

A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE ROW. 245 



your bonnet, No. 5 Cheyne Row was the house above 

 all others to be avoided ; little chance of inoculating 

 such a mind as Carlyle's with your notions of blow- 

 ing a toiling and sweating hero at his work ? But 

 welcome to any man with real work to do and the 

 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 comrades 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 gre^w 

 out of this terrible predilection for the individual 

 hero ; this bent or inclination determined the whole 

 water-shed, so to speak, of his mind ; every rill and 



