"I have likewise to thank you for your kind purpose of sending me the Nation, the first number of which, indeed, I find has safely introduced itself through the Rowland Hill slit in the door this day. As I have very little time, and especially at present hardly read any newspaper, it would be a further kindness if you now and then marked such passages as you thought would be most illuminative for me.
"I can say with great sincerity, I wish you well; and the essence of your cause, well—alas! if one could get the essence of it extracted from the adscititious confusions and impossible quantities of it, would not all men wish you and it right well?
"Justice to Ireland—justice to all lands, and to Ireland first as the land that needs it most—the whole English nation (except the quacks and knaves of it, who in the end are men of negative quantities and of no force in the English nation) does honestly wish you that. Do not believe the contrary, for it is not true; the believing of it to be true may give rise to miserable mistakes yet, at which one's imagination shudders.
"Well, when poor old Ireland has succeeded again in making a man of insight and generous valour, who might help her a little out of her deep confusions—ought I not to pray and hope that he may shine as a light, instead of blazing as a firebrand, to his own waste and his country's! Poor old Ireland, every man she produces of that kind, it is like another stake set upon the great Rouge-et-Noir, of the Destinies: 'Shall I win with thee, or shall I lose thee too—blazing off upon me as the others have done?' She tries again, as with her last guinea. May the gods grant her a good issue!
"I bid you, with many kind wishes, good speed, and am, very truly yours,
"T. CARLYLE."
I maintained friendly relations with my Northern colleague, Dr. M' Knight, and, judging by his replies, probably strove to draw him into the National Party, but that goal was only to be reached by stages.
"… You are right in saying (he wrote at this time) that my fears of Catholic ascendancy constitute my chief, though not my only, objection to Repeal. I have other and serious
