rene
moments. For no man lives who possesses greater kindness and
affection, or more good, noble, and humane qualities. All who know him
love him, although they may have much to pardon in him; not in a
social or moral sense, however, but in an intellectual one. His talk
is as rich as ever,--perhaps richer; for his mind has increased its
stores, and the old fire of geniality still burns in his great and
loving heart. Perhaps his conversation is better than his printed
discourse. We have never heard anything like it. It is all alive, as
if each word had a soul in it.

How characteristic is all that Emerson tells us of him in his "English
Traits"!--a book, by the way, concerning which no adequate word has
yet been spoken; the best book ever written upon England, and which no
brave young Englishman can read, and ever after commit either a mean
or a bad action. We are therefore doubly thankful to Emerson, both for
what he says of England, and for what he relates of Carlyle, whose
independent speech upon all subjects is one of his chief charms. He
reads "Blackwood," for example, and has enjoyed many a racy, vigorous
article in its pages; but it does not satisfy him, and he calls it
"Sand Magazine." "Fraser's" is a little better, but not good enough to
be worthy of a higher nomenclature than "Mud Magazine." Excessive
praise of any one's talents drives him into admiration of the parts of
his own learned pig, now wallowing in the stye. The best thing he knew
about America was that there a man could have meat for his labor. He
did not read Plato, and he disparaged Socrates. Mirabeau was a hero;
Gibbon the splendid bridge from the old world to the new. It is
interesting also to hear that "Tristram Shandy" was one of the first
books he read after "Robinson Crusoe," and that Robertson's "America"
was an early favorite. Rousseau's "Confessions" had discovered to him
that he was not a dunce. Speaking of English pauperism, he said that
government should direct poor men what to do. "Poor Irish folks come
wandering over these moors. My dame makes it a rule to give to every
son of Adam bread to eat, and supplies his wants to the next
house. But here are thousands of acres which might give them all meat,
and nobody to bid those poor Irish go to the moor and till it. They
burned the stacks, and so found a way to force the rich people to
attend to them." Here is the germ of his book on "Chartism." Emerson
and he talk of the immortality of t