 pulling down 32 pulling-down 69 179.2 Truth, 32 Truth 39 → 69 179.4 count; 32 count: 69 179.5 Burke, 32 Burke 69 179.7 rounded in; 32 rounded-in; 57 → 69 179.8 gird up 32 gird-up 69 179.10 rounded in: 32 rounded-in: 57 → 69 179.13 defend,—by 32 defend: by 40 → 69 179.14 or even 32 by the blinding of their own too importunate 53

179.17

while the life 32 while life 40 → 69 179.26 Pillory (that 32 Pillory, that 40 → 69 179.27 ‘character’),—would 32 ‘character,’—would 40 → 69 179.29 depart, 32 depart 47 → 69 179.31 abomination,—was 32 abomination, was 40 → 69 179.36 driftwood, 32 drift-wood, 69 179.36 seaworthy 32 sea-/worthy 39 sea-worthy 40 → 69 180.1 we, therefore 32 we therefore, 47 → 69 180.4 generations, 32 generations 69 180.7 squalor, 32 squalour, 40 180.12 wise, in 32 wise in 39 wise, and in 40 → 69 180.13 also, 32 too 40 → 69 180.15 Man! 32 man! 53 180.16 is, 32 is 39 → 69 180.16 terms, 32 terms 40 → 69 180.18 (out 32 out 40 → 69 180.19 Tophet), 32 Tophet, 40 → 69 180.24 Duty, 32 Duty 69 180.28 Symbol, 32 Symbol 69 180.28 for ever 32 forever 57 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

180.31

and for 32 and which for 53 180.31 that, 32 that 69 180.32 time, 32 time 69 180.35 which, 32 which 39 → 69 180.35 dusk, 32 dusk 40 → 69 181.6 it, 32 it 69 181.6 dark, 32 dark 47 57 → 69 181.7 shoeblack-seraph 32 shoe-black seraph 39 181.10 are 32 are, 40 → 69 181.16 Besides 32 Besides, 69 181.17 actual 32 Actual 40 → 69 181.17 Life, 32 Life 69 181.21 gift: an 32 gift,—an 47 → 69 181.32 jargon, 32 jargon 69 181.32 triviality 32 trivialty 39 181.33 attainable, 32 attainable; 40 → 69 181.35 rugged, 32 rugged 40 → 69 181.36 Kerne, 32 Kerne 40 → 69 181.37 force, 32 force 39 → 69 182.6 trundles off 32 trundles-off 57 → 69 182.6 them, 32 them 69

182.8

743

down stairs; 32 downstairs; 53 182.12 act, 32 act 47 → 69 182.17 handed in 32 handed-in 57 → 69 182.13 shew 32 show 39 57 → 69 182.24 ill health, 32 ill-health, 57 → 69 182.35 ‘Scholar!’ 32 ‘Scholar’! 69 182.35 ‘He 32 “He 40 → 69 182.35 Scholar:’ 32 Scholar:” 40 → 69 182.38 rubbish, 32 rubbish 69 183.6 eighteen pence 32 eighteen-pence 39 → 69 183.6 a-week; 32 a-week: 47 → 69 183.9 bread and milk 32 bread-and-milk 57 → 69 183.10 clean-shirt-day 32 clean-shirt day 69 183.10 abroad, 32 abroad 69 183.11 whom, 32 whom 69 183.14 painted 32 painted, 40 → 69 183.17 Why 32 Why, 69 183.20 were, 32 were 47 → 69 183.21 Buildings, 32 Buildings 47 → 69 183.26 Court 32 Court, 40 183.26 and Johnson’s 32 and to Johnson’s 69

744

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

183.26 and, 32 and 69 183.32 ‘I 32 “I 40 → 69 183.32 then,’ 32 then,” 40 → 69 183.33 ‘here, 32 “here, 40 → 69 183.33 garden’ 32 garden” 40 → 69 183.34 bed-quilt) 32 bed-quilt), 69 183.34 ‘where 32 “where 40 → 69 183.35 Bedrooms’ 32 Bedrooms” 40 → 69 183.35 ‘were 32 “were 40 → 69 183.36 in!’ 32 in!” 40 → 57 in”! 69 183.37 ‘I 32 “I 40 → 69 183.38 quarter, 32 quarter 69 183.38 me.’—’To 32 me.”—“To 40 → 69 183.38 also,’ 32 also,” 40 → 69 183.39 ways. 32 ways. (Note of 1832.) 53 184.1 made out 32 made-out 57 → 69 184.5 you to 32 you also to 40 → 69 184.11 ‘will 32 “will 40 → 69 184.11 country,’ 32 country,” 40 → 69 184.11 the 32 they there, the 69 184.11 ‘Back-woods-men’ 32 ‘Backwoods-men’ 47 → 53

‘Backwoods-/men’ 57 ‘Backwoodsmen’ 69 184.11 Desart! 32 Desert! 40 → 69 184.15 any thing 32 anything 39 → 69 184.17 nay, 32 nay 40 → 69 184.21 ‘Fame!’ 32 ‘Fame’! 69 184.25 flapping, 32 flapping 69 184.29 ‘by 32 by 40 → 69 184.29 review;’ 32 review; 40 → 69 184.30 ‘If 32 If 40 → 69 184.31 done.’ 32 done. 40 → 69 184.33 shew 32 show 39 57 → 69 184.34 that, 32 that 69 184.34 moment, 32 moment 69 184.35 meanwhile, 32 mean while, 57 → 69 184.35 any thing, 32 anything, 39 → 69 184.36 ‘Sir, 32 “Sir, 40 → 69 184.37 starve.’ 32 starve.” 40 → 69 184.37 head! 32 head: 40 → 69 184.38 man 32 Man 40 → 69 184.38 Letters. 32 Letters! 40 → 69 185.13 vapours: 32 vapors: 39 vapours; 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

185.13 star-/gazers 32 star-gazers 39 stargazers 40 → 69 185.13 it, 32 it 53 69 185.15 times, 32 times 69 185.19 smoke, 32 smoke; 40 → 69 185.20 pitch-cinders, 32 pitch-cinders 47 → 69 185.20 Diable! 32 diable! 40 → 69 185.21 all or nearly all 32 all, or nearly all, 69 185.25 see, 32 see 69 185.29 harrow up 32 harrow-up 69 185.29 Yet 32 Yet, 47 → 69 185.36 gallant, 32 gallant 40 → 69 186.5 Fleet-/ditch!’ 32 Fleetditch!’ 39 → 40 Fleet-ditch!’ 47 57 → 69 186.6 solid-thinking, 32 solid-thinking 39 → 40 186.11 ‘Your 32 “Your 40 → 69 186.11 Shonson!’ 32 Shonson!” 40 → 69 186.11 still 32 Still 47 → 69 186.12 death, 32 death 47 57 → 69 186.13 ‘Sir, 32 “Sir, 40 → 69 186.14 society!’ 32 society!” 40 → 69 186.14 Stat 32 stat 39

745

186.15 year, 32 year 69 186.16 three hundred 32 three-hundred 57 → 69 186.17 century, 32 century 47 → 69 186.18 noses; 32 noses: 39 → 69 186.21 Things;’ 32 Things.’ 40 → 69 186.28 all 32 All 69 186.34 meanwhile, 32 mean while, 57 → 69 187.3 idle; 32 Idle; 39 187.3 goaded on 32 goaded-on 69 187.8 Listeners, 32 listeners, 53 187.8 Answerers: 32 answerers: 53 187.10 which 32 which, 40 187.17 solemn, 32 solemn 47 → 69 187.18 Hope 32 Hope, 40 → 69 187.19 courageous, 32 courageous 69 187.20 was. [extra leading between paragraphs] ¶To 32 was. [page break between paragraphs] ¶To 47 was. ¶To 57 188.2 nation, 32 Nation; 40 → 69 188.3 nation 32 Nation 40 → 69 188.8 voice, 32 voice 47 → 69 188.9 Standing still; 32 Standing-still; 69

746

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

188.11 neglected, 32 neglected 40 → 69 188.12 with a heart-hatred 32 with heart-hatred 39 → 69 188.13 every where 32 everywhere 39 → 69 188.23 debateable. 32 debatable. 47 → 69 188.24 meanwhile, 32 mean while, 57 → 69 188.24 undoubted, 32 undoubted 40 → 69 188.24 who 32 who, 39 → 69 188.29 retardation, 32 retardation 69 188.34 nation 32 Nation 40 → 69 189.2 us. [extra leading between paragraphs] ¶If 32 us. [page break between paragraphs] ¶If 47 us. ¶If 57 → 69 189.4 now 32 now, 47 → 69 189.4 realised 32 realized 39 → 40 189.10 Courage 32 courage 40 → 69 189.12 poltroonery, 32 poltroonery 47 → 69 189.14 hounded on 32 hounded-on 47 → 69 189.17 shrieking, 32 shrieking 47 → 69 189.23 propriety. 32 propriety? 69 189.23 die, 32 die 69 189.25 ours, 32 ours 69 189.27 gallows, 32 gallows 47 → 69

189.31 poorfigure 32 poor figure 39 → 69 189.32 make, compared 32 make in comparison 69 189.33 fifteen-pence! 32 fifteen pence! 40 → 53 fifteenpence! 57 → 69 189.37 campaigning 32 compaigning 69 190.1 ages, 32 ages 69 190.10 heart, 32 heart 69 190.13 Golgotha-Death-dance 32 Golgotha Death-dance 40 → 69 190.15 defiance, 32 defiance 69 190.15 do 32 do, 47 → 69 190.16 endured 32 endured, 47 → 69 190.16 silence. How 32 silence. ¶How 39 → 69 190.18 shews 32 shows 39 57 → 69 190.19 wine-cup, 32 wine-cup 47 → 69 190.21 estate; 32 estate, 47 → 69 190.30 stupid 32 stupid, 47 → 69 190.30 pusillanimous 32 pusillanimous, 47 → 69 190.33 Literature: 32 Literature; 40 → 69 190.38 realising 32 realizing 39 → 40 190.38 Life-light 32 life-light 40 → 69 191.1 realised. 32 realized. 39 → 40

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

191.2

Johnson, 32 Johnson 69 191.6 things: 32 things; 39 191.8 battle, 32 battle 47 → 69 191.10 shewing 32 showing 39 57 → 69 191.10 debateable 32 debatable 40 → 69 191.12 themselves, 32 themselves 47 → 69 191.12 enough: 32 enough, 39 → 57 enough; 69 191.13 nature; 32 nature, 69 191.13 no where 32 nowhere 39 → 69 191.14 every where 32 everywhere 39 → 69 191.18* Whitfield, 32 Whitefield, 47 → 69 191.18 moves, 32 moves 47 → 69 192.5 ware; 32 ware: 39 → 69 192.6 Blacking Bottle, 32 Blacking-Bottle, 47 → 53 Blacking-bottle, 57 → 69 192.12 which, 32 which 69 192.12 Johnson, 32 Johnson 69 192.15 his, 32 his 47 → 69 192.16 mother’s, 32 mother’s 69 192.19 good, 32 good 40 → 69 192.25 Cat 32 cat 69 192.27 such-like 32

747

such like 40 → 57 suchlike 69 192.32 halfpence 32 half-pence 39 → 69 192.36 home, 32 home 47 → 69 192.36 Samaritan, 32 Samaritan 47 → 69 192.38 Sins? 32 sins? 47 → 69 193.1 Charity Balls, 32 Charity-Balls, 47 → 69 193.14 interment! 32 funeral! 40 → 69 193.14 Again, 32 Again 39 → 69 193.17 Tragedy’ (though unrhymed) 32 Tragedy,’ though unrhymed, 40 → 69 193.21 for ever 32 forever 40 → 69 193.22 brother, 32 brother 47 → 69 193.24 for ever; 32 forever; 40 → 69 193.29 eyes, 32 eyes 47 → 69 193.33 more.’ [new line without indent] Tears 32 more.’ ¶Tears 47 → 69 193.33 within! Still 32 within!—Still 47 → 69 193.35 “Once 32 “Once, 47 → 69 194.9 to-day 32 today 47 → 69 194.9 market, 32 market 69 194.11 expiatory.’ [new line without indent] Who 32 expiatory.’ [new line with indent] ¶Who 47 → 69

748

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

194.14 bystanders?’ 32 bystanders’? 69 194.17 buffetted 32 buffeted 40 → 69 194.18 oh! 32 oh, 69 194.21 sleeps: 32 sleeps well: 69 194.24 ‘Repentance! Repentance!’ 32 Repentance! Repentance! 40 → 69 194.26 ear, 32 ear 47 → 69 194.26 for ever. 32 forever. 47 → 69 194.33 for ever 32 forever 40 → 69 194.36 first-fruit 32 first fruit 40 → 53 195.5 court dress, 32 court-dress, 47 → 69 195.11 sitting 32 siting 39 195.15 (‘Renny dear’), 32 (Renny dear), 40 → 69 195.18 high breeding, 32 high-breeding, 47 → 69 195.20 Brummellian 32 Brummellean 40 → 69 195.21 man, 32 man 69 195.34 sprung, 32 sprang, 40 → 69 195.38 such like, 32 suchlike, 69 196.6 Heaven 32 heaven 39 → 53 196.10 nay, 32 nay 57 → 69 196.14 Scepticism, 32 Skepticism, 39 196.15 here: 32 here; 39 → 69

196.15 ‘Have 32 “Have 40 → 69 196.16 immortality?’ 32 immortality?” 40 → 69 196.16 ‘I 32 “I 40 → 69 196.16 more.’ 32 more.” 40 → 69 196.16 But 32 ¶But 69 196.23 must 32 should 53 196.24 Bishoprick 32 Bishohrick 39 196.28 greensick 32 green-/sick 47 green-sick 53 → 69 196.28 of (for 32 of, for 40 → 69 196.28 sake) 32 sake, 40 → 69 196.32 ‘Monsheer Nongtongpaw!’ 32 “Monsheer Nongtongpaw!” 40 → 69 196.32 John; 32 John: 40 → 69 196.36 still so equip 32 still equip 39 → 69 196.38 vigour 32 vigor 39 197.1 century, 32 Century, 40 → 69 197.6 children of 32 children nearly of 47 → 69 197.9 well-born, 32 wellborn, 40 197.18 any where 32 anywhere 39 → 69 197.20 widest, 32 widest 39 → 53 197.25 plaintiveness, 32 plaintiveness 47 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

197.29 home, 32 home 47 → 69 197.35 realised 32 realized 39 → 40 198.3 better-gifted,—may 32 better-gifted, may 47 → 69 198.5 Calton Hill 32 Calton-Hill 57 → 69 198.7 darkness, 32 darkness 69 198.7 them, 32 them 69 198.10 Candour, 32 Candour 47 → 69 198.11 Love, 32 Love 47 → 69 198.16 farewell! 32 farewell! [extra leading between paragraphs; centered text follows] the end. 53 “Corn-Law Rhymes” [32, 39, 40, 47, 57, 69] 199.0 Corn-Law Rhymes. 32 CORN-LAW RHYMES. 39 → 6910 199.1 Corn-Law Rhymes. 32 Corn-Law Rhymes. 39 → 57 199.1 London: 32 London, 39 → 69 199.2 Love; 32 Love; 39 → 57 199.2 a Poem. 32 a Poem. 69 199.3 London: 32 London, 39 → 69 199.4 The Village Patriarch; 32

749

The Village Patriarch; 39 → 57 199.4 a Poem. 32 a Poem. 69 199.4 Corn-Law Rhymes. 32 “Corn-Law Rhymes.” 69 199.5 London: 32 London, 39 → 69 199.7 assaying-balance, 32 assaying balance, 57 assaying balance 69 199.13 wide-spread 32 wide-spread 39 → 40 57 → 69 199.14 dust, 32 dust 47 → 69 199.23 events, 32 events 47 → 69 199.24 hire out 32 hire-out 57 → 69 200.2 Review 32 ‘Review 39 200.7 wants, say 32 wants, to say 47 → 69 200.10 marketings, 32 marketings 47 → 69 200.14 Farther, 32 Further, 47 → 57 200.20 Heavens; 32 heavens; 39 → 69 200.32 class, 32 class 40 → 69 200.38 unmonied, 32 unmoneyed, 39 → 69 201.6 nay, 32 nay 40 → 69 201.12 first hand 32 first-hand 69

10 1839 adds “[Edinburgh Review, 1832.]” under the title; 1840 and all subsequent editions change this to “[1832.]”. 1839 and subsequent editions shift the bibliographic information from the heading to a footnote. 1840 and following insert “Edinburgh Review, No. 110.—” at the beginning of the footnote.

750

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

201.18 that; 32 that: 39 → 69 201.27 eyeglasses, 32 eye-glasses, 39 → 69 201.31 frequent, 32 frequent 39 201.36 days, 32 days 39 202.1 men doubtless 32 men, doubtless, 69 202.3 grant too 32 grant, too, 69 202.4 posture-masters 32 posture[-]masters 57 202.7 perceive, 32 perceive 39 → 69 202.9 wider 32 wider, 40 → 69 202.13 freedom,—altogether 32 freedom, altogether 40 → 69 202.13 germs, too, 32 germs too, 40 → 69 202.19 Fredericks 32 Frederics 39 → 47 202.21 vocation; 32 vocation: 39 → 69 202.23 Nay, 32 Nay 47 → 69 202.24 Burns: 32 Burns; 39 → 69 202.26 therein; 32 therein: 39 → 69 202.27 toil, 32 toil 39 → 69 202.27 shoot out 32 shoot-out 57 → 69 202.30 gardens: 32 gardens; 39 → 69 202.33 though, unhappily, 32 though unhappily 40 → 69 202.34 also 32 also, 39

202.35 errors 32 errors, 39 → 57 202.37 Provision-waggons, 32 Provision-wagons, 39 57 → 69 203.1 ‘Had 32 Had 40 → 69 203.2 courage, 32 courage 47 → 69 203.5 show 32 shew 40 → 47 203.6 him.’ 32 him. 40 → 69 203.11 be, 32 be 39 → 69 203.12 and a so 32 and so 40 → 69 203.12 sumptuous Art 32 sumptuous an Art 40 → 69 203.18 realized. 32 realised. 47 → 69 203.21 civilized 32 civilised 47 → 69 203.27 Phœnix-ashes 32 phœnix-ashes 69 203.28 felt 32 felt, 39 → 40 203.29 letters, 32 letters 69 203.34 enkindled, 32 enkindled 47 → 69 204.1 Artifice: 32 Artifice; 39 → 69 204.8 whatever; 32 whatever: 39 → 69 204.14 That 32 that 39 → 69 204.17 particular: 32 particular; 39 → 69 204.21 root out 32 root-out 57 → 69 204.27 work: 32 work; 40 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

204.31

it, or 32 that, to extract 40 → 69 204.32 it, if you will! 32 that! 40 → 69 204.36 therefore 32 therefore, 39 → 69 204.37 fireproof 32 fire-proof 47 → 69 204.37 dishes; 32 dishes: 39 205.3 every thing, 32 everything, 39 → 57 everything 69 205.14 lamp-/black, 32 lampblack, 39 → 40 lamp-black, 57 → 69 205.16 Dr 32 Dr. 39 → 69 205.17 Dr 32 Dr. 39 → 69 205.17 Parr!—¶However, 32 Parr!— [extra leading between paragraphs] ¶However, 40 → 69 205.20 dotage:’ 32 dotage;’ 39 → 69 205.22 Rhymes, 32 rhymes, 39 → 69 205.26 spoken; 32 spoken: 69 205.27 metallurgy, 32 metallurgy 69 206.4 understood 32 understood, 69 206.5 is 32 is 47 → 69 206.5 earnest, 32 earnest 69 206.6 theorizer, 32 theoriser, 47 → 69 206.6 sentimentalizer, 32 sentimentaliser, 47 → 69 206.15 recompense; 32 recompense: 40 → 69

751

206.17 Literature, 32 Literature 69 206.23 cant, 32 cant 69 206.24 Wherein 32 Wherein, 39 → 69 206.27 Workman 32 Workman, 39 → 47 206.28 is, 32 is 39 206.31 originality; 32 Originality; 40 → 69 206.32 gift Force 32 gift, force 40 → 69 206.36 piercingly, 32 piercingly 47 → 69 207.1 traceable for instance 32 traceable, for instance, 47 → 69 207.4 ‘These, 32 These, 40 → 69 207.10 ocean’s 32 Ocean’s 57 → 69 207.11 fed.— 32 fed. 47 → 69 207.13 life is lawless, 32 law is lifeless, 39 207.16 Lo 32 Lo, 47 → 69 207.18 Orb, 32 Orb 57 → 69 207.20 the 32 The 40 → 69 207.23 vale, 32 vale 47 → 69 207.29 grey 32 gray 57 → 69 207.31 below.’ 32 below. 40 → 69 207.34 phantasmagoria: 32 phantasmagoria; 39 → 69 207.35 enquired 32 inquired 39 → 69

752 208.3

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

¶Farther 32 ¶Farther, 47 → 69 208.5 scarcity, 32 scarcity; 47 → 69 208.5 tames into 32 tames it into 40 → 69 208.6 order: 32 order; 39 → 69 208.11 much-loving, 32 much loving, 39 208.15 fellow men, 32 fellow-men; 40 → 69 208.16 asking; 32 asking: 39 → 69 208.19 heart: 32 core: 40 → 69 208.20 Hostility, 32 hostility, 40 → 69 208.20 Indignation, 32 indignation, 40 → 69 208.21 Right 32 right 40 → 69 208.21 Hope 32 hope 40 → 69 208.25 says, 32 says 39 → 69 208.28 recognisable; 32 recognisable: 39 → 69 208.32 disorganization, 32 disorganisation, 47 → 69 208.33 the 32 our 69 208.38 Spirit 32 spirit 39 → 69 209.5 each 32 each, 40 → 69 209.5 bound up 32 bound-up 57 → 69 209.7 Common-woe, 32 Common-wo, 40 209.14 Bitterness, and Hope 32 bitterness, and hope 40 → 69

209.16

Law Reform, 32 Law-Reform, 40 → 69 209.16 Poor Laws, want of Poor Laws, 32 Poor-Laws, want of PoorLaws, 40 → 69 209.17 Game Laws, 32 Game-Laws, 40 → 69 209.17 Corn Laws. 32 Corn-Laws. 40 → 69 209.21 way; 32 way: 40 → 69 209.23 evil; 32 evil: 39 209.23 Land: 32 Land; 40 → 69 209.24 Mr 32 Mr. 39 → 69 209.25 button up 32 button-up 57 → 69 209.26 ‘the Bread-tax,’ 32 the ‘Bread-tax,’ 40 → 69 209.28 Earth, 32 earth, 40 → 69 209.29 Corn Laws, 32 Corn-Laws, 40 → 69 209.34 Corn Trade 32 Corn-Trade 40 → 69 209.35 ‘it, 32 it, 40 → 69 209.35 satrap 32 ‘satrap 40 → 69 209.37 Alas, 32 Alas 69 209.37 ‘world 32 world 40 → 69 209.38 wickedness,’ 32 wickedness, 40 → 69 210.5 destructiveness, 32 destructiveness 69 210.7 other: 32 other; 40 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

210.8

‘the Lansdowns 32 the ‘Lansdowns 39 → 69 210.13 Teachers, 32 Teachers 69 210.17 ‘The 32 The 40 → 69 210.17 Jesuitry;’ 32 Jesuitry; 40 Jesuistry; 47 → 69 210.20* corporation,’ ‘dismal 32 corporation, dismal 40 → 69 210.22 being 32 seems 40 → 69 210.23 show 32 shew 40 → 47 210.28 heavy-laden, 32 heavy-laden 69 210.28 Pity and Hope 32 pity and hope 40 → 69 210.34 for ever. 32 forever. 40 → 69 210.38 Gleamings, 32 Gleamings 39 → 69 211.7 ‘bringing forth,’ 32 bringing forth, 40 → 69 211.7 and 32 and, 47 → 57 211.8 ‘devouring’ 32 devouring 40 → 69 211.8 on, on, in 32 on, in 39 → 69 211.13 ‘The 32 The 40 → 69 211.30 affright, 32 affright 47 → 69 211.31 tears!’ 32 tears! 40 → 69 211.37 life-element 32 life-element, 69 211.38 form, 32 form 69

212.1

753

¶’We 32 ¶We 40 → 69 212.2 on; 32 of: 39 → 69 212.3 Sleep!’ 32 Sleep! 40 → 69 212.7 me.’ [extra leading between paragraphs] ¶To 32 me.’ ¶To 40 → 69 212.10 had 32 should have 69 212.15 Libraries, 32 Libraries; 40 → 69 212.29 audible; 32 audible[«»] 40 audible, 47 → 69 212.31 developement, 32 development, 39 → 69 212.31 source, 32 source 47 → 69 212.32 which after all 32 which, after all, 47 → 69 213.3 Man to Man; 32 man to man; 40 → 69 213.3 suit of clothes to suit of clothes. 32 suit-of-clothes to suit-ofclothes. 69 213.5 thing,—a bearing 32 thing: a bearing 40 → 69 213.8 matter; 32 matter: 47 → 69 213.10 snappish seldom 32 snappish dialect seldom 40 snappish dialects seldom 47 → 57 213.22 shut in, 32 shut-in, 57 → 69 213.22 improveable 32 improvable 39 → 69 213.26 Books; 32 books; 39 → 69 213.27 prophetic-manuscript 32 prophetic manuscript 69

754

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

213.30 ‘Where 32 Where 40 → 69 214.2* ‘Debauch 32 Debauch 39 → 69 214.2* friends.’ / 32 friends. / [centered] * * * * * 40 → 69 214.4 Behold 32 ‘Behold 39 214.13 doom!’ 32 doom! 40 → 69 214.15 avowed, 32 avowed,’ 40 → 69 214.17 ‘Whose 32 Whose 40 → 69 214.31 squire’s!’ / ‘Jem 32 squire’s! / [centered] * * * * * Jem 40 → 69 214.33 sinks, 32 sinks; 39 214.36 not; 32 not, 69 214.36 feels;’ 32 feels; 39 → 69 214.37 steals! 32 steals!’ 39 215.3 blossoms 32 blossoms, 40 → 69 215.5 Earth; 32 Earth, 40 → 69 215.5 Heaven. 32 Heaven: 69 215.7 ‘Light! 32 Light! 40 → 69 215.9 him, 32 him; 39 → 69 215.16 Why then 32 Why, then, 69 215.21 Lo, 32 Lo 40 → 69 215.21 strong, 32 strong 40 → 69

