One winter night I tried to re-read Carlyle’s “Past and Present” and certain of his “Latter-Day Pamphlets;” but I found I could not, and thanked my stars that I did not have to. It was like riding a spirited but bony horse bareback. There was tremendous “go” in the beast; but oh, the bruises from those knotty and knuckle-like sentences! But the “Life of Sterling” I have found I can re-read with delight; it has a noble music. Certain of the essays, also, such as the ones on Scott, Burns, and Johnson, have a perennial quality. Parts of “Frederick” I mean to read again, and the “Reminiscences.” I have re-read “Sartor Resartus,” but it was a task, hardly a pleasure. Nearly four fifths of the book, I should say, is chaff; but the other fifth is real wheat, if you are not choked in getting it. Yet I have just read the story of an educated tramp who carried the book in his blanket thousands of miles and knew it nearly by heart. Carlyle wrote as he talked; his “Latter-Day Pamphlets” are harangues that it would have been a delight to hear, but in the printed page we miss the guiding tone and emphasis, and above all do we miss the laugh that mollified the bitter words. One can stand, or even welcome, in life what may be intolerable in print; put the same thing in a book, and it is the pudding without the sauce, and cold at that. The colloquial style is good, or the best, if perfectly easy and simple. In reading aloud we teach our children to read as they speak, and thus make the words their own. The same thing holds in writing: the less formal, the less _written_, the sentences are, or the more they are like familiar speech, the more genuine and real the writing seems, the more it becomes one’s own; but when the form and manner of spoken sentences are very pronounced, they become tiresome when transferred to print. Carlyle will doubtless hold his place in English literature, but he is terribly handicapped in some of his books by his crabbed, raw-boned style. What reading man does not re-read Boswell’s “Johnson” two or three times in the course of his life? The charm of this is that it is so much like the spoken word, and so filled with the presence of the living man. Another volume of a similar kind, which I have read three times and dipped into any number of times, is Eckermann’s “Conversations with Goethe.” It is a pregnant book; in fact, I know no such armory of critical wisdom anywhere else as this book contains. Its human interest may not be equal to Boswell, though I find this very great; but as an intellectual excitant it is vastly superior.