Archdeacon Hare having given a
somewhat coldly correct account of Sterling as a clergyman, Carlyle three
years later, in 1851, published his own impressions of his friend as
a thinker, sane philanthropist, and devotee of truth, in a work that,
written in a three months' fervour, has some claim to rank, though
faltering, as prose after verse, with _Adonais_, _In Memoriam_, and
Matthew Arnold's _Thyrsis_.
These years are marked by a series of acts of unobtrusive benevolence,
the memory of which has been in some cases accidentally rescued from the
oblivion to which the benefactor was willing to have them consigned.
Carlyle never boasted of doing a kindness. He was, like Wordsworth,
frugal at home beyond necessity, but often as generous in giving as he
was ungenerous in judging. His assistance to Thomas Cooper, author of the
_Purgatory of Suicides_, his time spent in answering letters of "anxious
enquirers,"--letters that nine out of ten busy men would have flung into
the waste-paper basket,--his interest in such works as Samuel Bamford's
_Life of a Radical_, and admirable advice to the writer; his instructions
to a young student on the choice of books, and well-timed warning to
another against the profession of literature, are sun-rifts in the storm,
that show "a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity." The same
epoch, however,--that of the start of the great writer's almost
uninterrupted triumph--brings us in face of an episode singularly delicate
and difficult to deal with, but impossible to evade.
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