s for his high
and enduring fame. "Though the lives of the Carlyles were not
happy," says Froude, "yet, if we look at them from the beginning to
the end, they were grandly beautiful. Neither of them probably under
other conditions would have risen to as high an excellence as in
fact they each actually achieved; and the main question is not how
happy men and women have been in this world, but what they have made
of themselves."* The loftier a man's own view of mental conceptions
and sublunary things, the more will he admire Carlyle as described
by Froude. The same Carlyle who made a ridiculous fuss about trifles
confronted the real evils and trials of life with a dignity,
courage, and composure which inspire humble reverence rather than
vulgar admiration. Froude rightly felt that Carlyle's petty
grumbles, often most amusing, throw into bright and strong relief
his splendid generosity to his kinsfolk, his manly pride in writing
what was good instead of what was lucrative, his anxiety that Mill
should not perceive what he lost in the first volume of The French
Revolution. Whenever a crisis came, Carlyle stood the test. The
greater the occasion, the better he behaved. One thing Froude did
not give, and perhaps no biographer could. Carlyle was essentially a
humourist. He laughed heartily at other people, and not less
heartily at himself. When he was letting himself go, and indulging
freely in the most lurid denunciations of all and sundry, he would
give a peculiar and most significant chuckle which cannot be put
into print. It was a warning not to take him literally, which has
too often passed unheeded. He has been compared with Swift, but he
was not really a misanthropist, and no man loved laughter more, or
could excite more uproarious merriment in others. I remember a sober
Scotsman, by no means addicted to frivolous merriment, telling me
that he had come out of Carlyle's house in physical pain from
continuous laughter at an imaginary dialogue between a missionary
and a negro which Carlyle had conducted entirely himself.

--
* 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 upo