saying my letter was good; but allow me to observe that among all my elegant and respectable correspondents there is none whose manner of letter-writing I so much envy as yours. A happy flow of language, either for pathos, description, or humour, and an easy, graceful current of ideas appropriate to every subject, characterise your style. This is not adulation; I speak what I think. Your letters will always be a feast to me, a varied and exquisite repast; and the time, I hope, will come, but I trust is far distant, when these, our juvenile epistles, will be read and publicly applauded by a generation unborn, and the name of Carlyle at least will be inseparably connected with the Literary History of the Nineteenth Century.”[12] Strangely enough, Carlyle’s answer to this letter has survived, and it is no less memorable:—“Oh Tom!” it says, “what a foolish flattering creature thou art! To talk of future eminence in connection with the Literary History of the Nineteenth Century to such a one as me! Alas! my good lad, when I and all my fancies and reveries and speculations shall have been swept over by the besom of oblivion, the Literary History of no century will feel itself the worse. Yet think not, because I talk thus, I am careless about literary fame. No, Heaven knows that, ever since I have been able to form a wish, the wish of being known has been the foremost. O Fortune! thou that givest unto each his portion on this dirty planet, bestow, if it shall please thee, coronets and crowns, and principalities and purses, and pudding and power, upon the great and noble and fat ones of the earth; grant _me_ that, with a heart of independence, unyielding to thy favours and unbending to thy frowns, I may attain to literary fame,—and, though starvation be my lot, I will smile that I have not been born a King.”[13]