Here is how Carlyle describes his new friend:  “A fine, large-featured, dime-eyed, bronze-coloured, shaggy-headed man is Alfred; dusty, smoky, free and easy; who swims outwardly and inwardly with great composure in an articulate element as of tranquil chaos and tobacco smoke; great, now and then when he does emerge; a most restful, brotherly, whole-hearted man.”  Or again:  “Smokes infinite tobacco.  His voice is musical, metallic, fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between.  I do not meet in these late decades such company over a pipe.  We shall see what he will grow to."*

Hallam, Lord Tennyson, Life of Tennyson.

Although Carlyle was older than Tennyson by fourteen years, this was the beginning of a friendship which strengthened with years and lasted when they were both gray-haired men.  They talked and smoked and walked about together often at night through the lamp-lit streets, sometimes in the wind, and rain, Carlyle crying out as they walked along against the dirt and squalor and noise of London, “that healthless, profitless, mad and heavy-laden place,” “that Devil’s Oven.”

The years passed and Carlyle added book to book.  Perhaps of them all that which we should be most grateful for is his Life and Letters of Cromwell.  For in this book he set Cromwell in a new light, a better light than he had ever been set before.  Carlyle is a hero worshiper, and in Cromwell as a hero he can find no fault.  He had of course his faults like other men, and he had no need of such blind championship.  For in his letters and speeches, gathered together and given to the world by Carlyle, he speaks for himself.  In them we find one to whom we may look up as a true hero, a man of strength to trust.  We find, too, a man of such broad kindliness, a man of such a tender human heart that we may love him.

Another great book was Carlyle’s History of Frederick the Great.  It is a marvelous piece of historical work, and as volume after volume appeared Carlyle’s fame steadily rose.

“No critic,” says his first biographer, Froude, “no critic after the completion of Frederick, challenged Carlyle’s right to a place beside the greatest of English authors, past and present.”  He was a great historian, but in the history he gives us not dead facts, but living, breathing men and women.  His pages are as full of color and of life as the pages of Shakespeare.

The old days of struggle and want were long over, but the Carlyles still lived the simple life in the little Chelsea house.  As another writer* has quaintly put it, “Tom Carlyle lives in perfect dignity in a little 40 pound house in Chelsea, with a snuffy Scotch maid to open the door; and the best company in England ringing at it.”

Thackeray.

Then in 1865 Carlyle was chosen Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, and although this could add little to his fame, he was glad that his own country had recognized his greatness.