household goods and
those of Carlyle's brother, Alexander, who lived in a cottage near by.
These were the two redeeming features of their lonely home--the presence
of Alexander Carlyle, and the fact that, although they had no servants
in the ordinary sense, there were several farmhands and a dairy-maid.

Before long there came a period of trouble, which is easily explained
by what has been already said. Carlyle, thinking and writing some of
the most beautiful things that he ever thought or wrote, could not make
allowance for his wife's high spirit and physical weakness. She, on her
side--nervous, fitful, and hard to please--thought herself a slave,
the servant of a harsh and brutal master. She screamed at him when her
nerves were too unstrung; and then, with a natural reaction, she called
herself "a devil who could never be good enough for him." But most of
her letters were harsh and filled with bitterness, and, no doubt, his
conduct to her was at times no better than her own.

But it was at Craigenputtock that he really did lay fast and firm the
road to fame. His wife's sharp tongue, and the gnawings of his own
dyspepsia, were lived down with true Scottish grimness. It was here that
he wrote some of his most penetrating and sympathetic essays, which were
published by the leading reviews of England and Scotland. Here, too, he
began to teach his countrymen the value of German literature.

The most remarkable of his productions was that strange work entitled
Sartor Resartus (1834), an extraordinary mixture of the sublime and the
grotesque. The book quivers and shakes with tragic pathos, with inward
agonies, with solemn aspirations, and with riotous humor.

In 1834, after six years at Craigenputtock, the Carlyles moved to
London, and took up their home in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, a far from
fashionable retreat, but one in which the comforts of life could be more
readily secured. It was there that Thomas Carlyle wrote what must
seem to us the most vivid of all his books, the History of the French
Revolution. For this he had read and thought for many years; parts of
it he had written in essays, and parts of it he had jotted down in
journals. But now it came forth, as some one has said, "a truth clad in
hell-fire," swirling amid clouds and flames and mist, a most wonderful
picture of the accumulated social and political falsehoods which
preceded the revolution, and which were swept away by a nemesis that was
the righteous jud