THOMAS CARLYLE. 365 



probably on that occasion her cup of bliss was fuller 

 than it had been for years before. 



Carlyle's great task having ended thus happily, he 

 ioined in festivities, public and private. Meat and wine 

 I have forgotten, but I have not forgotten the jocund 

 after-dinner songs. They were sung by their composers. 

 Dry science became plastic in the hands of these artists, 

 and the forms it assumed must have astonished Carlyle. 

 He joined heartily in the fun. Two banquets dwell 

 specially in my memory — a Symposium Academicum, 

 got up in Carlyle's honour, and a dinner at the house oi 

 his steadfast friend, Professor Masson. At both hilarity 

 ran high. The figure of Dr. Maclagan, with eyes 

 directed piteously upwards, with body bent, and hands 

 clasped in agony over some excruciating medical 

 absurdity, has left an unfading photograph upon my 

 brain. Till then I had thought the dinners of our 

 Royal Society Club in London the most genial in the 

 world ; but they could not hold a candle to this Edin- 

 burgh Symposium. The dinner at Masson's was equally 

 jovial. Lord Neaves was there — one of the most pleasant 

 personages I had ever met. He was charged with his 

 own bright ditties, which he sang with infective anima- 

 tion. Some time previously John Stuart Mill had 

 written his 4 Examination of the Philosophy of Sir 

 William Hamilton,' wherein he had reduced the ex- 

 ternal world to 'a series of possibilities of sensation.' 

 Lord Neaves had thrown this theory into lyric rhyme. 

 The refrain of his song was 4 Stuart Mill on Mind and 

 Matter.' The whole table joined in the refrain, Carlyle, 

 with voice-accompaniment, swaying his knife to and 

 fro, like the baton of a ' conductor.' If, afterwards, in 

 a fit of depression, he described the time he spent in 

 Edinburgh as ' a miserable time,' he must have been 

 the victim of self-delusion. It was a time of joy and 



