others.” Miss Jewsbury is all wrong in her dates here. Guthrie was then a young man living totally unheard of in his native Forfarshire, and not yet even a parish minister; and the great Chalmers, who had left Glasgow and its excitements in 1823 for the quiet leisure of the Moral Philosophy Professorship at St. Andrews, can have been but an occasional visitor to Edinburgh from that date till 1828, when they invited him to the more national post of the Professorship of Theology in Edinburgh University. Carlyle’s distinct statement in the _Reminiscences_ is that, after his casual meetings with Chalmers in Glasgow in Irving’s company in 1820 and 1821, he “never saw him again” till May 1847, when the noble old man, in his final visit to London a week or two before his death, called upon him, and sat an hour with him, in his house in Chelsea. More precious by far to Carlyle than all the acquaintanceships Edinburgh afforded, or could afford, was his correspondence with Goethe. It was to this great intellect, this German soul of light and adamant, now verging on his eightieth year, and whom he was never to behold in the flesh, that his thoughts turned incessantly in his domestic musings in Comely Bank, or in his walks anywhere, with or without Jeffrey, between Arthur Seat and the Corstorphines. Besides the four Review articles of 1827 and 1828, there had appeared, since that _Translation of Wilhelm Meister_ in 1824 which Goethe had acknowledged in the note from him received by Carlyle in London, the _Life of Schiller_ in 1825, and the _Specimens of German Romance_ in 1827, this last completing the translation of the _Meister_ by the addition of the “Meister’s Travels” to “Meister’s Apprenticeship.” These had been sufficient texts for new communications between the sage at Weimar and his Scottish admirer; and such accordingly there had been. Already there had been a beginning of the series of graceful little presents from Mrs. Carlyle to Goethe and from Goethe to Mrs. Carlyle of which we hear in the Goethe-Carlyle story as a whole; and there had been more letters between the two men. Nay, Carlyle and his writings had become a topic of frequent talk with Goethe in Weimar. It was on Wednesday, the 25th of July 1827, for example, that Goethe, having just received a letter from Sir Walter Scott, dated from Edinburgh on the 9th of that month, in reply to a letter of compliment and admiration which he had addressed to Scott circuitously in the preceding January, used these memorable words to Eckermann, after showing him Scott’s letter and expressing his delight with it:—“I almost wonder that Walter Scott does not say a word about Carlyle, who has so decided a German tendency that he must certainly be known to him. It is admirable in Carlyle that, in his judgment of our German authors, he has especially in view the _mental and moral core_ as that which is really influential. Carlyle is a _moral force of great importance_: there is in him much for the