ommuned with his own heart and was
still. Besides, had he not "awful examples"? There was the Suffolk
parson, his contemporary, who announced at nineteen that he had read all
Shakespeare and Milton, and did not see why he should not at any rate
equal them. So he fell to work--his poems were a joy to FitzGerald. Then
there was Bernard Barton. FitzGerald glances at his passion for
publishing, his belief that "there could not be too much poetry abroad."
And lastly there was Carlyle, half scornful of FitzGerald's "ultra
modesty and innocent _far-niente_ life," his own superhuman activity
regarded meanwhile by FitzGerald with a gentle half-pitying wonder, of
which one catches a premonitory echo in this extract from a long letter
{87} of Sir Frederick Pollock's to W. H. Thompson. It bears date 14th
February 1840, two years before Carlyle and FitzGerald met:--

"Carlyle's 'Chartism' has been much read. It has fine things in it,
but nothing new. He is eminently a man of one idea, but then neither
he nor any one else knows exactly what that one is. So that by dint
of shifting it about to and fro, and, as you observe, clothing his
remarks in the safe obscurity of a foreign language, he manages to
produce a great impression. Truly he is a trumpet that gives an
uncertain sound, an instrument of no base metal, but played without
book, whose compass is not ascertained, and continually failing from
straining at too high a note. Spedding has not yet found him out;
FitzGerald has, and we lamentably rejoice at our melancholy discovery.
Never was there such a waste of Faith as in that man. He is ever
preaching Faith. Very well, but in what? Why, again says he,
'Faith'--that is, Faith in Faith. Objectless, purposeless, unmeaning,
disappearing, and eluding all grasp when any occasion for action
arises, when anything is to be done, as sufficiently appears from the
miserable unpracticability of the latter chapters of the 'Chartism,'
where he comes forward to give directions for what is to be done."

FitzGerald's wide, albeit eclectic reading, is sufficiently illustrated
on every page of his published Letters. When, fourteen years before his
death, his eyesight began to fail him, he employed boy-readers, one of
whom read him the whole of the Tichborne trial. One summer night in 1889
I sat and smoked with this boy, a pleasant young man, in the bar-parlour
of the Bull Hotel. He