of an English periodical, which was at the time thought so good as to be almost a model for the American enterprise; but which seems, on re-reading it in the perspective of forty years, to be quite unworthy of the comparison. There was in England a man named John A. Heraud, author of a Life of Savonarola, and described in one of Carlyle’s most deliciously humorous sketches as “a loquacious, scribacious little man of middle age, of parboiled greasy aspect,” and by Leigh Hunt, as “wavering in the most astonishing manner between being Something and being Nothing.” He seems to have been, if not witty himself, the cause of wit in others, for Stuart Mill said of him: “I forgive him freely for interpreting the Universe, now when I find he cannot pronounce the h’s.” When Carlyle once quoted to him the saying of Novalis, that the highest problem of authorship is the writing of a Bible, — “‘That is precisely what I am doing,’ answered the aspiring, unaspirating.”[1]
Nothing was more natural than that Mr. Alcott — who, upon a far higher plane of character, as even Carlyle would have admitted, was engaged in the same rather daring task with Heraud, and even bound up some volumes of his manuscript diary with the label, “Scriptures for 1840,” or whatever the date might be — should have looked eagerly toward Heraud, especially when the latter began to publish his “New Monthly Magazine.”
- ↑ Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, i, 276, 277.
