for and against were so many and so strong that Carlyle himself could not decide what was to be done, and left it to me.  He could see all sides of the question.  Other people will see one, or one more strongly than another, whatever it may be; and therefore, do what I will, a large body of people will blame me.  Nay, if I threw it up, a great many would blame me.  What have I done that I should be in such a strait?  But I am sixty-four years old, and I shall soon be beyond it all.”

The first two volumes of the biography, covering the earlier half of Carlyle’s life, when his home was in Scotland, from 1795 to 1835, appeared in 1882 and added to the hubbub.  The public had got on a false scent, and gossip had found a congenial theme.  Carlyle was in truth one of the noblest men that ever lived.  His faults were all on the surface.  His virtues were those which lie at the foundation of our being.  For the common objects of vulgar ambition he had a scorn too deep for words.  He never sought, and he did not greatly value, the praise of men.  He had a message to deliver, in which he profoundly believed, and he could no more go beyond it, or fall short of it, than Balaam when he was tempted by Balak.  Contemporaries without a hundredth part of his talent, even for practical business, attained high positions, or positions which the world thought high.  Carlyle did not envy them, was not dazzled by them, but held to his own steadfast purpose of preaching truth and denouncing shams.  His generosity to his own family was boundless, and he never expected thanks.  He was tender-hearted, forgiving, kind, in all great matters, whenever he had time to think.  Courage and truth made him indifferent to fashion and popularity.  Popularity was not his aim.  His aim was to tell people what was for their good, whether they would hear or whether they would forbear.  Froude had so much confidence in the essential greatness of the man that he did not hesitate to show him as he was, not a prodigy of impossible perfection, but a sterling character and a lofty genius.  Therefore his portrait lives, and will live, when biographies written for flattery or for edification have been consigned to boxes or to lumber-rooms.

Froude was only following the principles laid down by Carlyle himself.  In reviewing Lockhart’s Life of Scott, Carlyle emptied the vials of his scorn, which were ample and capacious, upon “English biography, bless its mealy mouth.”  The censure of Lockhart for “personalities, indiscretion,” violating the “sanctities of private life,” was, he said, better than a good many praises.  A biographer should speak the truth, having the fear of God before his eyes, and no other fear whatever.  That Lockhart had done, and in the eyes Carlyle, who admired him as he admired few it was a supreme merit.  For the hypothesis Lockhart “at heart had a dislike to Scott, had done his best in an underhand, treacherous manner to dis-hero him,” he expressed, as he well might, unbounded contempt.  It seems incredible now that such a theory should ever, in or out of Bedlam, have been held.  Perhaps it will be equally incredible some day that a similar view should have been taken of the relations between Froude and Carlyle.