Authors, Scottish -- 19th century -- Biography; Carlyle, Thomas, 1795-1881; Historians -- Great Britain -- Biography
[Footnote: This is one of the few instances in which further knowledge led
to a change for the better in Carlyle's judgment. In a letter to Emerson,
1840, he speaks disparagingly of Landor as "a wild man, whom no extent of
culture had been able to tame! His intellectual faculty seemed to me to be
weak in proportion to his violence of temper: the judgment he gives about
anything is more apt to be wrong than right,--as the inward whirlwind
shows him this side or the other of the object: and _sides_ of an object
are all that he sees." _De te faliula._ Emerson answers defending Landor,
and indicating points of likeness between him and Carlyle.]
In 1846 he spent the first week of September in Ireland, crossing from
Ardrossan to Belfast, and then driving to Drogheda, and by rail to
Dublin, where in Conciliation Hall he saw O'Connell for the first time
since a casual glimpse at a radical meeting arranged by Charles Buller--a
meeting to which he had gone out of curiosity in 1834. O'Connell was
always an object of Carlyle's detestation, and on this occasion he does
not mince his words.
Chief quack of the then world ... first time I had ever
heard the lying scoundrel speak.... Demosthenes of blarney
... the big beggar-man who had L15,000 a year, and, _proh
pudor!_ the favour of English ministers instead of the
pillory.
At Dundrum he met by invitation Carleton the novelist, with Mitchell and
Gavan Duffy, the Young Ireland leaders whom he seems personally to have
liked, but he told Mitchell that he would probably be hanged, and said
during a drive about some flourishing and fertile fields of the Pale, "Ah!
Duffy, there you see the hoof of the bloody Saxon."
[Footnote: Sir C. Gavan Duffy, in the "Conversations and Correspondence,"
now being published in the _Contemporary Review_, naturally emphasises
Carlyle's politer, more genial side, and prints several expressions of
sympathy with the "Tenant Agitations"; but his demur to the _Reminiscences
of My Irish Journey_ being accepted as an accurate account of the writer's
real sentiments is of little avail in face of the letters to Emerson, more
strongly accentuating the same views, _e.g._ "Bothered almost to madness
with Irish balderdash.... '_Blacklead_ these two million idle beggars,' I
sometimes advised, 'and sell them in Brazil as niggers!'--perhaps
Parliament on sweet constraint will allow you to advance them to be
niggers!"]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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