Carlyle's Reminisciences.

Thames Star, Volume XII, Issue 3867, 21 May 1881, Page 1

Carlyle's Reminisciences.

Tbe following are extracts from tbe Reminisciences of Carlyle, edited by" Mr - Froude:—Charles Lamb and big sister came daily once or oftener; a very sorry pair of phenomena. Insuperable pro* clivity to gin in poor old Lamb. His talk contemptibly small, indicating wondrous ignorance and sballowiiess; even when it was serious and good-mannered, which it seMom was, usually ill-mannered (to a degree), screwed into frosty artificialities, ghastly make-believe of wit, in fact more like " diluted insanity " (as I defined it), than anything of real jocosity, humour, or geniality. A most slender fibre of actual worth in that poor Charles, abundantly recognisable to me as to others, in his better times and moods; but he was a cockney to the marrow ; and cockney - dom shouting " glorious, marvellous unparalleled in nature;" all his days had quite bewildered his poor head, and churned nearly all the sense out of the Eoor man. He was the leanest of manind, tiny black breeches buttoned to the kneecap and no further, surmounting spindle legs also in black, face and head fiendish, black,.bony, lean, and of a Jew type rather ; in the eyes a kind of smoky brightness, or confused sharpness ; spoke with a stutter; in walking, tottered and" shuffled ; emblem of imbecility bodily and spiritual (something of real insanity J have understood), and yet something too of human, ingenuous, pathetic, sportfully much enduring. Poor Lamb! he was infinitely astonished at my wile, and her quiet encounter of his too ghastly London wit by a cheerful native ditto. Adieu, poor Lamb! He soon after died, as did Badams, much more to the sorrow of us both. Pity indeed, infinite pity, is the note of these, volumes.; He pities poor Shelley—" To me also poor Shelley always was and is, a kind of ghastly object, colourless, pallid, without health or 'warmth or vigour; the sound of him shrieky, frosty, as if a ghost were trying to ' sing to us '■; the temperament of him spasmodic, hysteric «I, instead of strong or robust; with fine affections and aspirations, gone all suck a road:—a man. infinitely too weak for that solitary.., sealing of the Alps which he undertook in spite of all the world. At some point of the dialogue 1 said to bouthey, 'a haggard existenc • that of his. Jtie pities Southey. for whom, however, be has a kindness also: "I remember now how polile and delicate his praises of me were;" "I likened him to one of those huge sandstone grinding cylinders which 1 had seen at Manchester, turning with inconceivable velocity (in the condemned room af the iron factory, wnere f the mendie of lung disease at forty, but are permitted to smoke in their damp cellar, and thiuk that a rich recompense!)— screaming harshly and shooting out each of them its sheet of fire (ye»°i%«t"*whj, &c., according as it is brass or other kind of metal that you grind and H"J *«J> -beautiful /beefs of fire, P^^,^ each as from the paper cap, ot its ow it flies off altogether, and settles some yards from you, a grinding stone no longer, but a cartload of quiet aand." He pities Wordsworth, though with' not quite so much kindliness :-—" A man

well hiudl«4, M "ant^Dg two or.morfi of SSSBff' ■•« «ot capable o« ; n_uehs In fiet s rather dull, Jiard : tempered, unproductiTe an^slinost winitiot&e kind of m*q,¥f not adorable, by- any means, as a Itrerftrjppetic genius, .much less as the IMimegistus of such -, 'whom only a select few.could:erer read, instead of misreading, whicb wasl the opinion his worship^ per, confideutiy'-eniertained of him!" We cpncJnSe with _ characteristic sentence. Mr Carljle says : >'- Wonderful to me • On Species,'), as indicatitlß the capricious stupidity of mankind ; nerer.could read « p««ge of it, or waste the least thought upon it.' «.