It seems almost wrong or unreasonable of me to be talking thus of myself and my little Doings, when not only Carlyle has departed from us, but one, not so illustrious in Genius, but certainly not less wise, my dear old Friend of sixty years, James Spedding: {302} whose name you will know as connected with Lord Bacon. To re-edit his Works, which did not want any such re-edition, and to vindicate his Character which could not be cleared, did this Spedding sacrifice forty years which he might well have given to accomplish much greater things; Shakespeare, for one. But Spedding had no sort of Ambition, and liked to be kept at one long work which he knew would not glorify himself. He was the wisest man I have known: not the less so for plenty of the Boy in him; a great sense of Humour, a Socrates in Life and in Death, which he faced with all Serenity so long as Consciousness lasted. I suppose something of him will reach America, I mean, of his Death, run over by a Cab and dying in St. George's Hospital to which he was taken, and from which he could not be removed home alive. I believe that had Carlyle been alive, and but as well as he was three months ago, he would have insisted on being carried to the Hospital to see his Friend, whom he respected as he did few others. I have just got the Carlyle Reminiscences, which will take me some little time to read, impatient as I may be to read them. What I have read is of a stuff we can scarce find in any other Autobiographer: whether his Editor Froude has done quite well in publishing them as they are, and so soon, is another matter. Carlyle's Niece thinks, not quite. She sent me a Pipe her Uncle had used, for Memorial. I had asked her for the Bowl, and an Inch of stem, of one of the Clay Pipes such as I had smoked with him under that little old Pear Tree in his Chelsea garden many an Evening. But she sent me a small Meerschaum which Lady Ashburton had given him, and which he used when from home. _To S. Laurence_. _March_ 13/81. MY DEAR LAURENCE, It was very very good of you to think of writing to me at all on this occasion: {303} much more, writing to me so fully, almost more fully than I dared at first to read: though all so delicately and as you always write. It is over! I shall not write about it. He was all you say.