I must say further to the student: read either Carlyle's "French Revolution" or his "Frederick the Great," I care not which, although it is well worth one's while to read both. If your friends who maintain that history is a science convince you that the "French Revolution" is not history, as perhaps they may, read it as a narrative poem. Truly Carlyle spoke rather like a poet than a historian when he wrote to his wife (in his forty-first year): "A hundred pages more and this cursed book is flung out of me. I mean to write with force of fire till that consummation; above all with the speed of fire.... It all stands pretty fair in my head, nor do I mean to investigate much more about it, but to splash down what I know in large masses of colors, that it may look like a smoke-and-flame conflagration in the distance, which it is."[20] It was Carlyle's custom to work all of the morning and take a solitary walk in Hyde Park in the afternoon, when looking upon the gay scene, the display of wealth and fashion, "seeing," as he said, "all the carriages dash hither and thither and so many human bipeds cheerily hurrying along," he said to himself: "There you go, brothers, in your gilt carriages and prosperities, better or worse, and make an extreme bother and confusion, the devil very largely in it.... Not one of you could do what I am doing, and it concerns you too, if you did but know it."[21] When the book was done he wrote to his brother, "It is a wild, savage book, itself a kind of French Revolution."[22] From its somewhat obscure style it requires a slow perusal and careful study, but this serves all the more to fix it in the memory causing it to remain an abiding influence.