462 PRÆTERITA-II

that Mary’s mother, then a girl of twelve or thirteen, rushed out of the house and up to the cart,* shrieking, rather than crying, “Where’s Peggy?”

I could not make out, quite, how the two parts of the family were separated, so that his sister expected them to bring her back living, (or even well?). Carlyle was so much affected, and spoke so low, that I could not venture to press him on detail.

This master of his then, the father of Margaret, was entirely kind and wise in teaching him-a Scotch gentleman of old race and feeling, an Andrea Ferrara¹ and some silver-mounted canes hanging in his study, last remnants of the old times.

231. We fell away upon Mill’s essay on the substitution of patriotism for religion.²

“Actually the most paltry rag of”-a chain of vituperative contempt too fast to note-“it has fallen to my lot to come in with. Among my acquaintance I have not seen a person talking of a thing he so little understood.” The point of his indignation was Mill’s supposing that, if God did not make everybody “happy,” it was because He had no sufficient power, “was not enough supplied with the article.” Nothing makes Carlyle more contemptuous than this coveting of “happiness.”

Perhaps we had better hear what Polissena and the nun of Florence (Christ’s Folk, IV.³) have to say about happiness, of their sort; and consider what every strong heart feels in the doing of any noble thing, and every good

* “Rushed at the cart,” his words. Ending with his deep “Heigh dear,” sigh. “Sunt lacrymæ rerum.”4

¹ [For this broadsword, see Scott’s note to ch. 50 of Waverley.]

² [Mill’s Essays on Religion had been posthumously published in the year of the conversation here recorded (1874).]

³ [Which Part was being prepared for press by Ruskin at the time when he was writing. The title of it is “The Nun’s School in Florence”; and the nun is described as having “a confirmed belief that her life of teaching, cooking, and sewing is the most delightful and exhilarating possible.” It contains a story of Polissena also. See Vol. XXXII. pp. 287, 288.]

⁴ [Virgil, Æneid, i. 462.]

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