were the materials for Carlyle’s biography, and was begged to undertake it forthwith.  So far as his own interests were concerned, he had much better have declined the task.  His History of England had given him a name throughout Europe, and whatever he wrote was sure to be well received.  His English in Ireland was approaching completion, and he had in his mind a scheme for throwing fresh light on the age of Charles V. Principal Robertson’s standard book was in many respects obsolete.  The subject was singularly attractive, and would have furnished an excellent opportunity for bringing out the best side of the Roman Catholic Church, which in Charles’s son, Philip, so familiar in Froude’s History of England, was seen at its worst or weakest.  Charles was to him an embodiment of the Conservative principle, which he regarded as the strongest part of Catholicism, and as needed to counteract the social upheaval of the Reformation.  Such a book he could write in his own way, independent of every one.  The biographer of Carlyle, on the other hand, would be involved in numerous difficulties, could hardly avoid giving offence, and must sacrifice years of his life to employment more onerous, as well as less lucrative, than writing a History of his own.  Carlyle, however, was persistent, and Froude yielded.  After Mrs. Carlyle’s death they had met constantly, and the older man relied upon the younger as upon a son.

Froude sat down before the mass of documents in the spirit which had encountered the manuscripts of Simancas.  No help was accorded him.  He had to spell out the narrative for himself.  On one point he did venture to consult Carlyle, but Carlyle shrank from the topic with evident pain, and the conversation was not renewed.  It appeared from Mrs. Carlyle’s letters and journals that she had been jealous of Lady Ashburton, formerly Lady Harriet Baring, and by birth a Sandwich Montagu.  “Lady Ashburton,” says Charles Greville, writing on the occasion of her death in 1857, “was perhaps, on the whole, the most conspicuous woman in the society of the present day.  She was undoubtedly very intelligent, with much quickness and vivacity in conversation, and by dint of a good deal of desultory reading and social intercourse with men more or less distinguished, she had improved her mind, and made herself a very agreeable woman, and had acquired no small reputation for ability and wit ....  She was, or affected to be, extremely intimate with every man whose literary celebrity or talents constituted their only attraction, and, while they were gratified by the attentions of the great lady, her vanity was flattered by the homage of such men, of whom Carlyle was the principal.  It is only justice to her to say that she treated her literary friends with constant kindness and the most unselfish attentions.  They and their wives and children (when they had any) were received at her house in the country, and entertained there for weeks without any airs of patronage, and with a spirit of genuine benevolence as well as hospitality."*