892. Thomas Carlyle to RB

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 197.

Chelsea,

1 Jany., 1842–

My dear Sir,

If you happen to possess, among your Commonwealth Books, a copy of Heath’s Chronicle of the Civil Wars, [1] I could like to look at it for a while. It is a dim, close-printed, scraggy old folio, not of the thickest; the Author (who wrote the Flagellum too) [2] is a noisy blockhead; but his old farrago serves one as a kind of dictionary now and then. If you have it not, pray never mind, never regret;—who knows if that will not even be a kind of benefit to me! The stupidity of those old dead Books excels all that it has entered into the imagination to conceive.

With many true regards, and hoping to see you again in person before long,

Yours always

T. Carlyle.

You do not happen to have Dugdale on the Imbankment of Fens, [3] —or any Book that will give one an idea of Oliver’s locality two hundred years back? [4]

Publication: Carlyle (1), I, 246–247.

Manuscript: University of South Carolina.

1. James Heath (1629–64), historian and Royalist, was the author of A Brief Chronicle of the late Intestine War in the three Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1661).

2. Heath had also published Flagellum; or the Life and Death, Birth and Burial of Oliver Cromwell, the late Usurper (1663).

3. William Dugdale (1605–86), archæologist, topographer and Garter King-of-Arms from 1677 until his death, was the author of History of Imbanking and Drayning of divers Fenns and Marshes (1662).

4. Carlyle sought these books in connection with Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, which he published in 1845. An admirer of Cromwell, he stigmatized Heath as “Carrion Heath.” If RB did possess any of these titles, they did not survive as part of the library existing at the time of his death.

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