I remarked that, having started in life with the traditional estimate of Jeffrey as the king of critics and so forth, I found his articles in the Edinburgh Review, when I hunted them out with infinite pains, thin and disappointing.

not a great teacher, far enough from that, | ment in the gamut of human passion nor a man of solid sense like Wordsworth, which could not be adequately expressed but his talk was lively and graphic, though, in prose. Browning's earliest works had when one came to consider it, it was not been loudly applauded by undiscerning in any remarkable degree instructive or people, but he was now heartily ashamed profitable. It was pleasant and titillating, of them, and hoped in the end to do someat any rate, like the odorous perfume of a thing altogether different from "Sordello" pastille aux milles fleurs. and Paracelsus." He had strong ambition and great confidence in himself, and was considering his future course just now. When he first met young Browning, he was a youth living with his parents, people of respectable position among the Dissenters, but not wealthy neither, and the little room in which he kept his books was in that sort of trim that showed he was the very apple of their eyes. He was about six-and-thirty at present, and a little time before had married Miss Barrett, the writer of various poems. She had long been confined to a sofa by spinal disease, and seemed destined to end there very speedily, but the ending was to be quite otherwise, as it proved. Browning made his way to her in a strange manner, and they fell mutually in love. She rose up from her sick-bed with recovered strength and agility, and was now, it was understood, tolerably well. They married and were living together in Italy, like the hero and heroine of a mediæval romance.

Yes, Carlyle replied, his speculations and cogitations in literature were meagre enough. His critical faculty was small, and he had no true insight into the nature of things; but the Edinburgh Review had been of use in its time, too; when a truth found it hard to get a hearing elsewhere, it was often heard there. At present the great review was considerably eclipsed, and the influence with which it started into life was quite gone.

BROWNING AND COLERIDGE.

I BEGGED him to tell me something of the author of a serial I had come across lately, called "Bells and Pomegranates," printed in painfully small type, on inferior paper, but in which I took great delight. There were ballads to make the heart beat fast, and one little tragedy, "The Blot in the 'Scutcheon," which, though not over disposed to what he called sentimentality, I could not read without tears. The heroine's excuse for the sin which left a blot in a 'scutcheon stainless for a thousand years, was, in the circumstances of the case, as touching a line as I could recall in English poetry:

I had no mother, and we were so young.

He said Robert Browning had a powerful intellect, and among the men engaged in literature in England just now was one of the few from whom it was possible to expect something. He was somewhat uncertain about his career, and he himself (Carlyle) had perhaps contributed to the trouble by assuring him that poetry was no longer a field where any true or worthy success could be won or deserved. If a man had anything to say entitled to the attention of rational creatures, all mortals would come to recognize after a little that there was a more effectual way of saying it than in metrical numbers. Poetry used to be regarded as the natural, and even the essential, language of feeling, but it was not at all so; there was not a senti

I asked him did he remember a little
poem of Coleridge's called, "The Sui-
cide's Argument;" it had the most aston-
ishing resemblance to one of Browning's
various styles, and in a smaller man would
suggest palpable imitation.
This was the poem:

THE SUICIDE'S ARGUMENT.
Ere the birth of my life, if I wished it or no,
No question was asked me it could not be
so!

If the life was the question, a thing sent to try,
And to live on be Yes; what can No be? to
die.

people. What it wanted, I thought, was what her husband was strongest in, dramatic power. The feeble old Puseyite and the peasant girl, the woman of fashion and the woman of genius, spoke the same epigrammatic or axiomatic language. If it were reduced to half the length it would probably have twice the chance of living.

Carlyle said he had read little bits of "Aurora Leigh," in reviews chiefly, and did not discern anything in it which suggested the probability of its living beyond its little day. It furnished rather a beggarly account of this nineteenth century, with which one might guess future centuries would not concern themselves much. She went extensively into Fourierism and phalansteries, things likely to be altogether forgotten, and which would make the reading of the book a task as difficult to the next century as Spenser's historical allegories or Dryden's theological ones were just now. But she did not want a certain bright vivacity and keen womanly eye for the strange things transacted in the theatre of the world neither. If it was too big, that was not an uncommon fault of books just now. After a pause, he went on to say that he often reflected what an old Roman or a vigorous Norseman would make of modern sentimental poetry, or of such a windy phenomenon as Shelley.

CARLETON.

which the company received this sally put Carleton on his guard; he looked round the table with his keen natural wit, divined the state of the case, and escaped the ambuscade. "Ah, my young friend," he said, "it would be well for Shelley if he could write a book like 'Sartor Resartus.""

SAVAGE LANDOR.

I SPOKE of Savage Landor. Landor, he said, was a man of real capacity for literary work of some sort, but he had fallen into an extravagant method of stating his opinions, which made any serious acceptance of them altogether impossible. If he encountered anywhere an honest man doing his duty with decent constancy, he straightway announced that here was a phenomenal mortal, a new and authentic emanation of the Deity. This was a sort of talk to which silence was to be preferred. Landor had not come to discern the actual relation of things in the world, very far from it. But there was something honorable and elevated, too, in his view of the subject when one came to consider it. He was sincere as well as ardent and impetuous, and he was altogether persuaded for the time that the wild fancies he paraded before the world were actual verities. But the personal impression he left on those who casually encountered him was that of a wild creature with fierce eyes and boisterous attitudes, uttering prodigious exaggerations on every topic that turned up, followed by a guffaw that was not exhilarating; rather otherwise, indeed.

