Footnotes

CARLYLE APOLOGISES TO CAROLINE FOX FOR BEHAVING LIKE AN 'APOSTLE OF INTOLERANCE'. The subject of Cromwell's portraits apart – with Carlyle's characteristically vivid invocation of "the best Bust I know of Oliver, and the Mark of his dead Face too" – the first of these letters is of prime interest for the deft little portrait that he gives Caroline Fox not of Cromwell, or the great medallist Simon, but of the Sage of Chelsea himself: "You would not find me always such an 'Apostle of Intolerance', as you did on that wet night, with a dull party lying ahead, and the hackney-coachman lost! At least, the opposite side too, if I say less of it, lies present with me in the mute state. But I do confess myself such of all this sugary twaddle, and mawkish slavish godless confusion in good and evil". Caroline had been to stay with the Carlyles that May and in her diary gives a long account of her visit to Cheyne Row, with Jane ill and doped with opium, and Thomas 'dusky and aggrieved at having to live in such a generation', ranting about 'universal brotherhood, tolerance, and twaddle' and – even when driving with his guests to Sloane Square – 'talking with energetic melancholy to the last' (Memories of Old Friends: Being Extracts from the Journals of Caroline Fox, edited by Horace N. Pym, 1882, entry for 20 May 1847).

The second of these letters Caroline quotes in her diary for 1 March 1849. It concerns her friend the sculptor Neville Northey Burnard, a notably large man, whom she had introduced to Carlyle: 'March 1. – Found a kindly note from Thomas Carlyle. He has seen "my gigantic countryman," Burnard, and conceived that there is a real faculty in him; he gave him advice, and says he is the sort of person whom he will gladly help if he can' (1 March 1849); this entry quoted in the article on Burnard in the ODNB. Carlyle's reference to Simon's medal being the "the Mark" of Cromwell's "dead Face too" alludes to the fact that he was responsible for the Protector's death-mask. His Life and Letters of Oliver Cromwell was published on 16 June 1846. Neither of our letters is printed in The Collected Letters, volumes 23 and 24 (for 1847-49).