215.21 tho’ 32 though 40 → 69 215.21 grey, 32 gray, 57 → 69 215.22 village tower 32 village-tower 40 → 69 215.28 Link 32 Links 40 215.29 nought 32 naught 57 215.29 flood, 32 Flood, 57 → 69 215.31 best. / [extra leading between verses] 32 best. / [page break between verses] 39 → 40 best. / [no break between verses] 47 → 69 215.33 [indent] ‘Hail 32 [no indent] Hail 40 [no indent] Hail, 47 → 69 215.33 peace, 32 peace 47 → 69 215.34 spell, 32 spell; 47 → 69 216.1 Thro’ 32 Through 40 → 69 216.19 began— 32 began—’ 39 216.21 ‘King-humbling’ 32 ‘king-humbling’ 40 → 69 216.21 bread-tax, 32 Bread-tax, 40 → 69 216.21 enough else. ¶And 32 several other crabbed things! [extra leading between paragraphs] ¶And 40 → 69 216.23 wise, 32 wise 40 → 69 216.24 all too 32 all-too 40 → 69 216.28 itself ! 32 itself ? 39 → 40

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

217.15 master-manufacturer,’ 32 master-manufacturer, 47 → 69 217.15 ‘is 32 is 47 → 69 217.16 was in twenty-five 32 was in ‘twenty-five 39 was twenty-five 47 → 69 217.17 this state 32 this mad state 40 → 69 217.25 house, 32 house 39 → 69 217.25 ‘lineage 32 lineage 40 → 69 217.25 away.’ 32 away! 40 → 69 217.26 worse 32 worse, 40 → 69 217.26 ‘till 32 till 39 → 69 217.28 There 32 there 40 → 69 217.28 hopes 32 hope 40 → 69 217.34 symptom perhaps 32 symptom, perhaps, 69 218.5 Woe,’ 32 Wo,’ 40 218.12 have 32 have, 40 → 69 218.12 own 32 own, 40 218.15 For 32 ¶For 69 218.17 root out 32 root-out 69 218.17 deep-fixed 32 deepfixed 40 → 47 deep-/fixed 57 218.17 dock-weeds, 32 dock-/weeds, 39 47 dockweeds 40 218.21 Providence, 32 Povidence, 39

755

218.21 Goodness; 32 Goodness: 40 → 69 218.28 this; 32 this: 40 → 69 218.28 power; 32 power: 39 218.29 thee; 32 thee: 47 → 69 218.33 epitomized 32 epitomised 40 → 69 218.35 fellow-man, 32 fellow-man 39 219.1 newest, 32 newest 39 219.4 chant 32 Chant 40 69 Chaunt 47 → 57 219.6 nature, 32 nature 47 → 69 219.10 do 32 do 40 → 69 219.10 much, 32 much; 40 → 69 219.15 that strong 32 that that strong 69 219.17 handbreadth; 32 handbreadth, 40 → 69 219.17 must 32 had to 40 → 69 219.18 his realm. 32 his ancient realm. 40 → 69 219.28 fellow men, 32 fellow-men, 40 → 69 219.28 Arch Enemy 32 Arch-Enemy 40 → 69 219.31 out; 32 out: 39 → 69 219.34 first, 32 first 39 → 69 219.35 stone-pillar 32 stone pillar 69 219.36 here 32 here, 40 → 69

756 220.1

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

union; 32 union: 39 → 40 220.4 gayety; 32 gaiety; 40 → 69 220.5 it;—in 32 it:—in 39 it: in 40 → 69 220.8 him; 32 him: 39 → 69 220.10 hung up 32 hung-up 57 → 69 220.11 interesting;—to 32 interesting: to 40 → 69 220.16 them—To 32 them: To 40 → 69 220.18 millions, 32 millions; 40 → 69 220.18 hardhanded, earnest witness, 32 hardhanded earnest witness 47 → 69 220.19 writer, 32 writer 47 → 69 220.23 relation, 32 relation 39 → 69 220.23 Low, 32 Low 47 → 69 220.24 itself; to 32 itself, to 39 itself,—to 40 → 69 220.26 this, is 32 this is, 39 → 69 220.26 another. 32 another! 57 → 69 220.31 possible, 32 possible 47 → 69 220.36 singularity; 32 singularity, 40 → 69 221.1 Truly, 32 ¶Truly, 69 221.8 or anything 32 or indeed be anything 40 → 69

221.10 been, 32 been 47 → 69 221.12 shown 32 shewn 40 → 47 221.13 spirit, 32 spirit 47 → 69 221.14 status: 32 status; 47 → 69 221.14 must often compliment him, and 32 held him in respect, and he could 69 221.15 say, 32 say on any occasion, 69 221.15 Herein 32 Herein 40 Herein 47 → 69 221.15 Knave? 32 knave? 69 221.17 the suppression 32 the Suppression 40 → 69 the Preservation of Game, the Suppression 69 221.17 civil and religious 32 Civil and Religious 69 221.18 world; 32 World; 69 221.18 life-clutching, 32 life-clutching 47 → 69 221.22 tremor 32 tremour 40 → 69 221.24 greatness! 32 greatness: 40 → 69 221.24 Vote, the ear-piercing 32 Vote, ear-piercing 39 → 69 221.29 this,—Well 32 this, “Well 40 → 69 221.29 better? 32 better?” 40 → 57 better”? 69 221.30 one,—To 32 one: To 40 → 69 221.31 sincerity; 32 sincerity: 40 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

221.37 Novel, 32 Novel 57 → 69 222.1 Thought 32 thought 39 → 69 222.1 itself, 32 itself 39 222.1 and not 32 instead of 40 → 69 222.2 former. 32 former! 40 → 69 222.4 timber-toned, 32 timber-toned 47 → 69 222.7 it 32 it 40 → 69 222.7 walking? 32 walking! 40 → 69 222.19 wanting 32 wanting, 40 → 69 222.22 bread; 32 bread: 39 → 69 222.23 shut out 32 shut-out 57 → 69 222.31 long run 32 long-run 40 → 69 222.32 kings, of 32 kings, is king of 40 → 69 “Diderot” [33, 39, 40, 47, 57, 69] 223.0 Diderot. 33 DIDEROT.* 39 → 6911 223.1 Mémoires, 33 Mémoires, 39 → 57 223.1 Correspondance, 33 Correspondance, 39 → 40 Correspondance 47 → 57 Correspondance 69 223.1 et Ouvrages inédits de 33

757

et Ouvrages inédits de 39 → 57 223.1 Diderot; publiés d’après les manuscrits confiés, en mourant, par l’auteur à Grimm. 33 Diderot; publiés d’après les manuscrits confiés, en mourant, par l’auteur à Grimm. 69 223.2 Paris. 33 Paris, 39 Paris (Paulin, LibraireEditeur), 40 → 69 223.4 Œuvres de 33 Œuvres de 39 → 57 223.4 Denis Diderot; 33 Denis Diderot; 69 223.4 precédées 33 precédées 39 précédées 40 → 57 précédées 69 223.4 de Mémoires historiques et philosophiques sur sa Vie et ses Ouvrages, par 33 de Mémoires historiques et philosophiques sur sa Vie et ses Ouvrages, par 39 → 57 223.5 J. A. Naigeon. 33 J. A. Naigeon. 69 223.5 Paris. 33 Paris, 39 Paris (Brière), 40 → 69 223.13 amours 33 amours, 39 → 40 223.17 Petersburg 33 Petersburgh 39 → 47 223.17 awakened, 33 awakened 39 → 69

11 1839 adds [Edinburgh Review, 1832.]” under the title. This attribution is, of course, an error, corrected in 1840 and all subsequent editions, which change it to “[1833.]” and insert “Edinburgh Review, No. 22.—” at the beginning of the footnote. 1839 and following also shift the bibliographic information from the heading to the footnote.

758 224.5

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

oven: 33 oven; 39 → 69 224.5 true, 33 true 39 224.7 mis-instruct. 33 mis-/instruct. 47 misinstruct. 57 → 69 224.7 day, 33 day 39 → 69 224.12 Novel-writers, 33 Novel-writers 47 → 69 224.13 such like, 33 suchlike, 69 224.13 must (in 33 must, in 40 → 69 224.13 generation) 33 generation, 40 → 69 224.14 minors 33 minors, 39 → 40 224.14 semi-fatuous 33 semi-/fatuous 40 semifatuous 47 → 69 224.16 them, 33 them 39 → 69 224.16 have, 33 have 39 → 69 224.17 for ever 33 forever 47 → 69 224.22 uninspired, 33 uninspired 69 224.23 every-day 33 every-/day 39 → 40 everyday 47 → 69 224.23 this, 33 this 39 → 69 224.24 us, 33 us 39 → 69 224.24 Century 33 century 39 → 40 224.24 Paris, 33 Paris 39 → 69 224.28 happily be 33 be happily 39 → 69

224.33

shut up 33 shut-up 69 224.35 sight, 33 sight 47 → 69 225. 5 things 33 things, 40 → 69 225.9 there, 33 there 39 225.14 System, 33 System 39 → 69 225.15 centuries, 33 centuries 40 → 69 225.16 do,) 33 do), 40 → 69 225.16 mouldering down 33 mouldering-down 57 → 69 225.19 drive in 33 drive-in 40 → 69 225.19 set to 33 set-to 40 → 69 225.19 crowbars; 33 crow-/bars; 47 crow-bars; 57 225.22 so 33 so, 69 225.23 crash 33 crush 39 225.27 that, 33 that 39 → 69 225.34 rushing down 33 rushing-down 69 225.36 rain-holes 33 rain-holes, 39 → 40 226.4 building up, 33 building-up, 57 → 69 226.6 Life 33 life 39 → 69 226.12 But, 33 But 47 → 69 226.13 Man 33 man 47 → 69 226.19 light 33 light, 40 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

226.28

dashed off 33 dashed-off 57 → 69 226.28 generally 33 generally, 40 → 57 226.28 (on 33 on 40 → 69 226.28 Accident) 33 Accident, 40 → 69 226.30 de 33 des 39 227.2 printed, 33 printed 40 → 69 227.2 reprinted, 33 reprinted 39 227.3 original,) 33 original), 40 → 69 227.4 knowledge, 33 knowlodge, 69 227.7 specialities 33 specialties 40 → 69 227.12 ‘Edit s.’: 33 ‘Edits.:’ 69 227.17 and, 33 and 39 → 69 227.27 illuminated; 33 illuminated: 47 → 69 227.28 ‘Light-street’ 33 ‘Light-Street’ 40 → 69 227.28 Century; and 33 Century? And was not 39 → 69 227.30 existed,’ was now 33 existed,’ now 39 → 69 227.30 show 33 shew 40 → 47 227.30 such 33 such, 40 → 69 227.30 in, the 33 in,—the 39 in—the 40 → 69 227.30 Encyclopædia, 33 Encyclopedia, 39 → 69

227.31

759

Life—in 33 Life, in 40 → 69 227.31 three score 33 threescore 40 → 69 227.36 Alas! 33 Alas, 40 → 69 228.2 working 33 working, 39 → 40 228.5 hint; 33 hint! 39 228.8 hath 33 had 47 → 69 228.16 fury.—Let 33 fury. Let 40 → 69 228.21 Diderot then 33 Diderot, then, 69 228.23 amateur 33 Amateur 40 → 69 228.23 Dictionaries, 33 Dictionaries 57 → 69 228.25 sea 33 sea, 39 228.27 biography; 33 biography: 40 → 69 228.33 sensibilité, 33 sensibilité 47 → 69 229.3 or, 33 or 40 → 69 229.3 least, 33 least 47 → 69 229.4 sentiment’ (and 33 sentiment,’ and 40 → 69 229.4 things) 33 things, 40 → 69 229.6 already 33 already, 39 229.7 (and, 33 (and 47 → 69 229.9 (who 33 who 40 → 69 229.9 it), 33 it, 40 → 69 229.13 Memoir is 33

760

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

Memoir by Mademoiselle is 40 → 69 229.14 Unfortunately, as 33 Unfortunately, indeed, as 40 → 69 229.26 October, 33 October 57 → 69 229.27 hill-top, 33 hill top, 39 229.30 volatile 33 volatile, 39 229.33 idyllists, 33 idylists, 69 229.34 peasantry,’ 33 peasantry’ 47 → 69 229.37 do 33 do 40 → 69 229.38 rude, 33 rude 40 → 69 230.2 holiday 33 holyday 40 → 47 230.9 saying—’Ah, 33 saying: ‘Ah, 40 → 69 230.16 always (and sometimes 33 always, were it 40 → 69 230.17 empresses) 33 empresses, 40 → 69 230.21 commemorated: 33 commemorated; 40 → 69 230.22 terms. 33 terms: 40 → 69 230.27 intolerable: 33 intolerable; 47 → 69 230.28 presses in 33 presses-in 69 230.34 and, 33 and 40 → 69 231.3 himself, 33 himself 69 231.13 “one morning” 33 ‘one morning’ 39 → 69 231.13 “that 33 ‘that 39 → 69

231.14 school!” 33 school!’ 39 → 57 school’! 69 231.14 “Thou 33 ‘Thou 39 231.14 then?” 33 then?’ 39 231.14 “With 33 ‘With 39 231.14 heart.” 33 heart.’ 39 231.18* college,’—and 33 college,—and 39 → 69 231.24 which 33 which, 40 → 69 231.25 shown 33 shewn 40 → 47 231.30 shop, 33 shop 40 → 69 231.30 good-will, 33 good-/will, 39 goodwill, 40 → 69 231.32 hindrance 33 hinderance, 40 231.33 Derrick, 33 Derrick 47 → 69 231.33 such like, 33 suchlike, 69 231.35 Nothing-at-all? 33 Nothing at-all? 57 231.37 one-and-thirty 33 four-and-twenty 40 → 69 232.1 figures, 33 figures 69 232.11 entrusted 33 intrusted 69 232.15 “Whither 33 ‘Whither 39 232.16 hour?” “To Paris,” 33 hour?’ ‘To Paris,’ 39 232.16 “where 33 ‘where 39

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

232.16 Jesuits.”—”That 33 Jesuits.’—’That 39 232.17 to-night; 33 tonight; 57 → 69 232.17 sleep.” 33 sleep.’ 39 232.26 others 33 others, 39 → 40 232.28 you 33 you, 39 → 69 232.34 resided 33 residing 40 → 69 232.34 roof, 33 roof; 40 → 69 233.7 short-comings: 33 shortcomings: 57 → 69 233.8 vigour 32 vigor 39 233.8 truehearted, sharpwitted 33 true-hearted, sharp-witted 40 → 69 233.10 straight-laced 33 strait-laced 40 → 69 233.12 length, 33 length 40 → 69 233.16 Priest 33 Priest, 39 → 69 233.17 Encyclopédie 33 Encyclopédie, 39 → 69 233.22 poet 33 Poet 40 → 69 233.22 time; 33 time, 40 → 69 233.24 gaiety 33 gayety 39 233.35 and 33 and, 69 233.35 all 33 all, 69 233.37 answered 33 answered, 69 233.38 any body; 33 anybody; 40 → 69

234.4

761

be 33 be, 69 234.8 thereof, 33 thereof 47 → 69 234.14 own-hired 33 own hired 40 → 69 234.20 none-effect. 33 non-effect. 69 234.29 sharpest human 32 sharpest of human 39 → 69 234.32 friends, 33 friends 39 → 69 234.38 any thing, 33 anything, 39 → 69 235.1 fellow creatures 33 fellow-creature 40 → 69 235.5 result; 33 result: 39 → 69 235.7 sparkling; 33 sparkling: 39 → 69 235.16 he did act 32 did he act, 69 235.20 moveables, 33 movables, 39 → 69 235.21 Sermons (to order); 33 Sermons, to order; 40 → 57 Sermons to order; 69 235.23 paid them 32 paid for them 39 → 69 235.24 Once, 33 Once 69 235.26 ‘I 33 “I 40 → 69 235.27 longer.’—‘But, 33 longer.”—“But, 40 → 69 235.30 you.’—‘Monsieur, 33 you.”—“Monsieur, 40 → 69 235.34 dying.’ 33 dying.” 40 → 69 235.35 gaiety,’ 33 gayety,’ 39 235.37 ‘gold mines’ 33 ‘gold-mines’ 57 → 69

762

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

235.38 starvation, 33 starvation 39 → 69 236.7 Mademoiselle, 33 Mademoiselle; 40 → 69 236.11 Indeed, 33 Indeed 39 → 40 236.15 flamed on 33 flamed-on 57 → 69 236.17 nether-world 33 nether world 40 → 69 236.17 Joye, 33 Joie, 40 → 69 236.20 indeed 33 indeed, 40 → 69 236.22 cognizance, 33 cognisance, 57 → 69 236.23 proselytising 33 proselytizing 39 → 40 236.35 man, 33 man 69 236.38 Panckoucke, and Ladvocat, 33 Panckoucke 40 Panckouke 47 → 69 237.15 three-quarters 33 three quarters 69 237.18 taking up 33 taking-up 69 237.19 Hyancinthe 33 Hyacinthe 39 → 69 237.23 desperately, 33 desperately 69 237.23 ears, 33 ears 69 237.26 Scene 33 scene 40 → 69 237.30 I.—Scene VII. 33 I. Scene 7. 47 → 69 237.32 Alas! 33 Alas, 69 237.34 Ah 33 Ah, 69

237.35

. . . . 33 . . . . . 40 → 69 237.36 . . . . 33 . . . . . 40 → 69 237.37 moment, 33 moment 39 → 69 238.6 wheel: 33 wheel; 39 → 69 238.6 hard, 33 hard 39 → 69 238.10 her! 33 her? 69 238.16 neighbours—as 33 neighbours,—as 40 → 69 238.18 them.’ [new line without indent] The 33 them.’ ¶The 47 → 69 238.20 ‘I 33 “I 40 → 69 238.20 Church-licenciate 33 Church-licentiate 39 → 69 238.21 Nicolas, 33 Nicholas, 40 → 69 238.22 serpent.’ 33 serpent.” 40 → 69 238.30 surprise; 33 surprise! 47 → 69 238.31 oh, 33 oh 39 → 57 O, 69 238.38 linens;’ 33 linens:’ 47 → 69 238.39 exaggerated: 33 exaggerated; 47 → 69 239.7 resolution; 33 resolution: 39 239.10 (1744).’ 33 (1744).” 39 239.11 qualities 33 qualities, 47 → 57 239.12 pious, 33 pious 47 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

239.17

give up 33 give-up 69 239.18 loth 33 loath 39 → 47 69 239.19 long, 33 long; 69 239.21 charwoman 33 char-/woman 40 char-woman 47 → 69 239.20 looked in 33 looked-in 69 239.27 Regence, 33 Régence, 40 → 69 239.32 pass off 33 pass-off 69 239.34 Directly 33 Directly, 69 239.35 endless: 33 endless; 39 → 69 239.38 he; 33 he, 39 → 40 240.6 working; 33 working: 39 → 69 240.7 say 33 say, 39 → 57 240.26 House-mother 33 House-/mother 39 Housemother 40 → 69 240.26 in meridian 33 in a meridian 39 240.28 Correspondence; 33 Correspondance; 39 → 69 240.29 life, ‘parting 33 life,—‘parting 40 → 69 240.30 Wife 33 wife 40 → 69 240.33 Mercenary 33 mercenary 40 → 69 240.34 Spinster, 33 spinster, 40 → 69 240.35 ame 33 âme 69

240.37

763

it is, 33 is this, 40 → 69 240.37 scoundrelism 33 Scoundrelism 40 → 69 240.38 Wife, 33 wife, 40 → 69 241.1 of ), 33 of ) 40 → 69 241.11 Merite 33 Mérite 47 → 69 241.12 Orthodoxy (and 33 Orthodoxy, and 40 → 69 241.12 it), 33 it, 40 → 69 241.16 long-windedness, 33 long-/windedness, 40 69 longwindedness, 47 → 57 241.16 circumvolution 33 circumvolution, 39 241.16 for ever 33 forever 40 → 69 241.18 Sceptic 33 Skeptic 39 241.18 Sceptic; 33 Skeptic; 39 241.24 Authorship; 33 Authorship: 47 → 69 241.24 common-place 33 commonplace 47 → 69 241.26 metaphysico-Baconian 33 Metaphysico-Baconian 40 → 69 241.29 present, 33 present 40 → 69 241.33 metaphysico-Atheistic 33 Metaphysico-Atheistic 40 → 69 241.33 Muets, 33 Muets 69 241.34 three months’ 33 three-months 40 → 69 241.35 years 33 years’ 69

764

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

241.35 back-ground. 33 background. 69 241.36 repute, 33 repute 47 → 69 241.36 sanguineous, 33 sanguine 40 → 69 241.37 pay off 33 pay-off 57 → 69 242.1 Editors; 33 Editors: 47 → 69 242.5 Market-/place, 33 Market-place, 39 69 Marketplace, 40 → 47 242.11 History; 33 History: 39 242.12 Church, 33 Church 39 → 40 242.26 peasecods, 33 peascods, 69 242.31 raw-boned 33 raw-boned, 39 → 69 242.32 lean-cow, 33 lean cow, 39 → 69 242.32 fat-kine 33 fat kine 40 → 69 242.32 beware! All 33 beware! ¶All 69 242.32 this 33 this, 69 242.38 Proto 33 Proto- 40 → 69 243.1 Appolonius 33 Apollonius 39 → 69 243.1 thigh 33 thigh, 69 243.4 unrecognisable. ¶French 33 unrecognisable. [extra leading between paragraphs] ¶ French 69 243.10 commissariat officers 33 commissariat-officers 40 → 69 243.11 for ever 33 forever 40 → 69

243.11

part its 32 part with its 47 → 69 243.14 woe 33 wo 40 243.26 part, 33 part 39 → 69 243.26 nay, 33 nay 69 243.30 back parlour 33 back-parlour 40 → 69 243.30 sculls 33 skulls 69 243.32 Rowland 33 Roland 69 243.34 ‘leave 33 “Leave 40 → 69 “leave Strouse 243.34 room 33 room, 40 → 69 243.34 devil:’ 33 devil;’ 39 devil; 40 → 69 243.34 allez 33 Allez 40 → 69 243.34 moi! 33 moi!” 40 → 69 243.37 that 33 the 40 → 69 244.1 organized 33 organised 47 → 69 244.2 life 33 life, 39 → 40 244.12 fire 33 fire, 39 → 69 244.17 depravity, 33 depravity 47 → 69 244.18 three-score 33 threescore 69 244.18 years, 33 years 39 → 69 244.19 phenomenon, perhaps, 33 phenomenon perhaps 40 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

244.26

enacted (a 33 enacted, a 40 → 69 244.27 eternity); and, 33 eternity)—and, 39 eternity;—and, 40 → 69 244.31 work out 33 work-out 69 244.33 profit 33 profit, 39 → 69 244.35 showing 33 shewing 40 → 47 244.37 picture (that 33 picture, that 40 → 69 244.37 life-picture) 33 life-picture, 40 → 69 244.38 but can 33 but we can 40 → 69 244.38 time; 33 time: 40 → 69 245.1 canvas-picture, 33 canvass-picture, 39 → 47 245.3 is, 33 is 69 245.3 preternuptial 33 Preternuptial 39 → 69 245.3 Correspondence, 33 Correspondence 69 245.3 and again live 33 and live 69 245.9 inconsistencies, as the 33 inconsistencies the 39 inconsistencies, the 33Y 40 → 69 245.13 Abomination’ (écraser 33 Abomination, écraser 40 → 69 245.13 l’Infame), 33 l’Infame,’ 40 → 47 l’Infâme,’ 57 → 69 245.16 chace; 33 chase; 39 → 69 245.16 cheers on 33 cheers-on 40 → 69

765

245.19 must 33 has to 69 245.21 D’Alembert, too, 33 D’Alembert too 40 → 57 245.22 he 33 him 40 → 69 245.22 notions; 33 notions: 40 → 69 245.30 apostacy, 33 apostasy, 39 → 69 245.30 Evangile 33 Evangel 40 → 69 245.31 it, 33 it 47 → 69 245.35 death-bed: 33 deathbed: 57 → 69 245.36 ‘My friend,’ 33 “My friend,” 40 → 69 245.36 ‘a 33 “a 40 → 69 245.36 out.’ 33 out.” 40 → 69 245.37 woe-struck, 33 wostruck, 40 → 69 246.10 shot forth 33 shot-forth 69 246.14 for ever 33 forever 40 → 69 246.23 ‘Oh, 33 ‘O, 69 246.23 virtuous, 33 virtuous; 47 → 69 246.25 had 33 has 47 → 69 246.31 ‘continually virtuous’ 33 continually virtuous 40 → 69 246.33 blameable; 33 blamable; 39 47 → 69 246.35 peaceably, 33 peaceably 57 246.37 thread-bare 33

766

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

thread-/bare 39 threadbare 40 → 69 246.37 cat-calls 33 catcalls 40 → 69 246.38 Banise,’ 33 Banise,’ 40 → 69 247.5 wormed in, 33 wormed-in, 57 → 69 247.5 wormed out, 33 wormed-out, 57 → 69 247.6 Thread-bare 33 Threadbare 40 → 69 247.7 bag-wig, 33 bagwig, 40 → 69 247.7 lackers 33 lacquers 69 247.13 flying Sansculotte, 33 Flying-Sansculotte, 40 → 69 247.14 Grimm; 33 Grimm: 47 → 69 247.19 from: 33 from; 39 → 69 247.27 milch-cow, 33 milk-cow, 40 → 69 247.32 Love 33 Love, 39 → 40 247.35 mole-wise, 33 molewise, 69 247.37 revelations, 33 revelations 47 → 69 248.8 tear up 33 tear-up 69 248.9 how 33 How 40 → 69 248.20 hated,—he 33 hated, he 40 → 69 248.20 Geoffrin, 33 Geoffrin; 40 → 69 248.24 rabbits, 33 rabbits; 69 248.24 forest, 33 forest; 69

