222 A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE ROW. 



some attendant ceremony. But he had refused per- 

 emptorily. "If the angel Gabriel had summoned 

 me I would not haye gone," he said. It was too soon 

 to erect a monument to Scott. Let them wait a hun- 

 dred years and see how they feel about it then. He 

 had never met Scott ; the nearest he had come to it 

 was once when he was the bearer of a message to 



o 



him from Goethe : he had rung at his door with some 

 trepidation, and was relieved when told that the 

 great man was out. Not long afterwards he had a 

 glimpse of him while standing in the streets of Edin- 

 burgh. He saw a large wagon coining drawn by 

 several horses, and containing a great many people, 

 and there in the midst of them, full of talk aud hilar- 

 ity like a great boy, sat Scott. Carlyle had recently 

 returned from his annual visit to Scotland, and was 

 full of sad and tender memories of his native land, 

 He was a man in whom every beautiful thing awak- 

 ened melancholy thoughts. He spoke of the bloom- 

 ing lasses and the crowds of young people he had 

 seen on the streets of some northern city, Aberdeen, 

 I think, as having filled him with sadness ; a kind of 

 homesickness of the soul was upon him, and deepened 

 with age, a solitary and a bereaved man from first 

 to last. 



As I walked Cheyne Row that summer Sunday 

 my eye rested again and again upon those three 

 stone steps that led up to the humble door, each hol- 

 lowed out by the attrition of the human foot, the 

 middle one, where the force of the footfall would be 



