wise than himself:--

"A far finer essay were a faithful, loving, and yet critical, and
in part condemnatory, delineation of Jeremy Bentham, and his place
and working in this section of the world's history. Bentham will
not be put down by logic, and should not be put down, for we need
him greatly as a backwoodsman: neither can reconciliation be
effected till the one party understands and is just to the other.
Bentham is a denyer; he denies with a loud and universally
convincing voice; his fault is that he can _affirm_ nothing,
except that money is pleasant in the purse, and food in the
stomach, and that by this simplest of all beliefs he can
reorganise society. He can shatter it in pieces--no thanks to him,
for its old fastenings are quite rotten--but he cannot reorganise
it; this is work for quite others than he. Such an essay on
Bentham, however, were a great task for any one; for me a very
great one, and perhaps rather out of my road."

Perhaps Carlyle would have agreed that Mr. Mill's famous pair of
essays on Bentham and Coleridge have served the purpose which he had
in his mind, though we may well regret the loss of such a picture of
Bentham's philosophic personality as he would surely have given us. It
is touching to think of him whom we all know as the most honoured name
among living veterans of letters,[1] passing through the vexed ordeal
of the young recruit, and battling for his own against the waywardness
of critics and the blindness of publishers. In 1831 he writes to Mr.
Napier: "All manner of perplexities have occurred in the publishing
of my poor book, which perplexities I could only cut asunder, not
unloose; so the MS. like an unhappy ghost still lingers on the wrong
side of Styx; the Charon of ---- Street durst not risk it in his
_sutilis cymba_, so it leaped ashore again." And three months later:
"I have given up the notion of hawking my little Manuscript Book about
any further; for a long time it has lain quiet in its drawer, waiting
for a better day." And yet this little book was nothing less than the
History of the French Revolution.

[Footnote 1: Carlyle died on February 5, 1881.]

It might be a lesson to small men to see the reasonableness, sense,
and patience of these greater men. Macaulay's letters show him to have
been a pattern of good sense and considerateness. Mr. Carlyle seems
indeed to have found Jeffrey's editorial vigour mor