r. Carlyle had not spoken in public before yesterday, since those
grand utterances on Heroes and Hero-worship in the institute in
Edwards Street, Marylebone, which one can scarcely believe, whilst
reading them, to have been, in the best sense, extemporaneously
delivered. In that case Mr. Carlyle began the series, as we have
heard, by bringing a manuscript which he evidently found much in his
way, and presently abandoned. On the second evening he brought some
notes or headings; but these also tripped him until he had left them.
The remaining lectures were given like his conversation, which no
one can hear without feeling that, with all its glow and inspiration,
every sentence would be, if taken down, found faultless. It was so
in his remarkable extemporaneous address yesterday. He had no notes
whatever. 'But,' says our correspondent, in transmitting the report,
'I have never heard a speech of whose more remarkable qualities so few
can be conveyed on paper. You will read of "applause" and "laughter,"
but you will little realize the eloquent blood flaming up the
speaker's cheek, the kindling of his eye, or the inexpressible
voice and look when the drolleries were coming out. When he spoke
of clap-trap books exciting astonishment 'in the minds of foolish
persons,' the evident halting at the word '_fools_,' and the smoothing
of his hair, as if he must be decorous, which preceded the change
to 'foolish persons,' were exceedingly comical. As for the flaming
bursts, they took shape in grand tones, whose impression was made
deeper, not by raising, but by lowering the voice. Your correspondent
here declares that he should hold it worth his coming all the way
from London in the rain in the Sunday night train were it only to have
heard Carlyle say, "There is a nobler ambition than the gaining of all
California, or the getting of all the suffrages that are on the planet
just now!"' In the first few minutes of the address there was some
hesitation, and much of the shrinking that one might expect in a
secluded scholar; but these very soon cleared away, and during the
larger part, and to the close of the oration, it was evident that he
was receiving a sympathetic influence from his listeners, which he
did not fail to return tenfold. The applause became less frequent;
the silence became that of a woven spell; and the recitation of
the beautiful lines from Goethe, at the end, was so masterly--so
marvellous--that one felt in it that Carlyl