GENERAL INTERESTS. 71 



thought Lamb's talk a sort of dikited insanity. ... I have 

 opened their eyes a good deal, and interested them much, by 

 the microscope, and I am very glad that I offered to bring it. 

 I shall put it away now that the literary lions are coming down,* 

 and shall keep myself in the background as an observer. I 

 should have told you that Carlyle was very anxious to see one 

 of his own hairs ; and as it happened to be a very strong and 

 rough one, we had some amusing jokes as to the typical cha- 

 racter which it represented. Mrs. Carlyle then wanted one of 

 hers to be exhibited, which was rather slenderer, but still con- 

 siderably knobby. 



These brief days of rest were hardly sufficient, however, 

 for an overtasked frame, and an illness in the winter of 

 1856 drove him to St. Leonard's for restoration. There 

 he seized the opportunity for reading various works for 

 which the home-toils provided no leisure. The latest 

 published volumes of Macaulay's History gratified his taste 

 for political narrative, and he wrote to his mother with 

 enthusiasm of the interest with which he traced through his 

 pages the evolution " under the wise, firm, and imperturbable 

 "guidance of the king, of those principles of constitutional 

 "government on which our national prosperity has so 

 "securely rested." Theology, as usual, claimed some of his 

 attention ; — 



I have not head enough for sermon reading, but have 

 devoted myself on Sundays to " Port Royal," f which I find far 

 more interesting than I expected, and which comes much more 

 home to my feelings than abstract disquisitions on religious 

 subjects. It is remarkable, and I know not how to account for 

 it, that with so much tendency to abstraction and generalization 

 in my own mind, I cannot take in the abstractions and general- 

 izations of others without thinking them out for myself 



The same holiday enabled him to study with eagerness 



* Mr. Tennyson, Mr. Tom Taylor, and others, were expectetl. 



t An abridgment of Mrs. Sclunimelpenninck's History, by P. P. Carpenter. 



