460 PRÆTERITA-II

He had a precious sister left to him; but his life, as the noblest Scottish lives are always, was thenceforward generously sad,-and endlessly pitiful.

229. No one has yet separated, in analyzing the mind of Scott, the pity from the pride; no one, in the mind of Carlyle, the pity from the anger.

Lest I should not be spared to write another Præterita,¹ I will give, in this place, a few words of Carlyle’s, which throw more lovely light on his character than any he has written,-as, indeed, his instantly vivid words always did; and it is a bitter blame and shame to me that I have not recorded those spoken to myself, often with trust and affection, always with kindness. But I find this piece, nearly word for word, in my diary of 25th October, 1874. He had been quoting the last words of Goethe, “Open the window, let us have more light” (this about an hour before painless death, his eyes failing him²).

I referred to the “It grows dark, boys, you may go,”³ of the great master of the High School of Edinburgh.* On which Carlyle instantly opened into beautiful account of Adam’s early life, his intense zeal and industry as a poor boy in a Highland cottage, lying flat on the hearth to learn his Latin grammar by the light of a peat fire. Carlyle’s own memory is only of Adam’s funeral, when he, Carlyle, was a boy of fourteen, making one of a crowd waiting near the gate of the High School, of which part of the old black building of the time of James I. was still standing-its motto, “Nisi Dominus, frustra,” everywhere. A half-holiday had been given, that the boys might see the coffin carried by,-only about five-and-twenty people

* It was his Latin grammar, the best ever composed, which my Camberwell tutor threw aside, as above told,⁴ for a “Scotch thing.”

¹ [This chapter was written, as the date at the end shows, at Folkestone, in October 1887, when Ruskin was in poor health. An interval of six months elapsed before another chapter appeared.]

² [See G. H. Lewes’s Life of Goethe, 1875, p. 566.]

³ [Compare Fiction, Fair and Foul, § 94 (Vol. XXXIV. p. 364).]

⁴ [In i. § 92 (p. 83).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]