—­ * “Both he and she were noble and generous, but his was the soft heart and hers the stern one.”—–­Carlyle’s Life in London, vol. ii. p. 171. —­

The same can be said of Thirlwall, barring the groundless insinuation that he was dishonest in accepting a bishopric.  A very different sort of bishop, Samuel Wilberforce, Carlyle liked for his cleverness, though here too he could not help suggesting that on the foundation, or rather baselessness, of the Christian religion, “Sam” agreed with him.  The great historian of the age he did not appreciate at all.  But, then, he never met Macaulay.  “Some little ape called Keble,” is not a happy formula for the author of the Christian Year, and this is one of the phrases which I think Froude might well have omitted, as meaning no more than a casual execration.  Yet how minute are these defects, when set beside the intrinsic grandeur of the central figure in the book.  Carlyle mixed with all sorts and conditions of men and women, from the peasants of Annandale to the best intellectual society of London.  He was always, or almost always, the first man in the company, not elated, nor over-awed,” standing on the adamantine basis of his manhood, casting aside all props and shoars.”  From snobbishness, the corroding vice of English society, he was, though he once jocularly charged himself with it, entirely free.  He judged individuals on their merits with an eye as piercing and as pitiless as Saint Simon’s.  On pretence and affectation he had no mercy.  Learning, intellect, character, humility, integrity, worth, he held always in true esteem.  As Froude says, and it is the final word, Carlyle’s “extraordinary talents were devoted, with an equally extraordinary purity of purpose, to his Maker’s service, so far as he could see and understand that Maker’s will.”  He led “a life of single-minded effort to do right and only that of constant truthfulness in word and deed.”

That the man who wrote these sentences at the close of a book with which they are quite in keeping should have been reviled as a traitor to Carlyle’s memory is strange indeed.  To Froude it was incredible.  Conscious of regarding Carlyle as the greatest moral and intellectual force of his time, he could not have been more astonished if he had been charged with picking a pocket.  For criticism of his own judgment he was prepared.  He knew well that acute differences of opinion might arise.  The dishonesty and malignity imputed to him were outside the habits of his life and the range of his ideas.  He lived in a society where such things were not done, and where nobody was suspected of doing them.  He had fulfilled, to the best of his ability, Carlyle’s own injunctions, and he had faithfully portrayed as he knew him the man whom of all others he most revered.  He was bewildered, almost dazed, at what seemed to him the perverse and unscrupulous recklessness of his accusers.  Anonymous and abusive letters reached him daily; some