l: 'Chartist concern, and
Irish Repeal concern, and French Republic concern have all gone a bad
way since the March entry--April 20 (immortal day already dead), day of
Chartist monster petition; 200,000 special constables swore themselves
in, etc., and Chartism came to nothing. Riots since, but the leaders
all lodged in gaol, tried, imprisoned for two years, etc., and so ends
Chartism for the present. Irish Mitchel, poor fellow! is now in Bermuda
as a felon; letter from him, letter to him, letter to and from Lord
Clarendon--was really sorry for poor Mitchel. But what help? French
Republic _cannonaded_ by General Cavaignac; a sad outlook there.'[22]

Carlyle's _Cromwell_ had created a set of enthusiastic admirers who were
bent on having a statue of the great Protector set up. Carlyle was asked
to give his sanction to the proposal. Writing to his mother, he said:
'The people having subscribed L25,000 for a memorial to an ugly bullock
of a Hudson, who did not even pretend to have any merit except that of
being suddenly rich, and who is now discovered to be little other than
at heart a horse-coper and dishonest fellow, I think they ought to leave
Cromwell alone of their memorials, and try to honour him in some more
profitable way--by learning to be honest men like him, for example. But
we shall see what comes of all this Cromwell work--a thing not without
value either.'[23]

'Ireland,' says Froude, 'of all the topics on which Carlyle had
meditated writing, remained painfully fascinating. He had looked at the
beggarly scene, he had seen the blighted fields, the ragged misery of
the wretched race who were suffering for other's sins as well as for
their own. Since that brief visit of his, the famine had been followed
by the famine-fever, and the flight of millions from a land which was
smitten with a curse. Those ardent young men with whom he had dined at
Dundrum were working as felons in the docks at Bermuda. Gavan Duffy,
after a near escape from the same fate, had been a guest in Cheyne Row;
and the story which he had to tell of cabins torn down by crowbars, and
shivering families, turned out of their miserable homes, dying in the
ditches by the roadside, had touched Carlyle to the very heart. He was
furious at the economical commonplaces with which England was consoling
itself. He regarded Ireland as "the breaking-point of the huge
suppuration which all British and all European society then was."'[24]
Carlyle paid a second