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Show I , r IJ j Library Thomas Carlyle Gaye to Harvard IS If j,, Special to Tlio Tribune. hi I CAMBRIDGE. Mass., April 30. Of j ! the thousands of Americans who visit L ; j tho home of Thomas Carlyle In Chelsea, ( England, during1 each summer, proba-'.' proba-'.' ' bly a companitivcly small number rcal- ' Ize that the books which were used' by ' i Mm in writing "Cromwell" and 'MTred-ij 'MTred-ij , ' crick the Great" have beem for many G ,1 ' years oujthls sldo of the water, perma- j nently housed in tho Harvard college 11-I 11-I bmry. ' I ( . These boolcs, many of them now lull lu-ll j valuable owing: to the frequent marginal I 1- notes in Carlylo's handwriting, were , bequeathed by him to Harvard college, I and. together with a death mask of 1 l Cromwell that had long been im Car-' Car-' , lylc's possession, constitute one of the i I 'j woild's most interesting memorials to , f ' ihc great English author. I ' Aside from the value added to them I 1 by his characteristic marginal notes 1 and frequently recurring autographa the ' L1' Hlmplo fact that tho books, well on to- ward COO in number, had been so intimately inti-mately connected witli his work would I anake them Interesting to the large ' 1 number of Americans to whom Carlyle I is much more than a name in histories oC literature, i And the bookn moreover tj j nre a perpetual testimony to the au-.! au-.! ' thora appreciation of his American nu- dlcncc. ' 1 Tremendous Amount of Research. I In looking over these rows of volumes vol-umes "my poor Falstaff regiments of 1 T'.ooks" as Carlyle once humorously described de-scribed them in a letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson the privileged visitor to tho Hai-vard library cannot but be struck I i -with.thc tremendous amount of vosearch Carlyle did in preparation for the wrli-, wrli-, lng of his two famous biographies. l,i At one end of tho line there- are pon-i pon-i derous tomes such as Sir Bulstrode Whltlock's "Memorials of English Affairs," Af-fairs," of which Carlyle remarkii in his life of Cromwell: "Bulstrode has a kind of dramaturgic turn In him, indeed an occasional poetic frisklnci?s; moat mcx-peetcd, mcx-peetcd, as If the- hippopotamus Avould show a sudden tenderer to dance- At the other end are thir "dumpy little quarto" volumes of sermens of which he. once ild: "By human volition they can be read; but not by any human memory remembered." And between these extremes one llnds a host of histories; chap books; memoirs; mem-oirs; tracts; sermons; biographies; histories of special periods or incidents; dairies In fact, every form of written matter bearing however remotely ow the respective periods of Cromwell and Frederick. These- volumes, moreover, represent only part of the material that was digested' di-gested' to make the Cromwell and Frederick Fred-erick biographies, for the Harvard collection col-lection includes simply, In Carlylo's own words "the books (whatever of them I could not borrow, but had to buy and gather, .that is, in goneral whatever of them are still here) which T used in writing on Cromwell and Frederick." Corlyle's Appreciation, The gift of these books to some New England Institution, as a way of expressing ex-pressing hla appreciation of tho reception recep-tion nccorded his work on his side of the water, had been long considered by Carlyle. His own modesty, however, had made him hesitate. 1, a letter written to "Ralph "Waldo Emcrron in November, No-vember, 1869, and now part of the Carlyle Car-lyle collection at Harvard, he speaks of the present as one which he had had in mind for many years. 'The extreme insignificance of the gift," he writes, "this and nothing else, gave me pause. Last summer 1 was lucky enough to meet with your friend Charles Ellol Norton, and renew many old Massachusetts recollections In free talk with so genial, gracefully social and cheerful a man. To him T spoke of the affair, candidly dewrlblng it, especially es-pecially tho above questionable feature of It, so far as I could, unci hi answer then, and mora deliberately afterwards, was so hopeful, liearty and decisive that In effect it has decided me. .... "To say more about the Infinlteslmally small value of the books would bo superlative. su-perlative. Nay, in truth, many or most of them arc not without intrinsic value; one or two arc even excellent as Books: