Conversations with Carlyle

Preface

These papers were originally published in the Contemporary Review, chiefly for the purpose of presenting a more real, as well as a more human, picture of the philosopher of Chelsea than readers have been accustomed to of late.

It has been no little gratification to me to receive letters from cultivated and thoughtful people, declaring that the conversations and correspondence, and, in some degree, the testimony of the author, had enabled them to accept anew an estimate of Carlyle which they had relinquished with pain, and to be assured that the nature and habits of the eminent man were not unworthy of his position as a teacher and leader of his age.

They have incidentally served another purpose : they furnish a striking gallery of portraits, and an unique body of criticism on the writers of the century, by one of the most impressive painters of men that ever existed. The criticisms have sometimes been called harsh and unjust, by impatient vi PREFACE.

partisans of this or that personage ; but when they are dispassionately examined, they will be found, in almost every instance, to be just judgments, the exact truth uttered by a critic as competent to discern and express it as Bacon or Burke. The conversations have not been prematurely published ; it is more than forty years since the earliest of them were written, and it is not too soon to hear the judgment of such an expert on the men and things among which he lived.

Critics of these papers have recognised that Carlyle is made to use the exact phraseology he was accustomed to employ. The conversations were, in fact, written down immediately after they took place, when his emphatic and significant language was still fresh in my memory. Readers who knew Carlyle will, I think, recognise the familiar cadence, and those who did not know him will have the means of realising his ordinary speech and method for themselves.

Villa Marguerite,

Part First. Pags

Visit of the Young Irelanders to Carlyle . . i

Letter describing the Visit 4

First Letter from Carlyle to Gavan Duffy . 7

Letter from Mrs. Carlyle 8

Letter accompanying "Past and Present" . . 10

The "Curse of Cromwell" 12

Letters projecting First Visit to Ireland . . 15

His Visit 22

w. e. forster 23

Letter of Felicitation 28

Correspondence respecting his Second Visit to

Ireland 33

Second Visit commenced . . . . . .45

Carlyle in 1849 .46

Extracts from "Irish Reminiscences" ... 49

His Opinion of Wordsworth 53

Of Francis Jeffrey 55

Of Browning and Coleridge 56

Of Savage Landor 64

Odds and Ends 67

h

CONTENTS.

PART SECOND. An Irish Poor-House

• 71

Dickens and Thackeray

Sir James Stephen

Sir Henry Taylor

The London Press in 1849 •

"Sartor Resartus"

Carlyle's Method of Work

Father O'Shea

A Kerry Homestead

Lady Beecher (Miss O'Neill)

.

"Festus"

lOI

Irish History . . .

Henry VIII

The Chelsea Philosophy .

Buckle

Mazzini

Lynch Law ....

III More Odds and Ends

W. E. FORSTER

The Desolation of Westport

Repeal Pipes ....

CONTENTS.

Part Third. Page

The Irish Land Question in 1849 . . . .127

Mr. Espinasse 131

Mr. Linton 132

"Wanted, a Few Workmen" 136

Carlyle's Article in the "Nation" . . .146

Latter-Day Pamphlets 151

A Paper to Supersede Parliament — The First

Tenant-Right Movement 154

Cardinal Wiseman 163

John Stuart Mill 166

Dr. Murray and the '-'Edinburgh Review" . . 175

Disraeli 179

Specimen of an Harangue . . . . . .181