248.35

Corn Laws, 33 Corn-Laws, 40 → 69 248.36 himself ’ (pour 33 himself, pour 40 → 69 248.36 lui-même). 33 lui-même.’ 40 → 69 248.38 ‘for ever 33 ‘forever 47 → 69 248.38 Corn Laws;” 33 Corn Laws;’ 39 Corn-Laws:’ 40 → 69 249.6 forgotten, 33 forgotten 39 → 69 249.8 gain him him a 33 gain him a 39 → 69 249.11 eupeptic 33 eupeptic, 39 → 40 249.11 live 33 live, 47 → 69 249.14 too; 33 too: 47 → 69 249.18 noble-sentiments 33 noble-sentiments, 39 → 69 249.20 rest, 33 rest 40 → 69 249.20 remarked,) 33 remarked), 40 → 69 250.4 and, 33 and 69 250.5 other. Nor 33 other. ¶Nor 69 250.7 Guerrilla, 33 Guerilla, 40 Guerilla 47 → 57 Guerrilla 69 250.10 organized 33 organised 47 → 69 250.11 Frèron, 33 Fréron, 69 250.15 Wasp, 33 Wasp 40 → 69 250.15 Frèlon). 33 Frelon). 47 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

250.15 Empecenador, 33 Empecedor, 40 → 69 250.19 Philosophe hands, 33 Philosophe-hands, 40 250.21 divine 33 Divine 69 250.28 foreign 33 Foreign 40 → 69 250.32 Frederick, 33 Frederic, 39 → 69 250.36 receiving. 33 receiving, 69 250.38 Fredericks, 33 Frederics, 39 → 69 251.1 three-score 33 threescore 69 251.4 generation; 33 generation: 39 → 69 251.10 confused 33 confused, 39 → 40 251.14 death-lethargy, 33 death-lethargy 47 → 57 251.15 century, 33 country, 39 → 40 country 47 → 69 251.21 ease; 33 ease: 39 → 69 251.22 lamentable 33 lamentable, 39 → 40 251.25 govern (what is still called governing) 33 ‘govern’ 40 → 69 251.25 nation, 33 nation 39 → 69 251.25 World-Downfal, 33 World-Downfall, 47 → 69 251.26 taxes, 33 taxes; 40 → 69 251.26 prevent (in 33 prevent, in 40 prevent in 47 → 69 251.26 degree) 33 degree, 40 → 57 degree 69

251.27

767

clout up 33 clout-up 69 251.28 devil take 33 Devil govern 40 → 69 251.31 that 33 that, 40 → 69 251.31 day 33 day, 40 → 69 251.33 hours?—Send 33 hours? Send 39 → 69 251.36 approbation’ 33 approbation 40 → 69 251.36 Privilége 33 Privilège 40 → 57 251.36 Roi; 33 Roi;’ 40 → 69 251.37 Authority; 33 Authority: 69 251.38 proceed; 33 proceed; 39 → 69 252.5 library; 33 library: 39 → 69 252.8 king 33 King 40 → 69 252.10 chace, 33 chase, 39 → 69 252.11 saltpetre 33 saltpetre, 39 → 69 252.12 be but one 33 be one 40 → 69 252.13 crystallized. 33 crystallised. 47 → 69 252.19 Pompadour; 33 Pompadour, 39 Pompadour: 40 → 69 252.20 nonplus 33 nonplus, 39 → 69 252.21 majesty 33 Majesty 40 → 69 252.32 ancients; that 33 ancients; and that 40 → 69 253.2 truth” 33 truth 47 → 69

768 253.2

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

vraiment), 33 vraiment),” 47 → 69 253.3 Sire,” 33 sire,” 57 → 69 253.3 majesty 33 Majesty 40 → 69 253.6 unheard of 33 unheard-of 40 → 69 253.9 stocking looms, 33 stocking-looms, 40 → 69 253.12 Printer; 33 Printer: 47 → 69 253.18 Woman 33 Woman, 69 253.19 made up 33 made-up 69 253.23 building up (not 33 building up, not 40 → 57 building-up, not 69 253.24 one, 33 one 40 → 69 253.24 Paris): 33 Paris: 40 → 69 253.28 Ah! 33 Ah, 40 → 69 253.29 dispiritment! 33 dispiritment? 39 → 69 253.31 Goth, 33 Goth 47 → 69 253.32 night, 33 night 47 → 69 253.33 there, 33 there 39 → 69 253.33 pen, 33 pen 47 → 69 253.34 filling up 33 filling-up 69 253.35 up! 33 up. 39 → 69 253.38 Oh, 33 O, 69 254.1 ages,—that 33 ages—that 40 → 69

254.2

swaddling-clothes 33 swaddling clothes 47 → 57 254.4 get the 33 get entirely the 40 → 69 254.5 it. 33 it while he lived. 40 → 69 254.6 go 33 go, 39 → 69 254.7 hardworked, 33 hardworked 47 → 69 254.8 writing paper, 33 writing-paper, 40 → 69 254.9 household, 33 household 69 254.9 holiday; 33 holyday; 40 → 69 254.16 Baroness 33 Baroness, 40 → 69 254.16 silk, 33 silk 40 → 69 254.18 company: 33 company; 40 → 69 254.19 dressing gown 33 dressing-gown 40 → 69 254.21 in: 33 in; 40 → 69 254.24 bowmen; 33 bowmen: 39 → 69 254.27 particularize; 33 particularise; 47 → 69 254.28 call 33 called 47 → 69 255.1 Manor-house 33 Manorhouse 40 → 69 255.4 Hoop, 33 Hoop’s, 40 → 69 255.8 Vertue* 33 Virtue* 39 vertue* 40 → 69 255.8 further 33 farther 40 → 69 255.18 purgare! ¶Such 33

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

purgare! [new line without indent] Such 47 → 69 255.20 occurrence: 33 occurrence; 40 → 69 255.21 all too 33 all-too 40 → 69 255.23 ever new 33 ever-new 69 255.24 ‘stuffed,’ 33 ‘stuffed’ 40 → 69 255.27 existence, 33 existence 47 → 69 255.28 at 33 of 69 255.31 gaiety 33 gayety 39 255.33 ground, 33 ground 69 255.39 Connoisseurship; 33 connoisseurship; 40 → 69 255.39 Thrift. 33 thrift. 40 → 69 256.2 for ever. 33 forever. 40 → 69 256.3 Mother-in-law, 33 Mother-in-law 40 → 69 256.6 double meanings; 33 double-meanings; 69 256.6 stall cattle 33 stall-cattle 69 256.8 “Burn 33 ‘Burn 39 → 69 256.8 bed”; 33 bed’; 39 bed;’ 40 → 69 256.8 it 33 it 40 → 69 256.9 “daily 33 ‘daily 39 → 69 256.9 epochs” 33 epochs’ 39 → 69 256.12 Whereby 33 Whereby, 39 → 69

769

256.13 poor, 33 poor 40 → 69 256.23 “like 33 ‘like 39 → 69 256.23 walk;” 33 walk;’ 39 → 69 256.28 whosoever 33 whomsoever 39 256.29 five and twenty 33 five-and-twenty 40 → 69 256.35 d’Orleans) 33 d’Orléans) 69 256.35 five and twenty 33 five-and-twenty 40 → 69 256.36 louis, 33 louis 47 → 69 257.7 shows 33 shews 40 → 47 257.7 “Why 33 “Why, 40 → 69 257.8 little, 33 little; 40 → 69 257.8 sago; 33 sago, 40 → 69 257.9 Formicaleo?”—”No” 33 Formica-leo?”—”No.” 39 → 69 257.12 good day.” 33 good-day.” 69 257.15 digesting (better 33 digesting, better 40 → 69 257.15 worse); 33 worse; 40 → 69 257.20 heart, 33 heart 40 → 69 257.21 nay (highest 33 nay, highest 40 → 69 257.22 glories), 33 glories, 40 → 69 257.25 Chess-player, 33 Chess player, 57 257.31 marle, 33 marl, 69

770 257.32

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

desirable. Within 33 desirable. ¶Within 69 258.5 endeavour (to 33 endeavour, to 40 → 69 258.6 parallel), 33 parallel, 40 → 69 258.8 old; 33 old: 39 → 69 258.12 librarian 33 Librarian 69 258.13 ready money. 33 ready-money. 69 258.15 not (we find) 33 not, we find, 40 → 69 25815. all 33 All 69 258.17 sufficient; 33 sufficient: 39 258.19 (rather husky) 33 rather husky 40 → 69 258.21 generous, 33 generous 69 258.22 hindrance 33 hinderance 40 258.24 Life, 33 Life 47 → 69 258.25 Petersburgh 33 Petersburg 57 → 69 258.29 ill calculated 33 ill-calculated 69 258.30 was 33 were 39 → 69 258.31 thing 33 things 39 → 69 258.32 History;* 33 History;* 39 → 69 258.34 ‘But 33 “But 40 → 69 258.34 this?’ 33 this?” 40 → 69 258.34 ‘I will! I!’ 33 “I will, I!” 40 → 69

258.35 Abbé. 33 Abbé: 40 → 69 258.35 ‘Do 33 “do 40 → 69 258.35 proceed.’ 33 proceed.” 40 → 69 258.35 Meister). 33 Meister.) 40 → 69 258.37 instructors (of Kings) are 33 instructors’ of Kings ‘are 40 → 69 259.1 announcement (surpassing 33 announcement, surpassing 40 → 69 259.2 uttered, 33 uttered 40 → 69 259.2 utterable, 33 utterable 40 → 69 259.2 way) 33 way, 40 → 69 259.8 here (could 33 here, could 40 → 69 259.9 them); 33 them; 40 → 69 259.9 cordon! Nevertheless, 33 cordon! ¶Nevertheless, 69 259.11 put up 33 put-up 57 → 69 259.11 gentle, 33 gentle 69 259.13 civilized 33 civilised 40 → 69 259.14 accident, 33 chance, 39 → 69 259.17 unheard-of-things 33 unheard-of things 40 → 69 259.18 bottomless, 33 bottomless 40 → 69 259.23 powers, 33 powers; 40 → 69 259.24 seen, 33 seen 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

259.24

conquered (for 33 conquered, for 40 → 69 259.24 behoof ) 33 behoof, 40 → 69 259.26 radiant, 33 radiant 69 259.27 dim, 33 dim 40 → 69 259.27 sleep: 33 sleep; 39 → 69 259.33 people 33 people, 39 → 40 259.38 déséspoir 33 désespoir 47 → 69 259.39 thee!’ 33 thee’! 69 260.1 Seneca (on 33 Seneca, on 40 → 69 260.1 Works) 33 Works, 40 → 69 260.3 Sénéque; 33 Sénéque; 39 Sénèque; 57 → 69 260.4 alas! 33 alas, 40 → 69 260.4 tinkering, 33 tinkering 39 → 69 260.9 Dogbolt, 33 Dogbolt 40 → 69 260.9 a 33 some 40 → 69 260.13 Sénéque, 33 Sénèque, 57 → 69 260.14 him 33 him, 40 → 69 260.15 July, 33 July 57 → 69 260.15 Sceptic’s 33 Skeptic’s 39 260.21 Mais 33 “Mais 40 → 69 260.21 quelle 33 que 39 → 69

771

260.22 me?) 33 me?)” 40 → 69 260.25 Saint-Benôit. 33 Saint-Benoît. 57 → 69 260.38 Encyclopedism 33 Encyclopedism, 39 → 69 260.38 without 33 without, 39 261.2 and, 33 and 39 → 69 261.2 realized 33 realised 40 → 69 261.10 shown, 33 shewn, 40 → 47 261.10 showable, 33 shewable, 40 → 47 261.14 living, 33 living 39 → 69 261.14 Encyclopædia, 33 Encyclopedia, 39 → 69 261.23 Encyclopædia, 33 Encyclopedia, 39 → 69 261.26 in a quite other 33 in quite another 39 → 69 261.26 other 33 another 39 → 69 261.27 further 33 farther 40 → 69 261.27 taken in 33 taken-in 57 → 69 261.31 must 33 must, 57 → 69 261.32 contrary 33 contrary, 57 → 69 261.32 properly 33 properly, 39 → 69 261.35 morning tide 33 morning-tide 40 → 69 261.36 Universe, 33 Universe 40 → 69 262.1 Seer 33 Seer, 39 → 69

772 262.7

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

economically, 33 economically 40 → 69 262.10 embodyment, 33 embodiment, 40 → 69 262.10 is, 33 is 69 262.10 manifestations, 33 manifestations 69 262.12 said the Circumstances 33 said Circumstances 40 → 69 262.17 thought 33 thoughts 40 → 69 262.20 resolute, 33 resolute 47 → 69 262.22 different.’ Grant, 33 different.’ ¶Grant, 69 262.24 understand, meanwhile, 33 understand meanwhile 57 → 69 262.26 any, 33 any 39 → 69 262.27 [u]s 33 us 39 → 69 262.31 too 33 too, 47 → 69 262.36 ourselves, 33 ourselves 39 → 69 263.4 ‘Count us,’ 33 “Count us,” 40 → 69 263.5 ‘Well,’ 33 “Well,” 40 → 69 263.5 ‘it 33 “it 40 → 69 263.5 fished out 33 fished-out 57 → 69 263.6 it.’ 33 it.” 40 → 69 263.10 proselytising 33 proselytizing 39 → 40 263.18 realized. 33 realised. 47 → 69

263.30 Divinty; 33 Divinity; 39 → 69 263.30 ‘intellect, 33 intellect, 40 → 69 263.31 believing 33 believing, 47 → 69 263.32 communicating,’ 33 communicating, 40 → 69 263.33 either (if 33 either, if 40 → 69 263 33 spirit, 33 spirit 40 → 69 263.34 case) 33 case, 40 → 69 263.34 else (if 33 else, if 40 → 69 263.35 spirit) 33 spirit, 40 → 69 263.36 further, 33 farther, 40 → 69 264.1 itself ?’ 33 itself ’? 69 264.5 further. 33 farther. 40 → 69 264.6 itself (that 33 itself, that 40 → 69 264.6 say, 33 say 40 → 69 264.6 picture out 33 picture-out 57 → 69 264.7 itself ) 33 itself, 40 → 69 264.14 it: 33 it; 39 → 69 264.17 Natural-theology, 33 Natural Theology, 40 → 69 264.20 causes 33 causes, 39 → 69 264.21 them (if 33 them, if 40 → 69 264.21 he 33 be 39

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

264.21 them) 33 them, 40 → 69 264.22 Intuition; 33 intuition; 39 → 69 264.27 irrational; 33 irrational, 40 → 69 264.27 this, 33 this 40 → 69 264.28 Nature, 33 Nature 40 → 69 264.31 surely, 33 surely one would think, 40 → 69 264.32 home, in 33 home,—in 40 → 69 264.33 Natural-theologies, 33 Natural Theologies, 40 → 69 264.34 such like, 33 suchlike, 69 264.35 an indubitable 33 a certain 40 → 69 264.35 reprinting: 33 reprinting; 39 → 69 265.1 be 33 be, 40 → 69 265.3 turn out 33 turn-out 69 265.6 liesse)?’ 33 liesse)?’ 39 liesse)?’ 57 → 69 265.7 hurly-burly (of 33 hurlyburly, of 40 → 47 hurly-/burly, of 57 → 69 265.7 poor, 33 poor 40 → 69 265.8 Time) 33 Time, 40 → 69 265.9 here: 33 here; 39 → 69 265.14 word, 33 word 40 → 69

773

265.17 further 33 farther 40 → 69 265.18 Here, 33 Here 40 → 69 265.21 Creed, 33 Greed, 33Y → 39 greed, 40 → 69 265.21 galfness 33 halfness 33Y → 69 265.27 it (and 33 it, and 40 → 69 265.27 us), that 33 us, That 40 → 69 265.31 and, 33 and 39 → 69 266.1 same, 33 same 47 → 69 266.4 ‘rush-light 33 ‘rushlight 57 → 69 266.5 recognized 33 recognised 39 → 69 266.9 rests, 33 rests 69 266.14 recognizes 33 recognises 39 → 69 266.21 fact, 33 fact 39 → 69 266.22 drove on 33 drove-on 57 → 69 266.23 Sceptic; 33 Skeptic; 39 266.28 recognizable 33 recognisable 39 → 69 266.28 clear out 33 clear-out 57 266.33 ‘proselytising 33 ‘proselytizing 39 → 40 266.37 Bonze, 33 Bonze 47 → 69 267.5 and, 33 and 40 → 69 267.6 solemnize 33 solemnise 47 → 69

774

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

267.11 away; 33 away: 40 → 69 267.12 meanwhile, 33 mean while, 57 → 69 267.15 grind out 33 grind-out 57 → 69 267.21 hedge in 33 hedge-in 40 → 69 267.25 babblest 33 babblest, 40 → 69 267.27 pre-assurance 33 pre-/assurance 47 preassurance 57 → 69 267.29 further 33 farther 57 → 69 267.33 (under penalty 33 (under a penalty 40 → 69 267.37 Sacrament: 33 Sacrament: 39 → 69 268.4 morum: 33 morum: 39 → 69 268.8 rather 33 rather, 40 69 268.12 may (especially 33 may, especially 40 → 69 268.13 cognized 33 cognizable 40 cognisable 47 → 69 268.13 police-offices) 33 police-offices, 40 → 69 268.16 philanthropy; 33 philanthropy, 40 → 69 268.22 all?’ 33 all’? 69 268.25 (as 33 as 40 → 69 268.26 known) 33 known, 40 → 69 268.26 must assert 33 must needs assert 40 → 69 268.27 one 33 one, 39 → 57

268.28 Universe, 33 Universe 39 → 69 268.37 Duty)—that 33 Duty),—that 47 → 69 268.38 apostle 33 Apostle 47 → 69 269.2 (bounded 33 if bounded 40 → 69 269.2 alone) 33 alone, 40 → 69 269.3 miserable?’ 33 miserable’? 69 269.6 Vice (Denis 33 Vice, Denis 40 → 69 269.7 judge) 33 judge, 40 → 69 269.7 Indigestions?’ 33 Indigestions’? 69 269.7 That 33 This 47 → 69 269.9 what then 33 what, then, 69 269.12 binding. 33 binding! 40 → 69 269.13 court-toad-eater; 33 court-toadeater; 40 → 69 269.14 expedient; 33 expedient: 40 → 69 269.16 honnêteté, 33 honnéteté, 39 269.17 ames-nobles; 33 âmes-nobles; 57 → 69 269.18 sublime: ‘In 33 sublime:—In 40 → 69 269.19 it!’ 33 it! 40 → 69 269.19 will nevertheless 33 will, nevertheless, 69 269.19 recognize) 33 recognise) 39 → 69 269.25 stretch out 33 stretch-out 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

269.25 hand?’ 33 hand’? 69 269.30 Self, 33 Self,’ 40 → 69 269.30 action:’ 33 action: 40 → 69 269.32 knows 33 knows, for example, 40 → 69 269.33 before (for example) the 33 before the 40 → 69 269.35 co-exist 33 coexist 39 → 40 69 269.38 it, 33 it 40 → 69 269.38 length, 33 length 40 → 69 270.6 conviction,—has, 33 conviction, has, 40 → 69 270.8 wicked’ (the 33 wicked,’ the 40 → 69 270.8 foolish) 33 foolish 40 foolish, 47 → 69 270.9 Diderot! [extra leading between paragraphs] ¶The 33 Diderot! ¶The 57 → 69 270.11 Or, 33 Or 69 270.12 (think 33 think 40 → 69 270.12 admirers,) 33 admirers, 40 → 69 270.13 to 33 to, 47 → 69 270.17 him, 33 him 40 → 69 270.23 gaiety, 33 gayety, 39 270.28 and (with 33 and, with 40 → 69 270.28 submissiveness) 33 submissiveness, 40 → 69

775

270.29 Duel 33 duel 57 → 69 270.32 conversation, 33 conversation 39 → 69 270.38 utterance, 33 utterance 40 → 69 271.1 pages 33 pages, 39 → 69 271.2 not; 33 not; 39 → 69 271.2 is some truth 33 is truth 40 → 69 271.8 Disorder 33 disorder 40 → 69 271.14 specialties;’ 33 specialities;’ 39 271.16 stem (bearing 33 stem, bearing 40 → 69 271.17 round); 33 round; 40 → 69 271.20 smatterer 33 smatterer, 40 → 69 271.30 him 33 him, 39 271.31 applies, 33 applies 40 → 69 271.33 Great 33 great 40 → 69 271.38 become! 33 become? 57 → 69 271.38 Alas! 33 Alas, 40 → 69 271.38 stone-tower, 33 stone tower, 69 272.2 battered down 33 battered-down 57 → 69 272.7 parcel out 33 parcel-out 57 → 69 272.8 such like; 33 suchlike; 69 272.10 Diderot, 33 Diderot 47 → 69

776 272.22

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

Le 33 ‘Le 40 → 69 272.22 matière 33 matière, 39 → 40 272.23 Matter 33 Matter, 39 → 40 272.23 a point)! 33 a point)!’ 40 → 69 272.24 too, 33 too 69 272.26 Famille 33 Famille, 39 → 69 272.30 chance, 33 chance 47 → 69 272.31 nay, 33 nay 40 → 69 272.32 critically 33 critically, 40 → 69 272.35 genius (which only cannot manipulate), 33 genius, which wants nothing but a hand, 40 → 69 272.38 originator (almost 33 originator, almost 40 → 69 273.1 country) 33 country, 40 → 69 273.2 Nature 33 Nature, 39 → 69 273.2 Nature; 33 Nature: 47 → 69 273.5 seen (in 33 seen, in 40 → 69 273.5 Art) 33 Art, 40 → 69 273.20 shamelessness’; 33 shamelessness,’ 40 → 69 273.23 humour, 33 humour 69 273.23 background. 33 back-/ground. 40 57 back-ground. 47 69 273.24 Literature: 33 literature: 40 → 69

273.26

Quixote, 33 Quixote 69 273.30 working out 33 working-out 57 → 69 273.31 canvas; 33 canvass; 39 → 47 273.33 Compositions. 33 compositions. 47 → 69 273.35 enough, too, 33 enough too, 40 → 69 273.35 years, 33 years 40 → 69 273.37 1805; 33 1805: 47 → 69 273.38 otherwise,) 33 otherwise), 39 otherwise) 40 → 69 273.38 public, 33 public 40 → 69 273.38 all, 33 all 69 274.1 whom, 33 whom 40 → 69 274.1 written, 33 written 57 → 69 274.4 meet 33 properly suffice for 40 → 69 274.8 occasions; is 33 occasions; and is 69 274.22 show 33 shew 40 → 47 274.23 uncontroulableness; 33 uncontrollableness; 39 → 69 274.23 steadfastness, 33 stedfastness, 40 → 57 274.27 imagined (poor man) 33 imagined, poor man, 40 → 69 274.31 his: 33 his; 47 → 69 274.36 cœur-noble, 33 cœur-noble 47 → 57 cœur noble 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

274.38 enterprize, 33 enterprise, 39 → 69 275.4 fill up 33 fill-up 57 → 69 275.4 Sensibilité, 33 sensibilité, 40 → 69 275.11 him? [extra leading between paragraphs] ¶If 33 him?— ¶If 57 → 69 275.13 want, 33 want 39 → 69 275.19 ‘web’? 33 web? 40 → 69 275.20 matter (as 33 matter, as 40 → 69 275.20 all) 33 all matters, 40 → 69 275.22 time, 33 time 57 → 69 275.23 that 33 That 40 → 69 275.24 summed up, 33 summed-up, 69 275.27 miserables,’ 33 misérables,’ 47 → 69 275.27 War-song 33 Warsong 47 → 69 275.28 now (with 33 now, with 40 → 69 275.29 significance) 33 significance, 40 → 69 275.30 into, 33 into 39 → 69 275.30 three score! 33 threescore! 47 69 three-/score! 57 275.31 which 33 what 40 → 69

777

275.33

for ever; 33 forever; 47 → 69 275.34 result[«»] 33 result. 39 → 69 275.34 sole 33 sole, 39 275.37 belief 33 Belief 39 → 69 276.3 unfruitful.’ 33 unfruitful. 39 “Sir Walter Scott” [38, 39, 40, 47, 57, 69] 277.0 Memoirs of the Life of Scott. 38 MEMOIRS OF THE LIFE OF SCOTT.† 39 SIR WALTER SCOTT.† 40 → 69 12 277.1 i—vi. Cadell. Edinburgh, 38 i.—vi. Cadell. Edinburgh, 39 i.—vi. Edinburgh, 40 → 69 277.3* ¶American 38 [indent] ¶American 39 277.3 ‘an 38 ‘an 40 → 69 277.4 distinguished.’ 38 distinguished.’ 40 → 69 277.5 surely; 38 surely: 47 → 69 277.7 improved drop 38 improved-drop 40 → 69 277.9 choked out 38 choked-out 57 → 69 277.11 Mrs 38 Mrs. 39 → 69 277.11 female; 38 female! 39

12 1839 adds “[London and Westminster Review, 1838.]” under the title; 1840 and all subsequent editions change this to “[1838.]”. 1838 and subsequent editions shift the bibliographic information from the heading to a footnote. 1840 and following insert “London and Westminster Review, No. 12.—” at the beginning of the footnote.

