This part of his task Carlyle
performed with an admirable conscientiousness. His numerous letters
applying for out-of-the-way books to buy or borrow, for every pamphlet
throwing light on his subject, bear testimony to the careful exactitude
which rarely permitted him to leave any record unread or any worthy
opinion untested about any event of which or any person of whom he
undertook to write. From Templand (1833) he applies for seven volumes of
Beaumarchais, three of Bassompierre, the Memoirs of Abbe Georgel, and
every attainable account of Cagliostro and the Countess de la Motte, to
fuse into _The Diamond Necklace._ To write the essay on _Werner_ and
the _German Playwrights_ he swam through seas of trash. He digested the
whole of _Diderot_ for one review article. He seems to have read through
_Jean Paul Richter,_ a feat to accomplish which Germans require a
special dictionary. When engaged on the Civil War he routed up a whole
shoal of obscure seventeenth-century papers from Yarmouth, the remnant of
a yet larger heap, "read hundredweights of dreary books," and endured
"a hundred Museum headaches." In grappling with _Friedrich_ he waded
through so many gray historians that we can forgive his sweeping
condemnation of their dulness. He visited all the scenes and places of
which he meant to speak, from St. Ives to Prague, and explored the
battlefields.
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