A most agreeable walk I took one day down to Annan. Irving's name still exists there, but I believe all his near kindred have disappeared. Across the street from the little house where he was born this sign may be seen: "Edward Irving, Flesher." While in Glasgow, I visited Irving's grave, in the crypt of the cathedral, a most dismal place, and was touched to see the bronze tablet that marked its site in the pavement bright and shining, while those about it, of Sir this or Lady that, were dull and tarnished. Did some devoted hand keep it scoured, or was the polishing done by the many feet that paused thoughtfully above this name? Irving would long since have been forgotten by the world had it not been for his connection with Carlyle, and it was probably the lustre of the latter's memory that I saw reflected in the metal that bore Irving's name. The two men must have been of kindred genius in many ways, to have been so drawn to each other, but Irving had far less hold upon reality; his written word has no projectile force. It makes a vast difference whether you burn gunpowder on a shovel or in a gun-barrel. Irving may be said to have made a brilliant flash, and then to have disappeared in the smoke. Some men are like nails, easily drawn; others are like rivets, not drawable at all. Carlyle is a rivet, well _headed_ in. He is not going to give way, and be forgotten soon. People who differed from him in opinion have stigmatized him as an actor, a mountebank, a rhetorician; but he was committed to his purpose and to the part he played with the force of gravity. Behold how he toiled! He says, "One monster there is in the world,--the idle man." He did not merely preach the gospel of work; he was it,--an indomitable worker from first to last. How he delved! How he searched for a sure foundation, like a master builder, fighting his way through rubbish and quicksands till he reached the rock! Each of his review articles cost him a month or more of serious work. "Sartor Resartus" cost him nine months, the "French Revolution" three years, "Cromwell" four years, "Frederick" thirteen years. No surer does the Auldgarth bridge, that his father helped build, carry the traveler over the turbulent water beneath it, than these books convey the reader over chasms and confusions, where before there was no way, or only an inadequate one. Carlyle never wrote a book except to clear some gulf or quagmire, to span and conquer some chaos. No architect or engineer ever had purpose more tangible and definite. To further the reader on his way, not to beguile or amuse him, was always his purpose. He had that contempt for all dallying and toying and lightness and frivolousness that hard, serious workers always have. He was impatient of poetry and art; they savored too much of play and levity. His own work was not done lightly and easily, but with labor throes and pains, as of planting his piers in a weltering flood and chaos. The spirit of