The philosopher of Chelsea taught that | the course of history was regulated by the lives of great men; Mr. Buckle insisted that it was regulated by the course of great rivers. Nations were misled, he affirmed, by not sufficiently investigating natural causes. He regarded the human race as the bond-slaves of external phenomena; a rich soil or a temperate climate produced wealth, and civilization followed but never preceded the creation of capital. Civilization sprang up in an alluvial soil, or under a genial sky; and the distribution of wealth as well as the creation was governed entirely by physical laws.

The eternal laws of the universe, Carlyle said, told an altogether different story, and the man who refused to recognize them, or insisted on reconstructing the world on a theory of his own, was not worth the pains of listening to.

People kept asking him, "Have you read Buckle's book?" but he answered that he had not, and was not at all likely to do so. He saw bits of it from time to time in reviews, and found nothing in them but shallow dogmatism and inordinate conceit. English literature had got into such a condition of falsity and exaggeration that one may doubt if we should ever again get a genuine book. Probably not. There were no longer men to write or to read them, and the ultimate result of that sort of thing was one which might be conceived. I said it was not pleasant to begin life with so dark a lookout.

MAZZINI.

I ASKED him about the party of Young Italy and its leader. Mazzini, he said, was a diminutive, dark-visaged, little fellow, with bright black eyes, about the stature of that newspaper Barry whom he had encountered at Cork.* Mazzini was a perfectly honorable and true man, but possessed by wild and fanciful theories borrowed from the French Republicans. He believed in Georges Sand and that sort of cattle, and was altogether unac quainted with the true relation of things in this world. The best thing that had ever befallen him was the opening of his letters by Sir James Graham; he was little known in London before that transaction; known, in fact, to few people except the circle in Cheyne Row. But afterwards he had innumerable dinner invitations, and got subscriptions up and down London for his Italian schools and other undertakings.

Michael Joseph Barry, then editor of the Southern Reporter.

DIARY 1854. I spoke to Mrs. Carlyle of Mazzini, whose name just then was a good deal in the newspapers. She said his character, which was generous and self-devoted, was greatly spoiled by a spirit of intrigue. He was always thinking what advantage he could get out of every occurrence.

Advantage for his cause? I queried.

Yes, advantage for his cause, she said; but by methods such a man should scorn. It was he who planned the dinner of revolutionists at the American consul's lately, which got the American ambassador into such a scrape. The consul, a young American - Saunders was probably his name pestered Mazzini to dine with him. He would only consent on condition that Garibaldi, Kossuth, Ledru-Rollin, and the rest were invited. An old Pole, it was said, had to borrow a sovereign to get his uniform out of pawn. Mazzini expected great results in Italy and Hungary from the false interpretation which would be put on this dinner with an American official. Ledru-Rollin and Kossuth, who hated each other, met there for the first time, and probably never again. In fact it was all a stage play, which Mazzini expected to produce the effect of a sincere and serious transaction.*

I said I had supposed him too grave and proud for anything like a trick. She said he was certainly grave and dignified, but he sometimes uttered trivial sentimentalities, with this air of gravity and dig. nity, in a way that was intensely comic. He was entirely engrossed in his purpose, however, while one of his brother triumvirs in the government of Rome actually wrote to London to say that the Westminster Review need not despair of an article he had promised, he would send it with the delay of a month or two. This was a national tribune pour rire.

LYNCH LAW.

SPEAKING of strikes, he said artisans had probably been ill-used; injustice was to be met with in all departments of human affairs, but they had attempted to right themselves by methods which could on no account be tolerated-systematized outrages resembling the ugly gambols of Lynch law beyond the Atlantic.

On Tuesday last, the eve of Washington's birthday, G. N. Sanders, Esq., the American consul at

London, gave an international dinner at his residence,

when there were present Mr. Buchanan, Kossuth, Mazzini, Ledru-Rollin, Sir J. Walmsley, M.P., Garibaldi, Worcell, Orsini, Pulsky, Hertzen, and Mr. Welsh, Attaché to the Legation in London." (Illus trated London News, Feb. 25, 1854.

