278 A SUNDAY IN CHEYNE ROW. 



the pedestal of clay upon which the golden image 

 was reared. The gold he held to as do all serious 

 souls, but the dogma of clay he quickly dropped. 

 " Whatever becomes of us," he said, referring to this 

 subject in a letter to a friend when he was in his 

 twenty-third year, " never let us cease to behave like 

 honest men." 



IV. 



CARLYLE had an enormous egoism, but to do the 

 work he felt called on to do, to offset and withstand 

 the huge, roaring, on-rushing modern world as he did, 

 required an enormous egoism. In more senses than 

 one do the words applied to the old prophet apply to 

 him : " For, behold, I have made thee this day a 

 defended city, and an iron pillar, and brazen walls 

 against the whole land, against the kings of Juda, 

 against the princes thereof, against the priests thereof, 

 and against the people of the land." He was a de- 

 fended city, an iron pillar, and brazen wall, in the 

 extent to which he was riveted and clinched in his 

 own purpose and aim as well as in his attitude of 

 opposition or hostility to the times in which he lived. 



Froude, whose life of Carlyle in its just completed 

 form, let me say here, has no equal in interest or 

 literary value among biographies since his master's 

 life of Sterling, presents his hero to us a prophet in 

 the literal and utilitarian sense, as a foreteller of the 

 course of events, and says that an adequate estimate 



