To proceed with our task by the method of comparison is to pursue a course open to grave objection; yet it is forced upon us when we find, as we lately did, a writer in the Times newspaper, in the course of a not very discriminating review of Mr. Froude’s recent volumes, casually remarking, as if it admitted of no more doubt than the day’s price of consols, that Carlyle was a greater man than Johnson.  It is a good thing to be positive.  To be positive in your opinions and selfish in your habits is the best recipe, if not for happiness, at all events for that far more attainable commodity, comfort, with which we are acquainted.  “A noisy man,” sang poor Cowper, who could not bear anything louder than the hissing of a tea-urn, “a noisy man is always in the right,” and a positive man can seldom be proved wrong.  Still, in literature it is very desirable to preserve a moderate measure of independence, and we therefore make bold to ask whether it is as plain as the “old hill of Howth” that Carlyle was a greater man than Johnson?  Is not the precise contrary the truth?  No abuse of Carlyle need be looked for, here or from me.  When a man of genius and of letters happens to have any striking virtues, such as purity, temperance, honesty, the novel task of dwelling on them has such attraction for us that we are content to leave the elucidation of his faults to his personal friends, and to stern, unbending moralists like Mr. Edmund Yates and the World newspaper.  To love Carlyle is, thanks to Mr. Froude’s superhuman ideal of friendship, a task of much heroism, almost meriting a pension; still it is quite possible for the candid and truth-loving soul.  But a greater than Johnson he most certainly was not.

There is a story in Boswell of an ancient beggar-woman who, whilst asking an alms of the Doctor, described herself to him, in a lucky moment for her pocket, as “an old struggler.”  Johnson, his biographer tells us, was visibly affected.  The phrase stuck to his memory, and was frequently applied to himself.  “I too,” so he would say, “am an old struggler.”  So too, in all conscience, was Carlyle.  The struggles of Johnson have long been historical; those of Carlyle have just become so.  We are interested in both.  To be indifferent would be inhuman.  Both men had great endowments, tempestuous natures, hard lots.  They were not amongst Dame Fortune’s favorites.  They had to fight their way.  What they took they took by storm.  But—­and here is a difference indeed—­Johnson came off victorious, Carlyle did not.

Boswell’s book is an arch of triumph, through which, as we read, we see his hero passing into eternal fame, to take up his place with those—­

     “Dead but sceptred sovereigns who still rule
       Our spirits from their urns.”

Froude’s book is a tomb over which the lovers of Carlyle’s genius will never cease to shed tender but regretful tears.