—­ * I need hardly say that this was long before Froude’s connection with Fraser. —­

Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live.

Carlyle, unlike Coleridge, was a real moralist, and it was duty, not hope, that guided his pen.  Health he had, though he never would admit it, and with excellent sense he invested his first savings in a horse.  His frugal life was at least wholesome, and the one comfort with which he could not dispense was the cheap comfort of tobacco.  Idleness would have been impossible to him if he had been a millionaire, and labour was his refuge from despondency.  Like most humourists, he had low spirits, though his “genial sympathy with the under side of things,” to quote his own definition of the undefinable, must have been some solace for his woes.  He could read all day without wearying, so that he need never be alone.  As a talker no one surpassed him, or perhaps equalled him at his best, in London or even in Annandale.  What ought to have struck all readers of these volumes was the courage, the patience, the dignity, the generosity, and the genius of this Scottish peasant.  What chiefly struck too many of them was that he did not get on with his wife.

Froude’s defence is first Carlyle’s precept, and secondly his own conviction that the truth would be advantageous rather than injurious to Carlyle.  Carlyle’s way of writing about other people, for instance Charles Lamb, Saint Charles, as Thackeray called him, is sometimes unpardonable; and if Froude had suppressed those passages he would have done well.  His own personal conduct is a lesson to us all, and that lesson is in Froude’s pages for every one to read.  “What a noisy inanity is this world,” wrote Carlyle in his diary at the opening of the year 1835.  Without the few great men who, like Carlyle, can lift themselves and others above it, it would be still noisier, still more inane.

Next year the gossips had a still richer feast.  In 1883 Froude, faithful to his trust, brought out three volumes Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle.  The true and permanent interest of this book is that it introduced the British and American public to some of the most brilliantly witty and amusing epistles that the language contains.  Indeed, there are very few letter-writers in any language who can be compared with Mrs. Carlyle.  Inferior to her husband in humourous description, as in depth of thought, she surpassed him in liveliness of wit, in pungency of satire, and in terseness of expression.  Her narrative is inimitable, and sometimes, as in the account of her solitary visit to her old home at Haddington twenty-three years after her marriage, her dramatic power is overwhelming.  Carlyle himself had been familiar to the public for half a century through his books.  Until Mrs. Carlyle’s letters appeared the world knew nothing of her at all, except through her husband’s sketch.  Considering that good letter-writers are almost as