The first thing we did on the day of our arrival was to take a hansom and drive over to Chelsea, to look at the place where Carlyle passed the larger part of his life.  The whole region about him must have been greatly changed during his residence there, for the Thames Embankment was constructed long after he removed to Chelsea.  We had some little difficulty in finding the place we were in search of.  Cheyne (pronounced “Chainie”) Walk is a somewhat extended range of buildings.  Cheyne Row is a passage which reminded me a little of my old habitat, Montgomery Place, now Bosworth Street.  Presently our attention was drawn to a marble medallion portrait on the corner building of an ordinary-looking row of houses.  This was the head of Carlyle, and an inscription informed us that he lived for forty-seven years in the house No. 24 of this row of buildings.  Since Carlyle’s home life has been made public, he has appeared to us in a different aspect from the ideal one which he had before occupied.  He did not show to as much advantage under the Boswellizing process as the dogmatist of the last century, dear old Dr. Johnson.  But he remains not the less one of the really interesting men of his generation, a man about whom we wish to know all that we have a right to know.

The sight of an old nest over which two or three winters have passed is a rather saddening one.  The dingy three-story brick house in which Carlyle lived, one in a block of similar houses, was far from attractive.  It was untenanted, neglected; its windows were unwashed, a pane of glass was broken; its threshold appeared untrodden, its whole aspect forlorn and desolate.  Yet there it stood before me, all covered with its associations as an ivy-clad tower with its foliage.  I wanted to see its interior, but it looked as if it did not expect a tenant and would not welcome a visitor.  Was there nothing but this forbidding house-front to make the place alive with some breathing memory?  I saw crossing the street a middle-aged woman,—­a decent body, who looked as if she might have come from the lower level of some not opulent but respectable household.  She might have some recollection of an old man who was once her neighbor.  I asked her if she remembered Mr. Carlyle.  Indeed she did, she told us.  She used to see him often, in front of his house, putting bits of bread on the railing for the birds.  He did not like to see anything wasted, she said.  The merest scrap of information, but genuine and pleasing; an instantaneous photograph only, but it makes a pretty vignette in the volume of my reminiscences.  There are many considerable men in every generation of mankind, but not a great number who are personally interesting,—­not a great many of whom we feel that we cannot know too much; whose foibles, even, we care to know about; whose shortcomings we try to excuse; who are not models, but whose special traits make them attractive.  Carlyle is one of these few, and no revelations can