[40]. Mr. Ireland’s copies of Carlyle’s Letters, in Conway, pp. 192, 193.
[41]. Reminiscences, i. 208, 209.
[42]. Carlyle’s habit of smoking had begun in his boyhood, probably at Ecclefechan before he came to Edinburgh University. His father, he told me, was a moderate smoker, confining himself to about an ounce of tobacco a week, and so thoughtfully as always to have a pipe ready for a friend out of that allowance. Carlyle’s allowance, in his mature life, though he was very regular in his times and seasons, must have been at least six times as much. Once, when the canister of “free-smoking York River” on his mantelpiece was nearly empty, he told me not to mind that, as he had “about half-a-stone more of the same upstairs.”—“Another tobacco anecdote of Carlyle, which I had from the late G. H. Lewes, may be worth a place here. One afternoon, when his own stock of “free-smoking York River” had come to an end, and when he had set out to walk with a friend (Lewes himself, if I recollect rightly), he stopped at a small tobacco-shop in Chelsea, facing the Thames, and went in to procure some temporary supply. The friend went in with him, and heard his dialogue with the shopkeeper. York River, having been asked for, was duly produced; but, as it was not of the right sort, Carlyle, while making a small purchase, informed the shopkeeper most particularly what the right sort was, what was its name, and at what wholesale place in the city it might be ordered. “O, we find that this suits our customers very well,” said the man. “That may be, Sir,” said Carlyle; “but you will find it best in the long run always to deal in the veracities.” The man’s impression must have been that the veracities were some peculiar curly species of tobacco, hitherto unknown to him.
[43]. There does not seem to have been much direct intercourse between Wilson and Carlyle after the meeting mentioned, though there were cordial exchanges of regards between them, and some incidental compliments to Carlyle in Blackwood.
[44]. As the dates in this sentence will suggest, the last few paragraphs, narrating the story of Goethe’s frustrated attempt to bring Scott and Carlyle together, did not appear in the paper as originally published in Macmillan, but are an insertion into the present reprint made possible by the information furnished by the two recent publications named. I did, indeed, give an outline sketch of some such affair as it had hung in my memory from talk either with Carlyle himself or with his brother Dr. John Carlyle. But the sketch was hazy, and I now find that it was inaccurate in some points.—Scott and Carlyle, I may here add, were once together in the same room in Edinburgh in a semi-private way. The fact has been communicated to me by Mr. David Douglas, the editor of Scott’s Journal, who had it from Dr. David Aitken, already mentioned in this paper as an intimate friend of Carlyle’s in the Comely Bank days. The scene of the meeting was the shop of Mr. Tait, the publisher, then in an upper floor in Hanover Street. Carlyle and Mr. Aitken, who had been walking in Princes Street, turned aside for a call at Mr. Tait’s. While they were there and talking with Mr. Tait, Scott came in,—well known to both by sight. “Mr. Tait, have you got a copy of Horace at hand? I want to make a quotation,” were Scott’s words on entering. The book having been brought,—a handsome quarto, Dr. Aitken remembered,—Scott sat down with it in his lap, and began to turn over the leaves, Carlyle and Mr. Aitken standing a little way off meanwhile, and Carlyle continuing his talk with Mr. Tait. Soon, as if attracted by the voice or by something said, Scott began to look up, the volume still resting in his lap. Several times he raised his eyes in the same fashion from the book to the two strangers, or to the one who was talking. The expression, as Dr. Aitken interpreted it in recollection, was as if he were saying to himself: “He is a kenspeckle-looking chiel that; I wonder who he is.”—The date of this encounter I do not know. If it was after the affair of the Goethe medals and the unanswered letters (and that is not impossible if we suppose some occasion for a brief visit from Craigenputtock to Edinburgh in 1829 or 1830), one can imagine with what studious aloofness from his great senior Carlyle would comport himself in the accidental interview.
[45]. From the Correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle, edited by Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, we learn that Carlyle had, on the same day on which he wrote this letter to Procter, written to Goethe soliciting a testimonial from him for the same occasion. The testimonial was sent from Weimar, but not till the 14th of March; and it came too late to be of use. A copy of the original German, with an English translation, is printed in Mr. Norton’s volume. It is a document of five pages, and perhaps the most unbusiness-like thing ever sent in the shape of a testimonial on behalf of a candidate for a Scottish Professorship. It begins thus:—“True conviction springs from the heart; the Soul, the real seat of the Conscience, judges concerning what may be permitted and what may not be permitted far more surely than the Understanding, which will see into and determine many things without hitting the right mark. A well-disposed and self-observant man, wishing to respect himself and to live at peace with hims}elf, and yet conscious of many an imperfection perplexing his inner life, and grieved by many a fault compromising him in the eyes of others, whereby he finds himself disturbed and opposed from within and from without, will seek by all methods to free himself from such impediments.” Then follow two paragraphs of continued remarks on the intellectual or literary life in general; after which the testimonial becomes more specific, thus:—“It may now without arrogance be asserted that German Literature has effected much for humanity in this respect,—that a moral-psychological tendency pervades it, introducing not ascetic timidity, but free culture in accordance with nature, and a cheerful obedience to law; and therefore I have observed with pleasure Mr. Carlyle’s admirably profound study of this Literature, and I have noticed with sympathy how he has not only been able to discover the beautiful and human, the good and great, in us, but has also contributed what was his own, and has endowed us with the treasures of his genius. It must be granted that he has a clear judgment as to our Æsthetic and Ethic writers, and, at the same time, his own way of looking at them, which proves that he rests on an original foundation and has the power to develop in himself the essentials of what is good and beautiful. In this sense, I may well regard him as a man who would fill a Chair of Moral Philosophy with single-heartedness, with purity, effect, and influence, enlightening the youth entrusted to him as to their real duties, in accordance with his disciplined thought, his natural gifts, and his acquired knowledge, aiming at leading and urging their minds to moral activity, and thereby steadily guiding them towards a religious completeness.”—When one imagines the probable effects on the minds of the St. Andrews Principal and Professors of 1828 of such a testimonial from the German sage, known to them so dimly, and perhaps in ways that made them suspicious of him, one’s impression is that, if they had been thinking of appointing Carlyle, the presentation of this testimonial would have been likely to stop them. Never having been presented, it can have done no harm.
[46]. Review, in The Scots Observer (now The National Observer), 15th December 1888, of “Letters from and to Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, Esq. Edited by Alexander Allardyce. With a Memoir by the Rev. W. K. R. Bedford. In two volumes. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons.”
[47]. Lockhart, in his quotation from the Diary as here given, omitted a line or two. The complete text may be now read in Mr. Douglas’s edition of the entire Diary in 1890.
[48]. This is the “General Sharpe” from whom Carlyle’s father had a lease of his farm of Mainhill from 1815 onwards, and from whom Carlyle himself rented the house and grounds of Hoddam Hill for his one year’s experiment of farming-life in 1825–26. See the Reminiscences for the story of Carlyle’s quarrel, and then his father’s also, with their landlord, caused mainly by his “arbitrary high-handed temper, used to a rather prostrate style of obedience, and not finding it here.” Both father and son gave up their leases in 1826, the father protesting “We can live without Sharpe and the whole Sharpe creation,” and saying he would “rather go to Jerusalem seeking farms, and die without finding one,” than remain under such a landlord.
[49]. From The Scotsman of 18th November 1882; where it appeared as a review of “The Book-Hunter, etc. By John Hill Burton, D.C.L., LL.D., Author of A History of Scotland, The Scot Abroad, The Reign of Queen Anne, etc. A New Edition: with a Memoir of the Author. William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh and London.”