Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 37, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 April 1905 — CRUSTY CARLYLE. [ARTICLE]

CRUSTY CARLYLE.

An Anecdote Which Illustrates His Disagreeable Disposition. Carlyle suffered from dyspepsia and disappointment. He was therefore neither oversympathetic in intercourse with his friends nor fair in his estimates of other writers. Though he personally liked Tennyson, he spoke with Impatience of his “cobbling his odes,” dismissed Jane Austen’s novels as “dish washings,” Hallam, the historian, as “dry as dust” and Goldsmith as an “Irish blackguard.” Even the writers of editorials in the press were saluted with this hard saying: “What are these fellows doing? They only serve to cancel one another.” A characteristic anecdote illustrates his cruel disposition, which provoked him to inflict pain even on a friend. An artist who frequented Carlyle's house painted a picture of him in his dressing gown smoking a pipe by the fireside and Mrs. Carlyle ih an armchair sitting opposite him. The picture was hung at one of the Royal academy's exhibitions and, though not a striking work of art, was purchased by Lord Ashburton, Carlyle’s friend, for £3OO. > The delighted artist hurried off to the Carlyles, expecting congratulations on the sale and some manifestation of pleasure on their part at having such a value set on a picture of themselves and their domestic interior. He delivered his glad tidings, but all the response he received from Carlyle was: “Well, in my opinion, £SOO was just £405 too much.”