James Anthony Froude called it "the grandest of his works"[11] Ralph Waldo Emerson considered it "a book that is a Judgment Day, for its moral verdict on men and nations, and the manners of modern times."[11] He also called it "Infinitely the wittiest book that was ever written."[12] James Russell Lowell wrote that "The figures of most historians seem like dolls stuffed with bran, whose whole substance runs out through any hole that criticism may tear in them; but Carlyle's are so real in comparison, that, if you prick them, they bleed."[12]