a perpetual fever, deranges his liver, and makes him at times acrid and savage as a sick giant.  Hence his increased pugnacity of late,—­his fierceness, and angry hammering of all things sacred and profane.  It is but physical and temporary, however, all this, and does not affect his healthy and serene moments.  For no man lives who possesses greater kindness and affection, or more good, noble, and humane qualities.  All who know him love him, although they may have much to pardon in him; not in a social or moral sense, however, but in an intellectual one.  His talk is as rich as ever,—­perhaps richer; for his mind has increased its stores, and the old fire of geniality still burns in his great and loving heart.  Perhaps his conversation is better than his printed discourse.  We have never heard anything like it.  It is all alive, as if each word had a soul in it.

How characteristic is all that Emerson tells us of him in his “English Traits"!—­a book, by the way, concerning which no adequate word has yet been spoken; the best book ever written upon England, and which no brave young Englishman can read, and ever after commit either a mean or a bad action.  We are therefore doubly thankful to Emerson, both for what he says of England, and for what he relates of Carlyle, whose independent speech upon all subjects is one of his chief charms.  He reads “Blackwood,” for example, and has enjoyed many a racy, vigorous article in its pages; but it does not satisfy him, and he calls it “Sand Magazine.”  “Fraser’s” is a little better, but not good enough to be worthy of a higher nomenclature than “Mud Magazine.”  Excessive praise of any one’s talents drives him into admiration of the parts of his own learned pig, now wallowing in the stye.  The best thing he knew about America was that there a man could have meat for his labor.  He did not read Plato, and he disparaged Socrates.  Mirabeau was a hero; Gibbon the splendid bridge from the old world to the new.  It is interesting also to hear that “Tristram Shandy” was one of the first books he read after “Robinson Crusoe,” and that Robertson’s “America” was an early favorite.  Rousseau’s “Confessions” had discovered to him that he was not a dunce.  Speaking of English pauperism, he said that government should direct poor men what to do.  “Poor Irish folks come wandering over these moors.  My dame makes it a rule to give to every son of Adam bread to eat, and supplies his wants to the next house.  But here are thousands of acres which might give them all meat, and nobody to bid those poor Irish go to the moor and till it.  They burned the stacks, and so found a way to force the rich people to attend to them.”  Here is the germ of his book on “Chartism.”  Emerson and he talk of the immortality of the soul, seated on the hill-tops near Old Criffel, and looking down “into Wordsworth’s country.”  Carlyle had the natural disinclination of every nimble spirit to bruise itself against walls, and did not like to place himself where no step can be taken; but he was honest and true, and cognizant of the subtile links that bind ages together, and saw how every event affects all the future.  “Christ died on the tree; that built Dunscore Kirk yonder; that brought you and me together.  Time has only a relative existence.”