G. P. Gooch on Thomas Carlyle

“If the "Frederick" thus fails both as a biography and a history of the reign and adds little to knowledge, it is none the less full of purple patches. It has been called the largest and most varied show-box in historical literature. Mrs. Carlyle, an exacting critic, pronounced it the best of her husband's works. It exhibits an undiminished power of mise-en-scène, freshness of humour, and mastery of character-painting. Emerson pronounced it the wittiest book ever written. Carlyle never composed anything more brilliant than the story of Voltaire's visit to Potsdam, and the portraits of the rulers of Europe are in his best style.”

“Carlyle was the greatest of English historical portrait-painters... But the writer who saw individuals with such incomparable clearness was weak in perspective and blind to the very existence of the masses. His later years reveal something like contempt for the poor and the ignorant. "Shooting Niagara" gave almost brutal expression to his opinion of the working-classes in 1867. He told Wolseley, half in earnest, that he hoped he would lock the door of Parliament and turn the members out. He sided with the South in the slavery struggle, and with Governor Eyre against quashee nigger. His whole philosophy was that the common herd must be drilled, led and punished by their superiors. Alike in politics and history he drifted ever further away from the generous intuitions of his early manhood.”