and most of the humors of Tubbermore | reserve, while by commencing with the are now reckoned amongst the things of the past. From The Fortnightly Review. GLIMPSES OF CARLYLE. A FRAGMENT. BY THE LATE SIR LEWIS PELLY. MANY among us feel that our lives have been largely influenced by some one man or book that we chanced to become acquainted with in early youth. I was lying idle on the deck of a P. and O. steamer, wondering whether life was worth living, when my hand happened to light on a tattered volume of Carlyle's "Miscellanies," in which I found his essay on Burns and his second essay on Goethe. These papers read to me almost like a new revelation of life, and seemed to show that when earnestly regarded, the future, even of a lieutenant in the East India's Company's service, was susceptible of development. On reaching England I fell in with "Sartor Resartus" and "Past and Present," works which yet further attracted me to their author. Shortly afterwards Mr. Carlyle invited me to his house in Cheyne Row; but on presenting myself at the door an elderly Scotch female intimated that her master was engaged and did not see people. I said that I had come by appointment, upon which I was conducted to the top of the house, where I found Mr. Carlyle seated at a small table in the middle of a sort of prophet's chamber. A yet smaller table, with some books on it, stood against a double window. There was nothing else in the room, except two or three chairs. He welcomed me very kindly, and began talking of the north-west frontier of India. He seemed much interested about General John Jacob and his work with the Scinde Horse in the Bolan desert. I explained that my old chief, though employed in the command of cavalry, was yet a man of original thought and of an organizing and constructive mind. Mr. Carlyle had evidently been reading some of the general's diatribes against the foolishness of governments and religious cant. He objected that Jacob was too profuse of the superlative degree; and I remarked that I had often brought this characteristic under the notice of the general, suggesting that if he would begin with the positive he could hold the comparative and superlative in superlative there was nothing left but to expand into big print and underlinings. "And what did Jacob say?" asked Carlyle." He said, that what he wrote was God's truth, and it could not be printed too large. Mr. Carlyle then launched out upon the advantages of a life of action and military discipline; he advised me utterly to avoid that great froth ocean called literature, and specially the thing called poetry. I submitted that he himself had mainly attracted me to letters, and that I understood his life had been passed in printing his genius upon the age. "Yes," he said, "I am a writer of books; and once in a century a man may write a book worth reading. But the truth is, in early life I could not make anything of it, when some one told me that I should find what I wanted among the Germans, and thus I came upon Goethe. But for all that life is an action and not a thought, and you had better stick to your work on the frontier and life will open round you." He finished by asking me to come to him again; and a day or two afterwards wrote me a note in a very small hand, inviting me to accompany him to a dinner at Lord Ashburton's. I went accordingly, and sat next to a gentleman who proved to be Mr. Nassau Senior, and who soon engaged me in a conversation on political economy. I ventured to differ from him, and he was explaining to me that I knew very little of the subject, when Mr. Carlyle, from the other side of the table, burst in, saying that I was quite right, and telling Mr. Senior that he had driven God out of the universe, and would soon not let them have even the poor old devil. I need not add that I was greatly relieved by this interruption, and left the two giants to fight the battle out. On leaving, Mr. Carlyle called a four-wheeler, and said he would drive me as far as Hyde Park Corner, where our ways parted. No sooner had we started than he fired up on the politics of the day, and was anything but complimentary to Parliament and the Foreign Office; he became so excited that he stood up and swayed his arms about, quite astonishing me by the fact that a man of genius who largely dominated the thought of his time should so agitate him. self with matters which I, at that time, regarded as of little real importance. But he thundered on, and I did not attempt to get a word in even edgeways. At length the cab drew up, and we found ourselves at his door, whence I walked home to the other side of Hyde Park. Shortly afterwards Mr. Carlyle asked at his door, assuredly he should not have me to tea, and, with Mrs. Carlyle, received paid the half-crown for me. But he me in his simply furnished drawing-room. seemed too great for me to venture to He soon worried me into an argument and intrude my mite. upset everything I ventured to advance. Tea over, he went to the mantelpiece and filled his pipe which he smoked often, and which I suspect affected his digestion, for he complained more than once of dyspepsia, and I ventured to suggest that his smoking might perhaps injure and depress him. "Yes," he said, "and the doctors told me the same thing. I left off smoking and was very meeserable; so I took to it again, and was very meeserable still; but I thought it better to smoke and be meeserable than to go without." His pipe being filled he descended, as was his wont, to the small garden in rear of the house, to commune with the Eternal Silences. But just as he was closing the door Mrs. Carlyle called out, "Why, when Mazzini was here the other