As one is drawn into late middle-age there are few things more affecting and in a measure more surprising than the recollection of the ardent hero-worship of one's youth. Whether, if my dear old chief were back again and I could survey him in the light of a riper experience than I had during his lifetime, I should still be able to offer him such an undivided fealty as I paid him then, I cannot guess; but all the other gods of youth and early manhood, with one exception only, have fallen somewhat into the sere and yellow leaf. For some six or eight enthusiastic years, I was saturated with Carlyle; I thought Carlyle and talked and wrote in unconscious Carlylese, and one day when in the library at the British Museum I got an actual bodily sight of my deity, I was translated into a heaven of adoration which is really, at this time of day, pathetic to remember. I knew him from his portraits at a glance and I was assured of his identity, if any assurance had been necessary, by the profound and flattering deference which was paid to him by the officials and by the unanimity with which the students in the big circular hall found it necessary to pass the place at which he had taken his seat. He was not there more than a quarter of an hour, and during that time he behaved quite like an ordinary mortal except when he once produced a dark red handkerchief of enormous size and broke the silence of the place by a nasal blast which sounded like a trumpet call to arms. When he arose to go I arose also and followed him; I could no more have helped it than if he had been a magnet and I a bit of iron filing. He walked to Oxford Street and took a seat in a 'bus bound for Chelsea. I followed and sat opposite, hardly daring to lift my eyes to him until I found that he was wholly absorbed in the notes he had taken. When he alighted I followed him all the way to Cheyne Walk and watched until the door closed behind him.