Carlyle went diligently to work at the _French Revolution_. Some conviction he had that the book was worth something. Once or twice among the flood of equipages at Hyde Park Corner, when taking his afternoon stroll, he thought to himself, 'Perhaps none of _you_ could do what I am at!' But generally his feeling was, 'I will finish this book, throw it at your feet, buy a rifle and spade, and withdraw to the Transatlantic Wildernesses, far from human beggaries and basenesses!' 'This,' he says, 'had a kind of comfort to me; yet I always knew too, in the background, that this would not practically do. In short, my nervous system had got dreadfully irritated and inflamed before I quite ended, and my desire was _intense_, beyond words, to have done with it.' Then he adds: 'The _last_ paragraph I well remember writing upstairs in the drawing-room that now is, which was then my writing-room; beside _her_ there in a grey evening (summer, I suppose), soon after tea (perhaps); and thereupon, with her dear blessing on me, going out to walk. I had said before going out, "What they will do with this book, none knows, my Jeannie, lass; but they have not had, for a two hundred years, any book that came more truly from a man's very heart, and so let them trample it under foot and hoof as _they_ see best!" "Pooh, pooh! they cannot trample that!" she would cheerily answer; for her own approval (I think she had read always regularly behind me) especially in Vol. III., was strong and decided.' Mrs Carlyle was right. No critic or clique of critics could trample the _French Revolution_. A month before the completion of the first book of the _French Revolution_, Carlyle wrote in his journal: 'My first friend Edward Irving is dead. I am friendless here or as good as that.' In a week or two thereafter he met Southey, whom he describes as a 'lean, grey-white-headed man of dusky complexion, unexpectedly tall when he rises and still leaner then--the shallowest chin, prominent snubbed Roman nose, small carelined brow, huge brush of white-grey-hair on high crown and projecting on all sides, the most vehement pair of faint hazel eyes I have ever seen--a well-read, honest, limited (straitlaced even), kindly-hearted, most irritable man. We parted kindly, with no great purpose on either side, I imagine, to meet again.'[16] Later on Carlyle admits to his brother John that his prospects in London were not brightening; which fact left him gloomy and morose.