Nowhere, perhaps, are the Carlyle marginal annotations more suggestive and diverting than on his copies of Essays and Tales by John Sterling, in the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Collection at the Harvard College Library.
This Sterling is, of course, Carlyle's John Sterling, subject of the Carlyle Life to be issued three years later. Commonly known only as a young man for whom two unnecessary biographies were written, Sterling appears on further acquaintance to be delightfully representative of his time. Though the chronicle of his years is largely a record of vain Sittings in search of health, ending in slow death by tuberculosis, he managed throughout to keep his soul singularly alive and sensitive. A brilliant leader of the famous “Apostles” at Cambridge, he shared the undergraduate idealism there of the 1820's. As part owner of the young Athenaeum in 1828 and 18295 he did his bit at “uplift” in journalism.