We cannot but regret that the sketches were not written. They would have been immortal; for her power in this line has been unequalled by any one who has written in these later days. As it is, she has, unconsciously to herself, left a picture of the greatest of all the men she knew--Carlyle himself--which can never be blotted out. The portrait is full-length, full of Rembrandt-like light and shadow, and remorselessly faithful. Painted not for the public eye, but sketched in a thousand little parts, in matter-of-fact every-day letters to humble friends, with no remotest thought that other eyes would ever see them,--it is this by which Carlyle as a man will be known to all coming time. Not a hero, not a monster, as some have claimed, but a faulty man, with the defects of his qualities, described by a woman faulty like himself. A constitutional growler, with a warm heart withal, and infinite capacities for tenderness; selfish it may be, but inexorably just; cold to all the outside world, but warm-hearted and generous and magnificently loyal to his family, throughout all his distinguished career. No trace of snobbery or false shame in him. Not liking the reformers of his own day, but almost deifying the reformers of the past, and himself making it his mission, from earliest youth to hoary age, to reform the world in his own particular Carlylean way; fiercely assailing much that passed for religion, but being always deeply and truly religious at heart. What a vast contradictory Titan he seems in it all! If a lovely wind-flower, fresh and fragrant as the breath of morning, was crushed in the arms of this god of thunder, what shall we say? Shall we reject the god of thunder, who gave us the "Heroes," and the "Cromwell," and the "Frederick," and wish that he might have been a gentle poet singing to a lute; or shall we thank God for him, even as he was, though we give a tear to the wind-flower? [Illustration] [Illustration] VICTOR HUGO.