778

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

277.12 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 277.12 male! 38 male. 39 277.13 civilization, 38 civilisation, 40 → 69 277.14 blonde gowns 38 blonde-gowns 40 → 69 277.19 specialty 38 speciality 39 277.20 civilization 38 civilisation 40 → 69 277.22 not; 38 not: 39 → 40 277.22 nay, 38 nay 40 → 69 278.9 it 38 it, 47 → 69 278.12 results; 38 results: 39 → 47 278.16 even, 38 even 40 → 69 278.17 is, indeed, 38 is indeed 69 278.18 world now rapturously 38 world rapturously 39 → 69 278.19 huzzahs 38 huzzahs, 39 278.19 venerates 38 venerates, 40 → 69 278.22 bright; 38 bright: 40 → 69 278.25 best: 38 best; 39 278.31 nature 38 Nature 40 → 69 278.31 obey 38 obey, 40 → 69 278.32 Show 38 Shew 40 → 47 278.32 show 38 shew 40 → 47

278.36 ternary 38 ternary, 47 → 69 279.4 semblance,—cheerfully 38 semblance; cheerfully 40 → 69 279.8 exist; 38 exist, 39 → 69 279.10 men, in 38 men, men, in 39 279.16 taking in 38 taking-in 57 → 69 279.19 civilized 38 civilised 40 → 69 279.19 last, included 38 last included, 69 279.20 include 38 include, 69 279.26* “Life by 38 ‘Life by 39 Life ‘by 40 → 69 279.26 Son-in-law 38 son-in-law 40 → 69 279.26* executor” 38 executor’ 39 → 69 279.30 periodical publication 38 Periodical Publication 40 → 69 279.33 multitude; 38 multitude 39 multitude: 40 → 69 279.35 work 38 Work 40 → 69 279.35 six promised volumes, 38 Six promised Volumes, 40 → 69 279.36 seventh, 38 Seventh, 40 → 69 279.37* light. It will tell us, say they, little new and nothing pleasing to know. But 38 light. But 39 → 69 280.2 the seventh volume; 38 that Seventh Volume; 40 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

280.3

six 38 Six 40 → 69 280.4 two hundred 38 two-hundred 57 → 69 280.7 “Life” 38 ‘Life’ 39 Life 40 → 69 280.7 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 280.10 was 38 was, 57 → 69 280.11 picture forth 38 picture-forth 57 → 69 280.13 ‘There 38 “There 40 → 69 280.15 us:’ 38 us:” 40 → 69 280.16 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 280.18 perfection 38 perfection, 40 → 69 280.18 “Odyssey” 38 ‘Odyssey’ 39 Odyssey 40 → 69 280.18 “Thomas Ellwood” 38 ‘Thomas Ellwood’ 39 Thomas Ellwood 40 → 69 280.20 man; 38 man: 39 → 69 28023 “Odyssey,” 38 ‘Odyssey,’ 39 Odyssey, 40 → 69 280.24 “Odyssey,” 38 ‘Odyssey,’ 39 Odyssey, 40 → 47 Odyssey 57 → 69 280.24 “Pickwick;” 38 ‘Pickwick;’ 39 Pickwick; 40 → 69 280.26 “Odyssey” 38 ‘Odyssey’ 39 Odyssey 40 → 69 280.26 “Pickwick” 38

779

‘Pickwick’ 39 Pickwick 40 → 69 280.27 literature, 38 Literature, 40 → 69 280.30 above ground, 38 aboveground, 57 → 69 280.31 determines the value. 38 determines value. 39 280.32 eternity; 38 Eternity; 40 → 69 280.33 time. 38 Time. 40 → 69 280.33 Wo 38 Woe 47 → 69 280.33 wo 38 woe 47 → 69 280.38 had 38 Had 40 → 69 281.4 man and nature 38 Man and Nature 40 → 69 281.4 Saint Pierre 38 Saint-Pierre 40 → 69 281.5 islands 38 Islands 40 → 69 281.5 incoherences, 38 Incoherences, 40 → 69 281.8 him 38 him, 40 → 69 281.11 march-of-intellect 38 march-of-intellect, 39 → 40 281.12 other-wise 38 otherwise 39 → 69 281.14 shout 38 shout, 40 → 69 281.14 Io 38 “Io 40 → 69 281.14 Pæan, 38 Pæan! 40 → 69 281.15 conquered; and 38 conquered;”—and, 40 → 69 281.15 meanwhile 38 meanwhile, 40 → 47 mean while, 57 → 69

780

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

281.19 ¶Mr 38 ¶Mr. 39 → 57 [extra leading between paragraphs] ¶Mr. 69 281.20 at; 38 at: 39 → 69 281.22 documents, 38 documents 47 → 69 281.23 work, 38 Work, 40 → 69 281.26 “Life and Correspondence of Hannah More,” 38 ‘Life and Correspondence of Hannah More,’ 39 Life and Correspondence of Hannah More, 40 → 69 281.27 “Life of Scott,” 38 ‘Life of Scott,’ 39 Life of Scott, 40 → 69 281.28 seven volumes, 38 Seven Volumes, 40 → 69 281.30 other 38 other, 40 → 69 281.30 shown 38 shewn 40 → 47 281.31 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 281.31 and, 38 and 39 → 69 281.32 composition 38 composition, 40 → 69 281.34 that 38 but 40 → 69 282.1 has call 38 has a call 40 → 69 282.10 sincerity 38 sincerity, 39 → 40 282.15 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 282.19 nay, 38 nay 57 → 69 282.19 hero 38 Hero 40 → 69

282.20 biography 38 Biography 40 → 69 282.23 biography, 38 Biography, 40 → 69 282.24 for ever 38 forever 40 → 69 282.24 life-writer 38 Life-writer 40 → 69 282.24 life 38 Life 40 → 69 282.27 good-day.’ 38 good day.’ 39 → 40 282.30 was 38 was, 47 → 69 283.6 spirit, 38 spirit 40 → 69 283.6 it 38 it, 40 → 69 283.7 spirit), 38 spirit,) 39 283.10 Hamlet, 38 Hamlet 57 → 69 283.11 Biography, 38 biography, 40 → 69 283.12 (which after all 38 (which, after all, 47 → 69 283.13 matter; 38 matter! 39 283.15 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 283.16 approve 38 approve, 47 → 69 283.17 criticizing 38 criticising 39 → 69 283.17 public: 38 public; 39 283.18 work, 38 Work, 40 → 69 283.23 beatified ghost-condition. 38 beatified ghost condition. 39 beatified-ghost condition. 40 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

283.24

Let it be so. Several 38 Several 39 → 69 283.24 ‘See, 38 “See, 40 → 69 283.25 me!’ 38 me!” 40 → 69 283.27 illumination: 38 illumination; 39 → 69 283.31 The 38 ¶The 69 284.1 him, but also 38 him; but 40 → 69 284.7 nay, 38 nay 40 → 69 284.19 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 284.21 nought, 38 naught, 57 284.28 far: 38 far; 39 284.28 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 284.32 silence, ‘that 38 silence,—“That 40 → 69 284.33 Infinite.’ 38 Infinite.” 40 → 69 284.33 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 284.38 biographer 38 Biographer 40 → 69 285.1 analyzing 38 analysing 40 → 69 285.2 Raphael-pictures, 38 Raphael pictures, 39 → 57 285.2 novel-manufactory, 38 Novel-manufactory, 40 → 69 285.3 15,000l. 38 £15,000 39 → 47 285.4 heaven. 38 Heaven. 40 → 69 285.5 spreading out 38 spreading-out 57 → 69

285.7

781

“Lockhart’s Life of Scott,” 38 ‘Lockharts’s Life of Scott,’ 39 Lockhart’s Life of Scott, 40 → 69 285.8 decision, 38 decision 47 → 69 285.12 or the 38 or purchase the 40 → 69 285.13 life: 38 life; 39 Life; 40 → 69 285.19 he; 38 he: 39 → 69 285.19 good 38 good, 47 → 69 285.30 conflagration 38 conflagration, 40 → 69 285.31 showing 38 shewing 40 → 47 285.34 almost on 38 almost all on 39 → 69 285.38 tar-barrels, 38 tar-barrels 69 285.38 princesses 38 Princesses 40 → 69 286.1 “One 38 ‘One 39 286.1 Farinelli?” 38 Farinelli!’ 39 286.2 In 38 ¶In 69 286.2 literature 38 Literature 40 → 69 286.2 too, 38 too 69 286.2 Scott’s, 38 Scott’s 39 → 40 286.8 out, 38 out; 40 → 69 286.8 best, 38 best 69

782 286.9

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

few, 38 few 69 286.11 Don Quixote 38 Don Quixote 40 → 69 286.13 far shining 38 far-shining 40 → 69 286.17 bye-/standers 38 by-standers 39 bystanders 40 → 69 286.18 Or 38 ¶Or 69 286.21 dressed out 38 dressed-out 57 → 69 286.22 civilized 38 civilised 40 → 69 286.23 meanwhile 38 meanwhile, 39 → 57 286.24 he 38 he, 40 → 69 286.24 whole 38 whole, 40 → 69 286.24 enough; 38 enough: 39 → 69 286.25 not.—We 38 not. We 39 → 69 286.26 altogether, 38 altogether; 40 → 69 286.33 instinct 38 instinct, 39 → 40 286.34 tendency 38 tendency, 39 → 69 286.37 vigorous 38 vigorous, 39 → 40 287.1 His 38 ¶His 69 287.1 things 38 things, 40 → 47, 69 287.7 mystery of existence 38 Mystery of Existence 40 → 69 287.11 market labour, 38 market-labour, 57 → 69

287.14 anything: 38 anything; 39 → 69 287.14 nay, 38 nay 69 287.16 conventionalities: 38 conventionalities; 47 → 69 287.16 semi-false, 38 semi-false 47 → 69 287.18 ‘Wo 38 ‘Woe 47 → 69 287.19 wo 38 woe 47 → 69 287.20 hand 38 hand, 40 → 69 287.20 he 38 He 40 → 69 287.26 burn up 38 burn-up 57 → 69 287.28 burn up 38 burn-up 57 → 69 287.30 needs, 38 needs 39 287.31 nay, 38 nay 69 287.32 fatallest 38 fatalest 39 69 287.33 naught. 38 nought. 69 287.34 developed 38 developed, 40 → 69 287.36 nature. 38 Nature. 40 → 69 287.37 Napoleon 38 ¶Napoleon 69 288.2 soldier 38 Soldier 40 → 69 288.4 idea, 38 idea; 40 → 69 288.4* ‘la 38 ‘La 40 → 69 288.4 carriere 38 carriére 39 carrière 40 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

288.4* the 38 The 40 → 69 288.8 realize 38 realise 40 → 69 288.12 out, 38 out; 40 → 69 288.12 realized, 38 realised, 40 → 69 288.14 burn up 38 burn-up 57 → 69 288.17 ¶Yet, 38 ¶Yet 39 → 69 288.18 fantasticality 38 fantasticality, 39 → 57 288.18 distortion, 38 distortion 69 288.19 Nay 38 Nay, 39 → 47 288.23 distress, 38 distress 57 → 69 288.23 Samson-like, 38 Samson-like 57 → 69 288.25 menace, 38 menace 57 → 69 288.27 had, 38 had 57 → 69 288.30 healthy, 38 healthy 47 → 69 288.31 withal, 38 withal 40 → 69 288.33 Neither 38 ¶Neither 69 288.37 coronetted 38 coroneted 40 → 69 288.37 failures 38 failures, 40 → 69 289.3 net-total, 38 net total, 57 289.3 shown 38 shewn 40 → 47 289.4 nature, 38 Nature, 40 → 47 Nature 57 → 69

289.9

783

nature 38 Nature 40 → 69 289.10 shows 38 shews 40 → 47 289.12 fantastic, 38 fantastic 40 → 69 289.12 impossible—as 38 impossible;—as 40 → 69 289.13 not, 38 not 39 289.14 soap and water, 38 soap-and-water, 57 → 69 289.20 co-operative, 38 coöperative, 39 57 → 69 cooperative, 47 289.20 self-distractive, 38 self-distracting, 39 → 69 289.27 Nay, 38 Nay 69 289.32 literature 38 Literature 40 → 69 289.33 sentimentalism, 38 Sentimentalism 40 → 69 Sentimentalism, Strouse 289.35 “These 38 ‘These 39 289.36 there!” 38 there!’ 39 289.36 cheerfullest 38 cheerfulest 69 289.38 healthy.—Or, 38 healthy. ¶Or, 40 → 69 290.13 thitherward: 38 thitherward; 57 → 69 290.14 sign. 38 sign! 47 → 69 290.15 men. 38 men? 47 → 69 290.16 vocal 38 vocals 47 → 69 290.17 question 38 question, 39 → 69

784

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

290.18 discomfort, 38 discomfort 47 → 69 290.26 Border chief 38 Border-chief 47 → 69 290.32 to: 38 to; 47 → 69 291.1 vehemently: 38 vehemently; 47 → 69 291.5 literature, 38 Literature, 40 → 69 291.9 unincumbered 38 unencumbered 39 → 69 291.9 aristocracy: 38 aristocracy; 47 → 69 291.10 faculty, 38 faculty 57 → 69 291.12 light, 38 light 39 291.12 industry, 38 industry 47 → 69 291.14 ‘Let 38 “Let 40 → 69 291.15 body,’ 38 body,” 40 → 69 291.18 history-books, 38 history-books 47 → 69 291.23 organization; 38 organisation; 47 → 69 291.28 stream in 38 stream-in 57 → 69 291.30 character, 38 character 47 → 69 291.32 Scott 38 Scott, 40 291.33 Presbyterianism, too, 38 Presbyterianism too 40 → 69 291.36 universe, 38 Universe, 40 → 69 291.36 eternity, 38 Eternity, 40 → 69 291.38 heavenly behest, of duty 38

Heavenly Behest, of Duty 40 → 69 291.38 overcanopies 38 over-/canopies 47 over-canopies 57 → 69 292.1 people; 38 people: 39 → 69 292.4 That 38 That, 39 → 69 292.6 ‘Let 38 “Let 40 → 69 292.6 taught:’ 38 taught:” 40 → 69 292.8 ‘Let 38 “Let 40 → 69 292.10 eternity.’ 38 eternity.” 40 → 69 292.11 patent digesters 38 patent-digesters 40 → 69 292.12 these; 38 these: 39 → 69 292.19 hard-fisted, 38 hard-fisted 40 → 69 292.21 itself, one day, 38 itself one day 69 292.21 scepticism 38 skepticism 39 Scepticism 40 → 69 292.22 too, 38 too 40 → 69 292.22 wrestling, Titan-like, 38 wrestling Titan-like 47 → 69 292.24 melody 38 Melody 40 → 69 292.24 is and continues in 38 is there, and continues to manifest itself, in 40 → 69 292.25 voice 38 Voice 40 → 69 292.25 work 38 Work 40 → 69 292.25 nation 38 Nation 40 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

292.25 hardy, 38 hardy 40 → 69 292.29 and, 38 and 69 292.29 sides, 38 sides 69 292.32 Scott; 38 Scott: 39 → 69 292.37 ‘So 38 “So 40 → 69 292.38 century,’ 38 century,” 40 → 69 293.2 autobiography 38 Autobiography 40 → 69 293.3 shone out 38 shone-out 57 293.5 anywhere, 38 any where, 39 293.8 seems 38 seems, 40 → 69 293.15 affection, 38 affection; 40 → 69 293.18 further 38 farther 40 → 69 293.19* as 38 so 39 → 69 293.19 dismissed, 38 dismissed 47 → 69 293.24 to 38 to, 39 → 69 293.25 swathed up 38 swathed-up 57 → 69 293.27 farm-house, 38 farm-/house, 57 farmhouse, 69 293.29 M‘Dougal 38 M’Dougal 39 → 69 293.30 M‘Dougal 38 M’Dougal 39 → 69 293.31 him 38 him, 40 → 69 293.35 soldier 38 soldier, 39 → 69

785

293.35 sheep-skin, 38 sheep-/skin, 39 sheepskin, 40 → 69 293.37 M‘Dougal 38 M’Dougal 39 → 69 293.38 period.’—Vol. i, pp. 15—17. 38 period.—vol. i. pp. 15-17. 39 period.’† [footnote inserted] † Vol. i. pp. 15-17. 40 → 69 294.1 ‘Liddesdale raids.’ 38 ‘Liddesdale Raids.’ 47 → 69 294.1 grown up 38 grown-up 57 → 69 294.2 advocate: 38 Advocate: 40 → 69 294.2 vacation time 38 vacation-time 40 → 69 294.5 debateable 38 debatable 39 Debatable 40 → 69 Debateable Strouse 294.5 land, 38 Land, 40 → 69 294.9 thitherward: 38 thither-ward: 39 294.9 ours 38 ours, 40 → 69 294.12 whisky 38 whiskey 39 294.13 has perhaps 38 has, perhaps, 40 → 69 294.15 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 294.15 autobiography 38 Autobiography 40 → 69 294.16 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 294.19 district;—the 38 district—the 39 294.19 first indeed 38 first, indeed, 39 → 69

786

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

294.24 antiquity;—even 38 antiquity—even 39 antiquity,—even 40 → 69 294.24 nicknackets” 38 knicknackets” 39 → 69 294.26 “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border;” 38 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border; 40 → 69 294.29 researches 38 researches, 39 → 57 294.30 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 294.30 may be 38 maybe 39 → 69 294.30 passed; 38 passed: 39 → 69 294.31 little I daresay 38 little, I dare say, 39 → 47 little, I daresay, 57 → 69 294.32 memorandum 38 Memorandum 39 → 69 294.32 plenty, at 38 plenty—at 39 → 69 294.33 sheriff-substitute 38 Sheriff-substitute 39 → 69 294.34 farm-house 38 farmhouse 69 294.35 Elliott’s, 38 Elliot’s 39 → 69 Elliot’s, Strouse 294.35 of 38 at 39 → 69 294.36 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 294.38 Willie 38 Willie, 39 → 69 294.38 however, 38 however; 40 → 69 294.38 “out by 38 “out-by 39 → 69 295.1 “weel 38 “Weel, 39 → 69

295.1 295.1 295.2 295.2 295.3 295.4 295.5 295.6 295.7 295.7 295.7 295.7 295.8 295.8 295.8 295.8 295.9 295.9 295.9

295.10

Robin, deil 38 Robin, I say, de’il 39 → 69 I’se 38 I’s 39 → 69 oursels, 38 ourselves, 39 → 69 Half a dozen 38 Half-a-dozen 39 → 69 the advocate, 38 “the advocate,” 39 → 69 Elliott 38 Elliot 39 → 69 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 * * * 38 * * 39 Elliott’s 38 Elliot’s 39 → 69 punch-bowl 38 punch-bowl, 39 → 69 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 “half-glowring,” 38 “half-glowrin,” 39 → 57 “half-glowrin’,” 69 Dr 38 Dr. 39 → 69 Elliott’s 38 Elliot’s 39 → 69 Cloughhead, 38 Cleughhead, 39 → 69 where the two travellers (‘for,’ 38 where (“for,” 39 → 69 memorandum, 38 Memorandum, 39 → 69 were not 38 were na 39 → 47 werena 57 → 69 days,”) 38 days,”) the two travellers 39 days”) the two travellers 40 → 69 bed,—as indeed 38

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

bed—as, indeed, 39 bed,—as, indeed, 40 → 69 295.11 Dr 38 Dr. 39 → 69 295.11 Elliott, 38 Elliot 39 → 69 Elliot, Strouse 295.11 a clergyman, 38 (a clergyman) 39 → 69 295.12 MS. 38 ms. 47 Ms. 57 → 69 295.12 of 38 o’ 39 → 69 295.14 Tuzzilhope,” 38 Tuzzilehope,” 39 → 69 295.14 Elliott, 38 Elliot, 39 → 69 295.15 Cowe. 38 Cow. 39 → 57 295.16 ballad hunters 38 ballad-hunters 39 → 69 295.16 had taken, 38 had, 39 → 69 295.17 two, 38 twae, 39 → 57 twae 69 295.17 London 38 London 39 → 69 295.18 Tuzzilhope; 38 Tuzzilehope; 39 → 69 295.19 all the specimens 38 all specimens 39 → 69 295.19 “riding-music;” 38 “riding music,” 39 → 69 295.20 and moreover 38 and, moreover, 39 → 69 295.21 milk-pail, 38 milkpail, 39 → 69 295.21 “wisdom,” 38 “Wisdom,” 39 → 69 295.22 spoonfuls 38 spoonsful 47 → 57

787

295.22 liquor,—though 38 spirits—though 39 spirits,—though 40 → 69 295.24 wisdom, 38 “Wisdom,” 39 → 69 295.27 brawly 38 brawlie 39 → 69 295.28 everybody! 38 every body! 39 → 40 295.28 rest 38 lave 39 → 69 295.29 man 38 man, 39 → 69 295.29 any 38 ony 39 → 69 295.29 in company. 38 in the company. 39 → 69 295.30 drunk (this 38 drunk—(this, 39 → 69 295.31 rare); but, 38 rare)—but, 39 → 69 295.32 gude humour.” 38 gude-humor.”’ 39 gude-humour.’” 40 → 47 gude-humour.”’ 57 gude humour.”’ 69 296.1 conjectures, 38 conjectures 69 296.5 reception 38 reception, 39 → 69 296.5 surprise, 38 surprise 39 → 69 296.7 elderberry wine 38 elderberry-wine 69 296.10 good man 38 good-man 57 → 69 296.11 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 296.11 scandalized 38 scandalised 47 → 69 296.16 exercise 38 “exercise” 39 → 69 296.18 Elliott 38

788

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

Elliot, 39 → 69 Elliot Strouse 296.18 Armstrong 38 Armstrong, 39 → 69 296.19 delay, 38 delay; 69 296.20 streamed in 38 streamed-in 57 → 69 296.21 mimic, 38 mimic 39 → 69 296.21 humour, 38 humour 40 → 69 296.23 keg; the 38 keg—the 39 → 69 296.23 dame; and 38 dame—and 39 → 69 296.24 book.’—Vol. i, pp. 195—9. 38 book.’—vol. i. pp. 195-199. 39 book.’† [footnote inserted] † Vol. i. pp. 195-199. 40 → 69 296.29 Scott, 38 Scott 57 → 69 296.30 advocate 38 Advocate 40 → 69 296.32 sheriff, 38 Sheriff, 40 → 69 296.34 “Goethe’s Götz with the Iron Hand;” 38 ‘Goethe’s Götz with the Iron Hand;’ 39 Goethe’s Götz with the Iron Hand; 40 Goethe’s Götz with the Iron Hand; 47 → 69 296.35 “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,” 38 ‘Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,’ 39 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 40 → 69 296.36 nature and circumstance 38

Nature and Circumstance 40 → 69 296.38 valuable: 38 valuable; 39 → 69 297.2 hospitality, 38 hospitality 40 → 69 297.3 civic;—with 38 civic:—with 39 → 69 297.3 indeed 38 indeed, 39 → 69 297.5 unuttered, 38 unuttered 69 297.7 impulse: 38 impulse; 39 → 69 297.7 infinite 38 Infinite 40 → 69 297.12 publications, 38 publications 40 → 69 297.13 common-place 38 commonplace 39 → 47 69 common-/place 57 297.16 yeasty 38 yesty 39 → 69 297.19 Walter 38 ¶Walter 69 297.21 lost, say a 38 lost several 40 → 69 297.22 literature; 38 Literature; 40 → 69 297.22 happy, 38 happy 39 → 69 297.23 usefuller 38 usefuler 69 297.23 However, 38 However 39 → 47 297.24 a rather 38 rather a 39 → 69 297.25 scepticism, 38 skepticism, 39 297.30 what 38 What 40 → 69 297.31 outer parliament-house 38

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

Outer Parliament-house 40 → 69 297.33 “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border” 38 ‘Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border’ 39 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border 40 → 69 297.33 well, 38 well 69 297.34 romances 38 Romances 40 → 69 297.35 prose romances); 38 Prose Romances); 40 → 69 297.35 us: 38 us; 39 297.39 Fichte: 38 Fichte; 39 Fichte, 40 → 69 297.39 Ueber 38 Über 69 298.1 jack-/boots, 38 jack-boots, 39 → 69 298.3 lived! It 38 lived; it 39 lived: it 40 → 69 298.3 new-discovered 38 new discovered 39 → 57 298.3 literature; 38 Literature; 40 → 69 298.5 paradise 38 Paradise 39 → 69 298.7 refreshing, 38 refreshing 47 → 69 298.7 exhilarating: 38 exhilarating; 39 → 69 298.9 literature; 38 Literature; 40 → 69 298.10 Ladyes 38 Ladys 39 → 69 298.10 thick 38 quick 39 → 69 298.11 paid down 38 paid-down 57 → 69

789

298.12 (fifty, 38 (fifty 39 → 69 298.13 off 38 off, 40 → 69 298.13 renown 38 renown, 39 → 40 298.14 was: 38 was; 39 298.14 seven volumes, 38 Seven Volumes, 40 → 69 298.16 recal 38 recall 39 → 69 298.17 like 38 likely 39 → 69 298.21 proverb 38 Proverb 40 → 69 298.24 admirers; 38 admirers: 39 298.25 trueheartedly 38 true-/heartedly 39 true-heartedly 40 → 69 298.28 showed 38 shewed 40 → 47 298.33 practice, 38 practice 57 → 69 298.34 turn out 38 turn-out 57 → 69 299.1 say 38 say, 57 → 69 299.2 defeat, 38 defeat[] 40 299.7 showed 38 shewed 40 → 47 299.10 fame, 38 fame 39 299.10 except indeed 38 except, indeed, 40 → 69 299.12 ever! 38 ever? 39 299.13 nature, 38 Nature, 40 → 69 299.20 for 38 to 39 → 69

