. Nothing could
be more flattering than such an invitation from such a man. Froude
responded cordially, and became an habitual visitor. Like all really
good talkers, Carlyle was at his best with a single companion, and
there could be no more sympathetic companion than Froude. But there
was another object of interest at Cheyne Row, and Froude felt for
Mrs. Carlyle sincere compassion. She was often left to herself while
her husband wrote upstairs, and she suffered tortures from
neuralgia. It seemed to Froude that Carlyle, who never had a day's
serious illness, felt more for his own dyspepsia and hypochondria
than for his wife's far graver ailments. In this he was very likely
unjust, for Carlyle was tenderly attached to his "Jeanie," and would
have done anything for her if he had thought of it. But he was
absorbed in Friederich, whose battles he would fight over again with
the tired invalid on sofa. If woman be the name of frailty, the name
of vanity is man. Carlyle was fond of his wife, but he was thinking
of himself. His "Niagaras of scorn and vituperation" were a vent for
his own feelings, a sort of moral gout. The apostle of silence
recked not his own rede, nor did he think of the impression which
his purely destructive preaching might make upon other people. He
himself found in the eternities and immensities some kind of
substitute for the Calvinistic Presbyterianism of his childhood. To
her it was idle rhetoric and verbiage. He had taken away her
dogmatic beliefs, and had nothing to put in their place. Her "pale,
drawn, suffering face" haunted Froude in his dreams. In 1862 Mrs.
Carlyle's health broke down, and for a year her case seemed
desperate. Her doctor sent her away to St. Leonard's, and in no long
time she apparently recovered. After that her husband took more care
of her, and provided her with a carriage. But her constitution had
been shattered, and she died suddenly as she drove through Hyde Park
on the 21st of April, 1866, while Carlyle was at Dumfries, resting
after the delivery of his Rectorial Address to the University of
Edinburgh.

Carlyle's bereavement drove him into more complete dependence upon
Froude's sympathy and support. The lonely old man brooded over his
loss, and over his own short-comings. He shut himself up in the
house to read his wife's diaries and papers. He found that without
meaning it he had often made her miserable. In her journal for the
21st of June, 1856, he read, "The chief int