Where he suspected fraud of any kind he was pitiless—but half his utterances were redeemed by a loud laugh, a laugh which impressed me as being quite as much directed against himself as against his victim—and that laugh took the sting of cruelty out of his speech. He did not suffer fools gladly, and he could not brook being lionized, but during all the years that I knew him—from before the year 1850 to the time of his death—he was always kind to everybody with whom I saw him—kind and, in his rough way, considerate. The downright nature of the man was well shown by what he said of the Duke of Wellington’s speeches in the House of Lords: “He was no orator, but he was the best man there, for he had something to say and he said it.” To the gewgaws and tinsel of oratory he paid no respect; so the cloth were good he cared not for the embroidery. His great admiration of the old warrior was fully shared by Mrs. Carlyle. Is it not recorded in one of her letters or writings that on one occasion, happening to meet the Duke at some party, she contrived to brush up against him in order just to be able to say that she had once touched him? Like everybody else who held Carlyle in reverent affection I was shocked by Froude’s publications. No falser portrait of a great man was ever handed down to posterity than that which he has painted. Would Carlyle’s friends have loved him as they did had he been the snarling, spiteful, inhuman monster that he represents, without one scintilla of the rare geniality and of the power of friendship which he possessed? That he was a good hater—such a hater as Dr. Johnson would have loved—no man will deny; much of his hatred was political; in regard to social life—the life of man with his kind—I have known him to melt into a tenderness that was all the more touching coming as it did from the rugged Scottish peasant nature. I have walked with him and sat with him by the hour, without hearing him say an ill-natured word of man or woman. Above all it is a pity that the veil of sanctity which should mask the wedded life of even the humblest individual should have been lifted in the case of two such remarkable personalities as the Carlyles. Froude has done it, greatly to the prejudice of the friend who trusted him, but who was careful to express the feeling that the papers which he confided to him would need judicious editing, and that at a time when the one person fitted to edit them would be no more. In spite of my great admiration for Froude as a writer of English prose, I am bound to say that his treatment of Carlyle must always remain a blot upon his reputation not only as a man of letters but as a friend.