vial mind grasps at trivialities, and will not be satisfied
without them. Thousands who were quite incapable of appreciating the
letters as literature could read between the lines, and apply the
immortal principle that a warming-pan is a cover for hidden fire.
Unfortunately, Carlyle's heart-broken ejaculations over his dead
wife's words leant themselves to theories and surmises. He thought
that he had not made enough of her when she was alive, and
apparently he wanted the world to know that he thought so. Yet the
bulk of the letters are not those of an unhappy, oppressed, down-
trodden woman, nor of a woman unable to take care of herself. Some
few are intensely miserable, almost like the cries of a wounded
animal, and these, even in extracts, might well have been omitted.
Mrs. Carlyle would not have written them if she had been herself,
and in a collection of more than three hundred they would not have
been missed. Some thought also that there were too many household
details.* On the whole, however, these letters, with the others
published in the Life, are a rich store-house, and they retain their
permanent value, untouched by ephemeral rumour.

--
* "A good woman," I remember Lord Bowen saying of Mrs. Carlyle,
"with perhaps an excessive passion for insecticide."
--

I doubt if he bathed before he dressed.
A brasier? the pagan, he burned perfumes!
You see, it is proved, what the neighbours guessed:
His wife and himself had separate rooms.

Carlyle had been dead more than twenty years before the
controversies about all that was unimportant in him flickered out
and died an unsavoury death. The vital fact about him and his wife
is that they contributed, if not equally, at least in an
unparalleled degree, to the common stock of genius. But for Froude
we might never have known that Mrs. Carlyle had genius at all.
Through him we have a series of letters not surpassed by Lady Mary
Wortley's, or by any woman's except Madame de Sevigne's.

Then in 1884 Froude completed his task with Carlyle' s Life in
London, a biographical masterpiece if ever there was one. It is
written on the same principle of telling the truth, painting the
warts. But it brings out even more clearely than its predecessor the
essential qualities of Carlyle. In one way this was easier. The
period of fruitless struggle was almost over when Carlyle left
Craigenputtock in 1834. After the appearance of The French
Revolution in 1838 he was famous, and every