It is impossible to follow the matter further without a little bit of personal narration. On visiting England for the first time, in 1872, I was offered a letter to Carlyle, and declined it. Like all of my own generation, I had been under some personal obligations to him for his early writings,--though in my case this debt was trifling compared with that due to Emerson,--but his “Latter-day pamphlets” and his reported utterances on American affairs had taken away all special desire to meet him, besides the ungraciousness said to mark his demeanor toward visitors from the United States. Yet, when I was once fairly launched in that fascinating world of London society, where the American sees, as Willis used to say, whole shelves of his library walking about in coats and gowns, this disinclination rapidly softened. And when Mr. Froude kindly offered to take me with him for one of his afternoon calls on Carlyle, and further proposed that I should join them in their habitual walk through the parks, it was not in human nature — or at least in American nature --to resist.
We accordingly went after lunch, one day in May, to Carlyle's modest house in Chelsea, and found him in his study, reading — by a chance very appropriate for me — in Weiss's “Life of Parker.” He received us kindly, but
