392 ON UNVEILING THE STATUE OF 



ON UNVEILING THE STATUE OF THOMAS 

 CARLYLE. 



(26th October, 1882.) 



AMID scenes well calculated to tinge the mind with 

 solemnity, if not with awe, I have lately thought 

 a good deal of the hour that is now come, and of the man 

 in loving memory of whom we are here assembled. And 

 with my thoughts sometimes mingled the very genuine 

 wish that the honourable but trying task now before me 

 had been committed to worthier hands. Without con- 

 scious disloyalty, however, I could not decline the request 

 of the Carlyle Memorial Committee ; and so, without 

 further preface or apology, here I am. 



You have heard much this year of the bi-decennial 

 festival known as the Preston Guild. Two Guilds ago, 

 that is to say in 1842, I was a youth in Preston, being 

 attached to a division of the Ordnance Survey then 

 stationed there. It was a period of gloom and suffer- 

 ing in the manufacturing districts. Some time prior 

 to the Guild, processions of another kind filled the 

 streets — crowds of shiftless and hungry men who had 

 been discharged from the silent mills. In their help- 

 lessness and misery they had turned out, so that their 

 condition might be seen of all. Well, in Lune Street, 

 down which we could look from our office, the tumult 

 one day became unmanageable. Heated by its own in- 