790

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

299.22 weakly-organized 38 weakly-organised 40 → 69 299.26 men; 38 men: 39 → 69 299.26 and is 38 and is 39 and, alas, is 40 → 69 299.27 weakly-organized 38 weakly-organised 40 → 69 299.28 dry up 38 dry-up 57 299.30 Is 38 ¶Is 69 299.30 “Life of Byron,” 38 ‘Life of Byron,’ 39 Life of Byron, 40 → 57 Life of Byron 69 299.33 universe; 38 Universe; 40 → 69 299.34 pittifullest 38 pitifullest 39 → 57 pitifulest 69 299.36 stuck 38 struck 39 → 69 299.36 marrow! 38 marrow? 39 299.37 O, 38 O 47 → 69 299.38 loveable 38 loveable, 39 lovable, 40 → 69 300.2 memory 38 memory, 40 → 69 300.8 mind. 38 mind! 69 300.8 golden calf 38 Golden Calf 40 → 69 300.9 bull, 38 Bull, 40 → 69 300.10 sin 38 Sin 40 → 69 300.13 school?——¶It 38 school?—— [extra leading between paragraphs] ¶It 69

300.16

vates 38 Vates 40 → 69 300.16 prophet 38 Prophet 40 → 69 300.16 poet, 38 Poet, 40 → 69 300.17 incoherent. 38 incongruous. 40 → 69 300.21 If, 38 If 40 → 69 300.21 means, 38 means 57 → 69 300.23 higgling 38 higglings 39 → 69 300.24 contradiction 38 contradictions 39 → 69 300.27 believe, 38 believe 39 300.27 Saint 38 St. 47 → 69 300.31 Iago: 38 Iago, 40 → 69 300.31 Put money in thy purse. 38 Put money in thy purse. 40 → 69 300.32 ¶Here indeed 38 ¶Here, indeed, 39 → 69 300.32 that, perhaps, 38 that perhaps 40 → 69 300.38 could 38 could, 39 → 69 300.38 other 38 other, 57 → 69 300.38 at, 38 at 47 → 69 301.1 vates 38 Vates 40 → 69 301.7 faith, 38 faith 39 → 69 301.7 scepticism? 38 skepticism? 39 301.8 But, indeed, 38

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

Be this as it may, surely 40 → 69 301.9 great 38 greater 39 301.10 speaking. 38 speaking as Walter Scott. 40 → 69 301.11 product 38 products 39 → 69 301.15 unincumbered 38 unencumbered 39 → 69 301.15 an 38 un 39 301.17 daemon 38 dæmon 39 → 69 301.18 heaven, 38 heaven 39 301.18 firework, 38 fire-work, 39 301.19 it 38 it 39 → 69 301.19 otherwise!—The 38 otherwise! The 39 → 57 otherwise! ¶The 69 301.20 universe 38 Universe 40 → 69 301.22 gospel-tidings 38 gospel-tidings, 40 → 69 301.24 scepticism 38 skepticism 39 301.26 recognize 38 recognise 39 → 69 301.27 something 38 something, 40 → 69 301.29 its 38 his 39 → 69 301.30 unrest, 38 unrest 47 → 69 301.36 time, the 38 time, we may remark, the 40 → 69 301.38 This 38 This, 39 → 69

302.1

791

did, 38 did 39 → 69 302.1 degree, 38 degree 40 → 69 302.3 sympathized 38 sympathised 40 → 69 302.9 to the wearisomely 38 to wearisomely 39 → 69 302.10 But, 38 ¶But, 69 302.12 langour, 38 languor, 39 → 69 302.13 scepticism; 38 skepticism; 39 302.20 ‘O, 38 “O, 40 “Oh, 47 → 57 302.22 alive!’ 38 alive!” 40 → 69 30222. that, 38 that 39 → 69 302.24 an 38 the 39 → 69 302.24 hand of 38 land of a 39 land of 40 → 69 302.27 bath-keeper 38 bath-/keeper 47 bathkeeper 57 → 69 302.29 realized. 38 realised. 40 → 69 302.35 “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border” 38 ‘Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border’ 39 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border 40 → 69 302.37 higher 38 higher, 40 → 69 302.37 spring: 38 spring; 39 → 69 302.37 “Götz von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand;” 38 ‘Götz von Berlichingen

792

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

with the Iron Hand;’ 39 Götz von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand; 40 → 69 302.38 seen, 38 seen 39 303.3 “Götz” 38 Götz 39 → 69 303.3 “Werter,” 38 Werter, 39 → 69 303.9 first fruits, 38 first-fruits, 39 → 69 303.11 word once uttered 38 word, once uttered, 39 → 69 303.12 chaunted 38 chanted 40 → 69 303.12 all the notes 38 all notes 39 → 69 303.13 Sceptical 38 Skeptical 39 303.14 suicide, 38 suicide 47 → 69 303.15 staple literary 38 staple of literary 39 → 69 303.15 ware: 38 ware; 39 → 69 303.16 re-appeared 38 reappeared 39 → 69 303.16 countries; 38 countries, 39 → 69 303.17 and its bad 38 and bad 39 → 69 303.18 “Berlichingen with the Iron Hand,’ 38 Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, 39 → 69 303.23 ‘Götz von Berlichingen:’ 38 Götz von Berlichingen: 39 → 69 303.23 and 38 and, 39 → 69 303.25 “Marmion” 38 Marmion 39 → 69 303.25 “Lady of the Lake,” 38 Lady of the Lake, 39 → 69

30325.

has since followed 38 has followed 39 → 69 303.26 Truly 38 Truly, 39 → 69 303.26 For, 38 For 39 → 69 303.30 “Götz von Berlichingen” 38 ‘Götz von Berlichingen’ 39 Götz von Berlichingen 40 → 69 303.34 doubt but 38 doubt, that 40 → 69 303.36 making, 38 making 39 → 69 303.37 looking back 38 looking-back 57 → 69 303.37 past; 38 Past; 40 → 69 303.38 it, 38 it 69 304.2 potency: 38 potency; 47 → 69 304.3 chivalry literature 38 Chivalry Literature 40 → 69 304.4 and its Napoleon, 38 and Napoleon, 39 → 69 304.6 days, 38 days; 40 → 69 304.8 nobly-gifted 38 noble-gifted 39 → 69 304.9 Werter, 38 Werter 40 → 69 304.10 country; 38 county; 39 → 69 304.12 intoxication 38 intoxication, 39 → 40 304.12 speech; 38 speech: 39 304.13 waste, 38 waste 47 → 69 304.15 ¶But, however, leaving 38 ¶But leaving 40 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

304.20 cultivated, 38 cultivated 47 → 69 304.21 scepticism’ 38 skepticism’ 39 304.25 quarters 38 quarters, 39 → 69 304.28 abdication; 38 abdication: 40 → 69 304.29 business; 38 business: 39 304.33 official, 38 official 40 → 69 304.38 “Waverley;” 38 ‘Waverley;’ 39 Waverley; 40 → 69 304.38 literature; 38 Literature; 40 → 69 305.1 bookselling 38 Bookselling 40 → 69 305.3 “Don-Juan” 38 ‘Don-Juan’ 39 Don Juan 40 → 69 305.4 chivalry lays 38 chivalry-lays 40 → 69 305.5 “Waverley,” 38 ‘Waverley,’ 39 Waverley, 40 → 69 305.9 fortune 38 Fortune 40 → 69 305.10 honour, 38 honour 47 → 69 305.12 reading, 38 reading; 40 → 69 305.13 ranks 38 ranks, 40 → 69 305.13 A 38 ¶A 69 305.16 “Waverley” 38 ‘Waverley’ 39 Waverley 40 → 69 305.20 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 305.22 author, 38 Author, 40 → 69

793

305.28 “Waverley”’ 38 Waverley’ 40 → 69 305.29 world. ¶How 38 world. [extra leading between paragraphs] ¶How 69 305.30 circumstances 38 circumstances, 40 → 69 305.32 letters, 38 letters 39 305.34 wit, 38 wit 47 → 69 305.37 considerations 38 consideration 40 → 69 306.4 kind; 38 kind! 39 306.5 speak 38 speak, 40 → 69 306.5 himself 38 himself, 40 → 69 306.6 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 306.9 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 306.9 then 38 (then 39 → 69 306.9 Admiralty, 38 Admiralty) 39 → 69 306.10 said, 38 said— 39 306.11 get up 38 get-up 57 → 69 306.11 him;” 38 him,” 47 306.11 and 38 and, 39 → 69 306.12 levee, 38 levee, 39 → 69 306.13 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 306.15 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 306.15 Adam also 38 Adam, also, 40 → 69

794

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

306.17 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 306.18 York, the 38 York—the 39 → 69 306.19 Marquis 38 Marquess 39 → 69 306.19 Huntly), the 38 Huntly)—the 39 → 69 306.19 Marquis 38 Marquess 39 → 69 306.19 Yarmouth), the 38 Yarmouth)—the 39 → 69 306.19 Fife, and 38 Fife—and 39 → 69 306.20 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 306.22 remarkable 38 delightful 39 → 69 306.23 most (!) The 38 most. (!) The 39 most. The 40 → 69 306.24 all subsequent 38 all his subsequent 39 → 69 306.28 ermined 38 ermine 69 306.28 story 38 story, 39 → 69 306.31 this:—Braxfield, 38 this: Braxfield, 40 → 69 306.35 day-break; 38 daybreak; 39 → 69 306.35 said, 38 said,— 39 306.36 over 38 ower 39 → 69 306.36 present;” 38 present:” 40 → 69 307.4 terms: 38 terms— 39 → 69 307.8 whisper, 38 whisper— 39 → 57 307.8 now 38 now, 40 → 69

307.8

Donald, 38 Donald 69 307.10 “i’faith, 38 “I’faith, 39 → 69 307.11 breakfast, 38 breakfast— 39 → 69 307.13 “The 38 “‘The 39 → 57 307.14 Morning Post?” 38 Morning Post?’” 39 → 57 Morning Post?” 69 307.16 midnight 38 midnight, 39 → 69 307.16 bumper 38 bumper, 39 → 69 307.16 honours 38 honors, 39 honours, 40 → 69 307.18 moment; 38 moment, 39 → 69 307.20 pretensions, 38 pretensions; 40 → 69 307.21 drank off 38 drank-off 57 → 69 307.23 seats 38 seats, 40 → 69 307.23 Highness exclaimed, 38 Highness, 39 → 69 307.24 Walter, 38 Walter 69 307.30 songs.’—Vol. iii, pp. 340—3. 38 songs.’—vol. iii. pp. 340343. 39 songs.’† [footnote inserted] † Vol. iii. pp. 340-343. 40 → 69 307.34 Saint John 38 Saint-John 39 St. John 69 307.34 street, 38 Street, 39 → 69 307.35 birth-/eve 38 birtheve 39 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

308.1

phrases, 38 epithets, 39 → 69 308.2 with suitable 38 with the suitable 39 → 69 308.3 preses 38 præses 39 → 69 308.5 Macbeth— 38 Macbeth— 39 Macbeth, 40 → 69 308.10 came, 38 came— 39 → 69 308.12 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 308.14 for 38 to 39 → 69 308.14 Mrs 38 Mrs. 39 → 69 308.15 their 38 the 39 → 69 308.16 distended: 38 distended; 47 → 69 308.17 “with ’bated 38 with “’bated 39 → 69 308.17 stage conspirator 38 stage-conspirator 40 → 69 308.18 gallery, 38 gallery— 39 gallery,— 40 → 69 308.18 Waverley!” The 38 Waverley!”—The 39 → 69 308.20 proceeded, 38 proceeded— 39 → 69 308.22 Lord Burleigh 38 Lord-Burleigh 39 → 69 308.25 obscurity 38 obscurity, 40 → 69 308.28 “Waverley” 38 Waverley 40 → 69 308.28 circumstaace, 38 circumstance, 39 → 69 308.28 gratified, 38 delighted— 39 → 69

795

308.30 attempts 38 attempt 39 → 69 308.35 orchestra, 38 orchestra— 39 → 69 308.35 “The Maid of Lodi,” 38 The Maid of Lodi, 39 → 69 308.36 “The Bay of Biscay, O,” or 38 The Bay of Biscay, oh!—or 39 The Bay of Biscay, O!—or 40 → 69 308.36 “The sweet little cherub that sits up aloft.” 38 The sweet little cherub that sits up aloft. 39 → 69 308.37 Thompson, 38 Thomson, 39 → 69 308.38 “The Moorland Wedding,” 38 The Moorland Wedding, 39 → 69 308.38 “Willie brew’d a peck o’ maut;” 38 Willie brew’d a peck o’ maut; 39 → 69 309.5 romance. 38 Romance. 40 → 69 309.5 chapter,—one 38 chapter—one 39 → 69 309.10 Argyle, 38 Argyle 47 → 69 309.13 “One 38 one 39 → 69 309.13 Cleishbotham” 38 Cleishbotham 39 → 69 309.14 parting stave, 38 parting-stave, 39 → 69 309.14 “The Last Words of Marmion,” 38 The Last Words of Marmion, 39 → 69 309.15 Braham.’—Vol. iv, p. 166—8. 38 Braham.”—vol. iv. p. 166-

796

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

168. 39 Braham.’† [footnote inserted] † Vol. iv. p. 166168. 40 → 69 309.17 Abbotsford, 38 Abbotsford 57 → 69 309.20 stone 38 stone, 39 → 69 309.22 February 38 February’ 39 → 69 309.22 (1820),’ says 38 (1820)—says 39 (1820), says 40 → 69 309.22 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 309.23 spring, I 38 spring—I 39 spring,—I 40 → 69 309.25 ofter 38 often 39 → 69 309.26 Court; 38 Court, 39 court, 40 → 69 309.27 jacket, 38 jacket 47 → 69 309.27 his 38 the 39 → 69 309.30 way 38 weigh 39 → 69 309.32 hunting box 38 hunting-box 39 → 69 309.32 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 309.32 Constable 38 Constable, 39 → 69 309.33 church service 38 church-service 40 → 69 310.1 “Redgauntlet:” 38 Redgauntlet: 39 → 69 310.2 was perhaps 38 was, perhaps, 39 → 69 310.4 under-sized, 38 under-/sized, 47 undersized, 57 → 69

310.4

square made, 38 square-made, 47 → 69 310.5 frame 38 frame, 57 310.6 impaired perhaps 38 impaired, perhaps, 39 → 69 310.11 hat, 38 hat 47 → 69 310.11 comfort, 38 comfort 47 → 69 310.12 grieve,† 38 grieve† 39 → 69 310.13 orginally 38 originally 39 → 69

310.14

black-fisher; 38 black-fisher; 39 → 69 310.15 vigour; 38 vigor, 39 vigour, 40 → 69 310.22 Constable,— 38 Constable— 39 → 69 310.22 “scratching 38 scratching 39 → 69 310.23 buiks, 38 buiks 39 → 69 310.23 buiks 38 buiks, 40 → 69 310.27 farther 38 further 39 310.31 * * 38 * * * 47 → 69 310.32 Sunday pony, 38 “Sunday pony,” 39 → 69 310.33 as he did with 38 as with 39 → 69 310.33 put in 38 put-in 57 → 69 310.36 gripe.’—Vol. iv, p. 349—53. 38 gripe.’—vol. iv. p. 349-353. 39 gripe.’† [footnote inserted] † Vol. iv. p. 349-353. 40

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

gripe.’† [footnote inserted] † Vol. iv. pp. 349-353. 47 → 69 310.38 Overseer: 39 Overseer; 39 → 69 311.3 populous; 38 populous: 39 → 69 311.6 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 311.9 blue-bottles, 38 bluebottles, 39 → 69 311.12 showed 38 shewed 40 → 47 311.13 blue-bottles 38 bluebottles 39 → 69 311.17 oil gas, 38 oil-gas, 39 → 69 311.17 The,’ 38 The’ 69 311.20 “welled.out 38 “welled out 39 → 69 311.21 strain 38 stream 39 → 69 311.23 theme 38 theme, 39 → 69 311.26 “Christabel.”’ 38 Christabel.’ 39 → 69 311.26 readings, 38 readings 69 311.27 to-day 38 to-/day 40 today 47 → 69 311.28 stories: God 38 stories—God 39 → 69 311.28 gifted; so 38 gifted—so 39 → 69 311.31 takes,’ 38 takes’ 69 311.31 &c.—Vol. v, p. 375—402. 38 &c.—vol. v. p. 375-402. 39 &c.† [footnote inserted] † Vol. v. p. 375-402. 40 &c.† [footnote inserted] †

797

Vol. v. pp. 375-402. 47 → 69 311.36 blue-bottle 38 bluebottle 39 → 69 312.1 king’s-yellow! 38 king’s yellow! 39 → 69 312.2 it; 38 it: 39 312.6 poor, 38 poor 47 → 69 312.8 life,—though 38 life, though 40 → 69 312.9 blue-bottle 38 bluebottle 39 → 69 312.10 that. 38 that, 57 312.10 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 312.14 bright 38 bright, 39 → 40 312.15 sunshine; 38 sunshine, 39 → 69 312.15 coursing match 38 coursing-match 57 → 69 312.16 hill. 38 Hill. 39 → 69 312.16 chalked out 38 chalked-out 57 → 69 312.17 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 312.17 he too 38 he, too, 39 312.20 about, 38 about 39 312.24 Dr 38 Dr. 39 → 69 312.25 belles-lettres, 38 belles-lettres, 39 → 69 312.28 long-tailed 38 strong-tailed 47 → 69 312.28 Highlander 38 Highlander, 39 → 69

798 312.28

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

Gray, 38 Grey, 39 → 69 312.30 was adjutant. 38 was the adjutant. 39 → 69 312.34 thought; 38 thought, 39 → 69 312.34 costume, a 38 costume—a 39 → 69 312.35 fly-hooks; 38 fly-hooks— 39 → 69 312.35 jackboots 38 jack-/boots 39 57 jack-boots 40 → 47 69 312.37 well-polished 38 well polished 39 312.38 Dr 38 Dr. 39 → 69 312.38 black, 38 black; 47 → 69 313.1 countenance 38 countenance, 39 → 47 313.1 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 313.2 seventy-sixth 38 76th 39 → 69 313.4 on 38 upon 39 → 69 313.6 hours, 38 hours 39 → 69 313.8 Gray, 38 Grey, 39 → 69 313.9 way, 38 weigh, 39 → 69 313.11 pet.” 38 pet!” 47 → 69 313.16 background: Scott 38 background;—Scott, 39 → 69 313.17 song:— 38 song— 39 → 69 313.21 nae 38 na 39 → 69

313.22 wow 38 wow! 39 → 69 313.24 redoubled, and 38 redoubled—and 39 → 69 313.27 terriers; 38 terriers: 69 313.27 but indeed 38 but, indeed, 39 → 69 313.29 philosophers; but 38 philosophers—but 39 philosophers;—but 40 → 69 313.30 donkey 38 donkey, 39 → 69 313.35 white-haired 38 white haired 39 313.36 laird.”’—Vol. v, pp. 7—10.† [footnote] † On 38 laird.”’—vol. v. p. 7-10.† [footnote] † On 39 laird.”’† [footnote] † Vol. v. p. 7-10. ¶On 40 → 47 laird.”† [footnote] † Vol. v. pp. 7-10. ¶On 57 → 69 313.39 on:—‘I 38 on: ‘I 69 314.1 ¶‘There 38 ¶‘There’ 40 → 69 314.1 (at Chiefswood) 38 at Chiefswood 40 → 69 314.1 my 38 ‘my 40 → 69 314.1 1821,—the 38 1821—the 39 1821;—the 40 → 69 314.3 constantly-varying 38 constantly varying 39 → 69 314.5 new comers 38 new-comers 57 → 69 314.5 family 38 family, 39 → 69 314.7 beautifullest, 38 beautifullest 40 → 57 beautifulest 69 314.7 lap-dogs, 38

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

lapdogs, 39 lapdogs 40 → 69 314.9 Princes 38 Prince’s 39 → 69 314.9 street, 38 Street, 40 → 69 314.11 any one 38 anyone 69 314.11 draw back 38 draw-back 57 → 69 314.17 “Waverley’s” 38 Waverley’s 40 → 69 314.18 good humour; 38 good-humor; 39 good-humour; 40 → 57 314.19 chesnut-brown; 38 chestnut-brown; 39 → 69 314.20 obstacle 38 obstacles 39 314.21 fact, 38 fact 39 → 69 314.21 fellow 38 fellow, 39 → 69 314.22 wistfullest 38 wistfulest 69 314.23 dare say, 38 daresay, 47 → 69 314.25 shown, 38 shewn, 40 → 47 314.27 bland-smiling 38 bland-smiling, 39 → 40 314.30 prime minister 38 prime minister, 40 → 47 prime-minister, 57 → 69 314.30 authority 38 authority, 40 → 69 314.35 head, 38 head 47 → 69 315.2 house-keeping. 38 house-/keeping. 39 housekeeping. 40 → 69 315.3 perriwigged 38 periwigged 40 → 69

315.4

799

horse-/leech 38 horseleech 39 → 47 horse-leech 69 315.6 way, 38 way 39 315.8 over-/night, 38 over night, 39 → 47 overnight, 57 315.9 Gray’s 38 Grey’s 39 → 69 315.10 reveillé 38 reveillée 39 → 40 réveillée 47 → 69 315.11* ‘take 38 “take 39 → 69 315.11 at 38 in 39 → 69 315.11* inn.’ 38 inn.” 39 → 69 315.12 curs 38 ours 39 → 69 315.15 up stairs, 38 upstairs, 57 → 69 315.16 the “Pirate;” 38 The Pirate; 39 → 69 315.16 made up 38 made-up 69 315.16 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 315.17 work, and 38 work—and 39 → 69 315.18 Swanston,—until 38 Swanston—until 69 315.21 ade/vantage 38 advantage 39 → 69 315.22 littl- 38 little 39 → 69 315.22 on 38 upon 39 → 69 315.25 announced; this 38 announced—this 39 announced,—this 40 → 69 315.30 nothing.’—Vol. v, pp. 123-4.

800

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

38 nothing.’—vol. v. pp. 123, 124. 39 nothing.’† [footnote inserted] † Vol. v. pp. 123, 124. 40 → 69 315.32 Boccaccio: 38 Boccaccio’s: 69 315.35 senseless, 38 senseless 47 → 69 315.36 2,000l. 38 £2,000 39 → 40 315.36 a year 38 a-year 39 → 69 316.3 fearfullest 38 fearfulest 69 316.4 favour, 38 favour 47 → 69 316.4 ‘sixteen 38 “sixteen 39 316.5 a day,’ 38 a day,” 39 a-day,’ 40 → 69 316.7 wainscotting, 38 wainscoting, 40 → 69 316.8 with 38 and 40 → 69 316.9 called 38 call 47 → 69 316.11 Scotch 38 Scottish 39 → 69 316.11 lairds. It 38 lairds. ¶It 69 316.15 15,000l. 38 £15,000 39 → 40 316.15 a year, 38 a-year, 40 → 69 316.17 nicknacks, 38 knicknacks, 39 316.17 armour, 38 armour 47 → 69 316.24 world 38 word 39

316.31 tub!’ 38 tub.’ 39 → 69 316.36 which, 38 which 39 317.1 “Waverley Novels,” 38 ‘Waverley Novels,’ 39 Waverley Novels, 40 → 69 317.6 literature 38 Literature 40 → 69 317.7 indolent, 38 indolent 40 → 69 317.7 literature; 38 Literature; 40 → 69 317.9 ‘Be 38 “Be 40 → 69 317.10 Scott!’ 38 Scott!” 40 → 69 317.12 master-like 38 master-/like 57 masterlike 69 317.14 were 38 was 39 317.18 nature and man, 38 Nature and Man, 40 → 69 317.19 nature 38 Nature 40 → 69 317.21 Cœur-de-Lion; 38 Cœur-de Lion; 57 317.25 novels 38 Novels 40 → 69 317.28 Bailie 38 Baillie 47 → 69 317.28 legion) 38 legion), 47 → 69 317.31 Firenze 38 Firenze’ 40 → 69 317.31 e 38 ‘e 40 → 69 317.35 marairglia. 38 maraviglia. 39 → 69 317.36 . . . . 38 . . 57 . . . 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

317.36 ‘Onde 38 Onde 40 317.36 per ciò, 38 perciò, 39 → 69 317.39* rondo, 38 tondo 39 → 69 318.2 wanted 38 wanted, 40 → 69 318.4 Scott and a Shakspeare, a Goethe! 38 Scott, a Shakspeare, and a Goethe? 39 Scott, and a Shakspeare, a Goethe? 40 Scott, and a Shakspeare, a Goethe. 47 → 69 318.5 immense; 38 immense: 39 → 40 318.9 became 38 become 40 → 69 318.11 which 38 which, 39 → 69 318.15 illustrates, 38 illustrates 40 → 69 318.16 To 38 ¶To 69 318.16 purport indeed 38 purport, indeed, 39 → 57 318.17 every-day 38 everyday 39 318.18 mind, 38 mind 69 318.21 more: 38 more; 39 → 69 318.25 Waverley, 38 Waverley, 40 → 69 318.29 nature 38 Nature 40 → 69 318.32 trumpetting 38 trumpeting 39 → 69 318.33 truth, 38 truth 39 → 69 318.33 for ever, 38 forever, 40 → 69

801

318.33 literature 38 Literature 40 → 69 318.34 indolent, 38 indolent 40 → 69 318.34 literature 38 Literature 40 → 69 318.35 literature 38 Literature 40 → 69 318.37 head, 38 head 39 → 69 318.38 “Waverley Novels.” 38 ‘Waverley Novels.’ 39 Waverley Novels. 40 → 69 319.2 darkly struggling 38 darkly-struggling 69 319.5 ones, 38 ones; 40 → 69 319.6 novels 38 Novels 40 → 69 319.8 suddenly, 38 suddenly 39 → 69 319.8 vividness, 38 vividness 40 → 69 319.11 dandy, 38 Dandy, 40 → 69 319.12 wonderfullest 38 wonderfulest 69 319.14 antiquaries 38 antiquarians 39 → 69 319.14 uglier; 38 uglier: 39 → 69 319.17 romance heroes 38 romance-heroes 40 → 69 319.18 long run, 38 long-run, 40 → 69 319.21 Scott 38 Scott, 40 → 69 319.23 circulating library 38 circulating-library 40 → 69 319.24 two, 38 two 39 319.26 ¶What then 38 ¶What, then, 69