night, you took the side of the argument that Mr. Pelly did this evening.' Carlyle, putting his head round the door, merely said, "And what's the use of a man if he cannot take two sides of an argument?" Sometime afterwards I was sitting in his room when the conversation turned upon Goethe. I remarked that I had been much puzzled, when reading "Wilhelm Meister," by a diagram representing something between a key and a cross, and that I could not make out what it meant; he looked at me intently from under his beetling brows, and said, "No moore can I." But perceiving that I was a little disappointed he continued, "Well, you know Goethe used to keep several works on hand, and hang his manuscript up in bags; and I suppose that one day he must have pulled "Wilhelm Meister" down and scratched this cross while thinking of what he should say next." He then explained that Goethe was the many-sided liberator of the thought of Germany, and the germ of most that had come out since, whether in action or science. I find it difficult to recall many of his serious sallies, for what chiefly rested on my mind were his quaint sayings uttered with a half-humorous expression of face. His language in conversation, as in his writings, was often in sledge-hammer fashion, and yet it did not sound so, for his manner was kindly, natural, and at intervals almost tender. I was so engrossed with the man that it was not until after his death that I became aware of his origin and his honorable poverty. Had I known the latter when the cab pulled up Eventually I returned to the East, and was ordered to ride from the capital of Persia to the Indian frontier, in view to reporting on the political condition of the intervening territories. I was at Herat in 1860, when the Persian army, beaten by the Turcomans, was retreating along the line of the Moorgab; and when on this, and other public accounts, affairs were somewhat disturbed, and one's head at times felt a little loose on one's shoulders. I was lying one evening outside the walls of the Herat Fort, under the starlight and near the singularly beautiful mausoleum of the Timur family, when it occurred to me that I was unaccountably calm and happy for an ordinary man who found himself a thousand miles away from any other European, and surrounded by excit able Asiatics, some of whom had old blood feuds with the Indian government. On reflection, however, I attributed my mental condition to the influence of Carlyle, and I remember repeating to myself the lines which he had translated from Goethe, and which in that, as in many other crises, have shot strength and solace into my heart: The future hides in it And solemn before us Whilst earnest thou gazest But heard are the voices- "Here eyes do regard you Ye brave, to reward you; The next morning I went into the bazaar and selected a finely woven camel'shair robe, and a small Persian prayer carpet of exquisite color and texture, and resolved to carry both of them with me through Afghanistan and Beloochistan for transmission to Cheyne Row. These articles, in fact, formed my only luggage, besides what was contained in my saddlebags. The robe and rug reached Mr. Carlyle in due course, and many years afterwards my friend Miss F. told me that he had placed the little carpet under his writing-table in the upper chamber, and that the camel's-hair robe had been turned into a sort of dressing-gown, and used by him to the end of his life. She added, that it was this robe in which the late Sir Edgar Boehm had enveloped Carlyle's sitting figure, now placed in the Chelsea Gardens, and that the little carpet had been taken by Carlyle in a fit of tenderness to the dressing-table of his wife. Recalling these statements, I remember :he fable of the earthen vessel which an Oriental picked out of the stream, and, bringing it to his nostrils addressed it: "Why, you must be made of roses.' "No," replied the vessel, "I am only an earthen pot; but I used to hold roseleaves, and still keep their scent." what sharply: "And do you not think, Mr. Carlyle, that as much genius can be shown in the handling of cavalry as in the writing of books?" "Well," he said, "there is something in that." So I went on to expound to him what General Jacob had taught me about the fifteen campaigns of Hannibal, the battle of Dunbar, where the Lord delivered the enemy into the hand of Cromwell, and the letter of Hyder Ali to the English general. I concluded by referring to the battle of Rossbach, where Seidlitz, in command of the cavalry, repeatedly refused to obey the order of the king to charge until the right moment arrived, when he forthwith swept the foe from the field. Mr. Carlyle looked interested, but said nothing. When "The History of Frederick the Great" appeared, however, I was amused to find that Seidlitz and Ziethen had become great cavalry commanders, and that no mention was made of "famous gallopers." The thoughts of an age are the heritage of the age in common; but he who, passing those thoughts through the alembic of his own genius, reproduces them in language which men will not willingly let die, stamps the age with his image and superscription, and his works shine on through a long posterity. It was thus that Shakespeare, chancing to light on an old and unknown sonnet, turned it, by a stroke of his pen, into the deathless lines now inscribed be. low his statue in Westminster Abbey: "Style gives immortality." But I have omitted to mention two remnants of conversation; one related to Miss Martineau, who had been extremely kind to me when in London, honoring me by correspondence, and associating my name with her contributions to the Daily News. Asking Mr. Carlyle his