5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea
6 Nov. 1874.
Dear FitzGerald,
Thanks for your kind little Letter. I am very glad to learn that you are so cheerful and well, entering the winter under such favourable omens. I lingered in Scotland, latterly against my will, for about six weeks: the scenes there never can cease to be impressive to me; indeed as natural in late visits they are far too impressive, and I have to wander there like a solitary ghost among the graves of those that are gone from me, sad, sad, and I always think while there, ought not this visit to be the last?
But surely I am well pleased with your kind affection for the Land, especially for Edinburgh and the scenes about it. By all means go again to Edinburgh (tho’ the old city is so shorn of its old grim beauty and is become a place of Highland shawls and railway shriekeries); worship Scott, withal, as vastly superior to the common run of authors, and indeed grown now an affectingly tragic man. Don’t forget Burns either and Ayrshire and the West next time you go; there are admirable antiquities and sceneries in those parts, leading back (Whithorn for example, Whitterne or candida casa) to the days of St. Cuthbert; not to speak of Dumfries with Sweetheart Abbey and the brooks and hills a certain friend of yours first opened his eyes to in this astonishing world.
I am what is called very well here after my return, worn weak as a cobweb, but without bodily ailment
except the yearly increasing inability to digest food; my mind, too, if usually mournful instead of joyful, is seldom or never to be called miserable, and the steady gazing into the great unknown, which is near and comes nearer every day, ought to furnish abundant employment to the serious soul. I read, too; that is my happiest state, when I can get good books, which indeed I more and more rarely can.
Like yourself I have gone through Spedding, seven long long volumes, not skipping except where I had got the sense with me, and generally reading all of Bacon’s own that was there: I confess to you I found it a most creditable and even surprising Book, offering the most perfect and complete image both of Bacon and of Spedding, and distinguished as the hugest and faithfullest bit of literary navvy work I have ever met with in this generation. Bacon is washed clean down to the natural skin; and truly he is not nor ever was unlovely to me; a man of no culpability to speak of; of an opulent and even magnificent intellect, but all in the magnificent prose vein. Nothing or almost nothing of the ‘melodies eternal’ to be traced in him. Spedding’s Book will last as long as there is any earnest memory held of Bacon, or of the age of James VI., upon whom as upon every stirring man in his epoch Spedding has shed new veritable illumination; in almost the whole of which I perfectly coincided with Spedding. In effect I walked up to the worthy man’s house, whom I see but little, to tell him all this; and that being a miss, I drove up, Spedding having by request called here and missed me, but hitherto we have not met; and Spedding I doubt not could contrive to dispense with my eulogy. There
is a grim strength in Spedding, quietly, very quietly invincible, which I did not quite know of till this Book; and in all ways I could congratulate the indefatigably patient, placidly invincible and victorious Spedding.
Adieu, dear F. I wish you a right quiet and healthy winter, and beg to be kept in memory as now probably your oldest friend.
Ever faithfully yours, dear F.,
T. Carlyle.