the poor mocking-bird had met her fate. The correspondence falls under
two sections, the critical and the personal. The critical consists of
remarks, good, bad, and indifferent, on books and their writers. Carlyle
began his siege by talking German to her, now extolling Schiller and
Goethe to the skies, now, with a rare stretch of deference, half
conniving at her sneers. Much also passed between them about English
authors, among them comments on Byron, notably inconsistent. Of him
Carlyle writes (April 15th 1824) as "a pampered lord," who would care
nothing for the L500 a year that would make an honest man happy; but
later, on hearing of the death at Mesolonghi, more in the vein of his
master Goethe, he exclaims:--

Alas, poor Byron! the news of his death came upon me like
a mass of lead; and yet the thought of it sends a painful
twinge through all my being, as if I had lost a brother. O
God! that so many souls of mud and clay should fill up
their base existence to the utmost bound; and this, the
noblest spirit in Europe, should sink before half his course
was run.... Late so full of fire and generous passion and
proud purposes, and now for ever dumb and cold.... Had he
been spared to the age of threescore and ten what might he
not have been! what might he not have been! ... I dreamed of
seeing him and knowing him; but ... we shall go to him, he
shall not return to us.

This in answer to her account of the same intelligence: "I was told it
all alone in a room full of people. If they had said the sun or the moon
was gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of
a more awful and dreary blank in the creation than the words 'Byron is
dead.'" Other letters of the same period, from London, are studded or