No help was accorded him.
He had to spell out the narrative for himself. On one point he did
venture to consult Carlyle, but Carlyle shrank from the topic with
evident pain, and the conversation was not renewed. It appeared from
Mrs. Carlyle's letters and journals that she had been jealous of
Lady Ashburton, formerly Lady Harriet Baring, and by birth a
Sandwich Montagu. "Lady Ashburton," says Charles Greville, writing
on the occasion of her death in 1857, "was perhaps, on the whole,
the most conspicuous woman in the society of the present day. She
was undoubtedly very intelligent, with much quickness and vivacity
in conversation, and by dint of a good deal of desultory reading and
social intercourse with men more or less distinguished, she had
improved her mind, and made herself a very agreeable woman, and had
acquired no small reputation for ability and wit .... She was, or
affected to be, extremely intimate with every man whose literary
celebrity or talents constituted their only attraction, and, while
they were gratified by the attentions of the great lady, her vanity
was flattered by the homage of such men, of whom Carlyle was the
principal. It is only justice to her to say that she treated her
literary friends with constant kindness and the most unselfish
attentions. They and their wives and children (when they had any)
were received at her house in the country, and entertained there for
weeks without any airs of patronage, and with a spirit of genuine
benevolence as well as hospitality."*

--
* The Greville Memoirs, vol. iii. pp. 109, 110.
--

But Lady Ashburton and Mrs. Carlyle did not get on. As Carlyle's
wife the latter would doubtless have been welcome enough at the
Grange. Being much cleverer than Lady Ashburton, she seemed to
dispute a supremacy which had not hitherto been challenged, and the
relations of the two women were strained. Carlyle, on the other
hand, had become, so Froude discovered from his wife's journal,
romantically, though quite innocently, attached to Lady Ashburton,
and this was one cause of dissension at Cheyne Row. There was
nothing very dreadful in the disclosure. Carlyle was a much safer
acquaintance for the other sex than Robert Burns, whose conversation
carried the Duchess of Gordon off her feet, and Mrs. Carlyle's
jealousy was not of the ordinary kind. Still, the incident was not
one of those which lighten a biographer's responsibility. Froude has
himself explained, in a paper n