Thomas Carlyle : table talk.

  • Thomas Carlyle
Date:
1890
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Thomas Carlyle : table talk. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    38/72 page 32
    Lord Ashley (afterwards Lord Shaftesbury): Very straight between the eyes—a bad form of physiognomy; otherwise a stately aristocratic looking man. Alcott : Emerson is going to send me a man called Alcott, who is coming over with some “ new ideas ” about making a new world, but it hasn’t seemed to strike him that he has a world within his own waistcoat which would employ all his thought and energy if he would but give it. A genial, innocent, simple-hearted man, of much natural intelligence and goodness, with an air of rusticity, veracity, and dignity withal, which in many ways appeals to one. The good Alcott: with his long, lean face and figure, with his gray worn temples and mild radiant eyes; all bent on saving the world by a return to acorns and the golden age ; he comes before one like a kind of venerable Don Quixote, whom nobody can even laugh at without loving. Margaret Fuller: A strange lilting, lean old maid, not nearly such a bore as I expected. George Bancroft : We had a call from Bancroft the other evening. A tough Yankee man; of many worthy qualities more tough than musical; among which it gratified me to find a certain small under-current of genial humour, or as it were hidden laughter, not noticed heretofore. George Gilfillan [author of The Gallery of Literary Portraits, &c.] : A young dissenting minister in Dundee; a person of great talent, ingenuousness, enthusiasm, and other virtues; whose position as a preacher of bare old Calvinism under penalty of death sometimes makes me tremble for him. Macready’s deserts to the English Drama are notable here to all the world; but his dignified, generous, and everyway honourable deportment in private life is known fully, I believe, only to a few friends. I have often said, looking at him as a manager of great London theatres—
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3