e,"* she said also, many times over, that he was
the tenderest of husbands, and that no mother could have watched her
health with more solicitude. He gave what he had to give. He could
not give what he had not. "Of all the men whom I have ever seen,"
said Froude, "Carlyle was the least patient of the common woes of
humanity." The fact is that his natural eloquence was irrepressible.
If Miss Edgeworth's King Corny had the gout, nature said "Howl," and
he howled. If Carlyle had indigestion, he broke into picturesque
rhetoric about the hag which was riding him no-whither. A far
characteristic passage than his mother's "gey to deal wi'" is his
own simple confession to his father, "When I shout murder, I am not
always being killed."+

--
* Life, i. 302.
+ Life, i. 209.
--

That Froude's ideas of a biographer's duty were the same as his own
Carlyle had good reason to know. Froude had stated them plainly
enough in Fraser's Magazine, which Carlyle always saw, for June,
1876. He prefaced an article on the present Sir George Trevelyan's
Life of Macaulay, a daring attack upon that historian for the very
faults that were attributed to himself, with the following
sentences: "Every man who has played a distinguished part in life,
and has largely influenced either the fortunes or the opinions of
his contemporaries, becomes the property of the public. We desire to
know, and we have a right to know, the inner history of the person
who has obtained our confidence." This doctrine would not have been
universally accepted. Tennyson, for instance, would have vehemently
denied it. But it is at least frankly expressed, and Carlyle must
have known very well what sort of biography Froude would write.

If Froude dwelt on Carlyle's failings, it was because he knew that
his reputation would bear the strain. He has been justified by the
result, for Carlyle's fame stands higher to-day than it ever stood
before. That man, be he prince or peasant, is not to be envied who
can read Froude's account of Carlyle's early life without feeling
the better for it. It is by no means a cheerful story. The first
forty years of Carlyle's existence, when the French Revolution had
not been published, were an apparently hopeless struggle against
poverty and obscurity. Sartor Resartus was scarcely understood by
any one, and though his wife saw that it was a work of genius, it
seemed to most people unintelligible mysticism. With the splendid
exception of Goethe, h