merson and other
admirers would have welcomed him. But the disappointments in Scotland
decided him to make one more effort in London before accepting defeat,
and in 1834 he found a house at Chelsea and prepared to quit his
hermitage among the moors.

Cheyne Row, Chelsea, was to be his new home, a quiet street running
northward from the riverside in a quarter of London not then invaded by
industrialism. The house, No. 24, with its little garden, has been made
into a Carlyle museum, and may still be seen on the east side of the
street facing a few survivors of the sturdy old pollarded lime-trees
standing there 'like giants in Tawtie wigs'. His bust, by Boehm, is in
the garden on the Embankment not a hundred yards away. With this
district are connected other names famous in literature and art, but its
presiding genius is the 'Sage of Chelsea', who spent the last
forty-seven years of his life in it; and there, in a double-walled room,
in spite of trivial disturbances from without, in spite of far more
serious fits of dejection and discontent within, he composed his three
greatest historical books. At the outset his prospects were not bright,
and at the end of 1834 he confessed 'it is now twenty-three months
since I earned a penny by the craft of literature'. There was need of
much faith; and it was fortunate for him that he had at his side one who
believed in his genius and who was well qualified to judge. He must have
been thinking of this when he wrote of Mahomet in _Heroes_ and of the
prophet's gratitude to his first wife Kadijah: 'She believed in me when
none else would believe. In the whole world I had but one friend and she
was that!' In the same place he quoted the German writer Novalis: 'It is
certain my conviction gains infinitely, the moment another soul will
believe in it.'

So fortified, he worked through the days of poverty and gloom, with
groans and outbursts of fury, kindling to white heat as he imaged to
himself the men and events of the French Revolution, and throwing them
on to paper in lurid pictures of flame. One terrible misadventure
chilled his spirit in 1835, when the manuscript of the first volume was
lent to J. S. Mill, and was accidentally burnt; but, after a short fit
of despair, he set manfully to work to repair the loss, and the new
version was finished in January, 1837. This book marked an epoch in the
writing of history. Hitherto few had realized what potent force there
was in the original d