.

Carlyle never wrote so great a book as this. He had reached his middle
style, having passed the clarity of his early writings, and not having
yet reached the thunderous, strange-mouthed German expletives which
marred his later work. In the French Revolution he bursts forth, here
and there, into furious Gallic oaths and Gargantuan epithets; yet this
apocalypse of France seems more true than his hero-worshiping of old
Frederick of Prussia, or even of English Cromwell.

All these days Thomas Carlyle lived a life which was partly one of
seclusion and partly one of pleasure. At all times he and his
dark-haired wife had their own sets, and mingled with their own
friends. Jane had no means of discovering just whether she would have
been happier with Irving; for Irving died while she was still digging
potatoes and complaining of her lot at Craigenputtock.

However this may be, the Carlyles, man and wife, lived an existence
that was full of unhappiness and rancor. Jane Carlyle became an
invalid, and sought to allay her nervous sufferings with strong tea and
tobacco and morphin. When a nervous woman takes to morphin, it almost
always means that she becomes intensely jealous; and so it was with
Jane Carlyle.

A shivering, palpitating, fiercely loyal bit of humanity, she took it
into her head that her husband was infatuated with Lady Ashburton, or
that Lady Ashburton was infatuated with him. She took to spying on
them, and at times, when her nerves were all a jangle, she would lie
back in her armchair and yell with paroxysms of anger. On the other
hand, Carlyle, eager to enjoy the world, sought relief from his
household cares, and sometimes stole away after a fashion that was
hardly guileless. He would leave false addresses at his house, and
would dine at other places than he had announced.

In 1866 Jane Carlyle suddenly died; and somehow, then, the conscience
of Thomas Carlyle became convinced that he had wronged the woman whom
he had really loved. His last fifteen years were spent in wretchedness
and despair. He felt that he had committed the unpardonable sin. He
recalled with anguish every moment of their early life at
Craigenputtock--how she had toiled for him, and waited upon him, and
made herself a slave; and how, later, she had given herself up entirely
to him, while he had thoughtlessly received the sacrifice, and trampled
on it as on a bed of flowers.

Of course, in all this he was intensely morbid, and the diary