802

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

319.26 romances? 38 Romances? 40 → 69 319.27 more. 38 more! 40 → 69 319.27 can, 38 can; 40 → 69 319.36 Secondly, 38 ¶Secondly, 69 319.36 historical novels 38 Historical Novels 40 → 69 319.38 bygone 38 by-gone 39 320.2 controversies, 38 controversies 47 → 69 320.4 features, 38 features 47 → 69 320.8 imbodiment: 38 embodyment: 39 embodiment: 40 → 69 320.16 extreme, 38 extreme; 40 → 69 320.16 excellent 38 excellent, 40 → 69 320.17 novels, 38 Novels, 40 → 69 320.19 ready writing; 38 ready-writing; 69 320.20 copyright; 38 copy-right; 39 320.21 would 38 could 39 → 69 320.23 thrown off 38 thrown-off 57 → 69 320.29 wages 38 wages, 40 → 69 320.33 easy writing 38 easy-writing 69 320.34 And 38 ¶And 69 320.35 writing 38 writing, 47 → 69 320.36 ready writers 38 ready-writers 47 → 69

320.37 them, 38 them 47 → 69 320.38 shape, 38 shape 47 → 69 321.1 true 38 True 40 → 69 321.1 obscure and possible, 38 Obscure and Possible, 40 → 69 321.2 false? 38 False? 40 → 69 321.4 ready writers? 38 ready-writers? 47 → 69 321.5 review article. 38 Review Article. 40 → 69 321.5 Shakspeare 38 Shakspeare, 39 → 69 321.13 easy writer 38 easy-writer 69 321.19 unfortunate unhealthy 38 unfortunate and unhealthy 39 → 69 321.21 grey’ 38 gray’ 39 lean’ 40 → 69 321.24 for evermore 38 forevermore 69 321.24 No: 38 ¶No: 69 321.25 pains and fire-flames 38 pains, and fire-flames, 40 → 69 321.28 too 38 too, 39 → 69 321.29 on 38 upon 39 → 69 321.32 and 38 an 39 → 69 321.34 ‘Easy writing,’ 38 “Easy writing,” 40 → 69 321.35 ‘is 38 “is 40 → 69 321.35 d——d 38 d—d 40 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

321.35 reading.’ 38 reading.” 40 → 69 322.3 “Journal,” 38 ‘journal,’ 39 Journal, 40 → 69 322.4 journal 38 Journal 40 → 69 322.15 manner 38 manner, 40 → 69 322.16 practicality 38 practicability 39 322.17 mind; 38 mind: 39 → 69 322.19 easy writing 38 easy-writing 69 322.24 Paper-money,—seems 38 Papermoney,—seems 39 → 57 Paper-money, seems 69 322.26 motive-principle; 38 motive-principle: 69 322.26 flowed on 38 flowed-on 57 → 69 322.26 for ever, 38 forever, 40 → 69 322.28 editor 38 Editor 39 → 69 322.29 leading-articles; 38 leading articles; 40 → 69 322.32 inane: 38 inane; 39 322.34 gets up 38 gets-up 57 → 69 323.3 we will look 38 we look 39 → 69 323.5 me.’—But 38 me.’ But 39 → 69 323.6 ready-writer 38 ready writer 39 → 40 323.7 lately 38 late 39 → 69 323.7 “Don Carlos,” 38 ‘Don Carlos,’ 39 Don Carlos, 40 → 69

803

323.10 excuse 38 excuse, 39 → 69 323.11 6th 38 sixth 39 → 69 323.11 18th 38 eighteenth 39 → 69 323.12 over-exertion); 38 over exertion); 39 323.15 How hast 38 How well hast 69 323.16 it?—So, 38 it? ¶So, 69 323.16 stands; 38 stands: 39 → 69 323.20 reflection, 38 reflection; 40 → 69 323.31 bankrunptcy 38 bankruptcy 39 → 69 323.31 was 38 was, 57 → 69 323.38 “Don Carlos,” 38 ‘Don Carlos,’ 39 Don Carlos, 40 → 69 324.6 length have come 38 length come 39 → 57 324.7 worn out, 38 worn-out, 57 → 69 324.8 reluctance 38 reluctance, 40 → 69 324.11 rock-mountains, 38 rock mountains, 39 → 69 324.12 icebergs 38 ice-bergs 39 324.12 clangour, 38 clangor, 39 → 69 324.13 day, 38 day 39 → 69 324.19 unsuccessful 38 unsuccessful, 69 324.27 years 38 years, 69 324.30 life-strings 38

804

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

lifestrings 39, 47 life-/strings 40, 57 → 69 324.35 Woe 38 Wo 40 324.35 warhorse 38 war-/horse 57 war-horse 69 325.8 see 38 seen 69 325.9* a 38 on 39 → 69 325.10 sixth volume 38 Sixth Volume 40 → 69 325.11 ones:— 38 ones: 40 → 69 325.13 ¶‘May 38 ¶‘Abbotsford, May 40 → 69 325.16 availed,—and 38 availed—and 39 → 40 availed?—and 47 → 69 325.17 to-day 38 today 47 → 69 325.19 that 38 which 39 → 69 325.20 ¶‘Edinburgh, 38 ¶‘Edinburgh,— 39 → 69 325.20 Mrs 38 Mrs. 39 → 69 325.20 St 38 St. 39 → 69 325.20 street, May 38 Street—May 39 → 69 325.23 saw 38 say 39 → 69 325.23 Touchstone, 38 Touchstone, 39 → 69 325.23 “when 38 “When 39 → 69 325.24 place.” 38 place;” 39 → 69 325.24 Bailie 38 Baillie 39 → 69

325.25 consolation, 38 consolation— 39 → 69 325.27 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 325.27 Shandy,—a 38 Shandy—a 39 325.27 clergyman; 38 clergyman, 47 → 69 325.27 and 38 and, 39 → 69 325.27 one. 38 one.’ 39 → 69 325.28 Mr 38 Mr. 39 → 69 325.30 suffering. Hogg 38 suffering.—Hogg 39 → 69 325.31 yesterday; 38 yesterday 39 yesterday, 40 → 69 325.31 100l. 38 £100 39 → 47 325.32 fellow; 38 fellow, 39 → 69 325.33 myself. 38 myself.’ 39 → 69 325.34 Abbotsford. 38 Abbotsford.’ 57 → 69 325.36 days; easy 38 days—easy 39 → 69 326.1 for ever 38 forever 40 → 69 326.2 freedom, 38 freedom 47 → 69 326.3 stranger: what 38 stranger—what 39 → 69 326.4 myself 38 myself, 39 → 69 326.6 is 38 is, 39 → 69 326.7 family, all 38 family—all 39 → 69 326.9 talk down 38 talk-down 57 → 69

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

326.10

alone. Even 38 alone.—Even 39 → 69 326.11 my own weary 38 my weary 39 → 69 326.12 Charlotte, my 38 Charlotte—my 39 → 69 326.12 thirty-years’ 38 thirty years’ 39 → 40 thirty-years 47 → 69 326.14 elastic;—but 38 elastic—but 39 → 69 326.16 changed; 38 changed, 39 → 69 326.19 write down 38 write-down 57 → 69 326.19 write up 38 write up, 39 → 47 write-up, 57 → 69 326.22 in 38 among 39 → 69 326.23 gaiety 38 gayety 39 → 40 326.29 heaven!’ 38 Heaven!’ 39 → 69 326.31 * * 38 * * * 47 → 69 326.32 “Quarterly;” 38 Quarterly; 39 → 69 326.33 day, most 38 day—most 39 → 69 326.35 violence; a 38 violence—a 39 → 69 326.36 sensation; then 38 sensation—then 39 → 69 326.37 dead.’—Vol. vi, pp. 297— 307. 38 dead.’—vol. vi. pp. 297-307. 39 dead.’† [footnote inserted] † Vol. vi. pp. 297-307. 40 → 69 327.6 ‘when 38 When 40 → 69

326.6

departed departed, 47 326.7 him.’ him. 40 326.8 time. Time. 40 326.8 sagacity sagacity, 39 327.12 C. [Omitted.] 39

805 38 → 69 38 → 69 38 → 69 38 → 40 38 → 69

“Heintze’s Translation of Burns” [ms, 40] 329.0* [no title] HEINTZE’S TRANSLATION OF BURNS Strouse 329.1 übertragen ms Ubertragen 40 329.2 Scotchman ms Scotchman, 40 329.2 Burns: ms Burns; 40 329.3 Heintze). ms Heintze[.]) 40 329.7 Thunder-/god,” ms Thundergod,” 40 329.8 give) ms give), 40 329.9 facsimile ms facsimile, 40 329.9 Burns ms Burns, 40 329.9 Poet,—engraved ms Poet, engraved 40 329.10 Ploughman ms ploughman 40 329.11 Gauger ms gauger 40 329.11 Burgh ms burgh 40 329.13 Son ms son 40

806

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

330.26 have ms 329.14 brother: ms have, 40 brother; and 40 330.26 were ms 329.14* versions ms were, 40 versions, 40 330.27 Burns ms 329.15 select-versions ms Burns, 40 select-versions, 40 330.29 general ms 329.20 world, ms general, 40 world; 40 330.29* tune ms 329.21 indeed ms tune 40 indeed, 40 329.22 mankind ms 330.31 phrase ms mankind, 40 phrase, 40 330.5 reputed ms 330.31 tu[ne] ms reported 40 tune 40 330.6 name ms 330.32 in[.] ms names 40 in. 40 330.7 We know ms 330.33 sense;—that ms We ourselves know 40 sense; that 40 330.7 Kaufmann; ms 330.34 Burns, till the version be Kaufmann, 40 complete,—le[t us recommend] ms 330.8 George Westermann BraunBurns, let us recommend schweig;” ms 40 George Westermann Braunschweig,” 40 330.36 [his head and] ms his head and 40 330.13 that” [is] ms that,” is 40 330.37 neve[r] ms never 40 330.14 of it! ms it. 40 330.37 [will then come dancing] ms will then come dancing 40 330.16 “The ms The 40 330.38 t[he] ms the 40 330.16 guinea-stamp ms guinea-stamp, 40 330.38 tune! ms tune. 40 330.17 that,” ms that, 40 331.1 Green ms “Green 40 330.20 liked!—Heintze ms liked! ¶Heintze 40 331.1 rashes O ms rashes, O,” 40 330.23 for most ms for the most 40 331.1 “Grün werden nu[n] die Binsen, O” ms 330.26 instances ms “Grün werden nun die instances, 40 Binsen, O,” 40 330.26 felicity ms 331.2 grammatically ms felicity, 40 gramatically 40 331.3 grün wächst das Binsenkraut

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

807

331.24 “Spring” ms ms “Spring” 40 “grün wächst das Binsenkraut” 331.26 so ms 40 so, 40 331.4 also have ms 331.28 “Sae ms have also 40 Sae 40 331.5 i[s] ms 331.28 wantonly ms is 40 wantonly, 40 331.6 significance: ms 331.31 tree,” ms significance; 40 tree, 40 331.7 another! ms 331.38 dort.” ms another. 40 dort. 40 331.9 mädchen ms 332.2 Duncan Gray. ms “madchen” 40 “Duncan Gray.” 40 “mädchen” Strouse 332.3 song-readers ms 331.9 weiberschen ms song readers 40 “weiberchen” 40 332.3 jovial ms 331.10 better[)] ms jovial, 40 better), 40 332.5 Freit ms 331.10 lasses; ms “Freit,” 40 “lasses;” 40 332.5 indeed ms 331.11 no go!—— ms indeed, 40 not to the purpose: 4013 332.6 wooing o’t;—but ms 331.18 Perhaps ms “wooing o’t;” but 40 ¶Perhaps 40 332.16* Freit ms 331.20 [important blunder] ms Freit! 40 important blunder 40 332.19 Freit! (p. 200) ms 14 331.20 one[;] ms one; 40 Freit! 40 331.21 Macpherson’s ms 332.20* Ailsa-Craig,— Heintze “Macpherson’s 40 Ailsa-Craig, 40 331.21 Farewell,” ms 332.22 Dunkan Heintze Farewell” 40 Duncan 40 331.22* these ms 332.24 Wassertod— Heintze those 40 Wassertod, 40 Examiner (1840) here inserts the verses from “Auld Nature swears,” to “rashes O, &c.” They do not appear in the manuscript. However, Carlyle had written to the editor, Forster: “If you think that verse of ‘Green grows[’] will make my meaning a little plainer, insert it;—if not, not.—” (Letters 12:265). 14 Carlyle draws a line from the page reference to a note in the right-hand margin: “Here go on from the book—if you possibly can—down to last lines as opposite. Take great care of the book please.” As this note indicates, the last two lines of the translation follow. Thus, the copy-text for this portion of the poem (the remaining verses except the last two lines) is taken directly from Heintze. 13

808

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

333.20 [the Letters of Burns]. ms 332.27 Fluth— Heintze the Letters of Burns. 40 Fluth, 40 333.21 these; ms 332.29 Verschmähte Heintze these, 40 Berschmähte 40 333.22 history ms 332.29 thut— Heintze history, 40 thut, 40 333.22 shew ms 332.31 hirnverbrannt? Heintze show 40 hirnverbrnnt? 40 333.22 no[t] ms 332.36 Grund— Heintze not 40 Grund, 40 332.38 gesund,— Heintze 333.23 praisewort[hy] ms gesund, 40 praiseworthy 40 333.3 erquickt,— Heintze 333.24 for[midably] ms erquickt, 40 formidably 40 333.7 Dunkan Heintze 333.24 Lockhart’s Life ms Duncan 40 Lockhart’s Life, 40 333.7 Herz— Heintze 333.26 Cunningham, Currie, ms Herz, 40 Cunningham, Currie, 40 333.9 Scherz— Heintze 333.27 see, what ms Scherz, 40 see, and what 40 333.10 Freit. Heintze 333.28 him! ms Freit! 40 him. 40 333.11 Dunkan Heintze Duncan 40 “Preface to Emerson’s Essays” [41, 53] 333.13 Verein ms 335.0* PREFACE BY THE Berein, 40 ENGLISH EDITOR. 41 333.14 Freit. ms PREFACE TO EMERFreit! 40 SON’S ESSAYS. Strouse 333.17 Poems ms 335.3 Reprint 41 poems 40 reprint 53 333.18 To the Daisy, the Mouse, ms 335.5 Editor 41 “To the Daisy,” “The editor 53 Mouse,” 40 335.6 Reprinter 41 333.18 Man was made to mourn, ms reprinter 53 “Man was made to 335.6 Book 41 Mourn,” 40 book 53 333.20 recommend ms 335.7 Heaven, 41 recommend, 40 heaven, 53 333.20 [l]egible ms 335.12 ‘wanderers 41 legible 40 “wanderers 53 333.20 least ms 335.12 Night!’ 41 least, 40 night!” 53

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

335.13 Book 41 book 53 335.21 Travellers 41 travellers 53 335.23 Notability 41 notability, 53 336.1 true 41 true, 53 336.4 is perhaps 41 is, perhaps, 53 336.9 trying, 41 trying 53 336.11 dollars 41 dollars, 53 336.13 life 41 life, 53 336.13 place 41 place, 53 336.16 ‘All 41 “All 53 336.16 contemporaries;’ 41 contemporaries;” 53 336.17 said: 41 said, 53 336.18 There 41 there 53 336.20 nor indeed 41 nor, indeed, 53 336.20 all 41 all, 53 336.20 ‘Realities?’ 41 “Realities?” 53 336.24 nay 41 nay, 53 336.26 Life 41 life 53 336.27 coaches 41 coaches, 53 336.27 beef-eaters 41 beef-eaters, 53 336.28 Heaven, 41 heaven, 53

809

336.32 this!——Pity 41 this!—Pity 53 336.35 none 41 none, 53 336.35 few 41 few, 53 337.1 myself 41 myself, 53 337.3 me 41 me, 53 337.4 World 41 world 53 337.5 Tarif, 41 Tariff, 53 337.6 Improved-Socinianism: 41 improved Socinianism: 53 337.6 these 41 these, 53 337.6 substances 41 substances, 53 337.7 man; 41 man: 53 337.9 Stars 41 stars 53 337.9 Earth 41 earth 53 337.11 Life-Fountain 41 life-fountain 53 337.13 degrees 41 degrees, 53 337.13 souls 41 souls, 53 337.13 hear 41 hear, 53 337.14 this 41 this, 53 337.14 him!—Emerson 41 him! Emerson 53 337.17 Pamphlet 41 pamphlet 53 337.19 noteworthy 41 noteworthy, 53

810

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

337.20 Periodical 41 periodical 53 337.20 writes; 41 writes, 53 337.21 appears indeed 41 appears, indeed, 53 337.22 Volume 41 volume 53 337.23 Book. 41 book. 53 337.24 Book, 41 book, 53 337.24 composed 41 composed, 53 337.24 Lectures 41 lectures 53 337.26 man 41 man, 53 337.29 the ‘universal soul,’ 41 “the universal soul,” 53 337.29 &c. 41 &c, 53 337.29 Northern Streamers, 41 northern streamers, 53 337.31 Public 41 public 53 337.33 ‘a Pantheist,’ 41 “a Pantheist,” 53 337.34 this 41 this, 53 337.35 present 41 present, 53 337.36 ‘open 41 “open 53 337.37 universe’ 41 universe’ 53 338.3 Book 41 book 53 338.3 ‘system,’ 41 “system,” 53 338.5 England 41 England, 53

338.5

elsewhere 41 elsewhere, 53 338.5 such, 41 such 53 338.6 England 41 England, 53 338.6 eleswhere 41 elsewhere, 53 338.8 dead;—and 41 dead; and 53 338.10 Heavens, 41 heavens, 53 338.10 sort!—That 41 sort! That 53 338.11 recognises 41 recognizes 53 338.13 Man’s Soul 41 man’s soul 53 338.13 Universe 41 universe 53 338.14 Ages 41 ages 53 338.14 Miracles 41 miracles 53 338.15 who 41 who, 53 338.15 beliefs 41 beliefs, 53 338.20 ‘twelfth 41 “twelfth 53 338.20 night,’ 41 night,” 53 338.24 question; 41 question, 53 338.25 Book. 41 book. 53 338.30 Essays: 41 Essays; 53 338.31 Earth 41 earth 53 338.33 low-voiced 41 low-voiced, 53

H I S T O R I C A L C O L L AT I O N

339.3 339.3 339.4 339.4 339.5 339.5 339.6

Book 41 book 53 short; 41 short: 53 me 41 me, 53 English 41 English, 53 Book 41 book 53 Book 41 book 53 so: 41 so; 53

811

INDEX abolition, 510, 615 Adam (Old Testament), 137, 209, 222, 258, 299, 329 442, 508, 527, 549 Adams, William, 196, 492 Addison, Joseph, 51, 118; Spectator, 51, 376 Aeneas Silvius. See Pius I Aeschylus, 46, 371, 372, 518 Aesop, 145, 395, 446 Alaric I, 124, 433 Alembert, Jean de, 96, 108, 196, 242, 245, 250, 257, 415, 493, 546, 551 Alexander the Great, 105, 202, 316, 423, 499, 598, 600 Alexander VI (pope), 364 Alfieri, Vittorio, 96, 213, 413, 515, 518 Anaxarchus, 105, 423 Anster, John, 610 Antigonus, 355 Apollo, 110, 363, 472 Apollonius of Tyana, 243, 543 Arabian Tales. See Thousand and One Nights Arcadia, 34, 215, 294, 344, 360 Aretine, Griffolino, 90, 409 Aristotle, 344, 374, 359, 499 Asmodeus, 76, 254, 393 association, doctrine of, 44, 369 atheism, 81, 124, 176, 228, 241, 245, 249, 263-66, 271, 275-76, 494, 561, 617 Athena, 321, 604 Athenaeum, xxiv, xl, 526 Attila, 124, 253, 433, 553 Babel, 228, 287, 567, 581 Babylon, 68, 287, 299, 386, 566, 571, 581 Bacchus, 159, 459 Bachaumont, Louis de, 79, 397, 402, 413, 424 Bacon, Francis, 90, 241, 375, 446, 472; New Atlantis 409; Novum Organum, 44, 369, 471, 540-41 Bacon, Roger, 68, 134, 387, 439-40 Baillie, Griseld, 22-24, 351, 352

Baillie, Joanna, xiv, 3-27, 343, 347, 348, 350-52, 385; Count Basil, 4, 343, 363; “The Elden Tree,” 26, 353; Ethwall, 4, 343; “Lady Griseld Baillie,” 22-27, 351; “Legend of Columbus,” 18-22; “Malcolm’s Heir,” 26, 353; “A Metrical Legend of William Wallace,” 12-18, 350; Metrical Legends, xiv, xviii, xix, xxxii, xxxvi, 6, 12, 343, 347, 348, 350, 351, 352, 353 Balaam, 220-21, 523-25 Ballantyne, James, 284, 300, 307-8, 325, 577, 578, 59, 596, 606, 607 Ballantyne, John, 284, 300, 309, 577, 578, 593 Balsamo, Guiseppe, 119, 430 Batteaux, Charles, 52, 377 Bayle, Pierre, 120, 142, 176, 322, 431, 445, 446, 605 Beauclerk, Topham, 185, 449, 452, 481 Beaumont and Fletcher, 363 Bedlam, 82, 399 Beelzebub, 154, 454 Belief, 91, 122, 124, 135, 137-38, 142, 176, 187, 189, 195-96, 206, 224, 255, 264, 266, 275, 292, 302, 361, 561; See also Unbelief Belsham, William, 158, 457 Bentham, Jeremy, xxv, xxvii, 272, 338, 392, 400, 532, 568, 618 Bernays, Leopold, 609 Bernis, François de, 233, 535 Bible, 127, 221, 400, 416, 500, 518, 528. See also Old Testament, New Testament Biographie Universelle. See Michaud, J. F. biography, xvii, 28-32, 81, 115, 131-43, 160, 162-63, 165, 227, 280, 282-84, 445, 459, 575 Birch, Jonathan, 609 Birch, Thomas, 143, 446 Birkbeck, Morris, 31, 358 Blackie, John Stuart, 610 Blacklock, Thomas, 61, 381, 383 Blair, Hugh, 539 813

814



INDEX

Blount, Martha, 102, 420 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 315, 600 Boileau, Nicholas, 52, 377, 415, 438 Bolingbroke, Viscount (Henry St. John), 97, 176, 415, 438, 472 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 33, 47, 58, 78, 124, 202, 220, 287-88, 304, 316, 358, 395, 396, 400, 499, 484, 495, 499, 506, 524, 551, 582, 600, 637 Bonaventure, Saint, 550 Borgia, Cesare, 364 Borgia, Lucrezia, 364 Börne, Karl, 247, 548 Boston, Thomas, 51, 376 Boswell, James, 81, 140, 141, 142, 147, 150-58, 160, 162, 190, 227, 398, 437, 450, 492-93, 495, 522, 531, 567, 584; Life of Samuel Johnson, xvii, 131, 139, 142, 143, 145-98, 361, 370, 398, 437, 443, 446, 447, 448, 450-54, 464-69, 471-73, 475-84, 487-95, 505, 607 Bosworth, Alexander, 151, 451 Bourbon dynasty, 224, 529 Bourbon, Louis François de, 94, 412 Bourbon, Louise de, 85, 404 Boyce, Samuel, 171, 180, 468 Braham, John, 309, 597 Brant, Sebastian: Das Narrenschiff, 97, 415 Breton, André le, 243, 253, 254, 261, 528, 544, 553 Brewster, David, 377 Briasson, Antoine, 243, 544 Brière, J. L. J., 227, 530 Brown, James, 614 Browne, Isaac, 172, 187, 469, 483 Browne, Thomas, 399 Browning, Robert, 526 Bruce, John, 605 Brummell, George, 195, 491 Bruno, Giordano, 567 Bruyère, Jean de la, 273, 569 Buffon, Georges-Louis, comte de, 257, 314, 555, 599 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, xxiv, 575 Bunyan, John, 138, 373, 443, 462, 486, 487 Burke, Edmund, 179, 187, 246, 474, 477, 482, 483, 484, 546

Burnes, William, 55, 379 Burns, Jean Armour, 63, 384 Burns, Robert, xv, xxvii, 28-74, 201, 202, 205, 292, 294, 329-33, 353-62, 364-75, 378-86, 391, 439, 453, 464, 467, 483, 498-99, 500, 515, 60811, 613; “Address to the Deil,” 46, 370; “The Auld Farmer’s New-Year Morning Salutation to His Auld Mare Maggie,” 42, 48, 366; “Auld Lang Syne,” 50; “A Bard’s Epitaph,” 35, 360, 385; “The Brigs of Ayr,” 42, 366; “Bruce to His Troops,” 47, 371; “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” 56, 296, 357, 362, 379, 586; “The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie,” 48, 372; “Duncan Gray,” 50, 332-33, 611-12; “Elegy on Capt. Matthew Henderson,” 367-68; “Epistle to Davie,” 36, 361; “Epistle to J. L[apraik], An Old Scotch Bard,” 498; “The Gloomy Night is Gath’ring Fast,” 58, 381; “Green Grow the Rashes,” 331, 611; “Halloween,” 40, 365; “Here’s a Health,” 50, 375; “The Holy Fair,” 40, 365; “The Jolly Beggars,” 49, 374; “Macpherson’s Farewell,” 47, 50-51, 331, 371, 372, 611; “Man Was Made to Mourn,” 333, 612-13; “Mary in Heaven,” 50; “My Hoggie,” 313, 599; “Ode, Sacred to the Memory of Mrs. [Oswald] of [Auchencruive],” 46-47, 371; “On the Late Captain Grose’s Peregrinations thro’ Scotland,” 460, 587; “On Seeing a Wounded Hare,” 40, 365; “Open the Door to Me, Oh!,” 42, 367; “The Ordination,” 532; “Scotch Drink,” 42-43, 367; “Song— For a’ that and a’ that,” 33, 610; “Tam o’ Shanter,” 48-49, 372, 444; “To a Mountain Daisy,” 34, 333, 359, 612-13; To a Mouse,” 34, 48, 333, 359, 372, 612-13; “To the Guidwife of Wauchope House,” 53-54, 378; “To the Noblemen and Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt, 68, 386; “To William Ochiltree,” 43, 368; “The Vision,” 34, 360; translations of, 330, 608; “Willie brew’d a peck o’ Maut,”

