open the window, clear daylight had come, and the birds were singing. Regular to strictness as were Carlyle’s habits always, and obliged as he was to such strictness by the state of his health, he would venture now and then on such exceptionally late conviviality on sufficient occasion or in fit company, and did not find himself any the worse for it. Other instances of it are within my knowledge, when he sat for long hours with far humbler companions than Christopher North, and was the life and soul of their little symposium.[43] De Quincey had not made Edinburgh definitively his home in 1827 and 1828; but, his connection with _Blackwood_ having then begun, he was a good deal in Edinburgh through those years, astray for reasons of finance from his family in Grasmere, and quartered with his friend Wilson, or in Edinburgh lodgings of his own. In recollection of his severe review of Carlyle’s Translation of _Wilhelm Meister_ in the _London Magazine_ for August and September 1824, there was considerable shyness on his part in meeting Carlyle now; but, a meeting having happened somehow, and that disagreeable recollection having been sunk, no one was a more welcome visitor to Carlyle and his wife in Comely Bank than the weird little Opium-eater. The passage in the _Reminiscences_ in which Carlyle gives his own and Mrs. Carlyle’s impressions of De Quincey as they then knew him reveals on the whole, with all its qualifications of critical estimate, a lingering regard to the last for De Quincey as one of the most remarkable British men of genius in his generation; and there is perfectly conclusive evidence that in the Comely Bank days his regard for De Quincey was something still higher and more affectionate. But, indeed, all through those days Carlyle’s literary sympathies, politically a Radical _sui generis_ though he was, and the _protégé_ though he was of the Whig potentate Jeffrey, were rather with that Tory set of Edinburgh intellectualities of whom De Quincey was one, and of whom Wilson in _Blackwood_ was the public chief, than with Jeffrey’s more narrow-laced clientage of the Blue-and-Yellow. His acquaintance with Lockhart, who had been in London since 1826 as editor of the _Quarterly Review_, can hardly date from this period; but among those I have heard him speak of as Edinburgh friends of his, almost certainly of this period, was the accomplished George Moir, then one of the young Tory lawyers of literary note about the Parliament House, and afterwards Professor of Belles Lettres in the University. How many other persons, Whig or Tory, distinguished or undistinguished, came about him in Comely Bank, who can tell now? Miss Jewsbury, indeed, in her notes of Mrs. Carlyle’s talks with her, is very comprehensive and summary on that subject. “Whilst they were in Edinburgh,” says Miss Jewsbury of Carlyle and his wife, “they knew everybody worth knowing: Lord Jeffrey was a great admirer of hers, and an old friend; Chalmers, Guthrie, and many