slightly modified. The critic's praise of British contemporaries, other
than relatives, is so rare that the following sentences are worth
transcribing:--

He (Chalmers) was a man of much natural dignity, ingenuity, honesty, and
kind affection, as well as sound intellect and imagination.... He had a
burst of genuine fun too.... His laugh was ever a hearty, low guffaw,
and his tones in preaching would reach to the piercingly pathetic. No
preacher ever went so into one's heart. He was a man essentially of
little culture, of narrow sphere all his life. Such an intellect,
professing to be educated, and yet ... ignorant in all that lies beyond
the horizon in place or time I have almost nowhere met with--a man
capable of so much soaking indolence, lazy brooding ... as the first
stage of his life well indicated, ... yet capable of impetuous activity
and braying audacity, as his later years showed. I suppose there will
never again be such a preacher in any Christian church. "The truth of
Christianity," he said, "was all written in us already in sympathetic
ink. Bible awakens it, and you can read"--a sympathetic image but of no
great weight as an argument addressed to doubting Thomas. Chalmers, whose
originality lay rather in his quick insight and fire than in his mainly
commonplace thought, had the credit of recognising the religious side of
Carlyle's genius, when to the mass of his countrymen he was a rock of
offence. One of the great preacher's criticisms of the great writer is
notably just: "He is a lover of earnestness more than a lover of truth."

There follows in some of the early pages of the _Reminiscences_ an
account of a long walk with Irving, who had arranged to accompany Carlyle
for the first stage, _i.e._ fifteen miles of the road, of his for the
most part pedestrian march from Glasgow to Ecclefechan, a record among
many of similar excursions over dales and hills, and "by the beached