Upon his 80th birthday, Carlyle was presented with a gold medal from Scottish friends and admirers, and with a letter from Prince Bismarck, both of which he valued highly. His last public act was to write a letter of three or four lines to the _Times_, which he explains to his brother in this fashion: 'After much urgency and with a dead-lift effort, I have this day [5th May 1877] got issued through the _Times_ a small indispensable deliverance on the Turk and Dizzy question. Dizzy, it appears, to the horror of those who have any interest in him and his proceedings, has decided to have a new war for the Turk against all mankind; and this letter hopes to drive a nail through his mad and maddest speculations on that side.' Froude tells us that Carlyle continued to read the Bible, 'the significance of which' he found 'deep and wonderful almost as much as it ever used to be.' The Bible and Shakespeare remained 'the best books' to him that were ever written. The death of his brother John was a severe shock to Carlyle, for they were deeply attached to each other. When he bequeathed Craigenputtock to the University of Edinburgh, John Carlyle settled a handsome sum for medical bursaries there, to encourage poor students. 'These two brothers,' Froude remarks, 'born in a peasant's home in Annandale, owing little themselves to an Alma Mater which had missed discovering their merits, were doing for Scotland's chief University what Scotland's peers and merchants, with their palaces and deer forests and social splendour, had, for some cause, too imperfectly supplied.' In the autumn of 1880, Carlyle became very infirm; in January he was visibly sinking; and on the 5th of February 1881, he passed away in his eighty-fifth year. In accordance with his expressed wishes, they buried him in the old kirkyard of Ecclefechan with his own people.