Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises

[206] his own private work, made it up. He had special work assigned by himself for a certain time before breakfast, an interval which he daily gave largely to the Greek Testament and at some periods to Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Xenophon; working always with the original at hand and writing out translations or commentaries, always in the same exquisite handwriting and at first contained in small thin note-books, afterwards bound in substantial volumes, with morocco binding and proper lettering. All his writings were thus handsomely treated, and the shelves devoted to his own works, pamphlet or otherwise, were to the eye a very conservatory and flower garden of literature; or like a chamberful of children to whom even a frugal parent may allow himself the luxury of pretty clothes. All his literary arrangements were neat and perfect, and represented that other extreme from the celebrated collection of De Quincey in Dove Cottage at Grasmere, where that author had five thousand books, by his own statement, in a little room ten or twelve feet square; and his old housekeeper explained it to me as perfectly practicable “because he had no bookcases,” but simply piled them against the walls, leaving here and there little gaps in which he put his money.