—­ * Carlyle’s Early Life, i. 381. —­

Carlyle, it must be remembered, knew Froude’s historical methods quite as well as he knew Froude.  It was because he knew them, and approved of them, that he asked Froude to be the historian of Cheyne Row.  Froude’s devotion to him had indeed been singular.  During the last decade of his life Carlyle was very feeble, and required constant care.  He came to lean upon Froude more and more, requiring his company in walks, and even in omnibuses, until Froude almost ceased to be his own master.  The lecturing tour in the United States and the political visits to South Africa were permitted, because they were thought right.  But Fraser’s Magazine had to be given up, partly that employment might be found for a young man in whom Carlyle was interested, and the project for a new history of Charles V. was perforce abandoned.  It has been said, though not by any one who knew the facts, that Froude profited in a pecuniary sense by exchanging history for biography.  The exact opposite is the truth.  From 1866 to 1869, the last years of his great book, Froude received from Messrs. Longman about fourteen hundred pounds a year, including his salary as editor of Fraser, which he relinquished at Carlyle’s bidding.  From 1877 to 1884 he did not receive more than seven hundred.  Two volumes of history brought in about as much as three of biography, and there is no reason to suppose that Charles V. would have proved less popular than Henry viii. or Elizabeth.  Froude was unusually prosperous and successful as a man of letters, though it is of course impossible for the highest literary work to be adequately paid.  He had to deal with liberal publishers, and after 1856 his position as a writer was assured.  The idea that necessity drove him to fill his pockets at the expense of a dead friend’s reputation is as preposterous in his case as it would have been in Lockhart’s or Stanley’s.

Had Froude been the cynic he is often called, he would have borne with callous indifference, as he did bear in dignified silence, the attacks made upon him for his revelations of Carlyle.  But Froude was not what he seemed.  Behind his stately presence, and lofty manner, and calmly audacious speech, there was a singularly sensitive nature.  He would do what he thought right with perfect fearlessness, and without a moment’s hesitation.  When the consequences followed he was not always prepared for them, and people who were not worth thinking about could give him pain.  Human beings are composite creatures, and the feminine element in man is more obvious than the masculine element in woman.  Froude had a feminine disposition to be guided by feeling, and to remember old grievances as vividly as if they had happened the day before.  He was also a typical west countryman in habit of mind, as well as in face, figure, and speech.  His beautiful voice, exquisitely modulated, never raised in talk, was thoroughly Devonian.  So too were his imperfect sense of the effect produced