Before I give it, let me add a brief account of Sterling.  He was some ten years Carlyle’s junior, the son of the redoubtable Edward Sterling, the leader-writer of the Times, a man who in his day wielded a mighty influence.  Carlyle describes the father’s way of life, how he spent the day in going about London, rolling into clubs, volubly questioning and talking; then returned home in the evening, and condensed it all into a leader, “and is found,” said Carlyle, “to have hit the essential purport of the world’s immeasurable babblement that day with an accuracy above all other men.”

The younger Sterling, Carlyle’s friend, was at Cambridge for a time, but never took his degree; he became a journalist, wrote a novel, tales, plays, endless poems—­all of thin and vapid quality.  His brief life, for he died at thirty-eight, was a much disquieted one; he travelled about in search of health, for he was early threatened with consumption; for a short time he was a curate in the English Church, but drifted away from that.  He lived for a time at Falmouth, and afterwards at Ventnor.  He must have been a man of extraordinary charm, and with quite unequalled powers of conversation.  Even Carlyle seems to have heard him gladly, and that is no ordinary compliment, considering Carlyle’s own volubility, and the agonies, occasionally suppressed but generally trenchantly expressed, with which Carlyle listened to other well-known talkers like Coleridge and Macaulay.

Carlyle certainly had a very deep affection and admiration for Sterling; he rains down praises upon him, in that wonderful little biography, which is probably the finest piece of work that Carlyle ever did.

He speaks of Sterling as “brilliant, beautiful, cheerful with an ever-flowing wealth of ideas, fancies, imaginations . . . with frank affections, inexhaustible hopes, audacities, activities, and general radiant vivacity of heart and intelligence, which made the presence of him an illumination and inspiration wherever he went.”

But all Carlyle’s love and admiration for his friend did not induce him to praise Sterling’s writings; he looked upon him as a poet, but without the gift of expression.  He says that all Sterling’s work was spoilt by over-haste, and “a lack of due inertia.”  The fact is that Sterling was a sort of improvisatore, and what was beautiful and natural enough when poured out in talk, and with the stimulus of congenial company, grew pale and indistinct when he wrote it down; he had, in fact, no instinct for art or for design, and he failed whenever he tried to mould ideas into form.

The shadow of illness darkened about him, and he spent long periods in prostrate seclusion, tended by his wife and children, unable to write or talk or receive his friends.  Then a terrible calamity befell him.  His mother, to whom he was devotedly attached, died after a long illness, Sterling not being allowed to go to her, or to leave his own sick-room.  He received the news one morning by letter, that all was over, went in to tell his wife, who was ill; while they were talking, his wife became faint, and died two hours later.  So that within a few hours he lost the two human beings whom he most devotedly loved, and on whom he most depended for sympathy and help.