[57b] James Spedding.
[59a] In the original draft of Tales of the Hall, Book VI.
[59b] See Memoirs of Chateaubriand, written by himself, Eng. trans. 1849 p. 123. At the Château of Combourg in Brittany, ‘When supper was over, and the party of four had removed from the table to the chimney, my mother would throw herself, with a sigh, upon an old cotton-covered sofa, and near her was placed a little stand with a light. I sat down by the fire with Lucile; the servants removed the supper-things, and retired. My father then began to walk up and down, and never ceased until his bedtime. He wore a kind of white woollen gown, or rather cloak, such as I have never seen with anyone else. His head, partly bald, was covered with a large white cap, which stood bolt upright. When, in the course of his walk, he got to a distance from the fire, the vast apartment was so ill-lighted by a single candle that he could be no longer seen, he could still be heard marching about in the dark, however, and presently returned slowly towards the light, and emerged by degrees from obscurity, looking like a spectre, with his white robe and cap, and his tall, thin figure.’
[64a] ‘The Mighty Magician’ and ‘Such Stuff as Dreams are made of.’
[64b] See Winter’s Tale, iv. 4, 118-120.
[65] ‘Euphranor.’
[67] See ‘Letters,’ ii. 180.
[68] Sir Arthur Helps died March 7th, 1875.
[69] The Passage of Carlyle to which FitzGerald refers is perhaps in ‘Anti-Dryasdust,’ in the Introduction to Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches. ‘By very nature it is a labyrinth and chaos, this that we call Human History; an abatis of trees and brushwood, a world-wide jungle, at once growing and dying. Under the green foliage and blossoming fruit-trees of To-day, there lie, rotting slower or faster, the forests of all other Years and Days. Some have rotted fast, plants of annual growth, and are long since quite gone to inorganic mould; others are like the aloe, growths that last a thousand or three thousand years.’ Ste. Beuve, in his ‘Nouveaux Lundis’ (iv. 295), has a similar remark: ‘Pour un petit nombre d’arbres qui s’élèvent de quelques pieds au-dessus de terre et qui s’aperçoivent de loin, il y a partout, en littérature, de cet humus et de ce détrius végétal, de ces feuilles accumulées et entassées qu’on ne distingue pas, si l’on ne se baisse.’ At the end of his copy FitzGerald has referred to this as ‘Carlyle’s Peat.’
[71] In The Gamester. See ‘Macready’s Reminiscences,’ i. 54-57.