s will." He led "a life of single-minded effort to do right
and only that of constant truthfulness in word and deed."

That the man who wrote these sentences at the close of a book with
which they are quite in keeping should have been reviled as a
traitor to Carlyle's memory is strange indeed. To Froude it was
incredible. Conscious of regarding Carlyle as the greatest moral and
intellectual force of his time, he could not have been more
astonished if he had been charged with picking a pocket. For
criticism of his own judgment he was prepared. He knew well that
acute differences of opinion might arise. The dishonesty and
malignity imputed to him were outside the habits of his life and the
range of his ideas. He lived in a society where such things were not
done, and where nobody was suspected of doing them. He had
fulfilled, to the best of his ability, Carlyle's own injunctions,
and he had faithfully portrayed as he knew him the man whom of all
others he most revered. He was bewildered, almost dazed, at what
seemed to him the perverse and unscrupulous recklessness of his
accusers. Anonymous and abusive letters reached him daily; some even
of his own friends looked coldly on him. He was a sensitive man, and
he felt it deeply. He shrank from going out unless he knew exactly
whom he was to meet. But his pride came to his rescue, and he
preferred suffering injustice in silence to discussing in public, as
though it admitted of doubt, the question whether he was an honest
man. He did, however, invite the opinion of his co-executor, an
English judge, a close friend of Carlyle, and a man whose personal
integrity was above all suspicion. Although the calumnies which gave
Froude so much distress have long sunk into an oblivion of contempt,
and require no formal refutation, the conclusive verdict of Sir
James Fitzjames Stephen may be fitly quoted here:

"For about fifteen years I was the intimate friend and constant
companion of both of you [Carlyle and Froude], and never in my life
did I see any one man so much devoted to any other as you were to
him during the whole of that period of time. The most affectionate
son could not have acted better to the most venerated father. You
cared for him, soothed him, protected him, as a guide might protect
a weak old man down a steep and painful path. The admiration you
have habitually expressed for him was unqualified. You never said to
me one ill-natured word about him down to this day. It