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332 Emerson's speech to the students of Dartmouth College and how it had in a way forced me to give up my law-practice and go to Europe to study, he broke in excitedly:

"I remember well reading that very page to my wife and saying that nothing like it for pure nobility had been heard since Schiller went silent. It had a great power with it . . . And so that started you off and changed your way of life? . . . I don't wonder . . . . it was a great Call."

After that Carlyle seemed to like me. At our final parting too, when I was going to Germany to study and he wished me "God speed and Goodspeed! on the way that lies before ye", he spoke again of Emerson and the sorrow he had felt on parting with him, deep, deep sorrow and regret, and he added, laying his hands on my shoulders, "sorrowing most of all that they should see his face no more forever." I remembered the passage and cried:

"Oh, Sir, I should have said that, for mine is the loss, mine the unspeakable misfortune now", and through my tears I saw that his eyes too were full.

He had just given me a letter to Froude, "good, kindly Froude", who, he was sure, would help me in any way of commendation to some literary position "if I have gone, as is most likely", and in due time Froude did help me as I shall tell in the proper place.

My pen-portrait of Carlyle was ferociously attacked by a kinsman, Alexander Carlyle, who evidently believed that I had got my knowledge of Carlyle's weakness from Froude's revelations in 1904. But luckily for me, Sir Charles Jessel remembered a dinner in the Garrick Club given by him in 1886 or 1887, at which both Sir Richard Quain and myself were present. Jessel recalled distinctly that I had that evening told the story of Carlyle's impotence as