Strange that, while my memory retains this triviality of the evening so distinctly, almost all the rest should have gone into haze. Carlyle, I am sure, was not in his objurgatory vein at all that evening, but in his most genial vein of anecdote and miscellaneous talk. One of the things talked of was a recent murder, or suspected murder, by a poor Irish tramp; and I remember that Carlyle and Forster agreed in a kind of notion that one could hardly judge how easily a poor illiterate fellow might resort to murder merely to get out of a scrape. Forster had quite as much of the talk as Carlyle; and, though I had casual glimpses of Forster at intervals in subsequent years, and even some correspondence with him before his death, my strongest impression of him personally, save one, is from this first meeting with him. He must then have been only about thirty-two years of age.

5

George Lillie Craik, one of my earliest acquaintances in London, became a good friend of mine. When I first saw him, I looked at him with an interest that had been pre-awakened by reading his book, "The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties." " His prematurely gray hair gave him then something already the appearance of a veteran. He was a man of robust build, and broad and good-humored face, with a sanguine freshness of complexion and a general heartiness of demeanor. If there had been any difficulties in his own pursuit of knowledge, they had left no traces of discontent. Indeed, all the time I knew Craik a cheerful contentedness of disposition was his obvious characteristic. Craik and his family lived in a pretty cottage called "Vine Cottage." in Cromwell Lane, Old Brompton. In vain

5 Published in 1831. The name had been chosen by Lord Brougham, then President of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.-F. M.

now will any one look for that old Cromwell Lane. Even to imagine its whereabouts now, as I can remember it, is difficult. There it was once, however, a narrow, tortuous lane, lined with rusty-nailed palings, on the left hand as you went from Brompton, shutting off a succession of nurserygrounds, and at intervals on the right some quaint cottages, each nestled in its own bit of garden. Craik's cottage was one of these, the approach to it something of a venture at night, from the deficiency of lights and the general sense of loneliness. But in the daytime, and especially in summer, the cottage, with its garden about it, had a look of sequestered leafiness and of cosy English domesticity. On the small grass-plat which formed the chief part of the garden was such a plum-tree, laden with fruit every sunny autumn season, that you needed not to pluck any from the branches for eating. but might select from those that had fallen off from over-ripeness, and lay strewn for you temptingly round the root. There was no lack of visitors. Scottish or English, in Craik's pleasant home. Carlyle might be accounted a neighbor, and so with Leigh Hunt, an older Londoner than either, and living in Kensington; and they were both often there for a walk with Craik on late afternoons, or at those evenings of tea and talk at Vine Cottage. Very pleasant evenings these were--some of them even memorable. It chanced that I never met Carlyle under Craik's roof, and only once Leigh Hunt. This was on an evening when he had casually dropped in, and others were present. He did not take much part in the talk that went on, and my recollection is chiefly of his soft and genial manner, and the fine look of his white head. It was a head of goodish size, but not of such size as to diminish the wonder of the fact, recorded by himself somewhere, that his hat, when placed on

the heads of Byron, Shelley, and Keats, eclipsed them completely by slipping down over their eyebrows.

One day Carlyle, whose visits to the British Museum for material for his "Cromwell" were becoming intolerably irksome to him, asked me if I knew of any one who, for a moderate weekly remuneration, would relieve him of that trouble by making researches and copying extracts in the Museum under his instructions. At the moment I could think of no one likely to suit him; but, after I had left, it occurred to me that this would be the very thing for John Christie. He had been one of my class-fellows in the GrammarSchool of Aberdeen; a strong-headed fellow, rather older than most of us, rough in manner, sulky, and uncomely of face. He had followed me to Marischal College, attending the general classes there, but in training more especially for the medical profession. From that time I had lost sight of him till we met again in London; but the course of his life in the interim had become well known to me. Having taken his medical degree in Aberdeen with good credit, and having saved a little money, he had come to London, a fully-qualified medical man, intending to go out as a ship's surgeon for a few years of voyaging experience before settling in practice. Accident had changed his plans. He had met and won the affections of, and married, one of the most beautiful girls that man ever set eyes upon,-country-bred, gentle and winning in manner, as she was faultlessly beautiful. Christie stayed in London. With the small stock of money he had he entered into partnership with an apothecary in a poor London neighborhood, the intention being that his colleague would attend to the drug-dispensing part of the business, while Christie undertook such medical and surgical practice as might

