"In St. John's she was exceedingly kind and charitable to the poor,
and she and Lady Hoyles were active workers in the Dorcas Society.
She worshipped at St. Thomas' (Episcopal) Church, and was
especially interested in her Sunday-school class. As we have seen,
her sympathies were more with the Presbyterian Church, but probably
because of her husband's official position, she always chose in the
Colonies to connect herself with the Church of England."

If this be a fair account of Lady Bannerman, we may be pardoned for
wondering why any one thought her biography worth writing. What it all
has to do with Carlyle is to us far from clear. The eyes of publishers,
however, are in these matters notoriously sharper than those of
reviewers.

II

Having disposed of Carlyle's first love, we can attend to his second--if
that is where Miss Welsh comes in order of seniority; for our text
mercifully obliges us to say nothing of Miss Aurora Kirkpatrick, another
claimant to the honour of having sat for Blumine, while on the glories
of Lady Ashburton, who, to be frank, interests us no more than the
simplest of these extremely simple "misses," the title of our essay
precludes us from expatiating. But can we? Does not the great man, who
was to give Jane the splendour of his name, seem rather to demand prompt
satisfaction for the insult paid him in our first paragraph? There we
said, or implied, that he was obsolescent; and it is, perhaps, worth
pausing to inquire how a man who seemed to his own age one of the great
teachers and spiritual masters of humanity--the peer of Pythagoras and
Buddha, of Plato, Epictetus, St. Francis and Rousseau--comes in this
generation to be held a little higher than Emerson, a good deal lower
than Matthew Arnold, immeasurably so than Renan. And is it not worth
pausing again to reflect that, contemporaneously with these men, and
almost unknown to Western Europe, lived one who bids fair to produce a
greater effect on the world than has been produced by any teacher since
the crucifixion?

It was primarily as a teacher, as a disseminator of ideas, that Carlyle
appeared venerable to his own age; in a less degree they admired him as
an historian and an artist. To-day, his ideas are as musty as those of
Godwin--a better exponent of deeper speculations: as an historian--in
spite of an undeniable gift for visualizing and describing scenes from
the past--he is hardly of more conse