1. Before receiving this note, Pelly replied, 20 March, to TC's previous, untraced note asking him to dine the following Wed. [24] with Lord Ashburton: “I am honoured by your kind
note of yesterday, and it will give me very great pleasure to be permitted to dine with Lord Ashburton and you on Wednesday
next. / I thank you for allowing me also to call at your house on the same evening, and I will be punctual to my time.—/ Had
I been on our Frontier instead of within a few miles of you, I should not have considered the distance as any obstacle to
my accepting an invitation to meet you, Sir,—Indeed your kindness affects me very much; and though I have been much pleased
with, and I trust properly conscious of, the kind notice my Betters have bestowed on me since I arrived in London nothing
has moved me until your note.” He then replied to this note, also 20 March: “Saturday (this day week) will be a perfectly convenient time; and I will do myself the honour of calling at your house
a little before ½ after six on that day instead of upon Wednesday.” After the dinner with Lord Ashburton, Pelly described
leaving with TC who “called a four-wheeler, and said he would drive me as far as Hyde Park Corner. … No sooner had we started
than he fired up on the politics of the day, and was anything but complimentary to Parliament and the Foreign Office; he became
so excited that he stood up and swayed his arms about, quite astonishing me by the fact that a man of genius who largely dominated
the thought of his time should so agitate himself with matters which I, at that time, regarded as of little real importance”
(Sir Lewis Pelly, “Glimpses of Carlyle,” Fortnightly Review 51 [1892]: 724).
2. Pelly later recalled that at a period in his life when he had questioned “whether life was worth living,” he read TC's Critical and Miscellanous Essays, which seemed to give him “a new revelation of life” (Pelly, “Glimpses” 51:723). When invited to Cheyne Row in the 1850s, he was immediately impressed by TC, who “launched out upon the advantages of a life of action and military discipline;
he advised me utterly to avoid that great froth ocean, called literature and specially the thing called poetry” (51:723).
“His language in conversation, as in his writings, was often in sledge-hammer fashion, and yet it did not sound so, for his
manner was kindly, natural, and at intervals almost tender” (51:725). Pelly later came to tea at Cheyne Row; TC, he noted,
“soon worried me into an argument and upset everything I ventured to advance.” When JWC told TC, “Why, when Mazzini was here
the other night, you took the side of the argument that Mr. Pelly did this evening,” TC responded, “And what's the use of
a man if he cannot take two sides of an argument?” (51:724). Pelly also spoke with TC about Frederick the Great and two of
his cavalry generals, Seidlitz and Ziethen [see Works 16:36 and 17:236], whom TC called “just famous gallopers.” Pelly argued that they showed genius and defended his views with
examples. When Frederick was published, he “was amused to find that [they] had become great cavalry commanders” (51:727).
