come so. We are interested in
both. To be indifferent would be inhuman. Both men had great
endowments, tempestuous natures, hard lots. They were not amongst Dame
Fortune's favourites. They had to fight their way. What they took they
took by storm. But--and here is a difference indeed--Johnson came off
victorious, Carlyle did not.

Boswell's book is an arch of triumph, through which, as we read, we see
his hero passing into eternal fame, to take up his place with those--

'Dead but sceptred sovereigns who still rule
Our spirits from their urns.'

Froude's book is a tomb over which the lovers of Carlyle's genius will
never cease to shed tender but regretful tears.

We doubt whether there is in English literature a more triumphant book
than Boswell's. What materials for tragedy are wanting? Johnson was a
man of strong passions, unbending spirit, violent temper, as poor as a
church-mouse, and as proud as the proudest of church dignitaries; endowed
with the strength of a coal-heaver, the courage of a lion, and the tongue
of Dean Swift, he could knock down booksellers and silence bargees; he
was melancholy almost to madness, 'radically wretched,' indolent,
blinded, diseased. Poverty was long his portion; not that genteel
poverty that is sometimes behindhand with its rent, but that hungry
poverty that does not know where to look for its dinner. Against all
these things had this 'old struggler' to contend; over all these things
did this 'old struggler' prevail. Over even the fear of death, the
giving up of this 'intellectual being,' which had haunted his gloomy
fancy for a lifetime, he seems finally to have prevailed, and to have met
his end as a brave man should.

Carlyle, writing to his wife, says, and truthfully enough, 'The more the
devil worries me the more I wring him by the nose;' but then if the
devil's was the only nose that was wrung in the transaction, why need
Carlyle cry out so loud? After buffeting one's way through the storm-
tossed pages of Froude's _Carlyle_--in which the universe is stretched
upon the rack because food disagrees with man and cocks crow--with what
thankfulness and reverence do we read once again the letter in which
Johnson tells Mrs. Thrale how he has been called to endure, not dyspepsia
or sleeplessness, but paralysis itself:

'On Monday I sat for my picture, and walked a considerable way with
little inconvenience. In the afternoon and evening I felt myself