laugh many and many a night between ten and eleven o’clock, and more than once have had to stop by a lamp-post till the grotesque phrase or conception had shaken me to exhaustion in sympathy with him and the peal had ended. But better still was the proof of the depths of pleasant kindliness in his nature, his power of being actually happy himself and of making others happy, in some of those evening hours I have spent with him in the well-remembered dining-room in Chelsea. Then, both of us, or one of us, reclining on the hearth-rug, that the wreaths of pipe-smoke might innocently ascend the chimney, and Mrs. Carlyle seated near at some piece of work, and public questions laid aside or his vehemences over them having already subsided for that evening, how comfortable he would be, how simple, how husbandly in his looks round to his wife when she interjected one of her bright and witty remarks, how happy in the flow of casual fireside chat about all things and sundry, the quoting of quaint snatches of ballad or lyric, or the resuscitation of old Scottish memories! This mood of pleasant and easy sociability, which always remained with him as one into which he could sink when he liked out of his upper moods of wrath and lamentation, must have been even more conspicuous and common, more nearly habitual, in those Comely Bank days when he felt himself for the first time a full citizen and householder of the Modern Athens, and was not disinclined to friendly intimacy with the other Athenians. Then, as always, the basis of his nature was a profound constitutional sadness, a speculative melancholy, in the form of that dissatisfaction with all the ordinary appearances and courses of things, that private philosophy of protest and nonconformity, which made him really a recluse even when he seemed most accessible and frank. His talk with most of the Edinburgh people, even when apparently the friendliest, was therefore, as he told Mrs. Montagu, like talk from an upper window to people passing in the streets; and into the real house of his spirit few were admitted farther than the lobby. But he had at least disciplined himself into all the requisite observances of good-humoured courtesy, and learnt to practise in his own demeanour the maxim he had about this time thrown into verse:— “The wind blows east, the wind blows west, And there comes good luck and bad; The thriftiest man is the cheerfulest; ’Tis a thriftless thing to be sad, sad; ’Tis a thriftless thing to be sad.”