ook won him a success as complete and enduring
in Germany as in England and America.

[Note 5: Froude, _Carlyle, Life in London_, vol. ii, pp. 100 and
217.]

When this was finished, Carlyle was on the verge of seventy and his work
was done; though the evening of his life was long, his strength was
exhausted. His wife lived just long enough to see the seal set upon his
fame, and to hear of his election to be Lord Rector of Edinburgh
University. But in April 1866, while he was in Scotland for his
installation, which she was too weak to attend, he heard the news of her
sudden death from heart failure in London; and after this he was a
broken man. By reading her journal he learnt, too late, how much his
own inconsiderate temper had added to her trials, and his remorse was
bitter and lasting. He shut himself off from all his friends except
Froude, who was to be his literary executor, and gave himself to
collecting and annotating the memorials which she had left. Each letter
is followed by some words of tender recollection or some cry of
self-reproach. He has erected to her the most singular of literary
monuments, morbid perhaps, but inspired by a feeling which was in his
case natural and sincere.

About 1870 he began to lose the use of his right hand and he found it
impossible to compose by dictation. Of the last years of his life there
is little to narrate. The offer of a baronetcy or the G.C.B. from Mr.
Disraeli in 1874 pleased him for the moment, but he resolutely refused
external honours. He took daily walks with Froude, daily drives when he
became too weak to go on foot. Towards the end the Bible and Shakespeare
were his most habitual reading. He had long ceased to be a member of any
church, but his belief in God and in God's working in history was the
very foundation of his being, and the lessons of the Bible were to him
inexhaustible and ever new. Death came to him peacefully in February,
1881; and as he had expressed a definite wish, he was buried at
Ecclefechan, though a public funeral in the Abbey was offered and its
acceptance would have met with the approval of his countrymen.

The very wealth of records makes it difficult to judge his character
fairly. Few men have so laid bare the thoughts and feelings of their
hearts. It is easy to blame the unmanly laments which he utters over his
health, his solitude, and his sufferings, real or imaginary; few
imaginative writers have the every-day virtues. His egotism,