I suggested that something might be | twaddling old Scotchman who allows no said for Lynch law. It was the only chiv- one to utter a word but himself?" I was alry of the old type left in the world, which so tickled by this illustration of the folly righted wrongs and chastised evil-doers of scattering pearls in unsuitable places, for the simple love of justice. Its offi- that I burst into a guffaw of laughter, cials might be regarded by imaginative which was not easily extinguished. In persons as the knight-errants of the nine- the evening Carlyle asked me what I teenth century. had been laughing at so boisterously. I told him, expecting him to be as much amused as I was. But philosophers, I suppose, don't like to be laughed at by young brides, for he was as much disconcerted by the incident as a beau of fourand-twenty. The absurdity of her judgment he refused to see, and was disposed to insist that she was merely a charming embodiment of the vox populi, for undoubtedly he was an old Scotchman, and probably twaddled a good deal to no purpose.

Carlyle laughed, and said they were knights worthy of the century; blind, passionate, ignorant of real justice, and intolerably self-confident in their ignorance. Lynch law was the invention of a people given to loud talk and self-exhibition, who had done nothing considerable in the world that he had ever heard of.

At Galway our host was a man who had afterwards a remarkable career Edward Butler, then the editor of a Nationalist journal, who had been a State prisoner recently, and became a few years later leader of the Sydney bar and attorneygeneral of New South Wales. In the Reminiscences" Carlyle notes a curious rencontre at this time:

MORE ODDS AND ENDS.

DURING our western journey the talk one day was confined to trifles. I asked him if he had ever come to any decision as to the authorship of "Junius." He reHospitable luncheon from this good editor, plied that in his opinion it did not matter Duffy's sub-editor now, I think; in great tumult, in blazing dusty sun, we do get seated a brass farthing to any human being who in the "Tuam Car," quite full and Walker was Junius. I rejoined that one could not [introduction from Major Sterling, brother of well be indifferent to a question which it John Sterling] recognizing me, inviting warmly was alleged touched the honor of either both Duffy and me to his house at Sligo, and Burke, Chatham, Gibbon, or Grattan. mounting up beside me, also for Tuam this There was a library of controversy on the night, roll prosperously away, Duffy had question - books, pamphlets, essays, and almost rubbed shoulders with Attorney-Gen-articles-the writers of which must have eral Monahan; a rather sinister polite gentle- set a considerable value on the solution of man in very clean linen, who strove hard to have got him hanged lately, but couldn't, such was the bottomless condition of the thing called

66 'Law" in Ireland.

The Queen's College, of which Galway seemed to be particularly proud, planted on the lonely and desolate shores of Lough Corrib, opposite the poor-house, appeared to Carlyle like a reduced gentleman sitting in the mud waiting for relief from the establishment over the way.

On our journey towards Sligo an incident occurred so unexpected and characteristic that it deserves to be mentioned. We were inside passengers by a mail coach, and before it started a young bride and bridegroom on their honeymoon joined us. The bride was charming, and Carlyle courteously talked to her about sight-seeing and the pleasures of travelling, mounting at times to higher themes, like a man who never had a care. He got out of the coach for a moment at a roadside station, and the bride, whom I happened to have known at Belfast, from whence she came, immediately exclaimed, "Who is that

the problem. It probably did not, Carlyle said, concern the honor of Burke and the others in the slightest degree. Persons who dealt with questions of this nature seemed to be of opinion, if any one cared to know, that Philip Francis was the man.

I said that if I was sure of anything in the business it was that Francis was not the man. After his return from India he was constantly posing as a probable Junius, and after his death his wife made the claim definitely on his behalf; but if Junius wanted to be known he had the means of putting the matter outside the regions of doubt. I was persuaded that Francis was Junius's amanuensis and intermediary with Woodfall, and was fond of masquerading in his master's cast clothes. Carlyle made no answer, and proceeded to speak of other things.

