Early in 1869 the Queen expressed a wish, through Dean Stanley, to become personally acquainted with Carlyle. The meeting took place at Westminster Deanery: 'The Queen,' Carlyle said, 'was really very gracious and pretty in her demeanour throughout; rose greatly in my esteem by everything that happened; did not fall in any point. The interview was quietly very mournful to me; the one point of real interest, a sombre thought: "Alas! how would it have cheered her, bright soul, for my sake, had she been there!"' When Carlyle was in constant expectation of his end, he--in June 1871--brought to Mr Froude's house a large parcel of papers. 'He put it in my hands,' says Froude. 'He told me to take it simply and absolutely as my own, without reference to any other person or persons, and to do with it as I pleased after he was gone. He explained, when he saw me surprised, that it was an account of his wife's history, that it was incomplete, that he could himself form no opinion whether it ought to be published or not, that he could do no more to it, and must pass it over to me. He wished never to hear of it again. I must judge. I must publish it, the whole, or part--or else destroy it all, if I thought that this would be the wiser thing to do.'[40] Three years later Carlyle sent to Froude his own and his wife's private papers, journals, correspondence, reminiscences, and other documents. 'Take them,' he said to Froude, 'and do what you can with them. All I can say to you is, Burn freely. If you have any affection for me, the more you burn the better.' Mr Froude burnt nothing, and it was well, he says, that he did not, for a year before his death he desired him, when he had done with the MSS., to give them to his niece. 'The new task which had been laid upon me,' writes Froude in his biography of Carlyle, 'complicated the problem of the "Letters and Memorials." My first hope was, that, in the absence of further definite instructions from himself, I might interweave parts of Mrs Carlyle's letters with his own correspondence in an ordinary narrative, passing lightly over the rest, and touching the dangerous places only so far as was unavoidable. In this view I wrote at leisure the greatest part of "the first forty years" of his life. The evasion of the difficulty was perhaps cowardly, but it was not unnatural. I was forced back, however, into the straighter and better course.' The outcome of it all is too well-known to call for recapitulation here. In February 1874, the Emperor of Germany conferred upon Carlyle the Order of Merit which the great Frederick had himself founded. He could not refuse it, but he remarked, 'Were it ever so well meant, it can be of no value to me whatever. Do thee neither ill na gude.' Ten months later, Mr Disraeli, then Premier, offered him the Grand Cross of the Bath along with a pension. Carlyle gracefully declined both.