ife, can
tell me that their opinion of him is rather raised than diminished.
There is something demonic both in him and her which will never be
adequately understood; but the hearts of both of them were sound and
true to the last fibre. You may guess what difficulty mine has been,
and how weary the responsibility. You may guess, too, how dreary it
is to me to hear myself praised for frankness, when I find the world
all fastening on C.'s faults, while the splendid qualities are
ignored or forgotten. Let them look into their own miserable souls,
and ask themselves how they could bear to have their own private
histories ransacked and laid bare. I deliberately say (and I have
said it in the book), that C.'s was the finest nature I have ever
known. It is a Rembrandt picture, but what a picture! Ruskin, too,
understands him, and feels too, as he should, for me, if that
mattered, which it doesn't in the least."

A few years after publication the Reminiscences ran out of print,
and Froude was anxious to bring out a corrected edition. Mrs.
Alexander Carlyle, however, wished for another editor. The copyright
was Froude's, and no one could reprint the book in Great Britain
without his consent. At that time there was no international
copyright between the United Kingdom and the United States. A
distinguished American professor, Mr. Eliot Norton, was invited by
Mary Carlyle to re-edit the book beyond the Atlantic, and he
undertook the task. Froude always thought that Professor Norton
should have communicated with him, and the public will probably be
of the same opinion. In the end, however, Froude voluntarily
assigned the copyright to Mrs. Carlyle, who then had possession of
the papers, and Mr. Norton's edition appeared in England, published
by Macmillan, six years after Carlyle's death. It proved to be very
like the first, though some errors of the press were corrected and
also some slips of the pen. The disputed memoir was not omitted, nor
was anything of the slightest interest added by Mr. Norton to the
book. In his Preface he attacked Froude for fulfilling Carlyle's own
wishes, of which he seems to have known little or nothing, and, by
way of further justification for his interference, he added the
following paragraph:

"The first edition of the Reminiscences was so carelessly printed as
to do grave wrong to the sense. The punctuation, the use of capitals
and italics, in the manuscript, characteristic of Carlyle's method
of