1890. 



PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF THOMAS 

 CARLYLE. 1 



IT is an age of ' Reminiscences ' ; known to me, in 

 great part, through extracts and reviews. Pleasant 

 reading, in their fulness, many of these records must 

 surely be. Carlyle has given us his ' Reminiscences ' 

 written, alas ! when he was but the hull of the true 

 Carlyle. Still, methinks the indignation thereby aroused 

 was out of proportion to the offence. It is not, how- 

 ever, my task or duty to defend the * Reminiscences.' 

 In clearer and happier moments, Carlyle himself would 

 have recoiled from publishing their few offending pages. 

 When they were written, all things were seen by him 

 through the medium of personal suffering, physical 

 and mental. This lurid atmosphere defaced, blurred, 

 and sometimes inverted like mirage, his coast-line of 

 memory. The figure of himself, standing on that 

 quivering and delusive shore, has suffered more from 

 the false refraction than anything else. With the 

 piercing insight which belonged to him all this, in 

 healthier hours, would have been seen, weighed, and 

 rectified by Carlyle himself. 



Vast is the literature which has grown around the 

 memory of this man. It is not my desire, or intention, 

 to sensibly augment its volume. I wish merely to con- 

 tribute a few memorial notes which I am unwilling to 

 let die, but which, in presence of what has gone before, 

 are but as a pebble dropped upon the summit of a tor. 



1 Written for the most part from memory in the Alps, 1689, and 

 published in the Fortnightly Review, January, 1890. 



