The admiration you have habitually expressed for him was unqualified.

You never said to me one ill-natured word about him down to this day.

It is to me wholly incredible that anything but a severe regard for truth, learnt to a great extent from his teaching, could ever have led you to embody in your portrait of him a delineation of the faults and weaknesses which mixed with his great qualities."* -- * My Relations with Carlyle, p.

62.
-- Calling witnesses to the character of such a man as Froude is itself almost an insult.

But there is one judgment so valuable and so emphatic that I cannot refrain from citing it.