fluent in invectives on
all our 'rose-water imbecilities.' We all felt distant from him, and
Mazzini, after some vain efforts to remonstrate, became very sad. Mrs.
C. said to me,--

"'These are but opinions to Carlyle, but to Mazzini, who has given his
all, and helped bring his friends to the scaffold, in pursuit of such
subjects, it is a matter of life and death.'

"All Carlyle's talk, that evening, was a defence of mere
force,--success the test of right;--if people would not behave well,
put collars round their necks;--find a hero, and let them be his
slaves, &c. It was very Titanic, and anti-celestial. I wish the last
evening had been more melodious. However, I bid Carlyle farewell with
feelings of the warmest friendship and admiration. We cannot feel
otherwise to a great and noble nature, whether it harmonise with our
own or not. I never appreciated the work he has done for his age
till I saw England. I could not. You must stand in the shadow of that
mountain of shams, to know how hard it is to cast light across it.

"Honour to Carlyle! _Hoch_! Although, in the wine with which we drink
this health, I, for one, must mingle the despised 'rose-water.'

"And now, having to your eye shown the defects of my own mind, in
the sketch of another, I will pass on more lowly,--more willing to be
imperfect, since Fate permits such noble creatures, after all, to
be only this or that. It is much if one is not only a crow or
magpie;--Carlyle is only a lion. Some time we may, all in full, be
intelligent and humanely fair."

* * * * *

"_December_, 1846.--Accustomed to the infinite wit and exuberant
richness of his writings, his talk is still an amazement and
a splendour scarcely to be faced with steady eyes. He does not
converse;--only harangues. It is the usual misfortune of such marked
men,--happily not one invariable or inevitable,--that they cannot
allow other minds room to breathe, and show themselves in their
atmosphere, and thus miss the refreshment and instruction which the
greatest never cease to need from the experience of the humblest.

"Carlyle allows no one a chance, but bears down all opposition, not
only by his wit and onset of words, resistless in their sharpness as
so many bayonets, but by actual physical superiority,--raising his
voice, and rushing on his opponent with a torrent of sound. This is
not in the least from unwillingness to allow freedom to others. On the
contrary,