erest of to-day expressed
in blue marks on my wrists!"* He realised that he had almost driven
her to suicide, he the great preacher of duty and self-abnegation.
"For the next few years," says Froude, "I never walked with him
without his recurring to a subject which was never absent from his
mind." Doubtless his remorse was exaggerated. His letters, and his
wife's, show that he was a most affectionate husband when nothing
had occurred to deprive him of his self-command. But he had at times
been cruelly inconsiderate, and he wished to do penance for his
misdeeds. A practical Christian would have asked God to pardon him,
and made amends by active kindness to his surviving fellow-
creatures. Carlyle took another course. In 1871, five years after
his wife's death, he suddenly brought Froude a large bundle of
papers, containing a memoir of Mrs. Carlyle by himself, a number of
her letters, and some other biographical fragments. Froude was to
read them, to keep them, and to publish them or not, as he pleased,
after Carlyle was dead.+

--
* This passage was suppressed by Froude when he published Mrs. Carlyle's
Diary and Letters. But he kept the copy made by Carlyle's niece under
his superintendence, which still exists; and as an incorrect version
has appeared since his death, I give the correct one now.
+ "I long much, with a tremulous, deep, and almost painful feeling,
about that other Manuscript which you were kind enough to read at the
very first. Be prepared to tell me, with all your candour, the pros and
contras there."--Carlyle to Froude, 26th of September, 1871. From
The Hill, Dumfries.
--

Well would it have been for Froude's peace of mind if he had handed
the parcel back again, and refused to look at it. The tree of the
knowledge of good and evil scarcely yielded more fatal fruit. He
read the papers, however, and "for the first time realised what a
tragedy the life in Cheyne Row had been." That he exaggerated the
purport of what he read is likely enough. When there are quarrels
between husband and wife, a man naturally inclines to take the
woman's side. Froude, as he says himself, was haunted by Mrs.
Carlyle's look of suffering, physical rather than mental, and it
would necessarily colour his judgment of the facts. At all events
his conclusion was that Carlyle had just ground for remorse, and
that in collecting the letters he had partially expiated his
offence. When Mrs. Carlyle's Correspondence came to be publis