histories and biographies. The amount he tells you is something
astonishing--no platitudes, no rigmarole, no common-form, articles
which are the staple of most biography, but, instead of them, all the
facts and features of the case--pedigree, birth, father and mother,
brothers and sisters, education, physiognomy, personal habits, dress,
mode of speech; nothing escapes him. It was a characteristic criticism
of his, on one of Miss Martineau's American books, that the story of
the way Daniel Webster used to stand before the fire with his hands in
his pockets was worth all the politics, philosophy, political economy,
and sociology to be found in other portions of the good lady's
writings. Carlyle's eye was indeed a terrible organ: he saw
everything. Emerson, writing to him, says: 'I think you see as
pictures every street, church, Parliament-house, barracks, baker's
shop, mutton-stall, forge, wharf, and ship, and whatever stands,
creeps, rolls, or swims thereabout, and make all your own.' He crosses
over, one rough day, to Dublin; and he jots down in his diary the
personal appearance of some unhappy creatures he never saw before or
expected to see again; how men laughed, cried, swore, were all of huge
interest to Carlyle. Give him a fact, he loaded you with thanks;
propound a theory, you were rewarded with the most vivid abuse.

This intense love for, and faculty of perceiving, what one may call
the 'concrete picturesque,' accounts for his many hard sayings about
fiction and poetry. He could not understand people being at the
trouble of inventing characters and situations when history was full
of men and women; when streets were crowded and continents were being
peopled under their very noses. Emerson's sphynx-like utterances
irritated him at times, as they well might; his orations and the like.
'I long,' he says, 'to see some _concrete thing_, some Event--
Man's Life, American Forest, or piece of Creation which this Emerson