a feasible enough project; for I doubt if any of the poorer quarters of London could have commanded the services of a really abler or more thoroughly qualified practitioner than Christie would have proved himself to be. But there was a sudden collapse in the arrangement, I know not what, with the result that Christie and his. beautiful wife, with their infant boy,— all his money lost,-were living in apartments off Oxford Street. He labored at anatomical drawings for artists and coached artists in anatomy. He was ready-the rough, strongheaded fellow-for anything by which he could earn an honest living. Such was the state of his affairs, intimately known to me, when Carlyle made the inquiry I have mentioned. A note. from me to Carlyle, followed by an interview between Carlyle and Christie, settled the matter; and from that day till the conclusion of the "Cromwell" for the press Christie acted as Carlyle's factotum in the British Museum,. his deputy for researchings and copyings, and his personal amanuensis. Carlyle afterwards assured me that he could not have had an abler assistant for such work, or a more trustworthy.. Both he and Mrs. Carlyle contracted a real regard for Christie, and were very kind to him. But the "Cromwell" having been finished, the question had come to be what Christie was to do. next. If ever one human being labored on behalf of another in distress, it was Carlyle on behalf of poor Christie, through the months of 1845 and 1846. At last, by Sir James Clark's influence, if I remember rightly, there was definitely obtained for him a clerkship in the Registrar-General's office in Somerset House, with a salary of about £90 a-year; but it had come too late. His beautiful young wife had died of consumption. He had sent the child into the country to his dead wife's re

lations, and all that the clerkship could do now was to save the broken-hearted fellow himself from starvation and enable him to pay for the board of his child. He was very wretched, all his thoughts constantly on his dead wife and his little boy in the country. He talked, however, gratefully of the kindness of the Carlyles. His reverence for Carlyle was touching; he had kept the bound set of proof-sheets of the "Cromwell," with some marginal corrections on them, in affectionate evidence of his connection with Carlyle in that labor. A few months more and Christie and all his sorrows were out of my sight. The seeds of consumption, caught during his attendance on his wife, appeared in himself. He went back to his native Aberdeen to try the effect of that change, and there he died. The last incident of this London tragedy in my recollection is a visit which Alexander Bain and I paid to poor Christie's vacant rooms after his death for the purpose of making such arrangements as were possible, by inventory and sale of his worldly goods, for the benefit of his little boy. that son is now living he must be over forty years of age," and can remember nothing of his father and mother.

If

Of all the walks that Carlyle and I took together in the old London nights that now lie behind me like a distantstretching dream, there are two which I recall with peculiar associations of sacredness. One summer night about eleven o'clock we had passed our usual parting-point at Hyde Park Corner and had strolled into the Park itself, lured by the beauty of a specially soft and star-brilliant sky overhead. The softness and stillness around and the starry brilliance above had touched his soul to its finest and gentlest depths. All roughness, all querulousness, gone; he was in a mood of the simplest 6 Written about 1885.

LIVING AGE.

were

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and most sage-like serenity. sauntered to and fro on the grass, the sole human beings peripatetic, where but a few hours before there had been the roar of the carriages in stream and the parallel gallop of the equestrians, it was the stars and the silence that seemed to work upon him and to suggest his theme. From the mystery and the splendor of physical infinitude he passed to what ought to be the rule of human behavior, the conduct of one's own spirit, in a world framed so majestically and so divinely. There was too much jesting in it, he said, too much of mere irony and laughter at the absurd, too little of calm religiousness and serious walk with God. In speaking of the over-prevalence of the habit of irony, sarcasm, and jesting, he used a sudden phrase of self-humiliation which I have never forgotten. "Ah! and I have given far too much in to that myself-sniggering at things": these are the exact words. Though they are the only exact words I can now recall out of that quarter of an hour of his varied talk, all in the same vein of deeply-moved meditation, it is the solemn charm of the whole of the little colloquy that remains in my memory. If ever one man spoke to another absolutely spirit to spirit, it was Carlyle to me in that quarter of an hour of our walk to and fro in that star-silvered and free-skirted solitude in the middle of London.

As memorable to me, though for a different reason, is another evening walk with him, which must have been nearly contemporary. This time, by some chance, we had not taken the usual route from Cheyne Row in the direction of Hyde Park, but had turned down Cheyne Row to the Chelsea riverside. We had not gone far from his house, and were on a narrowish part of the foot pavement, in front of some small lighted shops, when, without anything preliminary that I can now re

member, he said, as if carelessly: "By the bye, I have a lot of money lying by me at present-far more than I have any need for: some of it might be more useful in your hands than in mine." Taken aback by the generosity of the offer, and by the suddenness of it, I could only express my thanks in a lame and stammering way, assuring him at the same time that I really did not need to avail myself of it, having quite enough of my own at that time for all necessary purposes. "Much better so; much better so," he replied, almost interruptingly; and, when I tried again to express to him how deeply his kindness touched me, he would not hear Blackwood's Magazine.

a word, but stopped me gruffishly by at once changing the subject. From that moment, the incident was never SO much as mentioned between us again. I daresay he had totally forgotten it in the later days of our intercourse, but it was not for me to forget it, and I never shall. Only to one or two persons have I ever confided it; but let it stand now in print as one of my registered experiences of the character of the stern-seeming man whom I walked with so often in those old London days of his full stature and strength, and who now rests in his grave at Ecclefechan.

