One hundred years ago
The literary event of the week has been the publication of Carlyle's reminiscences of his father, of his wife, of Lord Jeffrey, Southey, and Wordsworth, besides incidental notices of a good number of well-known literary men and women amongst his contemporaries. The book is marked by all Carlyle's vivid and picturesque genius, and by a feeling of profound piety towards his father and mother and devotion to his wife, that is at once passionate and full of mature deliberateness; but his judgments on his non-Scottish acquaintances in general are supercilious, and even scornful, not ' to say narrow — for there was not a little of the pragmatic peasant's bigotry of contempt for what was not congenial to him, in Carlyle. What he says of Charles Lamb, for instance, would be enough to excite contempt for himself, in any mind as unelastic as his own. But for the few there was a very deep store of love in Carlyle, Indeed, in Carlyle, a rich capacity for love and scorn seems to have been curiously blended.
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