"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."