Mill's just strictures on the "Nigger Pamphlet" he treats as the impertinence of a boy, and only to Emerson would he grant the privilege to hold his own. _Per contra,_ he overestimated those who were content to be his echoes. Material help he refused with a red Indian pride; intellectual he used and slighted. He renders scant justice to those who had preceded him in his lines of historical investigation, as if they had been poachers on his premises, _e.g._ Heath, the royalist writer of the Commonwealth time, is "carrion Heath": Noble, a former biographer of Cromwell, is "my reverend imbecile friend": his predecessors in _Friedrich,_ as Schlosser, Preuss, Ranke, Foerster, Vehse, are "dark chaotic dullards whose books are mere blotches of printed stupor, tumbled mountains of marine stores "--criticism valueless even when it raises the laughter due to a pantomime. Carlyle assailed three sets of people:-- 1. Real humbugs, or those who had behaved, or whom he believed to have behaved, badly to him. 2. Persons from whom he differed, or whom he could not understand--as Shelley, Keats, Lamb, Coleridge, and the leaders of Physics and Metaphysics. 3. Persons who had befriended, but would not give him an unrestricted homage or an implicit following, as Mill, Mazzini, Miss Martineau, etc. The last series of assaults are hard to pardon. Had his strictures been always just,--so winged with humorous epigram,--they would have blasted a score of reputations: as it is they have only served to mar his own. He was a typical Scotch student of the better class, stung by the *_oistros_ of their ambitious competition and restless push, wanting in repose, never like a gentleman at wise With moral breadth of tomperament, too apt to note his superiority with the sneer, "they call this man as good as me," Bacon, in one of his finest antitheses, draws a contrast between the love of Excellence and the love of Excelling. Carlyle is possessed by both; he had none of the exaggerated caution which in others of his race is apt to degenerate into moral cowardice: but when he thought himself trod on he became, to use his own figure, "a rattlesnake," and put out fangs like those of the griffins curiously, if not sardonically, carved on the tombs of his family in the churchyard at Ecclefechan.