Sometimes he would put away his pipe, don his long brown coat and soft wide-awake hat, grasp his cudgel and come out for a walk on the Embankment or in Battersea Park. Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, a great friend of Carlyle’s and afterwards his executor, was a pretty frequent companion on these Sunday walks. During these outings Carlyle used to cross-examine me about Japan, which greatly excited his curiosity. He made me very proud once by saying that he had “read my ‘Tales of Old Japan’ from Alpha to Omega.” He did not like the stories; there was too much blood and murder in them—but that was not my fault—at any rate, I felt that to have been read “from Alpha to Omega” by Carlyle was a bright feather in my cap. Occasionally, if the weather was bad, Carlyle would go for what he called his drive. This meant taking the omnibus in the King’s Road as far as the Bank and coming back in a return bus. I only once bore him company on one of these expeditions, but it was a memorable occasion. It was at the time of the Bulgarian atrocities when Mr. Gladstone was goading the country into fury with his eloquence, till Delane once said to me, “Upon my word I verily believe that Gladstone thinks that Dizzy himself had a hand in those outrages upon women and children.” Carlyle was as hot upon the subject as Gladstone himself. When we got into the omnibus the old man began lashing out. “Hoo! Sir!” he said, “there’s that Disraeli or Beaconsfield, or whatever he chooses to call himself; he thinks himself the wisest man on earth, and he’s just the foolishest thing that crawls upon the face of it”—and so he went off at score, rattling out the most fantastic invective against the Tory Government and “the unspeakable Turk”; accusations to make one’s hair stand on end, for he was as great an artist in adjectives as Dizzy himself—witness the “sea-green incorruptible” and the “French Revolution” _passim_—and when he had spent himself in his indignation, real or feigned, then would come a loud guffaw of laughter as much as to say, “See what a sad dog I am!” There were a few people in the omnibus who listened in open-mouthed amazement—but the conductors all knew him, and were used to his wonderful ways. I call attention to those bursts of laughter. They were very characteristic and very significant. Those who from Froude downwards have recorded much of Carlyle’s conversation have given the impression of an ill-natured, discontented man carping with no little spite at the rest of mankind. That was not Carlyle. That he held violent opinions expressed in violent language is a fact. But much of his so-called cynicism was, I am convinced, misunderstood.