I told him of a time when I had travelled over a part of our present route with John Mitchel and John O'Hagan (both known to him). After supper one evening, as O'Hagan read aloud a chapter of "Sartor Resartus," a commercial traveller who had

66

Recurring to Mitchel, he asked if dif ference of policy had been the main cause of our separation.

strayed into the room demanded if he were playing a practical joke, pretending to read and applaud such astonishing nonsense. O'Hagan mildly assured him it Certainly, I said, it had. He wanted to was a genuine book he read, written by advise the people not to pay poor-rate, Thomas Carlyle. 'Carlisle," he ex-poor-rate being the poor man's rent, and claimed, "I am not astonished at any- to prepare for immediate insurrection, thing that fellow would publish. I saw when famine was everywhere in the island, his shop in Fleet Street, with a bishop in and the French Revolution had not revived one window and the devil in another." the national spirit. But he, Carlyle, was O'Hagan informed him that Thomas Car- accountable for another cause of our diflyle was as different a person from Rich- ference; he had taught Mitchel to opard Carlisle as Solomon the wise king pose the liberation of the negroes, and from Solomon the old-clothes man. But the emancipation of the Jews. Mitchel he refused to be persuaded. "Why, sir," wanted to preach these opinions in the he repeated, "I saw with my own eyes Nation, but I could not permit this to be his shop in Fleet Street, with the bishop done, my own convictions being altogether and the devil side by side." different.

Mitchel, he said, would be found to be right in the end; the black man could not be emancipated from the laws of nature, which had pronounced a very decided decree on the question, and neither could the Jew.

W. E. FORSTER.

Carlyle said the bagman was better informed than his class since he knew enough to construct an hypothesis of his own on the subject. Opinions and criticisms about himself were things he heard with little satisfaction; they were for the most part unutterably trivial and worthless. He was known in some small degree to a few men whom he knew in turn, and TOWARDS the end of July, the young that was all that was needful or salutary. Quaker, whose arrival Carlyle had promI told him that when I was in London aised somewhere on the journey, suddenly few weeks before I heard people laughing a good deal at the idea of him which had impressed itself on the mind of a Whig official of the second class. At a dinner table the talk fell on the philosopher of Chelsea. After puzzling for a while to identify him, the official asked his neighbor in a whisper, "Isn't that the man who wrote the French Revolution' with a Scotch accent?"

Carlyle laughed heartily, and imitated his unknown critic in various banal phrases always ending with the Scotch accent. I suggested that the official instead of a bêtise would have made an epigram if he had inquired whether the Mr. Carlyle in question was not the man who wrote all his speculations about Ireland with a decidedly Scotch accent? He laughed, and told the story of the Scotch judge who thought a little hanging would be very useful to a prisoner, implying, I suppose, that a little rough usage was wholesome for Ireland.

I told him that a student, in whose capacity and disposition I had a strong belief, asked for a line in his handwriting, a guiding maxim, if he might choose. We had now arrived at our hotel, and Carlyle wrote on a scrap of paper, as fitting counsel for the case in hand, "Fais ton fait."*

This was the late Cashel Hoey, whose too early death is announced while these pages are being revised.

joined us. He was engaged in adminis tering a fund which his family and friends had raised for the relief of Irish distress, and has left a record of what he saw in Ireland which, for ghastly horror, rivals Defoe's picture of the Great Plague. He was at that time a vigorous, active young fellow, of simple habits and simple speech, in which no one would have detected the future statesman. In the "Reminiscences" Carlyle thus records his arrival:

Car to Ballina (Bally is place, vallum); drivers, boots, &c., busy packing. Tuam coach (ours of yesterday) comes in; there rushes from it, shot as if by cannon from Yorkshire or Morpeth without stopping, — W. E. Forster! very blue-nosed, but with news from my wife, and with inextinguishable out refection, and we start for Ballina; public good-humor; he mounts with us almost withcar all to ourselves; gloomy hulks of mountains on the left; country ill-tilled, some untilled, vacant, and we get upon wide stony moorland, and come in sight of the desolate expanses of "Lough Con."... Duffy has been at mass and sermon. Priest reproving practices on patron days" (pilgrimages, &c., which issue now in whisky mainly), with much good sense, says Duffy.

66

At Westport we came on a ruined population overflowing the workhouse and swarming in the streets. They were idle, or only making believe to work here and there, the Parliament in London having

...

We travelled slowly from Limerick to Sligo, and we found everywhere the features of a recently conquered country. Clare was almost a wilderness from Kilrush to Corofin. have resembled a desert but that the stumps The desolate shores of Lough Corrib would of ruined houses showed that not nature, but

man, had been the desolator. Between Killala Bay and Sligo, during an entire day's travel, we estimated that every second dwelling was pulled down; and not cabins alone, but stone houses fit for the residence of a substantial yeomanry.

