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 prevent his interesting us. He was not quite finished in
his parental existence. The bricklayer's mortar of his father's calling
stuck to his fingers through life, but only as the soil he turned with
his ploughshare clung to the fingers of Burns. We do not wish either to
have been other than what he was. Their breeding brings them to the
average level, carries them more nearly to the heart, makes them a
simpler expression of our common humanity. As we rolled in the cars by
Ecclefechan, I strained my eyes to take in every point of the landscape,
every cottage, every spire, if by any chance I could find one in that
lonely region. There was not a bridge nor a bit of masonry of any kind
that I did not eagerly scrutinize, to see if it were solid and honest
enough to have been built by Carlyle's father. Solitary enough the
country looked. I admired Mr. Emerson's devotion in seeking his friend
in his bare home among what he describes as the "desolate heathery
hills" about Craigenputtock, which were, I suppose, much like the region
through which we were passing.

It is one of the regrets of my life that I never saw or heard Carlyle.
Nature, who seems to be fond of trios, has given us three dogmatists,
all of whom greatly interested their own generation, and whose
personality, especially in the case of the first and the last of the
trio, still interests us,--Johnson, Coleridge, and Carlyle. Each was an
oracle in his way, but unfortunately oracles are fallible to their
descendants. The author of "Taxation no Tyranny" had wholesale opinions,
and pretty harsh ones, about us Americans, and did not soften them in
expression: "Sir, they are a ra