INDEX

50, 310, 596; “A Winter Night,” 4142, 45-46, 368, 372 Butler, Samuel, 29, 67; Hudibras 116, 353, 428, 600 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, xvii, 37, 55, 72-73, 138, 202, 205, 212, 217, 289, 299, 304-5, 343, 359, 361, 442, 496, 499, 500, 514, 517, 566, 583, 590, 592, 593, 594, 610; Burns compared to, 72-73; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 37, 183, 361, 405, 478, 595; Don Juan, 37, 305, 362, 595; The Giaour, 37, 183, 361, 478; Ravenna Journal, 325-26, 606-7 Cacus, 47, 371 Cade, Jack, 91, 410 Cadmus, 323, 606 Cagliostro, Count. See Balsamo, Guiseppe Calas, Jean, 85, 104, 107, 403, 422, 424 Calista, 140, 443 Camões, Luís de, 68, 387; Lusiads, 136, 441 Campbell, Thomas, 420 cant, xviii, 36, 154, 176, 188, 191, 206, 221, 284, 288, 289, 301, 361, 488, 505 Carlyle, James, 533 Carlyle, Jane Welsh, xx, 349, 400, 408, 475, 487, 555, 585, 599 Carlyle, John, xxiv, 456 Carlyle, Thomas: as reviewer, critical principles of, xiii-xvii; Works: “Biography,” xv, xxi, xxx, xxxi, xxxiii, xxxiv, xxxvi, 369, 374, 399, 437, 446, 451, 454, 455, 456, 462, 476, 496, 575; “Boswell’s Life of Johnson,” xv, xxi, xxx, xxxi, xxxiii-xxxiv, 361, 363, 383, 398, 399, 412, 430, 439, 446, 504, 531, 543, 544, 567, 573, 584, 595; “Burns,” xiv-xv, xvi, xix-xx, xxii-xxiii, xxx, xxxii-xxxiii, xxxvi xxxvii, xl, 366, 375, 383, 439, 444, 464, 483, 499, 523, 550, 584, 586, 608, 609, 613; “Characteristics,” 444, 450, 454, 460, 461, 470, 474, 487, 527, 560, 562, 581, 582, 593, 618, 619; “Chartism,” 386, 461, 464, 507, 510, 516, 523; “CornLaw Rhymes,” xv, xvi, xxii-xxiv, xxx, xxiv, 361, 374, 416, 483, 517, 519,

815 590; Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, xv, xxvii, xxix-xxxii, xxxiii, xxxiv, xxxv, xxxvii-xliii; “Cruthers and Jonson,” 352, 423; “Death of Edward Irving,” xxx,400; “Death of Goethe,” xxiii, 370, 444, 512; “The Diamond Necklace,” xv, 370, 374, 434, 440, 452, 516, 528, 548, 571, 573, 577, 583, 590, 599; “Diderot,” xv, xvi, xxiv-xxv, xxxi, xxxiv, xxxvi-vii, 369, 390, 393, 397, 407, 410, 414, 415, 420, 427, 435, 485, 493, 527, 531, 595; “Dr. Francia,” 402; Edinburgh Encyclopedia articles, xviii, 377, 405; “Early German Literature,” 347, 395, 415; “Early Kings of Norway,” 441; Frederick the Great, 401, 408, 414, 417, 421, 440, 499; “German Playwrights,” 344, 374, 392, 395, 412, 419, 461, 573, 579, 580; German Romance, 362, 372, 373, 383, 389, 390, 436, 464, 485, 490; “Goethe,” xix, 362, 363, 375, 399, 406, 407, 430, 433, 434, 441, 444, 510, 566, 593; “Goethe’s Faust,” xviii, 584; “Goethe’s Helena,” 359, 366, 528, 609; “Goethe’s Portrait,” 531; “Goethe’s Works,” 356, 385, 413, 426, 430, 435, 518, 519, 526, 532, 573; “Heintze's Translation of Burns," xxv, xxvii, xxxv, 372, 464, 608-11; “History of German Literature,” xxiv, 375, 440; “Historic Survey of German Poetry,” 364, 415, 512, 532; “Inaugural Address,” 434, 510; “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter,” xix, 367, 390, 429, 444, 573; “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter Again,” 381, 390, 391, 411, 438, 448, 452, 453, 488, 513, 543, 557, 559, 562, 573, 619; “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter’s Review of Madame de Stael’s ‘Allemagne,’” 390, 440, 530; Latter-Day Pamphlets, 351, 359, 364, 405, 407, 413, 440, 496, 572, 608, 619; Lectures on the History of Literature, 356, 369, 386, 390, 394, 405, 440-41, 579, 582, 619; “The Life of Heyne,” xix, 499, 504, 543, 558, 584; “Life and Writings of Werner,” 373, 377, 466, 525, 528; Life of Schiller, xix, 344, 345,

816



INDEX

346, 348, 351, 361, 385, 389, 391, 407, 419, 427, 438, 515, 598, 604, 608, 609; Life of Sterling, 364; “Memoirs of Mirabeau,” 359, 363, 367, 379, 559, 572, 573, 581, 582, 600; “Miss Baillie’s Metrical Legends,” xiv, xviii-xix, xxxii, xxxvi, 363, 385, 590; “Morgarten,” 347; “The Nibelungen Lied,” xxv, 387; On Heroes, xxx, xxxix, xlii, 351, 356, 359, 361, 363, 364, 368, 369, 370, 379, 391, 394, 403, 405, 407, 410, 416, 423, 444, 446, 453, 461, 462, 464, 477, 487, 501, 502, 505 513, 518, 523, 559, 562, 582, 586, 599, 604, 605, 608, 610; “On History,” 394, 438, 439, 449, 459, 476; “On History Again,” 439, 440, 520, 529; “Parliamentary History of the French Revolution,” 545, 609; Reminiscences, xvii, xix, 347, 353, 369, 390, 400, 500, 502, 504, 521, 533-34, 537, 610; Past and Present, xxvi, xxx, 384, 390, 440, 441, 447, 454, 461, 462, 464, 470, 475, 483, 487, 502, 507, 513, 522, 523, 572, 574, 602, 614; Sartor Resartus, xv, xviii, xxvii, xxx, xlii, 353, 356, 359, 361, 369, 374, 379, 386, 392, 395, 407, 409, 410, 416, 428, 431, 432, 433, 437, 438, 439, 453, 456, 460, 461, 462, 463, 470, 472, 473, 476, 483, 484, 485, 486, 491, 501, 502, 509, 512, 513, 515, 516, 518, 521, 522, 525, 527, 530, 532, 557, 558, 560, 561, 565, 566, 567, 573, 574, 582, 584, 589, 591, 593, 595, 599, 602, 603, 605, 613, 617, 618; “Portraits of John Knox,” 586; “Schiller,” xxi, 348, 356, 463, 515, 571; “Shooting Niagara: And After?,” 368, 433, 511; “Signs of the Times,” 392, 393, 395, 400, 412, 419, 432, 435, 436, 450, 463, 470, 520, 532, 559; “Sir Walter Scott,” xv, xxvi-xxvii, xxxi, xxxv, xxxix, 355, 378, 389, 433, 439, 447, 548, 560, 572; “State of German Literature,” 368, 387, 406, 410, 415, 429, 431, 435, 444, 456, 558, 561, 562, 588, 593; “The Tale” (translation), 373, 444, 619; Two Note Books, xvii, xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxiv,

xxxiii, xxxiv, 356, 363, 364, 370, 386, 388, 399, 426, 436, 437, 450, 470, 473, 474, 476, 480, 483, 484, 485, 497, 500, 503, 507, 515, 519, 522, 524, 525, 526, 538, 539, 540, 541, 542, 557, 559, 563, 568; “Varnhagen von Ense’s Memoirs,” xv, xxvii, 375; “Voltaire,” xvi, xxi, xxxiii, xxxvi, 377, 400, 406, 407, 412, 419, 432, 435, 436, 444, 455, 461, 473, 483, 484, 485, 515, 528, 529, 552, 585, 588, 591; Wilhelm Meister (translation), xiv, xviii, xix, 355, 359, 366, 369, 373, 380, 383, 388, 390, 395, 399, 406, 427, 430, 432, 433, 434, 437, 444, 455, 460, 461, 489, 510, 514, 516, 527, 554, 561, 585, 592, 593, 594; Wotton Reinfred, 346, 352, 360, 368, 369, 389, 416, 430, 519, 523 Caroline (queen), 83, 309, 401 “La carrière ouverte aux talens,” 288, 582 Carteret, John, 147, 448 Cartouche, Louis, 111, 426 Cataline, 90, 409 Catherine II (the Great), 83, 250-51, 257, 258-59, 401, 528, 551, 556 Catholic Emancipation, 94, 400, 412, 436 Catinat, Marchal, 355 Cave, Edward, 169, 171-72, 182, 187, 466, 469, 471, 483 Cervantes, Miguel de, 67, 70, 385-86, 389, 515, 579; Don Quixote, 116, 273, 286, 386, 428, 513, 569, 579 Chambers, Ephraim, Cyclopedia, 241, 541 Chanson de Roland, 544 Charlemagne, 82, 400, 544 Charles I (England), 177, 473, 486, 542 Charles II (England), 67, 138, 177, 353, 442, 443, 474, 494, 542 Charles X (France), 110, 425 Charles XII (Sweden), 428 Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de, 304, 594 Châtelet, Gabrielle, marquise du, 75, 89, 100, 101, 102, 248, 417, 418, 419, 420, 433, 550 Chesterfield, Earl of (Philip Stanhope),

INDEX

87, 174, 406, 471, 578 Choiseul, duc de, 252, 552 Cicero, 423, 458 Circe, 236, 299, 536, 590 Clarendon, Lord: History of the Rebellion 138, 442-43 Clarke, Samuel, 81, 399 Cleanthes, 426 Cleopatra, 258-59, 556 Cobbett, William, 201, 289, 322, 49899, 605 Cochrane, John George, xxiv, xxxiv Colburn, Henry, 81, 236, 281, 398, 538, 576 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 405, 441, 456, 496; “Christabel,” 311, 598 Collini, Alessandro, 79, 99, 396-97, 398, 408, 416, 417, 418 Columbus, Christopher, 18-23, 27, 113, 125, 350, 427 Combe, John a, 30, 356 Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicholas, 79, 95, 96, 107, 396, 401, 404, 408, 412, 413, 414, 417, 422, 424, 429 Constable, Archibald, 309-10, 323-24, 579, 589, 594-95, 597, 606; Constable’s Miscellany, 31, 357 Constantine (emperor), 184, 480 Cook, James, 87, 406 Cooper, James Fenimore, 277-78, 281, 571, 575-76 copyright, 150, 174, 242, 298, 300, 320, 451, 470, 542, 589, 594-95 Corn Laws, xxiv, 209, 222, 495, 497, 505, 506, 507, 510, 615 Corn-Law Rhymer. See Elliott, Ebenezer, Corneille, Pierre, 119, 429, 431 Cornelius, Wilhelm, 610 Cornual, Madame, 355 Cornwall, Barry. See Procter, Bryan Waller, Council of Trent, 40, 365 Courier, Paul, 336, 614 Cousin, Victor, 615 Crabbe, George, 212, 514 Critical Review, xiii, 591 Crockett, Davy, xxvii Croesus, 76, 393

817

Croker, John Wilson, 143, 145-50, 153, 306, 370, 446-47, 448, 449, 451, 452, 463, 465, 467, 472, 478, 481, 595. See also Boswell, James, Life of Samuel Johnson Cromek, Robert, 355, 371, 374, 613 Cumberland, Richard, 494 Cunningham, Allan, 333, 613 Currie, James, xxxiii, 30, 49, 63, 333, 354, 355, 357, 358, 367, 368, 369, 371, 374, 378, 381, 382, 613 Cuvier, Georges, 8, 347 Cyclops, 42, 201, 366-67 Damocles, sword of, 282, 283, 577 Dante Alighieri, 44, 253, 321, 368, 409, 553, 604 Darnley. See Stewart, Henry Darwin, Erasmus, 555; The Loves of the Plants, 302, 592; The Loves of the Triangles, 302, 592 Davies, Warburton, 610 Davy, Humphry, 312, 599 Decroix, Jacques, 392 Deffand, marquise du, 249, 550 Defoe, Daniel, 43, 271, 367, 567; Robinson Crusoe, 136, 442 Delphi, Delphic oracle, xvi, 39, 92, 363 democracy, 177, 288, 323, 507, 605 Democritus the Derider, 426 Dermody, Thomas, 231, 535 Derrick, Samuel, 231, 535 Desfontaines, Abbé, 85, 403-4, 410, 433 Detrosier, Rowland, 220, 523-24, 525 Dial, 337, 616, 619 Dickens, Charles: Pickwick Papers, 280, 575 Diderot, Angélique (mother), 230, 534 Diderot, Angélique (sister), 233, 240, 535 Diderot, Anne-Antoinette (née Champion), 237-38, 257, 538 Diderot, Denis, xvi, xxiv, 113, 189, 196, 223-76, 407, 415, 427, 527, 530, 531, 534, 535, 538, 539, 541, 547, 548, 550, 551, 552, 555, 556, 562, 563, 565, 567, 568, 570; Les bijoux indiscrets, 541; Dictionnaire de medicine, 241, 539; Entretien d’un Père avec ses Enfans, 233, 535; Essai sur la

818



INDEX

peinture, 273, 568; Essai sur le Mérite et la Vertu, 241, 539; L’Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron, 260, 557, 558; Le Fils naturel, 272, 568; Jacques le fataliste, 236, 273, 531, 537, 569; Lettre sur les Aveugles, 241, 541, 568; Lettre sur les Sourds et Muets, 241, 541; Mémoires, 223, 224, 236, 397, 528, 529, 533-41, 546, 547, 549, 552-56, 558, 559,; Le Neveu de Rameau, 250, 273, 537, 551, 555, 568, 569; Œuvres, 223, 226-27, 530, 531, 533, 535-41, 545, 546, 547, 549, 551, 552, 553, 555, 556, 558, 564, 566, 567, 568, 569, 570; Pensées Philosophiques, 241, 540; Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature, 241, 541; Père de Famille, 237, 272, 538, 568; Poésies Diverses, 556; La Religieuse, 257, 556; Le Rêve de L’Alembert, 229, 533; Salons, 272, 568. See also Encyclopédie Diderot, Didier-Pierre, 233, 535 Diderot, Didier, 229-30, 232, 236, 239, 240, 533-34 Diogenes Laetius, 423 Diogenes the Cynic, 218, 519 Dionysius II, 577 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 438 Dionysius of Syracuse, 410 Dionysius’s Ear, 92, 432 Dionysus (Greek god), 459 Disraeli, Isaac, 102, 420, 542 “Divine Idea,” xvii, 88, 266, 406-7, 56263, 581, 588 Dixie, Wolstan, 169, 466 Dodsley, Robert, 243, 543 Dryden, John, 110, 173, 425-26, 469, 472, 598 Dunlop, Frances, 38, 362 Duvernet, Théophile, 79, 396, 401, 4034, 417, 422 Eckermann, Johann, 602, 604 Edgeworth, Maria, 385 Edinburgh Monthly Review, xix Edinburgh Review, xiii, xiv, xv, xvii-xix, xxi, xxx, xxxii, xxxiv, xxxv, 357, 365, 376, 436, 447, 448, 477, 485, 496, 497, 565, 581 Edwards, Bryan, 18, 351

Elizabeth I, 50, 100, 317, 375, 419, 601 Elliott, Ebenezer (Corn-Law Rhymer), xv, xvi, xxii, xxiii-xxiv, 200, 205, 206, 210, 212, 213, 216, 218-22, 495-98, 503, 506-18, 520, 521, 523; “Cadi-Dervise,” 210, 511; Corn-Law Rhymes, 495, 497, 517, 519, 523; “Enoch Wray’s Dream,” 211-19, 515, 520, 521, 522; “Patched Elbows Petition,” 508; “The Ranter,” 210, 506, 511, 520; The Village Patriarch, xxii, 199, 219-20, 509-10, 511-22 Ellwood, Thomas, 280, 575 Elysium, 132, 273, 437, 569 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, xv, xxvii, xxxv, xxxvii-xxxviii, 335-39, 573, 613-19 Encyclopédie, 88, 123, 227, 233, 241, 243, 245, 251-54, 258, 261, 271, 275, 407, 415, 427, 493, 528, 531, 538, 541, 544, 545, 548, 549, 551, 552, 556, 570 Ense, Varnhagen von, 408, 430 epic, Carlyle on, 24, 38, 70, 112, 134-36, 192, 197, 219, 280, 440, 441-42, 454, 455, 520, 522, 575 Epinay, Louise, d’, 247, 249, 254, 547, 550 Ercilla y Zúñiga, Alonso de, 389 Ernulf, Bishop of Rochester, 263, 304, 559 Erskine, Henry, 153, 453 Espinasse, Jeanne de, 245, 249, 546, 550 Euclid, 157, 455 Euler, Leonhard, 257, 555 Euripides, 518 Eusebius, 242, 543 Eusebius von Wallenstein, Albrecht, 345 Eve (Old Testament), 248, 549, 591 Examiner, xxvii, xxxv, xxxvii, 503, 577, 608 Falconet, Étienne, 257, 555 Farinelli (Carlo Maria Broschi), 286, 579 Faust, Johann, 78, 323, 394, 395 Ferguson, Adam, 59, 60, 382 Fergusson, Robert, 32, 358 Fermat, Pierre de, 115, 428 Ferrara, Duke of, 173, 387, 469 Fichte, Johann, xvii, 297, 406-7, 410, 558, 562, 580, 588

INDEX

Fielding, Henry: Jonathan Wild, 438 Joseph Andrews, 473; Tom Jones, 136, 442 Filmore, Lewis, 609 Fitzwilliam, Charles Wentworth, 210, 509-10 Fletcher, John and Philip Massinger, 363; Beggar’s Bush, 49, 374 Fletcher of Saltoun, Andrew, 51, 375 Fleury, André-Hercule de, 85, 403 Fonblanque, Albany, xxxvii Fontenelle, Bernard de, 113, 244, 427, 545 Foreign Quarterly Review, xviii, xxiv, xxxi, xxxiv Foreign Review, xviii, xix, xxi, xxii, xxiv, xxv, xxxiii, xxxviii, 406, 419 Fourier, Charles, 618 Franklin, Benjamin, 205, 504 Franks, Robert, 319, 602 Fraser, James, xv, xxi, xxii, xxv, xxvii, xxxviii, xxxix, xl, 360, 613 Fraser, William, xxi, xxv Fraser’s Magazine, xv, xviii, xxi, xxii, xxv, xxvii, xxx, xxxi, xxxiii, xxxviii, xxxix, xl, 437, 445, 446, 603 Frederick II (the Great), 83, 85, 94, 98, 118-19, 195, 202, 250, 401, 404, 412, 416, 417, 493, 499, 551 Frederick William. See Friedrich Wilhelm freewill, 47, 97, 131, 155. See also Necessity French Revolution (1798), xv, 64, 89, 124, 176, 188, 244, 247, 304, 357, 384, 425, 433-34, 472, 529, 548, 585 French Revolution (1830), 472, 548 Fréron, Élie, 92, 250, 410, 550 Friedrich Wilhelm, 99, 417 Froude, James, 369, 411, 453, 460, 464, 508, 523, 577, 594, 608, 615 Fuller, Margaret, 616 Fust, Johann. See Faust Johann Galiani, Ferdinando, 248, 254, 549, 553 Galilei, Galileo, 68, 387 Galvani, Luigi, 590, 618 game laws and game preserving, 30, 68, 80, 158, 186, 209, 248, 356, 398, 458, 483, 507-8, 525

819

Garrick, David, 257, 555 Gay, John: Beggar’s Opera, 49, 374 Gehenna, 217, 373, 518 Geoffrin, Rodet, 249, 550 George II, 158, 401, 457 George III, 158, 194, 457, 458, 473, 482, 491, 595 George IV (Prince Regent), 306-7, 447, 595 George, Saint, 300, 591 Gerhard, Wilhelm, 610 Gessler, Herman, 12, 348 gigs, gigmanity, 152, 278, 391, 452, 573 Gilchrist, Alexander, xli Giotto, 317, 320, 600-2, 604 Gladstone, William, 614 Glover, Richard, 51, 375 Godwin, William, 4, 343 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 142, 265, 289, 318, 321, 329, 333, 361, 363, 373, 380, 407, 445, 499, 515, 518, 525, 526, 527, 561, 566, 568, 569, 571, 593, 594, 602, 604, 607, 608-9, 617; Dichtung und Wahrheit, 362, 559, 603; Goetz von Berlichingen, 118, 296, 302-4, 430, 588; Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (Sorrows of Young Werther), 303-4, 343, 415, 496-97, 566; Das Märchen (The Tale), 373, 444, 618; Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), 355; Faust, 330, 366, 373, 415, 455, 529, 609-10; Helena, 359, 373; Italianische Reise, 583; Wilhelm Meister, 136, 318, 373, 406, 442, 518, 564-65, 566, 602. See also Carlyle, Wilhelm Meister (translation of ) Goldsmither, Oliver, 51, 185, 376, 468, 481; Vicar of Wakefield 185, 504 Golgotha, 139, 190, 443, 486 Gower, Francis Leveson, 609-10 Gracchi, the, 90, 409 Gray, Thomas, 51, 375, 584 “greatest happiness principle,” 392. See also utilitarianism Grey, Lord, 503 Grimm, Friedrich, Baron von, 79, 223, 233, 246-47, 254, 255, 259, 269, 272, 397, 528, 547; Mémoires, Correspondance, et Ouvrages de Diderot, 223,

820



INDEX

247, 397, 528, 566 Grotius, Hugo, 86, 404-5 Gustav I, 305, 595 Gustavus Adolphus, 345, 368, 595 Gutenberg, Johann, 394, 395 Hades, 241, 475, 536, 540, 569 Hall, Basil, 311, 322, 598 Hall, George, 168, 465 Haller, Albrecht von, 458 Hardenberg, Friedrich von, 128-29, 393, 435, 455, 463, 466 Hargreaves, James, 354 Harte, Walter, 7, 345 Hartley, David, 369 Hawkins, John, 81, 149, 168, 171, 172, 185, 398, 449, 450, 463, 465, 469, 471, 478, 481, 484, 488 Hayley, William, 302, 592 Hayward, Abraham, 610 Hazlitt, William, 231, 359, 363, 496, 535, 580 Heintze, Heinrich, xv, xxvii, 329-33, 372, 608-11 Helvétius, Claude, 247, 248, 548 Hemans, Felicia, 212, 348, 514 Hengst (Hengist), 190, 486 Henry the Minstrel, 12, 348 Henry V, 7, 346 Hercules, 94, 177, 183-84, 300, 324, 371, 413, 473, 479, 591, 606 heroes and hero-worship, 29, 38, 41, 69, 73, 88, 95, 154, 179, 180, 212, 218, 247, 274, 278-79, 280, 282, 319, 35556, 363, 368, 391, 446, 453, 462, 505, 515, 573, 578, 595, 599, 618 Heron, Robert, 231, 354-55, 360, 361, 384, 535 Heyne, Christian, 242, 543 Hill, John, 609 Hill, John Edward, 508 history, 7-9, 113, 115-16, 133, 135, 138, 157-61, 319-20, 415, 438, 440, 456, 478. See also Universal History Hobbes, Thomas, 120, 431, 450 hodman, 261, 558, 562 Hogarth, William, 273, 569 Hogg, James, 325, 607 Holbach, Baron d’ (Paul-Henri Thiry), 244, 247, 249, 254, 256, 545, 549

Holford, Margaret, 348 Holinshed, 7, 344-45 Homer, 39, 42, 43, 68, 132, 134, 135, 154, 184-85, 261, 362, 366-67, 387, 441, 455, 578; The Iliad, 132, 136, 146, 367, 437, 441, 447, 454, 455, 481, 520; The Odyssey, 154, 156, 162, 280, 442, 454, 455, 461, 536, 575 Hooker, Richard, 115, 427 Hoop, Père, 254-55, 553 Horace, 36, 347, 352, 361, 367, 384, 468, 481, 567, 592 Horsa, 486 Hugo, Victor, 593 Hume, David, 52, 176, 189, 196-97, 198, 263, 292, 376-77, 378, 432, 457, 492, 493, 494, 495, 540, 559, 560, 586 Hume, Patrick, 23, 25, 351, 352 humour, 48, 116, 197, 212, 270, 273, 288, 293, 297, 429, 515, 569 Hunt, Leigh, 486, 496, 498, 601, 604 Irving, David, 355 Irving, Edward, 400, 436 Irving, Washington, 313, 599 Jackson, Andrew, 277, 571 James II, 353, 376, 474, 494 Jaucourt, Louis de, 247, 548 Jean Paul. See Jean Paul Friedrich Richter Jeffrey, Francis, xii, xiv, xvii-xxi, xxv, xxx, xxxii, 426, 485, 496, 514 Jeffreys (George), Baron, 177, 474 Jesuits, Jesuitism, 95, 117, 188, 210, 23032, 245, 249, 250, 413, 511, 534-35, 545 Jesus (New Testament), 148, 384, 386, 387, 388, 394, 403, 431, 443, 445, 451, 460, 467, 468, 472, 477, 481, 550, 565 Jöcher, Christian, 142, 445 John Chrysostom, Saint, 567 Johnson, Elizabeth (Porter), 148, 449 Johnson, Michael, 194, 490 Johnson, Samuel, xv, xvi, xvii, 46, 51, 81, 140, 146-48, 152, 153-57, 162-63, 165-98, 228, 242, 270, 290, 361, 370, 387, 398, 437, 446-56, 462-71, 473, 475-84, 487-95, 505, 531, 535, 543, 543, 567, 573, 584, 607; Dictionary,

