“’My mistress, gracious, mild, and good,
       Cries—­Is he dumb?  ‘Tis time he should.’

“I suppose you may wish to know how my disease is treated by the physicians.  They put a blister upon my back, and two from my ear to my throat, one on a side.  The blister on the back has done little, and those on the throat have not risen.  I bullied and bounced (it sticks to our last sand), and compelled the apothecary to make his salve according to the Edinburgh dispensatory, that it might adhere better.  I have now two on my own prescription.  They likewise give me salt of hartshorn, which I take with no great confidence; but I am satisfied that what can be done is done for me.  I am almost ashamed of this querulous letter, but now it is written let it go.”

This is indeed tonic and bark for the mind.

If, irritated by a comparison that ought never to have been thrust upon us, we ask why it is that the reader of Boswell finds it as hard to help loving Johnson as the reader of Froude finds it hard to avoid disliking Carlyle, the answer must be that whilst the elder man of letters was full to overflowing with the milk of human kindness, the younger one was full to overflowing with something not nearly so nice; and that whilst Johnson was pre-eminently a reasonable man, reasonable in all his demands and expectations, Carlyle was the most unreasonable mortal that ever exhausted the patience of nurse, mother, or wife.

Of Dr. Johnson’s affectionate nature nobody has written with nobler appreciation than Carlyle himself.  “Perhaps it is this Divine feeling of affection, throughout manifested, that principally attracts us to Johnson.  A true brother of men is he, and filial lover of the earth.”

The day will come when it will be recognized that Carlyle, as a critic, is to be judged by what he himself corrected for the press, and not by splenetic entries in diaries, or whimsical extravagances in private conversation.

Of Johnson’s reasonableness nothing need be said, except that it is patent everywhere.  His wife’s judgment was a sound one—­“He is the most sensible man I ever met.”

As for his brutality, of which at one time we used to hear a great deal, we cannot say of it what Hookham Frere said of Lander’s immorality, that it was—­

     “Mere imaginary classicality
     Wholly devoid of criminal reality.”

It was nothing of the sort.  Dialectically the great Doctor was a great brute.  The fact is, he had so accustomed himself to wordy warfare that he lost all sense of moral responsibility, and cared as little for men’s feelings as a Napoleon did for their lives.  When the battle was over, the Doctor frequently did what no soldier ever did that I have heard tell of,—­apologized to his victims and drank wine or lemonade with them.  It must also be remembered that for the most part his victims sought him out.  They came to be tossed and gored.  And after all, are they so much to