It is no disparagement of Lockhart’s great book to say that in this respect of telling the truth he had an easy task.  For Scott was as faultless as a human creature can be.  Every one who knew him loved him, and he loved all men, even Whigs.  His early life, prosperous and successful, was as different as possible from Carlyle’s.  It was not until the years were closing in upon him that misfortune came, and called out that serene, heroic fortitude which his diary has made an everlasting possession for mankind.  Carlyle once said in a splenetic mood that the lives of men of letters were the most miserable records in literature, except the Newgate Calendar.  There could be no more striking examples to the contrary than Scott’s life and his own.  Perhaps Froude went too far in the direction indicated by Carlyle himself; abounded, as the French say, too much in Carlyle’s sense.  In his zeal to paint his hero, as his hero’s hero wished to be painted, with the warts, he may have made those disfiguring marks too prominent.  That a great man often has many small faults is a truism which does not need perpetual insistence.  Froude is rather too fond, like Carlyle himself, of taking up and repeating a single phrase.  When, for example, Carlyle’s mother said, half in fun, that he was “gey ill to deal wi’,” she was not stating a general proposition, but referring to a particular, and not very important, case of diet.  When Miss Welsh, who was in love with Edward Irving, told Carlyle in 1823 that she could only love him as a brother, and could not marry him, it is a too summary judgment, and not compatible with Froude’s own language elsewhere, to say that had they left matters thus it would have been better for both of them.  If she said at the end of her life, “I married for ambition, Carlyle has exceeded all that my wildest hopes ever imagined of him-and I am miserable,"* she said also, many times over, that he was the tenderest of husbands, and that no mother could have watched her health with more solicitude.  He gave what he had to give.  He could not give what he had not.  “Of all the men whom I have ever seen,” said Froude, “Carlyle was the least patient of the common woes of humanity.”  The fact is that his natural eloquence was irrepressible.  If Miss Edgeworth’s King Corny had the gout, nature said “Howl,” and he howled.  If Carlyle had indigestion, he broke into picturesque rhetoric about the hag which was riding him no-whither.  A far characteristic passage than his mother’s “gey to deal wi’” is his own simple confession to his father, “When I shout murder, I am not always being killed."+

—­ * Life, i. 302. + Life, i. 209. —­