opinion whether it ought to be
published or not, that he could do no more to it, and must pass it over
to me. He wished never to hear of it again. I must judge. I must publish
it, the whole, or part--or else destroy it all, if I thought that this
would be the wiser thing to do.'[40]

Three years later Carlyle sent to Froude his own and his wife's private
papers, journals, correspondence, reminiscences, and other documents.
'Take them,' he said to Froude, 'and do what you can with them. All I
can say to you is, Burn freely. If you have any affection for me, the
more you burn the better.' Mr Froude burnt nothing, and it was well, he
says, that he did not, for a year before his death he desired him, when
he had done with the MSS., to give them to his niece. 'The new task
which had been laid upon me,' writes Froude in his biography of Carlyle,
'complicated the problem of the "Letters and Memorials." My first hope
was, that, in the absence of further definite instructions from himself,
I might interweave parts of Mrs Carlyle's letters with his own
correspondence in an ordinary narrative, passing lightly over the rest,
and touching the dangerous places only so far as was unavoidable. In
this view I wrote at leisure the greatest part of "the first forty
years" of his life. The evasion of the difficulty was perhaps cowardly,
but it was not unnatural. I was forced back, however, into the
straighter and better course.' The outcome of it all is too well-known
to call for recapitulation here.

In February 1874, the Emperor of Germany conferred upon Carlyle the
Order of Merit which the great Frederick had himself founded. He could
not refuse it, but he remarked, 'Were it ever so well meant, it can be
of no value to me whatever. Do thee neither ill na gude.' Ten months
later, Mr Disraeli, then Premier, offered him the Grand Cross of the
Bath along with a pension. Carlyle gracefully declined both.

Upon his 80th birthday, Carlyle was presented with a gold medal from
Scottish friends and admirers, and with a letter from Prince Bismarck,
both of which he valued highly. His last public act was to write a
letter of three or four lines to the _Times_, which he explains to his
brother in this fashion: 'After much urgency and with a dead-lift
effort, I have this day [5th May 1877] got issued through the _Times_ a
small indispensable deliverance on the Turk and Dizzy question. Dizzy,
it appears, to the horror of those who have any interest