Dickens carried it about with him, and founded on it his Tale of Two Cities.  Thackeray wrote an enthusiastic review of it.  Its wisdom and eloquence were a treasure to Dr. Arnold, who knew, if any man did, what history was.  It was like no other book that had ever been written, and critics were driven to talk of Aeschylus or Isaiah.  Such comparisons profit little or nothing.  The French Revolution is an original book by a man who believed in God’s judgment upon sin.  The memoirs of Madame Dubarry might have suggested it; but it came from Carlyle’s own heart and soul.

Professors may prove to their own satisfaction that it is not history at all, and Carlyle has been posthumously convicted of miscalculating the distance from Paris to Varennes.  It remains one of the books that cannot be forgotten, that fascinate all readers, even the professors themselves.  And yet, greater than the book itself is Carlyle’s behaviour when the first volume had been lost by Mill.  Mill, himself in extreme misery, had to come and tell the author.  He stayed a long time, and when he had gone Carlyle said to his wife, “Well, Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up; we must endeavour to hide from him how very serious this business is to us.”  Maximus in maximis; minimus in minimis; such was Carlyle, and as such Froude exhibits him, not concealing the fact that in small matters he could be very small.

The two personalities of Carlyle and his wife are so fascinating that there may be some excuse for regarding even their quarrels, which were chiefly on her side,* with interest.  But Frederick the Great will survive these broils, and so long as Carlyle’s books are read his biography will be read too, as his best extraneous memorial, just, eloquent, appreciative, sincere.  Carlyle was no model of austere, colourless consistency.  His reverent admiration of Peel, whom he knew, is quite irreconcilable with his savage contempt of Gladstone, whom he did not know.  Peel was a great parliamentary statesman, and Gladstone was his disciple.  Both belonged equally to the class which Carlyle denounced as the ruin of England, and rose to supreme power through the representative system that he especially abhorred.  On no important point, while Peel was alive, did they differ.  “On the whole,” said Gladstone, “Peel was the greatest man I ever knew,” and in finance he was always a Peelite.  That a man who was four times Prime Minister of England could have been a canting hypocrite, deceiving himself and others, implies that the whole nation was fit for a lunatic asylum.  Carlyle seldom studied a political question thoroughly, and of public men with whom he was acquainted only through the newspapers he was no judge.  Personal contact produced estimates which, though they might be harsh, hasty, and unfair, were always interesting, and sometimes marvellously accurate.  Of Peel, for instance, though he saw him very seldom, he has left a finished portrait, not omitting the great Minister’s humour, for any trace of which the Peel papers may be searched in vain.