248 A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE ROW. 



pect more of him than they got. The artist element 

 in him and his vital hold upon the central truths of 

 character and personal force, saved him from any 

 such fate as overtook his friend Irving. 



Out of Carlyle's fierce and rampant individualism 

 come his grasp of character and his power of human 

 portraiture. It is perhaps not too much to say that 

 in all literature there is not another such a master 

 portrait painter, such a limner and interpreter of his- 

 torical figures and phj-siognomies. That power of 

 the old artists to paint or to carve a man, to body 

 him forth, almost re-create him, so rare in the mod- 

 erns, Carlyle had in a preeminent degree. As an ar- 

 tist it is his distinguishing gift, and puts him on a par 

 with Rembrandt, Angelo, Reynolds, and with the an- 

 tique masters of sculpture. He could put his finger 

 upon the weak point arid upon the strong point of a 

 man as unerringly as fate. He knew a man as a 

 jocky knows a horse. His pictures of Johnson, of 

 Boswell, of Voltaire, of Mirabeau, what masterpieces ! 

 His portrait of Coleridge will doubtless survive all 

 others, inadequate as it is in many ways ; one fears 

 also that poor Lamb has been stamped to last. None 

 of Carlyle's characterizations have excited more ill- 

 feeling than this same one of Lamb. But it was 

 plain from the outset that Carlyle could not like such 

 a verbal acrobat as Lamb. He doubtless had him or 

 his kind in view when he wrote this passage in "Past 

 and Present " : " His poor fraction of sense has to be 

 perked into some epigrammatic shape, that it may 



