540 PRÆTERITA-III

meet the Queen at Dean Stanley’s,¹ in describing to us some of the conversation, he made us laugh by telling how, in describing to Her Majesty the beauty of Galloway, that ‘he believed there was no finer or more beautiful drive in her kingdom than the one round the shore of the Stewartry, by Gatehouse of Fleet,’ he got so absorbed in his subject that, in drawing his chair closer to the Queen, he at last became aware he had fixed it on her dress, and that she could not move till he withdrew it! Do you think I may say farther” (Of course, Joanie), “that Carlyle as a young man often went to my great-aunt’s (Mrs. Church) in Dumfriesshire; and he has several times told me that he considered her one of the most remarkable and kindest women he had ever known. On one occasion while there, he went to the little Cummertrees Church, where the then minister (as a joke sometimes called ‘Daft Davie Gillespie’) used to speak his mind very plainly from the pulpit, and while preaching a sermon on ‘Youth and Beauty being laid in the grave,’ something tickled Carlyle, and he was seen to smile; upon which Mr. Gillespie stopped suddenly, looked with a frown at Carlyle (who was sitting in my aunt’s pew), and said, ‘Mistake me not, young man; it is youth alone that you possess.’ This was told to me, (Joan), by an old cousin of mine who heard it, and was sitting next Carlyle at the time.”

65. I am so glad to be led back by Joanie to the thoughts of Carlyle, as he showed himself to her, and to me, in those spring days, when he used to take pleasure in the quiet of the Denmark Hill garden, and to use all his influence with me to make me contented in my duty to my mother; which he, as, with even greater insistence, Turner,² always told me was my first;-both of them seeing, with equal clearness, the happiness of the life that was possible to me in merely meeting my father’s affection and

¹ [This was in 1869: see Froude’s Carlyle’s Life in London, vol. ii. p. 379. For Carlyle’s own account of the meeting, see New Letters of Thomas Carlyle, 1904, vol. ii. pp. 253-255.]

² [See ii. § 106 (above, pp. 341-2).]

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