Of Carlyle's numerous later works the most important are 'Past and Present,' in which he contrasts the efficiency of certain strong men of medieval Europe with the restlessness and uncertainty of contemporary democracy and humanitarianism and attacks modern political economy; 'Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches,' which revolutionized the general opinion of Cromwell, revealing him as a true hero or strong man instead of a hypocritical fanatic; and 'The History of Frederick the Great,' an enormous work which occupied Carlyle for fourteen years and involved thorough personal examination of the scenes of Frederick's life and battles. During his last fifteen years Carlyle wrote little of importance, and the violence of his denunciation of modern life grew shrill and hysterical. That society was sadly wrong he was convinced, but he propounded no definite plan for its regeneration. He had become, however, a much venerated as well as a picturesque figure; and he exerted a powerful and constructive influence, not only directly, but indirectly through the preaching of his doctrines, in the main or in part, by the younger essayists and the chief Victorian poets and novelists, and in America by Emerson, with whom he maintained an almost lifelong friendship and correspondence. Carlyle died in 1881. Carlyle was a strange combination of greatness and narrowness. Like Macaulay, he was exasperatingly blind and bigoted in regard to the things in which he had no personal interest, though the spheres of their respective enthusiasms and antipathies were altogether different. Carlyle viewed pleasure and merely esthetic art with the contempt of the Scottish Covenanting fanatics, refusing even to read poetry like that of Keats; and his insistence on moral meanings led him to equal intolerance of such story-tellers as Scott. In his hostility to the materialistic tendencies so often deduced from modern science he dismissed Darwin's 'Origin of Species' with the exclamation that it showed up the capricious stupidity of mankind and that he never could read a page of it or would waste the least thought upon it. He mocked at the anti-slavery movement in both America and the English possessions, holding that the negroes were an inferior race probably better off while producing something under white masters than if left free in their own ignorance and sloth. Though his obstinacy was a part of his national temperament, and his physical and mental irritability in part a result of his ill-health, any candid estimate of his life cannot altogether overlook them. On the whole, however, there is no greater ethical, moral, and spiritual force in English Literature than Carlyle, and so much of his thought has passed into the common possession of all thinking persons to-day that we are all often his debtors when we are least conscious of it.