Carlyle’s paper reads like a solemn and touching funeral oration to the uncovered mourners as they stand round the grave before it is closed:—­

“A very beautiful soul has suddenly been summoned from among us; one of the clearest intellects, and most aerial activities in England, has unexpectedly been called away.  Charles Buller died on Wednesday morning last, without previous sickness, reckoned of importance, till a day or two before.  An event of unmixed sadness, which has created a just sorrow, private and public.  The light of many a social circle is dimmer henceforth, and will miss long a presence which was always gladdening and beneficent; in the coming storms of political trouble, which heap themselves more and more in ominous clouds on our horizon, one radiant element is to be wanting now.

“Mr. Buller was in his forty-third year, and had sat in Parliament some twenty of those.  A man long kept under by the peculiarities of his endowment and position, but rising rapidly into importance of late years; beginning to reap the fruits of long patience, and to see an ever wider field open round him.  He was what in party language is called a ‘Reformer,’ from his earliest youth; and never swerved from that faith, nor could swerve.  His luminous sincere intellect laid bare to him in all its abject incoherency the thing that was untrue, which thenceforth became for him a thing that was not tenable, that it was perilous and scandalous to attempt maintaining.  Twenty years in the dreary, weltering lake of parliamentary confusion, with its disappointments and bewilderments, had not quenched this tendency, in which, as we say, he persevered as by a law of nature itself, for the essence of his mind was clearness, healthy purity, incompatibility with fraud in any of its forms.  What he accomplished, therefore, whether great or little, was all to be added to the sum of good; none of it to be deducted.  There shone mildly in his whole conduct a beautiful veracity, as if it were unconscious of itself; a perfect spontaneous absence of all cant, hypocrisy, and hollow pretence, not in word and act only, but in thought and instinct.  To a singular extent it can be said of him that he was a spontaneous clear man.  Very gentle, too, though full of fire; simple, brave, graceful.  What he did, and what he said, came from him as light from a luminous body, and had thus always in it a high and rare merit, which any of the more discerning could appreciate fully.

“To many, for a long while, Mr. Buller passed merely for a man of wit, and certainly his beautiful natural gaiety of character, which by no means meant levity, was commonly thought to mean it, and did for many years, hinder the recognition of his intrinsic higher qualities.  Slowly it began to be discovered that, under all this many-coloured radiancy and coruscation, there burnt a most steady light; a sound, penetrating intellect, full of adroit resources, and loyal by nature itself to all that was methodic, manful, true;—­in brief, a mildly resolute, chivalrous, and gallant character, capable of doing much serious service.