the fear of God before his eyes, and
no other fear whatever. That Lockhart had done, and in the eyes
Carlyle, who admired him as he admired few it was a supreme merit.
For the hypothesis Lockhart "at heart had a dislike to Scott, had
done his best in an underhand, treacherous manner to dis-hero him,"
he expressed, as he well might, unbounded contempt. It seems
incredible now that such a theory should ever, in or out of Bedlam,
have been held. Perhaps it will be equally incredible some day that
a similar view should have been taken of the relations between
Froude and Carlyle.

It is no disparagement of Lockhart's great book to say that in this
respect of telling the truth he had an easy task. For Scott was as
faultless as a human creature can be. Every one who knew him loved
him, and he loved all men, even Whigs. His early life, prosperous
and successful, was as different as possible from Carlyle's. It was
not until the years were closing in upon him that misfortune came,
and called out that serene, heroic fortitude which his diary has
made an everlasting possession for mankind. Carlyle once said in a
splenetic mood that the lives of men of letters were the most
miserable records in literature, except the Newgate Calendar. There
could be no more striking examples to the contrary than Scott's life
and his own. Perhaps Froude went too far in the direction indicated
by Carlyle himself; abounded, as the French say, too much in
Carlyle's sense. In his zeal to paint his hero, as his hero's hero
wished to be painted, with the warts, he may have made those
disfiguring marks too prominent. That a great man often has many
small faults is a truism which does not need perpetual insistence.
Froude is rather too fond, like Carlyle himself, of taking up and
repeating a single phrase. When, for example, Carlyle's mother said,
half in fun, that he was "gey ill to deal wi'," she was not stating
a general proposition, but referring to a particular, and not very
important, case of diet. When Miss Welsh, who was in love with
Edward Irving, told Carlyle in 1823 that she could only love him as
a brother, and could not marry him, it is a too summary judgment,
and not compatible with Froude's own language elsewhere, to say that
had they left matters thus it would have been better for both of
them. If she said at the end of her life, "I married for ambition,
Carlyle has exceeded all that my wildest hopes ever imagined of him-
and I am miserabl