describe a peculiarity of Sir William’s talk, when, in expounding some difficult point perfectly lucid to himself, he would say “_The fact is_,” and then, after plunging for a while through a tough jungle of words and distinctions, would repeat “_The fact is_,” and so go on again, without ever quite succeeding in clutching “the fact” so as to bring it out to his satisfaction. There is also an account of a debate on Craniology between Sir William and Mr. George Combe one evening at a great meeting of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, when Sir William, in Carlyle’s opinion, utterly demolished Combe and his phrenology by exhibiting two skulls, one the skull of a Malay murderer and the other the skull of George Buchanan, and showing that by the phrenological measurements the Malay murderer was much the superior man. That presence of Carlyle in the Royal Society rooms seems, however, to have been on a winter visit to Edinburgh a year or two after the time of his residence in Comely Bank. That he knew those rooms by more attendances in them than one I am positively certain; for he recollected the excellent and rare quality of the tea that, from some exceptional opportunity of correspondence with China, used then to be served to members and visitors of the Edinburgh Royal Society after the business of the meetings. Another Edinburgh acquaintanceship of the Comely Bank time was that with John Wilson, the everfamous “Christopher North.” He had been lord of _Blackwood_ since 1817, and since 1820 the admired and adored of all the youth of Edinburgh University, for his magnificent mien and stature, and the legends of his feats of strength, pedestrianism, and pugilism, no less than for his eloquent prelections in the Moral Philosophy professorship. To know the great Wilson by his figure and face as he strode, yellow-haired and white-hatted, along Princes Street or George Street, was a mere privilege of being in the same city with him. You could not miss him if you were in either of those streets, and on the outlook for him, any three days in succession; and once seen he was in your memory for ever. That amount of cognisance of Wilson in Edinburgh had been Carlyle’s, as everybody else’s, for not a few years; but it was now, in Wilson’s forty-second or forty-third year, and Carlyle’s thirty-second or thirty-third, that they first met in private and shook hands. It was in the rooms of the Dr. John Gordon already mentioned as one of Carlyle’s most intimate friends of those days. Carlyle once described to me the meeting, and how late they sat, and in what a glory of talk, though the details had been forgotten, they spun out the hours, not without hospitable aids on the table, whether of the foreign ruby and amber sorts or of the more potent native crystal. It was so very late, or rather such early morning, before they parted, I heard afterwards from Dr. Gordon himself, that, when Wilson rose and threw