In 1879 Dr. Carlyle died, leaving Froude and Stephen the sole executors under the will.  Late in the autumn of that year Carlyle suddenly said to Froude, “When you have done with those papers of mine, give them to Mary.”  Mary was his niece Mary Aitken, Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, who had lived in Cheyne Row to take care of her uncle since her aunt’s death, and was married to her cousin.  Carlyle speaks of her with great affection in his will, “for the loving care and unwearied patience and helpfulness she has shown to me in these my last solitary and infirm years.”  It was natural that he should think of her, and should contemplate leaving her more than the five hundred pounds specified in his original will.  But this particular request was so startling that Froude ought to have made further inquiries.  The papers had been given to him, and he might have destroyed them.  They had been, without his knowledge, left in the will to John Carlyle, who was then dead.  Carlyle’s mind was not clear about the fate of his manuscripts.  Froude, however, acquiesced, and did not even ask that Carlyle should put his intentions on paper.  At this time, while he was writing the first volume of the Life, Froude made up his mind to keep back Mrs. Carlyle’s letters, with her husband’s sketch of her, to suppress the fact that there had been any disagreement between them, but to publish in a single volume Carlyle’s reminiscences of his father, of Edward Irving, of Francis Jeffrey, and of Robert Southey.  To this separate publication Carlyle at once assented.  But in November, 1880, when he was eighty-five, and Mrs. Carlyle had been fourteen years in her grave, he asked what Froude really meant to do with the letters and the memoir.  Forced to make up his mind at once, and believing that publication was Carlyle’s own wish, he replied that he meant to publish them.  The old man seemed to be satisfied, and no more was said.  Froude drew the inference that most people would, in the circumstances, have drawn.  He concluded that Carlyle wished to relieve himself of responsibility, to get the matter off his mind, to have no disclosure in his lifetime, but to die with the assurance that after his death the whole story of his wife’s heroism would be told.

On the 4th of February, 1881, Carlyle died.  Froude, Tyndall, and Lecky attended his quiet funeral in the kirkyard of Ecclefechan, where he lies with his father and mother.  Dean Stanley had offered Westminster Abbey, but the family had refused.  Carlyle was buried among his own people, who best understood him, and whom he best understood.  The two volumes of reminiscences at once appeared, including sketches of Irving and Jeffrey, with the memoir of Mrs. Carlyle.  But even before the publication of these volumes, which came out early in March, a question, which was ominous of future trouble, arose out of copyright and title to profits.  A fortnight after Carlyle’s death Froude’s co-executor, Mr. Justice Stephen,