and inflamed before I quite ended, and my desire
was _intense_, beyond words, to have done with it.' Then he adds: 'The
_last_ paragraph I well remember writing upstairs in the drawing-room
that now is, which was then my writing-room; beside _her_ there in a
grey evening (summer, I suppose), soon after tea (perhaps); and
thereupon, with her dear blessing on me, going out to walk. I had said
before going out, "What they will do with this book, none knows, my
Jeannie, lass; but they have not had, for a two hundred years, any book
that came more truly from a man's very heart, and so let them trample it
under foot and hoof as _they_ see best!" "Pooh, pooh! they cannot
trample that!" she would cheerily answer; for her own approval (I think
she had read always regularly behind me) especially in Vol. III., was
strong and decided.' Mrs Carlyle was right. No critic or clique of
critics could trample the _French Revolution_.

A month before the completion of the first book of the _French
Revolution_, Carlyle wrote in his journal: 'My first friend Edward
Irving is dead. I am friendless here or as good as that.' In a week or
two thereafter he met Southey, whom he describes as a 'lean,
grey-white-headed man of dusky complexion, unexpectedly tall when he
rises and still leaner then--the shallowest chin, prominent snubbed
Roman nose, small carelined brow, huge brush of white-grey-hair on high
crown and projecting on all sides, the most vehement pair of faint hazel
eyes I have ever seen--a well-read, honest, limited (straitlaced even),
kindly-hearted, most irritable man. We parted kindly, with no great
purpose on either side, I imagine, to meet again.'[16] Later on Carlyle
admits to his brother John that his prospects in London were not
brightening; which fact left him gloomy and morose.

During his enforced leisure after the destruction of the first book of
the _French Revolution_, Carlyle saw more of his friends, among whom he
numbered John Sterling, fresh from Cambridge and newly ordained a
clergyman. Sterling was of a 'vehement but most noble nature,' and he
was one of the few who had studied _Sartor Resartus_ seriously. He had
been also caught by the Radical epidemic on the spiritual side.
Although dissenting from much of what Carlyle taught, Sterling
recognised in him 'a man not only brilliantly gifted, but differing from
the common run of people in this, that he would not lie, that he would
not equivocate, that he would say alw