INDEX

174, 183, 243, 544; Idler, 195; Lives of the English Poets, 426; Prayers and Meditations, 490; Rambler 51, 376; Rasselas, 51, 193, 376; “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” 478 Johnson, Sarah, 193, 490 Jonson, Ben, 183, 353, 479, 501 Jördens, Karl, 142, 445 Joseph II, 251, 305, 551, 595 Jove, 321, 542, 604 Julius Caesar, 379 Jung, Johann, 142, 445 Juvenal, 370, 478 Kames, Lord, 52, 376, 377 Kaufmann, Philipp, 330, 610 Keats, John, 43, 368, 480, 496 Kemble, John, 308, 596 Kepler, Johannes, 90, 125, 409, 434 Khan, Genghis, 78, 395 Kien-Long, 106, 423 Kippis, Andrew, 143, 446 Kitchiner, William, 101, 420 Knox, John, 292, 584-86 Koran, 136, 221, 441, 565, 600 Kotzebue, August von, 286, 579-80 La Barre, Chevalier, 401 Laharpe, Jean-François, 108, 424 laissez-faire, xxiii, 209, 507 Lang, Andrew, 578 Langhorne, John, 60, 382 Langton, Bennet, 185, 481-82 Lansdowne, marquis of, 158, 457, 50910 Larkin, Henry, xli-xlii Lavater, Johann, 274, 570 Lawrence, Thomas, 451 Le Sage, Alain-René, 393 Lebahn, Falck, 609 Lebreton, André. See Breton, André le Leibniz, Gottfried, 378-79, 450 Lenclos, Anne (Ninon) de, 83, 401 Lepan, Joseph, 79, 396, 401, 417 Levet, Robert, 192, 489 Lewis, Matthew, 296, 587-88 Livy, 399 Locke, John, 70, 388; Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 70, 369 Lockhart, John Gibson, 28, 31, 279, 294, 306, 309, 311, 312, 355, 465, 496,

821

574, 585; Life of Burns, xiv, xix-xx, 2974, 333, 354, 355, 357, 358, 360, 361, 362, 365, 368, 369, 371, 372, 374, 378-85, 391, 613; Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, xxvi, 277, 279-85, 298, 325, 327, 577-79, 583, 586, 587, 589, 593, 594, 596, 597, 598, 600, 602, 605, 607 London and Westminster Review, xviii, xxv, xxxi, xxxv, 574, 575, 585, 614 London Review, xviii, xxv Longchamp, Sébastien, 75, 79, 80, 85, 89, 92, 101, 106, 107, 392, 396, 397, 402, 404, 411, 412, 424, 591 Loo, Charles van, 257, 555 Loo, Louis-Michel van, 257, 555 ‘Loom of Time,’ 226, 530 Loring, Ellis, xxxvii-xxxviii Louis XIV, 107-8, 377, 424, 542 Louis XV, 123-26, 225, 251, 252-53, 413-14, 433, 529, 552, 600 Louis, Saint, 94, 412 Lowe, Hudson, 33, 358 Lucretius, 454 Lucy, Thomas, 30, 356 Lushington, Vernon, xli-xlii Luther, Martin, 40, 78, 90, 364, 409, 459, 576 Mably, Gabriel de, 52, 377 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, xiv, xv, xvii, xxi, xxxvii, 447, 448, 477 MacCulloch, John, xxiv Macdonald, William, 609 Machiavelli, Nicolo, 364 Mackenzie, Henry, 312-13, 599 MacPherson, James, 439, 498 Maecenas, Gaius, 63, 173-74, 384, 470 Maginn, William, xxx, 445 Mahomet. See Mohammed Malesherbes, Guillaume-Chrétien de, 251, 552 Malves, Jean Gua de, 241, 541 Mammon, 73, 154, 265, 336, 391, 454, 507, 614 Marmontel, Jean-François, 100, 248, 418, 549, 567 Martineau, Harriet, 614 Mary (queen of Scotland), 160, 459 Massinger, Philip, 363, 374

822



INDEX

Maupertuis, Pierre de, 98, 416, 417 McKean, Henry, xxxviii Mecænas. See Maecenas, Gaius, Meister, Jacques-Henri de, 258, 274, 556, 570 Metastasio (Pietro Trapassi), 12, 349 Michaud, J. F.: Biographie Universelle, 142, 445 Michelangelo, 133, 438 Mignot, Marie, 99, 103, 417 Mill, James, 532 Mill, John Stuart, xxii, xxiii, xxv-xxvi, 495, 497, 498, 523, 573, 574, 575, 585, 593 Millar, Andrew, 243, 544 Milnes, Richard Monckton, 614 Milton, John, xiv, 70, 72, 73, 74, 190, 290, 321, 365, 387, 391, 441, 486, 523, 584, 603; “L’Allegro,” 363; “How Soon Hath Time,” 523; Lycidas, 592; “Il Penseroso,” 372; Paradise Lost, 70, 94, 136, 146, 174, 352, 371, 388-89, 393, 396, 407, 430, 432, 447, 463, 470, 475, 478, 548, 550, 580 Minerva Press, 39, 134, 318, 363, 439 Mitchell, Robert, xviii Mohammed, 76, 268, 393-94, 565 Molière (Poquelin, Jean-Baptiste), 242, 542, 554 Monmouth, Duke of, 25, 352, 353 Montaigne, Michel de, xviii, 116, 260, 423, 429, 558 Montesquieu, Charles, xviii, 52, 86, 362, 377, 404-5 Monthly Review, xiii, xvii, xix, xxxv Moore, Thomas, 299, 307, 485, 590, 596, 610 More, Hannah, xxv, 281, 313, 576-77 Morellet, André, 248, 254, 549, 553 Moréri, Louis, 142, 445 Moses (Old Testament), 76, 393, 524 Mosheim, Johann, 242, 386, 543 Murphy, Arthur, 149, 449 Musäus, Johann, 48, 372-73, 440 Naigeon, Jacques-André, 223, 227-28, 229, 263, 264, 530, 531, 532, 533, 535, 541, 546 Napier, Macvey, xx-xxi, xxii-xxiii, xxiv, xxxiv, 497, 517

Napoleon. See Bonaparte, Napoleon Nasmyth, Alexander, 60, 382, 608 Nebuchadnezzar II, 277, 386, 571 Necessity, 57, 97, 131, 165, 197, 201, 205, 279, 283, 380, 494, 503. See also Freewill Nemesis, 102, 299, 421, 589 Nero, 77, 260, 557 Neuberg, Joseph, xli New Edinburgh Review, xviii, xix, xxxii, xxxvi, 609 New Monthly Magazine, xxii, 444 New Testament: Acts, 223, 451, 458, 468, 488, 528; Colossians, 476; 1 Corinthians, 454, 504, 546, 565, 580; Ephesians, 476, 546; Galations, 386; Hebrews, 346, 465, 476, 591; James, 462; John, 383, 384, 386, 432, 460, 462, 472, 532, 550; 1 John, 509; Luke, 378, 386, 445, 454, 467, 477, 488, 489, 504, 528, 529, 536; Mark, 443, 477, 489, 495; Matthew, 354, 386, 388, 391, 399, 431, 433, 436, 443, 454, 472, 476, 477, 488, 491, 504, 505, 508, 512, 518, 519, 529, 536, 566, 593; 1 Peter, 489; Romans, 436, 471, 527; 1 Timothy, 565 Newgate prison, 189, 277, 485, 571 Newton, Isaac, 113, 164, 235, 427, 462, 550 Niagara Falls, 12, 349 Nimrod, 47, 372 “No man is a hero to his valet,” 29, 355-56 Novalis. See Hardenberg, Friedrich von Odin, 428 Old Testament: Amos, 536, 548, 580; 1 Chronicles, 488; 2 Chronicles, 466; Daniel, 386, 422, 571; Deuteronomy, 477, 482, 518, 590; Ecclesiastes, 405, 505, 525, 555, 590; Exodus, 389, 393, 421, 476, 482, 488, 512; Ezra, 552; Genesis, 372, 439, 442, 472, 508, 516, 521, 527, 542, 543, 549, 581, 591, 605; Habakkuk, 396; Isaiah, 275, 321, 373, 422, 434, 476, 551, 570, 603; Jeremiah, 373, 476; Job, 585, 606; Jonah, 393; Joshua, 477; Judges, 363-64, 466, 570, 582; 1 Kings, 351,

INDEX

364, 466, 519; Lamentations, 546; Leviticus, 453, 541, 576; Numbers 220-21, 503, 524, 525; Psalms, 360, 416, 455, 476, 509, 527, 544, 546, 561, 566-67, 577; Proverbs, 352, 444, 460, 486, 504, 506, 527; Revelation, 488, 524, 535, 541, 589, 590; 1 Samuel, 364, 476; 2 Samuel, 364, 488; Zechariah, 504 “one thing needful,” 54, 132, 209, 378 ‘open secret,’ 141, 337, 363, 416, 444, 565 Orcus, 286, 580 Orleans, duc de, 109, 425 Osborne, Thomas, 174, 243, 471 Osório, Jerónimo, 50, 375 Ossian, 133, 439, 498 Otway, Thomas, 171, 468 Ovid, 382, 480 Owen, Robert, 618 Packwood, George, 236, 537 Paley, William, 560 palingenesia, 187, 472, 484 Palissot de Montenoy, Charles, 250, 273, 550, 551; Les Philosophes, 250, 550 Pan, 155, 360, 455 Panckoucke, Charles-Joseph, 236, 243, 538, 544 Paoli, Antonio di, 151, 451 Papin, Denis, 449, 462 Parr, Samuel, 170, 205, 467, 504 Parr, Thomas, 223, 529 patent digester, 148, 165, 292, 449, 462 Paterson, Robert (“Old Mortality”), 183, 479 Paul, Hamilton, 355 Paul, Saint, 170, 260, 268, 468, 527, 557, 565 Paulin, Jean, 223, 228, 533 Peacock, Thomas, 364, 398 Peck, Francis, 143, 446 Pelham, Henry, 158, 457 Pelham-Holles, Thomas, 158, 457 Pelops, 47, 372 Peter, Saint, 88, 407, 433 Peterkin, Alexander, 355 Peterloo, 82, 189, 400 Petrarch, 321, 392, 604

823

Petronius, 521 Petty, William, 158, 457 phantasmagoria, 48, 141, 207, 241, 373 Philidor, François-André, 257, 555 Philip II (Spain), 67, 346, 386 philosophes, philosophism, 99, 124-26, 223, 224, 244-45, 247, 248, 249-51, 253, 254, 257, 259, 262, 273, 275-76, 402, 410, 415, 417, 434, 529, 530, 535, 549, 550, 551, 560, 566 Phlegethon, 179, 475 phoenix, 176, 203, 472, 484, 501 Pilate, Pontius, 77, 176, 394, 472 pillar of fire, 180, 209, 476, 508 Piozzi, Hester, 149, 183, 186, 370, 449, 450, 478, Piron, Alexis, 92, 410-11 Pitt the Younger, William, 188, 484 Pius II, 159, 459 Plato, 262, 468 Plessis, Armand du, 94, 412 pole-star, 176, 472. See also loadstar Pompadour, Marquise de, 96, 123, 252, 414 Poole, Richard, xix Poor Laws, 209, 507, 516-17 Pope, Alexander, 102, 169, 384, 401, 420-21, 426, 447, 461, 466, 481; The Dunciad, 383, 409, 475; Essay on Man, 437, 492 Porphyry, 120, 431 Porter, Jane, 348, 350 Poussin, Nicholas, 42, 366 Priestley, Joseph, 369 Prince Regent. See George IV Procter, Bryan Waller, xix, xxi Prometheus, 93, 273, 358, 411, 568-69 Proteus, 95, 413 puffery, 173, 192, 218, 243, 470, 474, 488, 544 Puisieux, Madeleine de, 240, 241, 538 quacks, quackery, 92, 107, 152, 154, 178, 207, 280, 288, 314, 474, 506, 511, 580, 599 Quarterly Review, xiv, xvii, xviii, 326, 355, 446, 447, 452, 480-81, 491, 497, 573 Quesnay, François, 52, 377 Rabelais, François, 71, 389-90

824



INDEX

Racine, Jean, 52, 119, 242, 377, 429, 431, 542 Radicals, Radicalism, xxii-xxiii, xxv, 82, 177, 208, 209, 210, 217, 343, 474, 497, 498, 506, 518, 523 Ramdas, Samarth, 287-88, 581 Ramsay, Allan, 32, 60, 358 Raphael Sanzio, 115, 285, 428; Transfiguration, 132, 437 Raynal, Guillaume, 254, 258, 553, 556 Reason (versus Understanding), 121, 430, 435 Redivivus, Smelfungus, 199, 496 Reform Bill of 1832, xv, xxiii, 176, 209, 472, 497, 502-3, 506, 507, 510, 516, 519, 523, 524 respectability, 72, 152, 171, 179, 221, 278, 282-83, 390-91, 408, 452-53, 573, 577 Retzsch, Friedrich, 41, 366 reverence, 45, 88, 122, 153, 156, 173, 198, 210, 217, 406, 432, 510, 527, 564, 565 Reynolds, Frances (Renny), 195, 491 Reynolds, Joshua, 187, 451, 480, 481, 483 Ricardo, David, 378 Riccobon, Marie-Jeanne, 257, 555 Richard I, 317, 567, 601 Richardson, Samuel, 43, 271, 367, 567 Richelieu. See Plessis, Armand du Richter, Jean Paul Friedrich ( Jean Paul), xix, 71, 212, 242, 300, 362, 390, 515, 561 Rienzi, Cola di, 58, 381 Robert the Bruce, 348 Roberts, William: The Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah Moore, 281, 576-77 Robertson, John, xxxv, 574 Robertson, William, 19, 52, 159, 351, 377, 459 Rochefoucauld, duc de la, 291, 585 Rockingham, Earl of, (Charles Watson-Wentworth), 158, 210, 457, 510 Rogers, Samuel, 578 Roper, Derek, xiii, xiv Rothschild family, 336, 614 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 74, 91, 113, 142,

196, 223, 245-47, 391, 409-10, 416, 445, 493, 528, 546, 547; Confessions, 135, 440, 547 Rowe, Nicholas, 356 Rückert, Friedrich, 600 Rudolf II, 125, 409, 434 Runnymede (Runnymead), 83, 400-1 Russell, Lord (William), 177, 474 Sadler, Michael, 159, 459 Saint-Lambert, Jean de, 101-2, 247, 420, 421, 548 Saint-Pierre, Jacques-Henri de, 281; Paul et Virginie, 576 Saint Simon, Claude, 463 Saladin, 270, 567 Sallust, 115, 428 Samson (Old Testament), 169, 288, 466, 582 Sand, Georges, 593 Satan, 72, 161, 300, 432, 460, 546, 581, 591 Sauerteig, Gottfried, 135-38, 142, 157, 440, 445, 455, 456, 496 Saumaise, Claude, 242, 542 Saunderson, Nicholas, 568 Savage, Richard, 184, 478, 480 Savile, George, 210, 509-10 scepticism, 69, 94, 120, 127, 176, 178, 196, 241, 260, 266, 292, 297, 301-4, 540, 586, 589, 594 Schiller, Friedrich, xix, 12, 311, 321, 323, 344, 345, 347-48, 366, 515, 598, 604, 605; Don Carlos, 323, 605; Wilhelm Tell, 344, 348; Wallenstein, 344 Schmidt-Phiseldeck, Konrad von, 330, 610 Schubart, Christian, 142, 445 Scott, George, 183, 479 Scott, Lady, 312 Scott, Walter (father), 292 Scott, Walter, xvi, 12, 52, 59, 279-327, 345, 349-50, 355, 357, 378, 388, 451, 467, 479, 496, 572-608; The Abbot, 284, 579; The Bay of Biscay, 308, 420, 596; The Bride of Lammermoor, 349; The Fortunes of Nigel, 572, 592; Goetz de Berlichingen (translation of ), 296, 302-3; Guy Mannering, 587, 596, 601; Harold the Dauntless, 589; The Heart

INDEX

of Midlothian, 596, 601; The History of Scotland, 324, 606; Ivanhoe, 589, 601; Kenilworth, 589, 601; The Lady of the Lake, 298, 303, 589; Lay of the Last Minstrel, 298, 589; A Legend of Montrose, 349, 601; Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, 324, 606; The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, 324, 606; The Lord of the Isles, 298, 589; The Maid of Lodi, 308, 596; Marmion, 298, 303, 307, 309, 572, 589, 596; Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 294, 296-98, 302, 584, 587, 607; Old Mortality, 349, 479; Peveril of the Peak, 602; The Pirate, 284, 315, 579; Redgauntlet, 310; Rob Roy, 496, 601; Tales of my Landlord, 345, 479, 596; Waverley, 304-5, 318, 349, 532, 589, 593, 594-95, 602; Waverley novels, 221, 305, 307, 309, 317-21, 349, 350, 593-94, 596 self-interest, 96, 124-26, 208, 392, 434 Seneca, 260, 518, 557 Senior, Nassau, 159, 459 sentimentalism, 36, 141, 192, 199, 206, 269, 274-75, 289, 303, 318, 343, 344, 363, 382, 489, 496, 566, 583, 615 Sévigné, Madame de, 355 Shaftesbury, Earl of (Anthony Cooper), 87, 120, 241, 406, 431, 450, 539, 540 Shakespeare, William, 7, 11, 30, 38, 40, 44, 49, 50, 67, 115, 117-18, 134, 150, 173, 184, 203-4, 242, 261, 290, 301, 318, 321, 356, 366, 369, 376, 387, 429, 469, 499, 501, 502, 513, 515, 542, 584, 603; As You Like It, 416, 607; Hamlet, 30, 115, 117, 118, 283, 285, 353, 356, 387, 388, 405, 428, 429,457, 475, 505, 518, 599; Henry IV Part I, 349, 502, 514, 590, 609; Henry V, 346, 379, 492, 550, 606; Henry VI, Part 2, 501; Julius Caesar, 346, 502; Macbeth, 4, 8, 308, 346, 363, 419, 430, 490, 596; The Merchant of Venice, 385, 536; Merry Wives of Windsor, 492; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 407; Othello, 4, 285, 363, 525, 590, 591, 604; Richard II, 345, 381; Richard III, 345, 551; Romeo and Juliet, 501; The Tempest 30, 158, 356, 457, 463, 501, 512, 549,

825

618; Troilus and Cressida, 405 Shaster, 113, 136, 427, 441 Shattock, Joanne, xviii xiv, xix, xvii, xxiv, xxxvii Shelburne, Earl of, 158, 457 Shelley, Percy, 364, 480, 496, 619 Sheridan, James, 346 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 321, 485-86, 604 silence, 161-62, 190, 268, 277, 280, 284, 337, 460, 486-87, 564-65 sincerity, xxii, 36-38, 80, 104-5, 161, 206, 221, 270, 277, 282, 285, 305 Sirven family, 104, 422 Smelfungus. See Redivivus, Smelfungus Smith, Adam, 52, 354, 377, 378, 494, 507 Smith, John Thomas, 479 Smith, Sydney, 581 Smith, Thomas: “The Moorland Wedding,” 308, 596 Smollett, Tobias, 158, 434, 457, 469, 496, 606 Socinians, 311, 337, 399, 597, 615-16. See also Unitarians Socrates, 68, 100, 121, 170, 222, 387, 388, 419, 432, 436, 468, 527 Sophocles, 109, 372, 425, 518 Southampton, Earl of (Henry Wriothesley), 173, 469 Southey, Robert, 496, 497, 498 Spenser, Edmund: The Faerie Queene, 287, 311, 580, 598 Spurzheim, Johann, 272, 568 Staël, Madame de, 390, 440, 486, 498, 530 Standish, Frank, 80, 397 Stanislaus I, 102, 421 Stanyan, Temple, 239, 241, 538 Stauffacher, Werner, 12, 347 Steele, Richard, 51, 376 Sterling, John, 617, 619 Sterne, Laurence, 48, 192, 372, 496, 515; Sentimental Journey, 363, 489, 496; Tristram Shandy, 116, 209, 370, 428, 464, 508 Stewart, Dugald, 43, 44, 59, 355, 368, 369 Stewart, Henry, 160, 459

826



INDEX

Stoics, Stoicism, xxii, 97, 171, 197, 426, 468, 494 Stuart, Charles Edward, 515 Stulz, George, 319, 602 Sumner, Charles, 614 Swift, Jonathan, 65, 74, 110, 391, 416, 425, 515; “Against abolishing the Christian Religion,” 255, 554; Battle of the Books, 116, 428; Gulliver’s Travels, 438, 477 Sybil, 226, 273, 530 Sydney, Algernon, 177, 474 Syme, David, 610 Syme, John, 47, 371 Tacitus, 76, 77, 321, 394, 603 Talbot, Robert, 610 Talmud, 113, 393, 427 Tamerlane, 77-78, 394 Tartarus, 301, 437 Tasso, Torquato, xix, 68, 173, 242, 387, 469, 542 Taylor, Jeremy, 309, 597 Tell, Wilhelm, 12, 347. See also, Schiller, Friedrich, Wilhelm Tell Teniers, David, 49, 374 Tennyson, Alfred, 526 Teufelsdröckh, Diogenes, 385, 460, 484, 485, 486, 501, 502, 512, 515, 521, 522, 527, 573, 593 Thales, 121, 432 Theocritus, 40, 365 Theologia Germanica, 576 Thiriot, Nicholas, 86, 404 Thomson, George, 308, 611 Thomson, James, 358 Thousand and One Nights, 380, 411, 513, 581 Thrale, Henry, 183, 186, 479 Thrale, Hester. See Piozzi, Hester Thurtell, John, 111, 152, 391, 426, 452, 573 Tiberius, 77, 394 Tieck, Ludwig, 48, 372 Tiglath-pileser, 253, 552 Tindal, Matthew, 120, 431 Tirant lo Blanch, 246, 247, 547 Tiresias, 246, 546 Titans, 32, 241, 292, 402, 411, 512, 540 Toland, John, 120, 176, 431, 472

Tophet, 48, 187, 247, 373, 476 Tory party, xv, 151, 177-79, 188, 323, 447, 467, 473, 484 Tyburn, 420 Tyers, Thomas, 149, 449 Tyler, Wat, 91, 410 Tyrtaeus, 258, 556 Unbelief, 52, 83, 128, 255, 275, 276, 401. See also Belief Understanding. See Reason Unitarians, Unitarianism, 597, 614, 616, 617. See also Socinians Universal History, 122, 133, 145, 224, 244, 275, 439, 529 utilitarianism, 75, 377, 392, 400, 432, 434, 527, 532, 540, 568, 618 Valhalla, 115, 243, 428, 544 Vandeul, Marie-Angélique de, (Diderot), 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 235, 236, 240, 246, 257, 258, 533 vates, xvi, 39, 300-1, 363, 591 Vaucanson, Jacques de, 228, 532 Vedam, 113, 427 Vega, Lope de, 286, 579 Venus, 50, 375 Virgil, 175, 321, 382, 384, 466, 472, 489; Aeneid, 136, 441, 522, 603 Vives, Juan Luis, 29, 436 Volland, Louise-Henriette (Sophie), 240, 244, 538, 539 Voltaire (François Marie Arouet), xvi, xxi, 52, 75-129, 176, 181, 189, 196, 223, 225, 245, 250, 252, 257, 300, 311, 377, 392, 396-405, 407-20, 422-29, 431-33,473, 493, 527, 528, 529, 530, 545, 550, 551, 591, 597-98; Candide, 116, 376, 405, 418, 428, 545; Diatribe du docteur Akakia, 417; Dictionnaire philosophique, 84, 394, 402; L’Ecossaise, 250, 550; Eloge Funebre Louis XV, 414; La Henriade, 84, 115, 401, 402, 428; Histoire de Charles XII, 115, 428; Lettres Ecrites de Londres sur les Anglois, 399, 427, 429; Mahomet, 120, 431; Melanges Littéraires, 429; Memnon, 85, 404; Le monde comme il va: Vision de Babouc, 85, 116, 404, 450; Œuvre de Poésies, 89, 408; La pucelle d’Orleans, 116, 428; Sémiramis, 92-93,

INDEX

411; Le siècle de Louis XIV, 113, 427; Temple de la gloire, 413; Zadig, 85, 116, 403, 404, 428; Zaïre 120, 431 Vulcan, 366, 371, 506 Wagnière, Jean-Louis, 75, 79, 80, 99, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 392, 397, 401, 402, 404, 418, 422, 423, 424, 425, 426 Walker, Josiah, xxxiii, 30, 59, 355, 357 Walker, Thomas, 289, 582 Wallace, William, 12-18, 22, 23, 27, 347, 348, 349, 350, 371 Walpole, Horatio (Horace), 481 Walpole, Robert, 158, 457 Walter the Penniless, 78, 395 Walton, Izaak, 599 Warren, Robert, 236, 537 Waterloo, Battle of, 78, 188, 189, 358, 396, 400 Webster, John, 346 Werner, Zacharias, 377, 466, 525 Werterism, 97, 289, 303-4, 343, 415, 583. See also Goethe, Die Leiden des

827

jungen Werthers Wesley, Charles, 511 Wesley, Samuel, 353-54 Westminster Review, xxviii, xxv, 585 Wetherell, Charles, 503 Wheeler, Charles, xxxviii Whig party, xiv, xv, xxviii, 177-78, 188, 197, 370, 447, 467, 473, 474, 489, 615 White, Gilbert: Natural History of Selborne, 142, 445 Whitefield, George, 191, 487 Wilkes, John, 179, 191, 474-75, 487 Wilkie, William: Epigoniad, 136, 441 Williams, Anna, 453, 487, 489 Wolf, Friedrich, 440 Wollaston, Hyde, 312, 599 Wordsworth, William, 380, 385, 464, 487, 496, 514 ‘Worship of Sorrow,’ 121, 432 Xanthippe, 100, 419 Xenophon, 527 Xerxes, 105, 423 Zend, 113, 427

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