brown shade.' Yet hope will sometimes visit me, and, at the worst, complaint is weak, and idle if it were not. After all, one has a desperate struggleand for what? For the bubble reputation, that we may fly alive through the mouths of men, and be thought happy, or learned, or great, by creatures as feeble and fleeting as ourselves. Sure it is a sorry recompense for so much [illegible] bustle and vexation. Do not leave your situation, if you can possibly avoid it. Experience shows it to be a fearful thing to be swept on by the roaring surge of life, and then to float alone-undirected on its restless, monstrous bosom. Keep ashore while yet you may; or, if you must to sea, sail under convoy; trust not the waves without a guide. You and I are but pinnaces or cockboats yet; hold fast by the Manilla ship; do not let go the painter, however rough and grating. I am sorry you are tired of anatomy, and such things. I am tired too, but that does not mend the matter. Yet trust the best; nec deus intersit is indeed true, naturally as well as poetically. Yet in spite of this, all things will and shall be well, if we believe aright. I designed to tell you a long tale about my most neglected studies, but I have no room. I have lived riotously with Schiller, Goethe, and the rest. They are the greatest men at present with me,

"I am yours affectionately,

"T. CARLYLE."

28.

TO LEIGH HUNT.

"CRAIGENPUTTOCH, DUMFRIES, November 20, 1832.

"MY DEAR SIR,-I sent you a little note, by some conveyance I had, several months ago; whether it ever came to hand is unknown here. We learned soon afterwards, from a notice in the New Monthly Magazine, that you were again suffering in health.

"If that note reached you, let this be the second; if it did not, let this be the first little messenger arriving from the mountains to inquire for you, to bring assurance that you are lovingly remembered here, that nothing befalling you can be indifferent

to us.

"Being somewhat uncertain about the number of your house, I send this under cover to a friend who will punctually see that it reaches its address. If he deliver it in person, as is not impossible, you will find him worth welcoming. He is John Mill, eldest son of India Mill; and, I may say, one of the best, clearest-headed, and clearest-hearted young men now living in London.

"We sometimes fancy we observe you in Tait's and other periodicals. Have the charity sometime soon to send us a token of your being and well

being. We often speak of you here, and are very obstinate in remembering.

"I still wish much you would write Hazlitt's Life. Somewhat of history lay in that too luckless man; and you, of all I can think of, have the organ for discerning it and delineating it.

"As for myself, I am doing little. The literary element is one of the most confused to live in, at all times; the bibliopolic condition of this time renders it perfect chaos. One must write 'articles'-write and curse (as Ancient Pistol ate his leek); what can one do?

"My wife is not with me to-day, otherwise she would surely beg to be remembered. You will offer my best wishes to Mrs. Hunt, to Miss, and the little gray-eyed philosopher who listened to us.

"I asked you to come hither and see us, whenever you wanted to rusticate a month. Is that forever impossible?

"I remain, always, my dear sir, yours truly and kindly, T. CARLYLE."

29.

"CRAIGENPUTTOCH, April 18, 1834. "MY DEAR SIR,-Your letters are rare, too rare, in their outward quality of sequence through the post; but happily still rarer in their inward quality ; the hope and kind trustful sympathy of new eighteen dwelling unworn under hair which, you tell me,

is getting tinged with gray. It is actually true we are coming to London! So far has Destiny and a little resolution brought it. The kind Mrs. Austin, after search enough, has now (we imagine) found us a house which I hope and believe is not very far from yours. It shall be farther than my widest calculation if I fail to meet your challenge, and walk and talk with you to all lengths. I know not well how Chelsea lies from the Parish Church of Kensington, but it is within sight of the latter we are to be; and some 'trysting-tree' (do you know so much Scotch?) is already getting into leaf, as yet unconscious of its future honor between these two suburbs of Babylon. Some days, too, we will walk the whole day long, in wide excursion; you lecturing me on the phenomena of the region, which to you are native. My best amusement is walking; I like, as well as Hadrian himself, to mete out my world with steps of my own, and to take possession of it. But if to this you add Speech! Is not Speech defined to be cheerfuller than light, and the eldest daughter of Heaven? I mean articulate discourse of reason, that comes from the internal heavenly part of us; not the confused gabble, which (in so many millions) comes from no deeper than the palate of the mouth, which it is the saddest of all things to listen to a thing that fills one alternately with sorrow and indignation, and at last almost with a kind of horror and terror.

As if the world were a huge Bedlam, and the sacred speech of men had become an inarticulate jargon of hungry, cawing rooks!

"We laid down your description of your house as the model our kind friend was to aim at. How far we have prospered will be seen. In rent we are nearly on a par. We also anticipate quiet, and some visitations of the heavenly air; but, for the rest, ours will be no 'high-wainscoted' dwelling, like Homer's and yours-no, some new-fangled brickwork which will tremble at every step, in which no four-footed thing can stand, but only three-footed, such as 'Holland Street, Kensington,' in this year of grace, can be expected to yield. However, there is a patch of garden, or, indeed, two patches. I shall have some little crib for my books and writing-table, and so do the best that may be. Innumerable vague forebodings hang over me as I write; meanwhile there is one grand assurance-the feeling that it was a duty, almost a necessity. My dame, too, is of resolution for the enterprise, and whatsoever may follow it; so, forward in God's name!

"I have seen nothing of you for a long time, except what of the 'Delicacies of Pig-driving' my Examiner once gave me. A most tickling thing, not a word of which can I remember; only the whole fact of it, pictured in such subquizzical, sweet-acid geniality of mockery, stands here, and, among smaller and