trenchantly what will always be the puzzle of Carlyle’s life—­that, as Ruskin said, he groaned and gasped and lamented over the intolerable burden of his work, and that yet, when you came to read it, you found it all alive, full of salient and vivid details, not so much patiently collected, as obviously and patently enjoyed.  Again there is the mystery of his lectures.  They seem to have been fiery, eloquent, impressive harangues; and yet Carlyle describes himself stumbling to the platform, sleepless, agitated, and drugged, inclined to say that the best thing his audience could do for him would be to cover him up with an inverted tub; while as he left the platform among signs of visible emotion and torrents of applause, he thought, he said, that the idea of being paid for such stuff made him feel like a man who had been robbing hen-roosts.

There is an interesting story of how Tennyson once stayed with Bradley, when Bradley was headmaster of Marlborough, and said grimly one evening that he envied Bradley, with all his heart, his life of hard, fruitful, necessary work, and owned that he sometimes felt about his own poetry, what, after all, did all this elaborate versifying amount to, and who was in any way the better or happier for it?

The truth is that the man of letters forgets that this is exactly the same thought as that which haunts the busy man after, let us say, a day of looking over examination-papers or attending committees.  The busy man, if he reflects at all, is only too apt to say to himself, “Here have I been slaving away like a stone-breaker, reading endless scripts, discussing an infinity of petty details, and what on earth is the use of it all?” Yet Sir Alfred Lyall once said that if a man had once taken a hand in big public affairs, he thought of literature much as a man who had crossed the Atlantic in a sailing-yacht might think of sculling a boat upon the Thames.  One of the things that moved Dr. Johnson to a tempest of wrath was when on the death of Lord Lichfield, the Lord Chancellor, Boswell said to him that if he had taken to the law as a profession, he might have been Lord Chancellor, and with the same title.  Johnson was extremely angry, and said that it was unfriendly to remind a man of such things when it was too late.

One may conclude from such incidents and confessions that even some of the most eminent men of letters have been haunted by the sense that in following literature they have not chosen the best part, and that success in public life is a more useful thing as well as more glorious.

But one has to ask oneself what exactly an imaginative man means by success, and what it is that attracts him in the idea of it.  Putting aside the more obvious and material advantages,—­wealth, position, influence, reputation,—­a man of far-reaching mind and large ideas may well be haunted by a feeling that if he had entered public life, he might by example, precept, influence, legislation,