continually without attempting to exhibit any of our own
conceptions. We amass ideas, it is true; but at the same time we
proportionally weaken our powers of expressing them; a power
equally valuable with that of conceiving them, and which, tho' in
some degree like it the gift of Nature, is in a far higher degree
the fruit of art, and so languishes more irretrievably by want of
culture," etc.

Even when writing to a lady with whom one is on the most delicate terms
such austerity is excessive, especially when it runs into a dozen pages.
Carlyle is at his best when describing people, and it is to be regretted
that his editor, out of respect for the memory of Campbell's widow and
others long since deceased, has felt obliged to suppress more than one
passage in which contemporaries are freely handled. He is at his worst
when writing, and generally complaining, about himself; and, like the
majority of people who take themselves very seriously, most amusing when
unconsciously so. In the October of 1824 he visited Paris and told Miss
Welsh just what he thought of it:

"[I am] daily growing more and more contemptuous of Paris, and the
_maniere d'etre_ of its people. Poor fellows! I feel alternately
titillated into laughter and shocked to the verge of horror at the
hand they make of Life.... Their houses are not houses, but places
where they sleep and dress; they live in _cafes_ and promenades and
theatres; and ten thousand dice are set a-rattling every night in
every quarter of their city. Every thing seems gilding and
fillagree, addressed to the eye, not to the touch."

Mrs. Carlyle, on the other hand, had a genuine gift; her genius may be
small, but it is undeniable. She was never in the first flight of
letter-writers, a tiny band which consists, we take it, of Merimee, Mme.
de Sevigne, Horace Walpole, Byron, and whom else? But in that larger
second class, the class of Gray and Julie de Lespinasse, Lady Mary
Montagu, Swift, Flaubert, Leopardi, Charles Lamb, Gibbon, Fitzgerald,
Voltaire, Cicero we suppose, and a good many more, she is entitled to a
place. Jane Welsh, however, is by no means Mrs. Carlyle. She was but
twenty-five when she married. Here we find her rather too conscious of
her own superiority; not only was she the beauty, she was also the Muse
of the village; had she been less vain she must have been unnatural.
Yet, under all her p