Although Froude cared little for music, the rhythm of his sentences is musical, and the organ-note of the opening words in the quotation carries a reminiscence of Tacitus which will not escape the classical reader.  That is literary artifice, though a very high form of it.  The real merit of the paragraph is not so much its eloquence as its insight into the depth of things.  Many respectable historians see only the outward lineaments.  Froude saw the nation’s heart and soul.  It was the same with the great man whose biographer Froude became.  Carlyle’s faults would have been impossible in a character mean or small.  They were the defects of his qualities, those

Fears of the brave, and follies of the wise,

which do not wait to appear till the last scene of life.  Now that more than twenty years have passed since the final volumes of the Life were published, it may be said with confidence that Carlyle owes almost as much to Froude as to his own writings for his high and enduring fame.  “Though the lives of the Carlyles were not happy,” says Froude, “yet, if we look at them from the beginning to the end, they were grandly beautiful.  Neither of them probably under other conditions would have risen to as high an excellence as in fact they each actually achieved; and the main question is not how happy men and women have been in this world, but what they have made of themselves."* The loftier a man’s own view of mental conceptions and sublunary things, the more will he admire Carlyle as described by Froude.  The same Carlyle who made a ridiculous fuss about trifles confronted the real evils and trials of life with a dignity, courage, and composure which inspire humble reverence rather than vulgar admiration.  Froude rightly felt that Carlyle’s petty grumbles, often most amusing, throw into bright and strong relief his splendid generosity to his kinsfolk, his manly pride in writing what was good instead of what was lucrative, his anxiety that Mill should not perceive what he lost in the first volume of The French Revolution.  Whenever a crisis came, Carlyle stood the test.  The greater the occasion, the better he behaved.  One thing Froude did not give, and perhaps no biographer could.  Carlyle was essentially a humourist.  He laughed heartily at other people, and not less heartily at himself.  When he was letting himself go, and indulging freely in the most lurid denunciations of all and sundry, he would give a peculiar and most significant chuckle which cannot be put into print.  It was a warning not to take him literally, which has too often passed unheeded.  He has been compared with Swift, but he was not really a misanthropist, and no man loved laughter more, or could excite more uproarious merriment in others.  I remember a sober Scotsman, by no means addicted to frivolous merriment, telling me that he had come out of Carlyle’s house in physical pain from continuous laughter at an imaginary dialogue between a missionary and a negro which Carlyle had conducted entirely himself.