STUDIES ON THE COMMONWEALTH.

199

was stiff work; he did not find he could make great progress in this new enterprise. His interest in it even threatened sometimes to decline and die.' He found it not a tenth part such a subject as the "French Revolution," nor could the art of man ever make such a book out of it.'

6

We must hold on (he said). One dreadful circumstance is that the books, without exception, the documents, &c., one has to read, are of a dulness to threaten locked jaw. I never read such jumbling, drowsy, endless stupidities. Seventhly and lastly! Yet I say to myself, a great man does lie buried under this waste continent of cinders, and a great action. Canst thou not unbury them, present them visible, and so help, as it were, in the creation of them?

Again:

November 16, 1840.-My reading goes on: my stupidity seems to increase with it more and more. I get to see that no history in the strict sense can be made of that unspeakable puddle of a time, all covered up with things entirely obsolete to us—a Golgotha of dead dogs. But some kind of a book can be made. That we are still looking to.

And again :

November 26.-My reading progresses with or without fixed hope. I struggled through the Eikon Basilike 'yesterday; one of the paltriest pieces of vapid, shovel-hatted, clear-starched, immaculate falsity and cant I have ever read. It is to me an amazement how any mortal could ever have taken that for a genuine book of King Charles's. Nothing but a surpliced Pharisee, sitting at his ease afar off, could have got up such a set of meditations. It got Parson Gauden a bishopric. It remains as an offence to all genuine men—a small minority still-for some time yet. The writing of that book, if I ever write it, will be consider

ably the hardest feat I have attempted hitherto. Last night, greatly against wont, I went out to dine with Rogers, Milman, Babbage, Pickwick, Lyell the geologist, &c., with sundry indifferent-favoured women. A dull evening, not worth awakening for at four in the morning, with the dance of all the devils round you. Babbage continues eminently unpleasant to me, with his frog mouth and viper eyes, with his hide-bound, wooden irony, and the acridest egotism looking through it. Rogers is still brisk, courteous, kindlyaffectioned a good old man, pathetic to look upon. On Sunday I walked three hours out Harrow-ward through the fields. A great deal of solitude I find indispensable for my health of mind. The generality of men have no sincerity in their speech, no sense or profit in it. You are better listening to the inarticulate winds, regulating if possible the dogkennel of your own heart.

Finally, Carlyle thus winds up the year

Journal.

1840:

December 26.-World all lying bound in frost, sheeted in snow and rime. Venomous cold. Jane better than usual this winter. Yesterday a long walk with Mill, otherwise entirely lonely. The stillest Christmas a man could spend. Evening passed in reading Whitelocke. I did not go to Scotland or anywhither in autumn. My lectures, written out since the end of August, lie here still unpublished. Saunders & Ottley offer me 50l. for an edition of 750. Munificent! Fraser, consulted by my wife, did not definitely offer any cash at all, I think. For a famous man, my bookseller's economics seem singular enough. Yet what of economics? I happily do not need cash at present. If cash were my object in writing, I had made the lamentablest business of it. For these lectures I wanted any inward monition to publish. Outward there was none but a 50l.—rather weakish. And yet some inward monition, difficult to distinguish clearly from a mere prurient love of feeling myself busy, of hearing myself talk

IMPATIENCE WITH LONDON.

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(cavendum), does begin to manifest itself at times. Perhaps we shall print after all before long. Not of much importance either way. Reviews by Whig, Tory, by 'Deux Mondes' -plenty of reviewing. What is far better, I begin to get alive again! So much vitality recovered that I feel once more how miserable it is to be idle. After all I have seen and undergone here, flatteries, prospects, &c., I feel that the one felicity of my existence is that of working at my trade, working with or without reward. All life otherwise were a failure to me, a horrid incoherence in which there was no meaning or result. To work then! I often long to be in the country again; at Puttock again, that I might work and nothing else but work. Had not my wife opposed, I should probably have returned thither before now. Unlucky or lucky? One never knows. In sick seasons this practical question, hitherto insoluble for doubt, returns always on me in a most agitating, uncomfortable manner. Know thy own mind! I am sure to be sick everywhere. I am a little sicker here, and do thoroughly dislike the mud, smoke, dirt, and tumult of this place. Wherein, however, is decidedly a kind of possible, an actual association with my fellow-creatures, never granted elsewhere. Solitude would increase, perhaps twofold or more, my power of working. Shall I go, carrying and dragging all along with me into solitude? Alas! it is a dreary, desolate matter, go or stay. My one hope and thought for most part is that very shortly it will all be over, my very sore existence ended in the bosom of the Giver of it-at rest somehow. Things might be written here which it is considerably better not to write. As I live, and have long lived, death and Hades differ little to me from the earth and life. The human figure I meet is wild, wondrous, ghastly to me, almost as if it were a spectre and I a spectre-Taisons.

Oliver Cromwell will not prosper with me at all. I began reading about that subject some four months ago. I learn almost nothing by reading, yet cannot as yet heartily begin to write. Nothing on paper yet. I know not where to begin. I have not yet got through the veil, got into

genuine sympathy with the thing. It is ungainly in the highest degree; yet I am loth to quit it. In our whole English history there is surely nothing as great. If one can delineate anything of England, then this thing. Heaven guide me! Verily one has need of Heaven's guidance.

A NEW BOOK TO BE WRITTEN.

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CHAPTER VIII.

A.D. 1840-1. ET. 45-46.

Preparation for Cromwell '-Nervous irritability-A jury trial-Visit to Fryston-Summer on the Solway-Return to London and work-Difficulties in the way-Offer of a professorship-Declined.

MRS. CARLYLE, writing at the end of 1840, says of the state of things in Cheyne Row: Carlyle is reading voraciously preparatory to writing a new book. For the rest he growls away much in the old style. But one gets to feel a certain indifference to his growling; if one did not, it would be the worse for one.'

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He well knew his infirmities, and wished and meant to mend them. Think not hardly of me, dear Jeannie,' he himself wrote to her a few months later.

In the mutual misery we often are in, we do not know how dear we are to one another. By the help of Heaven, I shall get a little better, and somewhat of it shall abate. Last night, at dinner, Richard Milnes made them all laugh with a saying of yours. When the wife has influenza, it is a slight cold-when the man has it, it is, &c. &c.'

No one can be surprised that she objected to being taken back to the 'desert.' She, though she enjoyed London, would have cheerfully gone with