estimate of her genius, and alluding in particular to her able summary of the Positive Philosophy, he paused for a moment, and then said slowly, "Well, she is the sort of a woman that would have made a good matron in a hospital." I did not continue the subject. The other conversation related to Frederick the Great, whose history he was then writing. He explained that his view of Frederick was that he found himself set to govern a country with a simply insufferable frontier, and that Frederick had therefore, by the only possible means, namely, drilled force, resolved to render his frontier a tolerable one, and moderately secure against surrounding enemies. I asked him what he thought of Frederick's cavalry generals, Seidlitz and Ziethen. "Well," he said, "they were just famous gallopers." Now this was, perhaps, the only subject upon But this is hearsay; and it is not thus which my philosopher and guide could that my mind's eye beholds him. I prehave roused me into contradiction. But fer to imagine those dreamily intent eyes fresh from my cavalry general, and im- regarding us from eternity's stillness, for bued with all his lessons concerning the death is not a curtain with a skull behind cavalry genius of Hannibal, Cromwell, it. Hyder Ali, and others, I rejoined some After many years I again returned from the East, and again met Carlyle, but he seemed to me an altered man. The enthusiasm was gone, and he appeared to take less interest in men and in affairs. The last time I saw him he was passing into the London Library. He looked aged, bent, and hopelessly sad; the wreck of a long and of a well-spent life. I lifted my hat to him, but he did not seem really to recognize me, and so he disappeared into the library, and not long after, through death, into eternity. I am told that in his last hours he repeated Garth's lines: To die is landing on some silent shore, Where billows never break nor tempests roar; Ere well we feel the friendly stroke, 'tis o'er. As to his books, I find that Carlyle's writings still survive, and that some among them are more than ever read by the people. His later efforts never attracted me, and it irritates my flesh to read through "Frederick; " but England is now realiz ing much that was predicted in "Past and Present." His "Sartor" has appeared like a new revelation, and his "Hero Worship" has taught many a young trifler to become earnest in thought and courageous in work. His essays influenced the lives of many, for he knew how to lift and cheer the existence of another, although he was incapable of rendering his own life cheerful. Emerson said of him that he was a "marvellous child." Still more recently I was invited by some friends to look over Carlyle's old dwelling-place. Arriving at the door, I found the number changed, and panes of glass smashed in the dining-room window. Inside the house was desolate and bare; its rooms quite mute; its tenants passed away. In the drawing-room I whispered to my friend, "I see things here you cannot see; he sat there ;" and there between the windows stood the little couch on which she rested with her pet dog. Passing into the back room, a druggist's bottle stood on the mantelpiece labelled, for Mrs. Carlyle, and half-filled with medicine, which she will never take. Looking out of the window, the little garden had all gone astray, and the walls stared emptily on one another. I turned from the scene as one turns from the ambitions of life on finding at last what folly they are. Still Carlyle, though dead, yet speaketh, and his works do follow him Onward, upward, his soul's flight, From Temple Bar. AN EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF GOUNOD. CHRISTMAS eve, many, many years ago. It had been bitterly cold all day, and towards night a white mist had risen from the turbid, swollen river, wrapping its banks and the streets abutting on it in a semi-opaque cloud that shed weird, fantastic shadows on the familiar landmarks and objects all round, and transformed them into so many ghoul-like, uncouth monsters, startling the belated wayfarers and causing them to hurry on towards the wished-for haven home. The clock of Notre-Dame had just boomed forth eight strokes, but the sound fell with a dull thud upon the air and scarcely roused an echo. All but the main thoroughfares leading southward from the Seine were deserted, and in the long, narrow Rue Mazarine, behind the Institute of France, there were not a dozen people abroad. The few that were paid no attention whatsoever to a tall old man who was dragging himself painfully along towards the quay, standing still now and then to indulge in a prolonged shiver, because, apparently, he had not the strength to shiver and to be moving at the same time. He leant heavily on a thick stick while his left arm held closely pressed against his body an oblong object wrapped in a chequered cotton handkerchief. He was but thinly clad, in fact, he represented the shorn human creature to whom, unlike to the lamb under similar conditions, the wind was not tempered. A pair of summer trousers, and a threadbare coat, buttoned up to the chin, prob. ably to hide the absence of linen, were all the armor against the raw, icy moisture that fell from above and trickled profusely down his flowing white beard and hair, the latter crowned by a broad. brimmed soft hat pulled over the eyes, as a means, perhaps, to escape recognition, though recognition, Heaven knows, would perhaps have been the best thing that could have befallen him. When the old man got to the riverside, he stood for a moment undecided, then crossed the Pont-des-Arts, looking neither to the right nor left; maybe, the water would have proved