“My dear Sir,—Yesterday I left your Napier’s ‘Montrose’ with Fraser, who promised to send it home forthwith; many thanks for it. The book is very readable, not without talent: an anti-Cameronian rant, as in the former case, but with somewhat of the dissonance abated, marrowbone and cleaver music mostly left out, &c. I find the great Montrose not unintelligible; a right brave man, with his haughty shut mouth, with his broad mournful brow; a man of genius,—a hero and hero-worshipper, with nothing but a poor shambling Charles First to worship: one of the most tragical conditions. Ah me!
“Have you ‘Argyle’s Letters’ among your Maitland books? or is it a Bannatyne one?
“If you ever see that Mr. Richardson, of Fludyer Street,1 perhaps you will bethink you to gather from him whether he actually possesses a stock of Covenant works, and is communicative of it? I have got from Scotland, after endless labour, a Baillie under way for me. A hapless man searching in these departments is like a cinder-sifter, a Parisian rag-picker, searching and swashing through all gutters, happy if here and there he find a copper button or an old nail!
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1 Mr. Richardson had a good library, now at Kirklands. |
| 232 | LIFE OF J. G. LOCKHART. |
“I wish I fell in with you oftener. A mouthful of rational conversation does a man real good; and he seldom gets it in these times and places, poor devil!—Yours very truly, T. Carlyle.”
