The complement to "Old Fitz" was Carlyle. He was the friend of both FitzGerald and Tennyson. Gruff, grumbling, self-centred, satirical, at times even rude and rough, as he was, both of them seemed to have got not so much on his blind, as on his kind side from the first, and always to have remained there. Carlyle's descriptions of Tennyson as a young man in the early "forties" and of the pleasure he had in his company are well known. "He seemed to take a fancy to me," Tennyson said himself one day while we talked about him at Farringford. They foregathered a good deal at this period, sat and smoked silently, walked and talked together, both by day and night. FitzGerald told Hallam Tennyson, years after, during the visit to Woodbridge, that Carlyle was much concerned at this period about his father's poverty, and said to him, "Alfred must have a pension." The story of the way in which he spurred on "Dicky" Milnes to secure the pension is now classical. What his special effect, if he had any, on Tennyson was, it might be difficult to estimate or analyse. The younger generation to-day does not remember the period of Carlyle's immense influence. It lasted just into the youth of my contemporaries and myself, or perhaps a little longer, and then began to wane and die away. He certainly was a "radio-active" force in the days and with the men of Tennyson's youth,--Maurice, and Sterling, and "Dicky" Milnes, as he was a little later with Ruskin and Kingsley. FitzGerald, with his detachment and his fearless sincerity, estimated him as fairly as any one. "Do you see Carlyle's _Latter-Day Pamphlets_?" he wrote. "They make the world laugh, and his friends rather sorry for him. But that is because people will still look for practical measures from him. One must be content with him as a great satirist who can make us feel when we are wrong, though he cannot set us right. There is a bottom of truth in Carlyle's wildest rhapsodies." He wrote to Frederick Tennyson in 1850: "When I spoke of the 'Latter-Day Prophet' I conclude you have read or heard of Carlyle's Pamphlets. People are tired of them and of him; he only foams, snaps, and howls and no progress people say. This is about true, and yet there is vital good in all he has written." Again, in 1854, he says, "Carlyle I did not go to see, for I have really nothing to tell him, and I am tired of hearing him growl, tho' I admire him as much as ever." "I wonder if he ever thinks how much sound and fury he has vented," he writes on another occasion. But the posthumous publication of Carlyle's Letters, as he wrote about a fortnight before his own death, "raised him in FitzGerald's esteem"; and his last effort was to go to Chelsea to see his statue, and the old house hard by which he had not seen for five-and-twenty years, to find it, alas, "deserted, neglected, and 'To let!'"