w a poor Clerk, with his Legs out of the window
from his bed--like a Heron's from his nest--but rather more horizontally.
We dash about in Boats whether Sail or Oar--to which latter I leave him
for his own good Exercise. Poor fellow, he would have liked to tug at
that, or rough-ride a horse, from Boyhood: but must be made Clerk in a
London Lawyer's Office: and so I am glad to get him down for a Holyday
when he can get one, poor Fellow!

The Carlyle 'Reminiscences' had long indisposed me from taking up the
Biography. But when I began, and as I went on with that, I found it one
of the most interesting of Books: and the result is that I not only
admire and respect Carlyle more than ever I did: but even love him, which
I never thought of before. For he loved his Family, as well as for so
long helped to maintain them out of very slender earnings of his own;
and, so far as these two Volumes show me, he loved his Wife also, while
he put her to the work which he had been used to see his own Mother and
Sisters fulfil, and which was suitable to the way of Life which he had
been used to. His indifference to her sufferings seems to me rather
because of Blindness than Neglect; and I think his Biographer has been
even a little too hard upon him on the score of Selfish disregard of her.
Indeed Mr. Norton wrote to me that he looked on Froude as something of an
Iago toward his Hero in respect of all he has done for him. The
publication of the Reminiscences is indeed a mystery to me: for I should
[have] thought that, even in a mercantile point of view, it would
indispose others, as me it did, to the Biography. But Iago must have
bungled in his work so far as I, for one, am concerned, if the result is
such as I find it--or unless I am very obtuse indeed. So I tell Mr.
Norton; who is about to edit Carlyle's Letters to Emerson, and whom I
should not like to see going to his work with such an 'Animus' toward his
Fellow-Editor.

Yours always,
E. F.G.

Faites, s'il vous plait, mes petits Compliments a Madame Wister.

CVII. {247}

ALDEBURGH: _Sept._ 1, [1882.]

MY DEAR MRS. KEMBLE,

Still by the Sea--from which I saw _The Harvest Moon_ rise for her three
nights' Fullness. And to-day is so wet that I shall try and pay you my
plenilunal due--not much to your satisfaction; for the Wet really gets
into one's Brain and Spirits, and I have as little to write of as ever
any Full Moon ever brought me. And yet, if I accomplish