We were shown the mansion of a baronet who spent in London a rental of £30,000 a year drawn from his Irish tenantry; he had ejected three hundred and twenty persons within a few months, and was in arrears with his poor-rate.

Human swinery has here reached its acme, happily: 30,000 paupers in this union, population supposed to be 60,000. Workhouse proper (I suppose) cannot hold above 3 or 4000 of them, subsidiary workhouses and outdoor relief for the others. Abomination of desolation! what can you make of it? Outdoor quasi-work; 3 or 400 big hulks of fellows tumbling about with shares, picks, and barrows, "levelling" the end of their workhouse hill; at first glance you would think them all working; look nearer, in each shovel there is some ounce or two of mould, and it is all make-believe; 5 or 600 boys and lads pretend- The degradation which had fallen on the ing to break stones. Can it be a charity to generous Celtic race was a sight such as I had keep men alive on these terms? . . . Fifty-nowhere seen or read of. The famine and four wretched mothers sat rocking young offspring in one room; vogue la galère. "Dean Bourke" (Catholic priest, to whom also we had a letter) turns up here; middle-aged, middle-sized figure, rustyish black coat, hessian boots, white stockings, good-humored, loud-speaking face, frequent Lundyfoot snuff; a mad pauper woman shrieks to be towards him, keepers seize her, bear her off shrieking; Dean, poor fellow, has to take it "asy," I find how otherwise? Issuing from the workhouse ragged cohorts are in waiting for him, persecute him with their begging. Wherever he shows face, some scores, soon waxing to be hundreds, of wretches beset him: he confesses he dare not stir out except on horseback, or with some fenced park to take refuge; poor Dean Bourke!

The Irish problem, Carlyle said as we came away, was to make a beginning in checking pauperism. This was the first task a sensible man would desire to see taken in hand. He would not attempt to show the way, not being familiar with practical business, but he asserted there was a way. Peel, from his mastery over the details of business, knowing what this axle and that wheel was fit for, had great advantages, and if he were only thirty years of age with his present experience, he would do some notable work before he died.

One spectacle which struck Mr. Carlyle much in the later days of our journey, he has omitted to notice in the "Reminiscences," the systematic suppression of the peasantry by the landlords. I borrow a page or two from my own diary of the period on this and some other forgotten incidents:

the landlords have actually created a new race in Ireland. We saw on the streets of Galway crowds of creatures more debased than the Yahoos of Swift- creatures having only a distant and hideous resemblance to human beings. Grey-headed old men whose idiotic faces had hardened into a settled leer of mendicancy, and women filthier and more frightful than the harpies, who at the jingle of a coin on the pavement swarmed in myriads from unseen places; struggling, screaming, shrieking for their prey, like some monstrous and unclean animals. In Westport the sight of the priest on the street gathered an entire pauper population, thick as a village market, swarming round him for relief. Beggar children, beggar adults, beggars in white hairs, girls with faces grey and shrivelled; women with the more touching and tragic aspect of lingering shame and self-respect not yet effaced; and among these terrible realities, imposture shaking in pretended fits to add the last touch of horrible grotesqueness to the picture! I saw these accursed sights, and they are burned into my memory forever. Poor, mutilated, and debased scions of a tenin the battle of centuries for the right to live der, brave and pious stock, they were martyrs in their own land, and no Herculaneum or Pompeii covers ruins so memorable to me as those which lie buried under the fallen rooftrees of an "Irish extermination."

After such a tragedy as Westport exhib. ited we could have little relish, I fancy, for criticism, or the biography of notabilities, but Carlyle reports that the day finished as usual with “babbling of literature," for which, it seems, I was responsible, needing, perhaps, some relief after much natural wrath and pity.

