sentimental radicalism, his kindly, convivial, gregarious life? He,
again, did his work in a rapture of solitary creation, and seemed
to have no taste for discussing his ideas or methods. Then, too,
Dickens's later desertion of his work in favour of public readings
and money-making is curious to note. He was like Shakespeare in
this, that the passion of his later life seemed to be to realise an
ideal of bourgeois prosperity. Dickens seems to have regarded his
art partly as a means of social reform, and partly as a method of
making money. The latter aim is to a great extent accounted for by
the miserable and humiliating circumstances of his early life,
which bit very deep into him. Yet his art was hardly an end in
itself, but something through which he made his way to other aims.

Carlyle, again, was a writer who put ideas first, despised his
craft except as a means of prophesying, hated literary men and
coteries, preferred aristocratic society, while at the same time he
loved to say how unutterably tiresome he found it. Who will ever
understand why Carlyle trudged many miles to attend parties and
receptions at Bath House, where the Ashburtons lived, or what
stimulus he discerned in it? I have a belief that Carlyle felt a
quite unconscious pride in the fact that he, the son of a small
Scotch farmer, had his assured and respected place among a semi-
feudal circle, just as I have very little doubt that his migration
to Craigenputtock was ultimately suggested to him by the pleasure
and dignity of being an undoubted laird, and living among his own,
or at least his wife's, lands. In saying this, I do not wish to
belittle Carlyle, or to accuse him of what may be called
snobbishness. He had no wish to worm himself by slavish deference
into the society of the great, but he liked to be able to walk in
and say his say there, fearing no man; it was like a huge mirror