retaining only three for himself.  She accepted the money, though she denied that it was a gift.  In the opinion of Mr. Justice Stephen, which is worth rather more than hers, it was legally a gift, though there may have been in the circumstances a moral obligation.  But Mary Carlyle put forward another clam, of which the executors heard for the first time in June, 1881.  She then said that in 1875, six years before his death, her uncle had orally given her all his papers, and handed her the keys of the receptacles which contained them.

—­ * The provision for Mary Carlyle in the will of 1873 was, however, materially increase by the codicil of 1878, under which she received the house in Cheyne Row after the death of her uncle John, who died before her uncle Thomas. —­

Her recollection, however, must have been erroneous.  For the bulk of the papers had been in Froude’s possession since the end of 1873, or at latest the beginning of 1874, and were not in the drawers or boxes which the keys would have opened.  On the strength of her own statement, which was never tested in a court of law and was inconsistent with the clause in Carlyle’s will leaving his manuscripts to his brother John, Mrs. Carlyle demanded that Froude should surrender the materials for his biography, and not complete it.  He put himself into the hands of his co-executor, who successfully resisted the demand, and Froude, in accordance with Carlyle’s clearly expressed desire, kept the papers until he had done with them.  In a long and able letter to Froude himself, printed for private circulation in 1886, Mr. Justice Stephen says, with natural pride, “It was my whole object throughout to prevent a law-suit for the determination of what I felt was a merely speculative question, and to defeat the attempt made to prevent you from writing Mr. Carlyle’s life, and I am happy to say I succeeded.”  The public will always be grateful to the Judge, for there was no one living except Froude who had both the knowledge and the eloquence that could have produced such a book as his.  Of the Reminiscences Froude wrote to Skelton, “To me in no one of his writings does he appear in a more beautiful aspect; and so, I am still convinced, will all mankind eventually think.”

His own frame of mind at this period is vividly expressed in a letter to Max Muller, dated the 8th of December, 1881.  After some references to Goethe’s letters, and German copyright, he continues: 

“So much ill will has been shown me in the case of other letters that I walk as if on hot ashes, and often curse the day when I undertook the business.  I had intended, when I finished my English history, to set myself quietly down to Charles the Fifth, and spend the rest of my life on him.  I might have been half through by this time, and the world all in good humour with me.  My ill star was uppermost when I laid this aside.  There are objections to every course which I can follow.  The arguments