slipperiest, lamest, most confused, unbusinesslike man I have seen. Nevertheless poor Dreck was in a few minutes settled, or put on the way of settlement: I got a line to his printer (miles off! it is Clowes, who used to do the Foreign Review); found him, expounded to him, and finally about two in the afternoon saw Dreck on the way to the printing office, and can hope to get the first page of him to-morrow! Perhaps a week may elapse (perhaps less, so exceedingly irregular is Murray) before we be fairly under steady way, after which a month or so will roll it all off my hands, and Dreck will lie in sheets till his hour come.' Alas! but three days later Murray was writing from Ramsgate a note as bitter as it was brief: 'Your conversation with me respecting the publication of your MS. led me to infer that you had given me the preference, and certainly not that you had already submitted it to the greatest publishers in London, who had declined to engage in it. Under these circumstances it will be necessary for me also to get it read by some literary friend before I can in justice to myself engage in the printing of it.' There had clearly been a misunderstanding, for Murray's letter is incompatible with Carlyle's belief that he wished him to offer the book elsewhere. But the publisher's suggestion, repeated in a subsequent letter, that a material fact had been unfairly concealed, must have been a stinging blow to Carlyle. 'The man behaved like a pig,' was his comment. He loftily left Murray free to consider the book afresh, and negotiations came to an end with the opinion of the 'bookseller's taster': 'the Author has no great tact; his wit is frequently heavy; and reminds one of the German Baron who took to leaping on tables, and answered that he was learning to be lively.' Carlyle was at last convinced that ' Dreck cannot be disposed of in London at this time.'
In May 1833—the Reform Bill, which had lain
