brain which was to cloud his intellect, and which is the best apology for certain utterances which offended his readers. When a correspondent complained of his speaking of Mill and Mr. Herbert Spencer as 'geese,' he replied that he said so simply because he 'knew a goose when he saw one.' Other phrases show a rudeness strange in one who in personal intercourse was the most courteous of men. When, indeed, he has said something specially sharp, he generally proceeds to insist upon the extreme care and moderation of his language. 'Whatever is set down for you in Fors,' he says, 'is assuredly true, inevitable, trustworthy to the uttermost, however strange.' He quaintly admits in a note that he may make a mistake or two upon merely 'accessory points.' Such extravagancies, and there are plenty of them, shocked the critic of well-regulated mind. Matthew Arnold, if I remember rightly, refers to some of them as instances of British crudity. We may forgive them if we take them as due to a physical cause. No doubt, however, he had a tendency to such escapades: he took a pleasure, as he admits somewhere, in a 'freakish' exaggeration of his natural humour. Carlyle used often to qualify his extravagant remarks by