I said he dropped his paragons as abruptly as he took them up. The first edition of the "Imaginary Conversations" was dedicated to Bolivar and Sir Robert Wilson; to Bolivar because he accomplished a more memorable work than any man had ever brought to a termination in this universe, and to Wilson for prodigious military achievements and heroic personal virtues. John Forster told me that Landor erased these dedications because he had altered his mind about the men, and regarded Bolivar, in particular, as an impostor, erowned with laurels for winning battles at which he was not even present.

I RECALLED an incident at one of our recent breakfasts in Dublin, the by-play of which had escaped him. He was speaking of Shelley, and declared he was a poor shrieking creature who had said or sung nothing worth a serious man being at the trouble of remembering. D. F. MacCarthy, a young poet, who was an enthusiastic Shelleyite, was in great wrath, but controlled himself out of respect for the laws of hospitality. William Carleton, who was present, took up Carlyle's dictum, and declared that this was what he had long been saying to these young men, but they would not listen to him. MacCarthy, who had great humor and readiness, and who was persuaded that Carleton had never taken the trouble to Yes, Carlyle replied, this was his method read either Shelley or Carlyle, looked at of procedure. He was not inflexible in him reproachfully a moment, and said, his opinions, but he was inflexible in his "Surely, Carleton, you would not dispar-determination to be right, which, when age Shelley's masterpiece, Sartor Resartus'?" The ripple of laughter with

D. F. MacCarthy, the translator of Calderon and
author of "The Early Days of Shelley," etc.
Author of "The Traits and Stories of the Irish
Peasantry."

one came to consider it, was the more manful and honorable method.

I suggested that it was a serious deduction from the "Imaginary Conversations" that they had the dramatic form without the dramatic spirit. He made

ODDS AND ENDS.

Romans, Saxons, and Sandwich Islanders talk the same balanced periods, and approached the heart of a subject by the same slow Socratic method. And he sometimes destroyed the illusion of his work by putting sly sarcasms on Pitt or Byron, Napoleon or the Pope, into the mouths of Greeks and Romans, or of En-in common use in the country. It might glishmen of quite a different generation.

Yes, he said, even in the windy rollicking "Noctes" of Blackwood you met human beings whose sayings belonged to the speaker, and were not to be confounded one with another; but the "Conversations" were all more or less Landor. There were fine touches of character in his statesmen and poets which Wilson or Lockhart could not match, astonishing liveliness and vigor, too, and a far wider horizon of human interest.

I inquired whether literature was not merely his pastime, taken up by fits and starts?

He replied that Landor had been drawn into literature by ambition; he found it did not altogether succeed with him; his merits were far from being acknowledged by all mankind, which soured him in dealing with his fellow-creatures.

He fell into a pleasant gossip on trifling things, and suggested that going the whole hog was probably a phrase of Irish origin. Hog he found was a synonym in Ireland for a tenpenny piece when that coin was be assumed, without much improbability, that an Irishman who began to give his friend a treat in a frugal spirit gradually warmed to the business, and at length, in an explosion of hospitality, proclaimed his intention of magnanimously spending the entire coin. In this sense, going the whole hog had a plain significance; but in the other it was hopeless nonsense. I told him that I thought I had recently chanced on the explanation of another perplexing phrase, Hamlet's test of his own sanity that he knew a hawk from a handsaw. A plasterer who was working for me called to the boy in attendance to bring him his hawk, which it appears is the name of the sort of pallet on which a plasterer carries mortar. Knowing a hawk from a handsaw in this sense was a natural enough test of intelligence, like knowing a hatchet from a crowbar.

After a pause he went on. Landor, Was there any evidence, he inquired, when he was young, went to Italy, believe that the word was in use in the reign of ing that England was too base a place for Elizabeth? This was an indispensable a man of honor to dwell in; but he soon basis for my hypothesis. The hawk and came to discover that Italy was intrinsi- the heronshaw of falconry seemed a more cally a baser place. For the last ten years natural comparison in the mouth of a he lived near Bath, coming rarely to Lon-young prince than one taken from the tools don, which he professed to hate and de- of an artisan. Speaking of the significant spise. He had left his wife in Italy, giving|sayings of notable men, I happened to her all his income except a couple of hundred pounds to get him a daily beefsteak in England. She was not a wise or docile woman, and he could not live with her any longer. He was about to remove his children that they might be properly educated, a task for which he esteemed her in no way fit, but the eldest son snatched up a gun and declared that he had come to a time of life to form an opinion on this question, and by Ghe would shoot any one who attempted to separate his mother and her children – so Landor had to leave them where they

were.

I inquired if his wife were the Ianthe to whom so many of his poems were addressed. Carlyle said he thought not; Ianthe was probably a young girl at Bath, whom Landor counted the model of all perfection, and whom he got a good deal rallied about in London, other people forming quite a different estimate of her gifts.

quote Lord Plunket's phrase: that to the unthinking history was only an old almanac. He said the phrase, if anybody cared to know, was not Lord Plunket's at all, but Jimmy Boswell's, who said to Johnston that somebody or other would reduce all history to the condition of an old almanac, a mere chronological series of events. I answered, laughing, that the currency of Jimmy Boswell's book in Ireland sixty years ago was an indispensable basis for any theory that called in question Plunket's originality. Speaking of the difficulties foreigners find in mastering colloquial English, he mentioned a blunder of Mazzini's, who called Scotch paupers "Scotch poors.' I told him a kindred story which a friend of mine, who visited Dr. Döllin. ger, brought home with him. "There is a prodigious multitude of infidels in Germany, I fear," said my friend. "Yes," replied the professor, “infidels are numerous, but there are a good many 'fidels ' also." He had been smoking all day, and