ays what he actually thought,
careless whether he pleased or offended.' He introduced Carlyle to his
father, who was then the 'guiding genius' of the _Times_, and who
offered Carlyle work there on the usual conditions. 'Carlyle,' says
Froude, 'though with poverty at his door, and entire penury visible in
the near future, turned away from a proposal which might have tempted
men who had less excuse for yielding to it. He was already the sworn
soldier of another chief. His allegiance from first to last was to
_truth_, truth as it presented itself to his own intellect and his own
conscience.'

On the 16th of February 1835 Carlyle wrote to his brother John: 'I
positively do not care that periodical literature shuts her fist against
me in these months. Let her keep it shut for ever, and go to the devil,
which she mostly belongs to. The matter had better be brought to a
crisis. There is perhaps a finger of Providence in it.... My only new
scheme, since last letter, is a hypothesis--little more yet--about
National Education. The newspapers had an advertisement about a Glasgow
"Educational Association" which wants a man that would found a Normal
School, first going over England and into Germany to get light on that
matter. I wrote to that Glasgow Association afar off, enquiring who they
were, what manner of man they expected, testifying myself very friendly
to their project, and so forth--no answer as yet. It is likely they will
want, as Jane says, a "Chalmers and Welsh" kind of character, in which
case _Va ben, felice notte_. If otherwise, and they (almost by miracle)
had the heart, I am the man for them. Perhaps my name is so heterodox in
that circle, I shall not hear at all.'[17] Carlyle also remarks, in the
same letter, that John Stuart Mill is very friendly: 'He is the nearest
approach to a real man that I find here--nay, as far as negativeness
goes, he _is_ that man, but unhappily not very satisfactory much
farther.'

Not long thereafter Carlyle met Wordsworth. 'I did not expect much,' he
said in a letter, 'but got mostly what I expected. The old man has a
fine shrewdness and naturalness in his expression of face, a long
Cumberland figure; one finds also a kind of _sincerity_ in his speech.
But for prolixity, thinness, endless dilution, it excels all the other
speech I had heard from mortals. A genuine man, which is much, but also
essentially a small, genuine man.'

Early in October 1835 Carlyle started for his old home