A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE ROW 225 



courage to do it; welcome to any man who stood 

 for any real, tangible thing in his own right. ^' In 

 God's name, what art thou ? Not Nothing, sayest 

 thou! Then, How much and what? This is the 

 thing I would know, and even must soon know, 

 such a pass am I come to! " ("Past and Present.") 



Caroline Fox, in her Memoirs, tells how, in 

 1842, Carlyle's sympathies were enlisted in behalf 

 of a Cornish miner who had kept his place in the 

 bottom of a shaft, above a blast the fuse of which 

 had been prematurely lighted, and allowed his com- 

 rades to be hauled up when only one could escape 

 at a time. He inquired out the hero, who, as by 

 miracle, had survived the explosion, and set on 

 foot an enterprise to raise funds for the bettering 

 of his condition. In a letter to Sterling, he said 

 there was help and profit in knowing that there 

 was such a true and brave workman living, and 

 working with him on the earth at that time. "Tell 

 all the people," he said, "that a man of this kind 

 ought to be hatched, — that it were shameful to eat 

 him as a breakfast egg ! " 



All Carlyle's sins of omission and commission 

 grew out of this terrible predilection for the indi- 

 vidual hero : this bent or inclination determined the 

 v/hole water-shed, so to speak, of his mind; every 

 rill and torrent swept swiftly and noisily in this 

 one direction. It is the tragedy in Burns 's life that 

 attracts him; the morose heroism in Johnson's, the 

 copious manliness in Scott's, the lordly and regal 

 quality in Goethe. Emerson praised Plato to him; 