There have been some dispassionate observers, not in Great Britain only but upon the Continent of Europe, who have felt the Church of England to be in a special sense the hope of Christianity and of religion. They have looked perhaps upon Christendom from the intellectual side; they have been firm believers in the rights of the individual conscience; liberty of thought, of speech and of worship has been to them a sovereign principle of life; they have been well-disposed and sometimes devoted to religion, yet only to such a religion as was in their eyes not a hot-house plant but a tree strong enough to brave the stress and storm of a critical world; and while they have found themselves more or less repelled by the hard, dogmatic, authoritative system of the Church of Rome, and driven to doubt whether a church, if she had misled them, as they believed, in many earthly things, where it was possible to test her teaching by experience, could be an infallible guide in the heavenly things which admit of no such testing, they have turned wistful

eyes to the Church of England as uniting in a singular degree freedom and faith, intellectuality and spirituality among her members, and as helping to produce, in the words of the venerable Archbishop of Armagh, the welcome spectacle of a faith which was not afraid to reason and a science which was not ashamed to believe. Or they have taken perhaps what may be called the historical view of Christendom; they have set a high value upon tradition as the exponent of unbroken Catholic practice; it is the antiquity and the continuity of the Church which have appealed to their sympathies; they have resented the idea of a Church beginning or seeming to begin with the reformers of the sixteenth century and still more with a Robert Browne or a John Wesley; and it has appeared to them that the Church of England by her apostolic orders, her regular sacraments and her whole ecclesiastical system is capable of offering them the spiritual atmosphere which it was not so easy to breathe in the Presbyterian bodies of Ireland and Scotland and of

Protestant Europe. Or it may be again that such persons, if they have imbibed something of the spirit commonly, but not upon the whole correctly, associated with the name of Erastus, have been attracted by the Church of England as avoiding "the falsehood of extremes," or realizing the via media which was in their eyes the path not of safety alone but of truth, or allowing a great and wide liberty of profession and practice to her clergy and still more to her laity, or as influencing the course of public affairs not so much by any exercise of authority as by the wise statesmanship of her bishops and the quiet unobtrusive sympathy of her ministers with the highest and noblest aspirations of the national life.

It may be worth while in this regard to quote two or three significant testimonies.

Casaubon remarked long ago that, if he was not mistaken, the soundest part of the Reformation was to be found in England, where the study of antiquity flourished together with zeal for the truth. Madame de Stael wrote, "La Réformation a mis chez les Anglois les lumières parfaitement en accord avec les sentimens religieux." De Maistre wrote:

Si jamais les Chrétiens se rapprochent, comme tout les y invite, il semble que la motion doit partir de l'Eglise de l'Angleterre. . . . L'Eglise anglicane, qui nous touche d'une main, touche de l'autre ceux que nous ne pouvons toucher, et quoique, sous un certain point de vue, elle soit en butte aux coups des deux partis... cependant elle est très précieuse sous d'autres aspects, et peut être considérée comme un de ces intermèdes chymiques, capables de rapprocher des élémens inassociables de leur nature.2

So too the late Mr. Lecky could say, 1" Considérations sur la Révolution Francoise," Part VII. ch. v.

2" Considérations sur la France, ch. ii. p. 32.

"there is no other Church which has shown itself so capable of attracting and retaining the services of men of general learning, criticism, and ability.3

The Church of England, if it were her only title to the respect of Christendom that she has succeeded in harmonizing to a unique degree the rival tendencies of faith and thought, history and liberty, practical common sense and spiritual devotion, would occupy a position of singular interest in the Christian world. But the providential course of secular events has affected and augmented her dignity. She is, as her name implies, the Church of the English nation. If she has exercised an influence upon the characteristics of the national life, she has in turn been influenced by them. Such reciprocal influence has been the outcome of a tacit sympathy between the Church and the nation. The Church has been or has aspired to be in faith and morals ahead of the nation; but she has seldom been out of touch with the nation. For good or for evil she has not unfaithfully reflected in her long history the dominant tones of national sentiment and conviction. Of this mutual understanding between the civil and ecclesiastical forces the State Establishment, as it is called, is the natural expression, but it is not the neces sary condition. What has been essential to the peculiar influence of the Church of England upon the national life is that she has stood and has been felt to stand in a sympathetic relation to the English people. In the Abbey Church of Westminster, Roman Catholics still kneel at the shrine of the Confessor; Nonconformists still look up to the memorials of Milton and Watts and the Wesleys. But the spiritual allegiance of Englishmen all the world over to the Abbey Church of 'Westminster is no more than a su3 Map of Life, ch. ii. p. 216.