ed him, or perhaps equalled him at his best, in
London or even in Annandale. What ought to have struck all readers
of these volumes was the courage, the patience, the dignity, the
generosity, and the genius of this Scottish peasant. What chiefly
struck too many of them was that he did not get on with his wife.

Froude's defence is first Carlyle's precept, and secondly his own
conviction that the truth would be advantageous rather than
injurious to Carlyle. Carlyle's way of writing about other people,
for instance Charles Lamb, Saint Charles, as Thackeray called him,
is sometimes unpardonable; and if Froude had suppressed those
passages he would have done well. His own personal conduct is a
lesson to us all, and that lesson is in Froude's pages for every one
to read. "What a noisy inanity is this world," wrote Carlyle in his
diary at the opening of the year 1835. Without the few great men
who, like Carlyle, can lift themselves and others above it, it would
be still noisier, still more inane.

Next year the gossips had a still richer feast. In 1883 Froude,
faithful to his trust, brought out three volumes Letters and
Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle. The true and permanent interest of
this book is that it introduced the British and American public to
some of the most brilliantly witty and amusing epistles that the
language contains. Indeed, there are very few letter-writers in any
language who can be compared with Mrs. Carlyle. Inferior to her
husband in humourous description, as in depth of thought, she
surpassed him in liveliness of wit, in pungency of satire, and in
terseness of expression. Her narrative is inimitable, and sometimes,
as in the account of her solitary visit to her old home at
Haddington twenty-three years after her marriage, her dramatic power
is overwhelming. Carlyle himself had been familiar to the public for
half a century through his books. Until Mrs. Carlyle's letters
appeared the world knew nothing of her at all, except through her
husband's sketch. Considering that good letter-writers are almost as
rare as good poets, and that Jane Carlyle is one of the very best,
the general reader might have been simply grateful, as perhaps he
was. But for purposes of scandal the value of the book was the light
it threw upon the matrimonial squabbles, actual or imaginary, of two
remarkable persons. Mrs. Carlyle had long been dead, and her
relations with her husband were of no importance to any one. But the
tri