That Thomas Carlyle is a grand and noble writer, no one who has ever read his ‘French Revolution,’ his ‘Life of John Sterling,’ and his ‘Hero Worship,’ could have the insolence to deny; but he is a writer demanding a considerable expenditure of brain power on the part of his readers; and for a worker who has been sitting in a cramped position all day mending shoes, to find himself lost among the Immensities, or vainly endeavouring to grapple with Phantasmal Captains, Ineptitudes, and other strange creatures, is hardly the most refreshing form of mental solace after physical labour. Mrs. Joyce was sewing on the other side of the little table, wasting her eyesight in order to economize her candle. Mother and son rose at Cyril’s entrance, and the widow brought forward the best chair, a battered old easy chair, which her son had neatly covered with bright-looking chintz, for the visitor. Emmanuel was tall, thin, and pale, with hollow cheeks and a projecting forehead, under which shone darkly bright eyes, large and bulbous. His lips were thin, his chin indicated a firmness of character verging upon obstinacy. It was an interesting face, but not altogether a pleasant one, save when the young man spoke to his mother, and then his countenance was lighted by a smile which made it beautiful. ‘Mother told me you’d been to see her, sir,’ he said. ‘She took it very kindly that you should spare time to sit down and chat a bit with her, especially as you didn’t leave a tract behind you.’ ‘You don’t like tracts,’ said Cyril, smiling at the energy with which the last sentence was spoken. ‘I detest them.’ ‘Yet I think the book you are reading is something in the form of a tract,’ speculated Cyril, whose quick eye had caught the title of Carlyle’s book. ‘It is not a religious tract, sir. It appeals to man’s highest faculties--it kindles all that is best and greatest in his soul--but it does not pelt him with Scripture texts, or tell him that he is by nature a reprobate and castaway, judged and doomed before he was born.’ ‘Do you think the Bible tells a man that?’ ‘Yes, sir, it does. The Bible texts that were flung at my head in my childhood and boyhood were all to one purpose. They told me that I was a vessel of wrath, and that I was doomed to the burning. When I was eighteen years of age I began to think for myself.’ ‘You began to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.’ ‘No, sir. I had read Shelley’s “Queen Mab,” by that time, and I had my own ideas of the justice of my Creator. If He were just He would not create me for misery either here or hereafter. And then I looked round me and saw a world that reeked with human misery and divine injustice.’