He was now beginning to feel the effects of his great age.  Yearly and monthly he grew more feeble.  His wonted walking exercise had to be curtailed, and at last abandoned.  He was affectionately and piously tended during these last years by his niece, Mary Aitken, now Mrs. Alexander Carlyle.  In the autumn of 1879 he lost his brother, Dr. John Aitken Carlyle, the translator of Dante’s “Inferno.”

The end came at last, after a long and gradual decay of strength.  The great writer and noble-hearted man passed away peacefully at about half-past eight o’clock on the morning of Saturday, February 5, 1881, in the eighty-sixth year of his age.

His remains were conveyed to Scotland, and were laid in the burial-ground at Ecclefechan, where the ashes of his father and mother, and of others of his kindred, repose.  He had executed what is known in Scotch law as a “deed of mortification,” by virtue of which he bequeathed to Edinburgh University the estate of Craigenputtoch—­which had come to him through his wife—­for the foundation of ten Bursaries in the Faculty of Arts, to be called the “John Welsh Bursaries.”  In his Will he bequeathed the books which he had used in writing on Cromwell and Friedrich to Harvard College, Massachusetts.

In less than a month after his death, with a haste on many accounts to be deplored, and which has excited much animadversion, his literary executor, Mr. James Anthony Froude, the historian, issued two volumes of posthumous “Reminiscences,” written by Carlyle, partly in 1832, and partly in 1866-67.  The first section consists of a memorial paper, written immediately after his father’s death; the second contains Reminiscences of his early friend, Edward Irving, commenced at Cheyne Row in the autumn of 1866, and finished at Mentone on the 2nd January, 1867.  The Reminiscences of Lord Jeffrey were begun on the following day, and finished on January 19.  The paper on Southey and Wordsworth, relegated to the Appendix, was also written at Mentone between the 28th January and the 8th March, 1867.  The Memorials of his wife, which fill the greater part of the second volume, were written at Cheyne Row, during the month after her death.

Of the earlier portraits of Carlyle three are specially interesting, 1.  The full-length sketch by “Croquis” (Daniel Maclise) which formed one of the Fraser Gallery portraits, and was published in the magazine in June, 1833. (The original sketch of this is now deposited in the Forster Collection at South Kensington.) 2.  Count D’Orsay’s sketch, published by Mitchell in 1839, is highly characteristic of the artist.  It was taken when no man of position was counted a dutiful subject who did not wear a black satin stock and a Petersham coat.  The great author’s own favourite among the early portraits was 3. the sketch by Samuel Laurence, engraved in Horne’s “New Spirit of the Age,” published in 1844.  Since the art of photography came into vogue, a series of photographs of various degrees of merit