“A far finer essay were a faithful, loving, and yet critical, and in part condemnatory, delineation of Jeremy Bentham, and his place and working in this section of the world’s history.  Bentham will not be put down by logic, and should not be put down, for we need him greatly as a backwoodsman:  neither can reconciliation be effected till the one party understands and is just to the other.  Bentham is a denyer; he denies with a loud and universally convincing voice; his fault is that he can affirm nothing, except that money is pleasant in the purse, and food in the stomach, and that by this simplest of all beliefs he can reorganise society.  He can shatter it in pieces—­no thanks to him, for its old fastenings are quite rotten—­but he cannot reorganise it; this is work for quite others than he.  Such an essay on Bentham, however, were a great task for any one; for me a very great one, and perhaps rather out of my road.”

Perhaps Carlyle would have agreed that Mr. Mill’s famous pair of essays on Bentham and Coleridge have served the purpose which he had in his mind, though we may well regret the loss of such a picture of Bentham’s philosophic personality as he would surely have given us.  It is touching to think of him whom we all know as the most honoured name among living veterans of letters,[1] passing through the vexed ordeal of the young recruit, and battling for his own against the waywardness of critics and the blindness of publishers.  In 1831 he writes to Mr. Napier:  “All manner of perplexities have occurred in the publishing of my poor book, which perplexities I could only cut asunder, not unloose; so the MS. like an unhappy ghost still lingers on the wrong side of Styx; the Charon of ——­ Street durst not risk it in his sutilis cymba, so it leaped ashore again.”  And three months later:  “I have given up the notion of hawking my little Manuscript Book about any further; for a long time it has lain quiet in its drawer, waiting for a better day.”  And yet this little book was nothing less than the History of the French Revolution.

[Footnote 1:  Carlyle died on February 5, 1881.]

It might be a lesson to small men to see the reasonableness, sense, and patience of these greater men.  Macaulay’s letters show him to have been a pattern of good sense and considerateness.  Mr. Carlyle seems indeed to have found Jeffrey’s editorial vigour more than could be endured: 

“My respected friend your predecessor had some difficulty with me in adjusting the respective prerogatives of Author and Editor, for though not, as I hope, insensible to fair reason, I used sometimes to rebel against what I reckoned mere authority, and this partly perhaps as a matter of literary conscience; being wont to write nothing without studying it if possible to the bottom, and writing always with an almost painful feeling of scrupulosity, that light editorial hacking and hewing to right and left was in general nowise to my mind.”

But we feel that the fault must have lain with Jeffrey; the qualifications that Lord Cockburn admired so much were not likely to be to the taste of a man of Mr. Carlyle’s grit.  That did not prevent the most original of Mr. Napier’s contributors from being one of the most just and reasonable.