Duffy and I privately decide that we will have some luncheon at our inn, and quit this

citadel of mendicancy, intolerable to gods and man, back to Castlebar this evening. Brilliant rose-pink landlady, reverent of Duffy. Bouquet to Duffy; mysteriously handed from unknown young lady, with verse or prose note; humph! humph!-and so without accident in now bright hot afternoon, we take leave of Croagh Patrick (devils and serpents all collected there -Oh, why isn't there some Patrick to do it now again!) and babbling of "literature" (not by my will), perhaps about 5 P.M. arrive at Castlebar again, and (for D.'s sake) are reverently welcomed.

At Donegal our pleasant trip ended. I had to return to Dublin with a view to re

vive immediately the Nation (which had been suppressed by the government in July, 1848), and Carlyle, after a brief visit to Gweedore, was to sail from Derry to Glasgow. This is the notice of our dispersion in the "Reminiscences," somewhat abridged:

of it in cheaper materials, in chalk, I believe, instead of pipe clay; and after earning a little dishonest profit by selling it under the same name, totally destroyed the character of both articles, and brought the traffic to an end. I told the story to Carlyle, and assured him that this had been the history of more important industrial enterprises in Ireland. Our native woollens had been imitated in shoddy in Yorkshire, and the fraudulent article sent for sale in Dublin as Irish manufacture. Carlyle said the despicable and distracted career of modern competition had many worse incidents to exhibit. One of the most alarming phases of our social life was complete contempt for veracity and integ. rity, by which profit was pursued by these sons of Mammon, the ultimate result of which no reasonable man could doubt.

As soon as he got settled at home our correspondence recommenced, and a little later our conversations.

C. GAVAN Duffy.

From The Cornhill Magazine. ON DUTCH CANALS.

THE man who wants a hearty laugh may be counselled to take his skates into Holland and spend a week or two gliding over the canals of that somewhat dismal land. He must, of course, have a taste for ice in the first place. Further, his pleasure is more likely to be assured if he also have no objection to gin, extremely cold beds, and female faces upon which, also, he will but seldom be able to discover a single beautiful feature. In fact, he must go in the mood of the safe philosopher to whom it is all one whether he suffers or enjoys, and to whom virtue and vice are the equivalents of beauty and ugliness.

Sea and Donegal and Killibegs, moory raggedness with green patches near, all treeless -nothing distinct till steep narrow street of "Ballyshannon; mills, breweries, considerable, confused, much white-washed country town. Tourists, quasi-English, busy at table already: silent exct. waiter, doing his swiftest in imperturbable patience and silence. And so to the road again, quitting Ballyshannon; only Duffy, Forster, and I did breakfast there. Donegal a dingy little town; triangular market place; run across to see O'Neill's old mansion; skeleton of really sumptuous old castle,Spanish gold in Queen Elizabeth's time had helped. Dropping Forster, who will go by Glentier to Gweedore, and meet me there; Duffy is for Dublin, I for Derry, and we part at Stranorlar; I, by appointment, am for Lord George Hill's, and have a plan of route from Plattnauer. And now from the moor-edge one sees "Stranorlar" several miles off, and a valley mostly green, not exemplary for culture, but most welcome here. Down towards it, Duffy earnestly talking, consulting, questioning; pathetic, as looking to the speedy end now. Down into the valley; fat heavy figure, in grey coarse woollen, suddenly running with us, sees me, says We all know that nature is a very fickle "all r-ight!" It is poor Plattnauer, who has come personage. The man who times his gothus far to meet me! we get him up; enterings and his comings upon a forecast of through the long outskirts of "Stranorlar," her moods is sure to make mistakes. Only up its long idle-looking street, to coach-stand; once in a hundred times may the helpless and there Duffy stretching out his hand, with mortal aim deliberately at the bull's-eye of silent sorrowful face, I say, "Farewell," and the future, and anon be able to congratuam off to Plattnauer's little inn; and consider late himself upon his good fortune. This my tour as almost ended. refers especially to castles of hope built upon ice. I don't know how a mathematician would compute the odds against the likelihood of a frost's continuance; but they must be crushing. A man may busy himself with anticipations and arrangements, buy new skates for the purpose, and set off gleefully for the steam-packets

I had sent to Dublin to procure a supply of Carlyle's favorite repeal pipes, which I hoped to give him before parting, and I got in reply a story with a moral. The repeal pipe had been pushed out of the market by an enterprising English manufacturer, who fabricated an imitation