too strong a temptation to lie down and "have done with it," and he would not yield to it. Entering by the southern gate, he made his way across the Place du Carrousel and the maze of illsmelling slums which in those days separated the Tuileries from the Palais-Royal, and at last found himself in the centre of fashionable Paris, for half a century ago the erstwhile residence of Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin could still lay claim to that title. He seemed fairly dazzled by the lights, the bustle of the crowd, "on enjoyment bent," and made the turn of the gardens several times, apparently unable or afraid to come to a decision. In another moment, however, he stopped in the Fountain's Court under a wooden awning at the angle of that busy passage. He firmly planted his back against the wall, put his stick within reach of him, and began undoing the parcel he had carried under his left arm. It contained a violin and its bow. Having examined its strings, be carefully folded his handkerchief in four, placed it on his left shoulder and began to tune his instrument. But at the first notes of the sad and sentimental romance he endeavored to play, the poor feilow himself stood aghast, while a couple of irreverential urchins whom the sound had attracted to the spot, set up a derisive how and belabored him with merciless chaff. He stopped short and sank down on the steps of the alley, his instrument on his knees, murmuring to himself: "Great God! I can no longer play," while a big sob choked all further utterance. He had been sitting thus for several minutes, when at the other end of the passage there entered a party of three young men who were evidently in high spirits, for they sang as they went; they sang a ditty very popular in those days with the students of the Conservatoire de Musique. They did not see the old fiddler, for one stumbled against his outstretched leg, and a second almost knocked his hat off his head, while the third positively drew back startled as the old man rose proudly, but despondingly, to his feet. capital of two was sixteen sous, the third only produced a small cube of rosin, without which the violinist scarcely ever stirs abroad. They kept looking at one another for a few moments, then one spoke up. "Sixteen sous is of no use, friends; we want more, much more than that to relieve our fellow-artist. A pull, and a strong pull all together. You, Adolphe, take the violin and accompany Gustave, while I go round with the hat." In the twinkling of an eye the preparations for carrying out the project are finished; coat-collars are turned up, the hair is brought over the features to disguise them, and to make detection still more difficult, hats are tilted forward to conceal the eyes. Then the young fellow who has been the prime mover in the whole, gives the signal to start. "It is Christmas eve, Adolphe," he says, "and remember that at this performance the Almighty is as likely to be among the audience as not. So do your very best." And Adolphe does his very best, assur"I am sure, we are very sorry, mon-edly; for scarcely have the first notes of sieur, and beg your pardon, but we did not see you. I hope we did not hurt you?" said the latter. 66 No, you did not hurt me," was the answer while the speaker stooped to pick up his hat; but his interlocutor was too quick for him, and handed it to him. Then, and then only, he noticed the instrument in the old man's hands. "You are a musician, monsieur?" he said deferentially. "I was so once," sighed the old man, while two big tears coursed down his wrinkled cheeks; seeing which the three young men came closer to him. "What is the matter?" they asked all at once. "Do you feel ill, and can we do anything for you?" For a moment the old man preserved a deep silence, then, with a look that would have melted a heart of stone, held out his hat to them. "Give me a trifle for the love of God," he whispered softly. "I can no longer earn my living with my instrument; my fingers have become stiff, and my daughter is dying of consumption and want." This time it was the young fellows' turn to be silent. Confusion was written on their faces, and for the first time in their lives perhaps, they felt ashamed, nay, angry at being poor. They all fumbled in their pockets, but the result of their investigations was lamentable; the combined the "Carnaval de Venise "fallen upon the air than every window round about is flung wide open, disclosing eager listeners, while below in the galleries and gardens of the Palais-Royal, the passers-by stop as if rooted to the spot or else retrace their steps to swell the serried group slowly gathering round the performer. And when the last notes have died away, there is a frantic shout of approval, while the hat of the old man, placed by the lamppost is rapidly filling, not only with copper but with silver coins also. The three young fellows do not allow the excitement to cool; in another moment the strains of the violin are heard again, but now they accompany a voice of mar-. vellous sweetness, compass, and puritythat of Gustave, who sings the favorite cavatina from "La Dame Blanche" in such a manner as to keep his listeners spell-bound. Meanwhile the audience has assumed unwonted proportions, and when the singer has finished, it positively "rains money," which the promoter of the entertainment has all his work to pick up. But he is determined that the harvest shall be a good one, and shielding his face as much as possible from the now very interested gaze of his public, he continues his collec tion. "One more tune," he whispers to his companions, "and then we have done. You, Adolphe, while accompanying us, |