Johnson was the greatest master of conversation in his day, whose detached sayings are still quoted more often than his most elaborate periods.  I apprehend that there was a great contrast between Johnson’s writings and his conversation.  While the former are Ciceronian, his talk was epigrammatic, terse, and direct; and its charm and power were in his pointed and vehement Saxon style.  Had he talked as he wrote, he would have been wearisome and pedantic.  Still, like Coleridge and Robert Hall, he preached rather than conversed, thinking what he himself should say rather than paying attention to what others said, except to combat and rebuke them,—­a discourser, as Macaulay was; not one to suggest interchange of ideas, as Addison did.  But neither power of conversation nor learning would have made Johnson a literary dictator.  His power was in the force of his character, his earnestness, and sincerity, even more than in his genius.

I will not dwell on the other Review articles which Carlyle wrote in his isolated retreat, since published as “Miscellanies,” on which his fame in no small degree rests,—­even as the essays of Macaulay may be read when his more elaborate History will lie neglected on the shelves of libraries.  Carlyle put his soul into these miscellanies, and the labor and enjoyment of writing made him partially forget his ailments.  I look upon those years at Craigenputtock as the brightest and healthiest of his life, removed as he was from the sight of levities and follies which tormented his soul and irritated his temper.

Carlyle contrived to save about L200 from his literary earnings, so frugal was his life and so free from temptations.  His recreation was in wandering on foot or horseback over the silent moors and unending hills, watered by nameless rills and shadowed by mists and vapors.  His life was solitary, but not more so than that of Moses amid the deserts of Midian,—­isolation, indeed, but in which the highest wisdom is matured.  Into this retreat Emerson penetrated, a young man, with boundless enthusiasm for his teacher,—­for Carlyle was a teacher to him as to hundreds of others in this country.  Carlyle never had a truer and better friend than Emerson, who opened to him the great reward of recognition in distant America while yet his own land refused to take knowledge of him; and this friendship continued to the end, an honor to both,—­for Carlyle never saw in Emerson’s writings the genius and wisdom which his American friend admired in the Scottish sage.  Nor were their opinions so harmonious as some suppose.  Emerson despised Calvinism, and had no definite opinions on any theological subject; Carlyle was a Calvinist without the theology of Calvinism, if that be possible.  He did not, indeed, believe in historical Christianity, but he had the profoundest convictions of an overruling God, reigning in justice, and making the wrath of man to praise Him.  Carlyle, too, despised everything visionary and indefinite, and had more respect for