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92 CARLYLE'S LOVES AND LETTERS
correspondence. In these early days his
mind is as undeveloped as his style ; he is
crude, awkward, over-emphatic ; apter at
catching the faults than the excellences of the
eighteenth-century prose writers. That one
should write to
please rather than to improve
one's correspondent was an idea which seems
to have occurred to him :
hardly
"
When I sit down to write Letters to people
I care anything for, I am too apt to get into
a certain ebullient humour, and so to indite
great quantities of nonsense, which even my
own judgment condemns when too late for
being mended."
That is his own admission. Here is a specimen
of his solemn admonitions to his future wife :
" I very much approve your resolution to
exercise your powers in some sort of
literary
effort; and I shall think myself if happy, by
any means I can aid you in putting it in
practice. There is nothing more injurious to
the faculties than to sit poring over books
continually without attempting
to exhibit
any of our own conceptions. We amass ideas,
it is true ; but at the same time we pro-
portionally weaken our powers of expressing
them a ; power equally valuable with that of
conceiving them, and which, tho' in some