and all of them, it. may perhaps be said, have a kind of symbolic or biographic value and testify (a thing not useless) on what slender commissariat stores considerable campaigns twelve years long or so may be carried on in this world." The "slender commissariat stores," which the average mind would shudder at the thought of digesting even In twelve years of study, arc In several languages, chiefly in English, German and French, and many of the volumes are now numbered among the rare books that librarians guard with especial espe-cial vigilance. Even If they were not rare in themselves the marginal comments com-ments of the great English thinker would give them a priceless value to book collectors. Interminable Rubbish Heaps. Written as Carlyle was actually wading wad-ing through the mass of material a large part of which he afterward described de-scribed as the "bewildered, lntermlnablo rubbish heaps of the Cromwellian Histories; His-tories; the dreariest perhaps that anywhere any-where exist still visited by human curiosity, curi-osity, In this world," his notes are naturally nat-urally extremely characteristic. On one "Life of Olivor Cromwell" wo find, for example, that he "used to think this a hook of some respectability; It seems no belter than the others; hereabouts here-abouts there Is an error in almost every line- of It." Of another he writes "finished "fin-ished my distressing survey ot It, 10 April. 1S59." Hardly a volume. In fact, is without either marginal notes, which run the gamut from extreme approval to extreme ex-treme censure, or autographs and. to r aders of Curb le many of the old books have a special interest from the frequency with which ho referred to them in his published writings as when in "Cromwell" he speaks of the "Rushworths, Whltlocks, Nelsons, Thurlows, enormous folios, these and many others have been printed and. fomc of them again printed, but never yet edited edited as you edit wagon loads of broken -bricks and dry mortar, simply by tumbling up the wagon. Not ono of those monstrous old volumes vol-umes has so much as an available index," in-dex," Or when ho refers in "Frederick the Great" to certain memoirs of Catherine Cath-erine II. as a "a creditable and highly remarkable little Pleco; worth all the others (books' about Catherine), if it Is knowledge of Catherine you are seeking." seek-ing." Cromwell's Death Mnok. Cromwell's death musk, which so appropriately ap-propriately rounds out tho Cromwell part of the Harvard Carlyle collection, hung for many years In the English writer's home In Chelsea and was then given by him to his friend and correspondent corre-spondent Prof. Charles Eliot Norton of Cambridge. The cast had been presented pre-sented to Carlyle by the sculptor Thomas Woolncr, the present possessor posses-sor of the original death mark, and Is one of the few casts ever taken from the original mask. When Carlyle's bequest came to Harvard Har-vard Prof. Norton presented tho cast to the Harvard college library, and the Harvard library thus became possessed pos-sessed of the fourth cast taken from the original mask, the other three being be-ing respectively at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and in the British Brit-ish museum. Carlyle considered It undoubtedly un-doubtedly the truest existing image 'of Cromwell's face, far to be preferred to the common casts In which all the liner points of likeness had become obliterated. oblite-rated. Carlyle himself had described Cromwell's Crom-well's face as follows: "Big, massive head, of somewhat leonine aspect, 'evident 'evi-dent workshop and storehouse of a vast treasury of natural parts.' Wart above the right eyebrow, nose of considerable blunt-aquiline proportions; strict yet copious co-pious lips, full of all tremulous sensi bilities, and also, If need were, of all fierceness and rigours; deep loving eyes, call them grave, call them stern, looking look-ing from under those craggy brows, as If in life-long sorrow, and yet not thinking It so now, thinking it only labor and endeavor: on tho whole, a right noble lion-face and hero-faco; and to me royal enough." And the description is easily recognizable recog-nizable to anybody who examines the cast an it now stands in the Harvard library, reproducing both the Imperfections Imperfec-tions and perfections of tho mask hastily has-tily mado Just after the death of the Great Protector. |