A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE ROW. 249 



prick into me, perhaps (this is the commonest) to 

 be topsy-turvied, left standing on its head, that I may 

 remember it the better ! Such grinning insanity is 

 very sad to the soul of man. Human faces should 

 not grin on one like masks ; they should look on one 

 like faces ! I love honest laughter as I do sunlight, 

 but not dishonest ; most kinds of dancing too, but the 

 St. Vitus kind, not at all ! " 



If Carlyle had taken to the brush instead of to the 

 pen he would probably have left a gallery of portraits 

 such as this century has not seen. In his letters, 

 journals, reminiscences, etc., for him to mention a 

 man is to describe his face, and with what graphic 

 pen and ink sketches they abound. Let me extract 

 a few of them. Here is Rousseau's face, from " He- 

 roes and Hero Worship " : "A high but narrow-con- 

 tracted intensity in it ; bony brows ; deep, straight-set 

 eyes, in which there is something bewildered-looking, 

 bewildered, peering with lynx-eagerness ; a face 

 full of misery, even ignoble misery, and also of an 

 antagonism against that ; something mean, plebeian, 

 there, redeemed only by intensity : the face of what is 

 called a fanatic, a sadly contracted hero ! " Here a 

 glimpse of Dan ton : "Through whose black brows 

 and rude, flattened face there looks a waste energy 

 as of Hercules." Camille Desmoulins : " With the 

 face of dingy blackguardism, wondrously irradiated 

 with genius, as if a naphtha lamp burned in it." 

 Through Mirabeau's " shaggy, beetle - brows, and 

 rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled face there look nat- 



