"From birth upwards she had lived in opulence;”—repeated in these volumes; but then Carlyle described his little house in Chelsea as made into a sort of palace by her exertions, which Mr. Froude and all his friends are aware was a good deal more than the fact. The opulence" of the country doctor's daughter was something of the same kind. Modest comfort, even luxury in a sober way, the highest estimation, and all the petting and pleasures that an only beloved child could be surrounded with, she no doubt had. But life in Haddington in the first quarter of this century was not like life in South Kensington in the present day. The woman's share of the world's work was very distinct, and was despised by no one. There is no evidence that Dr. Welsh was ever rich-so far, indeed, is the evidence against this, that his daughter had to make over the little property of Craigenputtock, in order to secure her mother's independence, leaving herself penniless. But even had she been left with a dot proportioned to her position, and had she married one of her father's assistants, or a neighbouring ministerher natural fate-there is no reason to suppose that she would

have been much more elevated above the cares of common life than she was as the wife of Thomas Carlyle. In such a case, she would have begun her housekeeping with one maid-of-all-work, and all the affairs of the house to overlook and aid in, just as she did in reality. A more placid husband would no doubt have diminished her cares, and a more considerate one would have lightened the burden of them; but when we have said that we have said all. The primitive offices of life, the making, mending, cleaning, cooking (which we dare to challenge Mr. Froude no true woman, even in South Kensington, and at this day, would allow to be ignoble or unworthy, or would not in her secret heart find ideally fit, when exercised for those she loved), at which we are asked to hold up our hands in horror, were nothing extraordinary, nothing to be dismayed at, to Dr. Welsh's daughter. When the worry and harass broke down her impatient, sensitive spirit, and fatigued her never very strong physical frame, she darted forth by times a complaint, as most of us do, of our fate, now and then, whatever that fate may be; but only not with that voice of geuius which makes the complaint worth remembering. But in reality there would have been just as much to do in a moorland manse as in Craigenputtock; and if the minister had been cranky, like Carlyle, just as much to put up with. The wife of the Rev. Amos Barton was still less well off. The present writer, though of a later generation than Mrs. Carlyle, was trained to believe that a woman should be able to "turn her hand" to any domestic duty that might be necessary. And the pathetic picture of an elegant young lady descending from her elevated sphere to make the bread, and even to mend the trousers of her husband, which has touched

the sympathetic public to such indignation, is ludicrous to those to whom the fact of both positions is known.

This, however, is by the way, a protest which we cannot deny ourselves. It is too late to return upon that branch of the subject. The volumes before us begin with the life of the Carlyles in London, when the pair settled down there in the same small house, trim and neat and not unlovely, in which they spent all the rest of their lives. Mrs. Carlyle was at this time thirty-three, at the very height and prime of life, fully developed in mind, with no diminution of beauty or high spirits, notwithstanding the loneliness of Craigenputtock and the early struggles of poverty: a woman of genius scarcely inferior to that of her husband, of observation far more lively and keen, of whimsical humour, and a gift of self-revelation as rare as it is delightful. Her account of what she saw and heard and did, if it were only an encounter with a washerwoman, or a tramp, would keep half-a-dozen men of letters-the best of their time, Mill, Darwin, Forster, many more-in delighted attention. She saw nothing that she did not extract some interest out of, some gleam of reflection or sparkle of discovery. Charitable she was not, at least in words, but tender, sympathetic, pitiful to the bottom of her heart. To see her coax and subdue a semi-madman out of his misery, making him in the very jaws of hell "pass an agreeable evening," and cultivate the small gifts of the little "peasweep" of a plaintive child-servant, and at the same time pronounce sharp judgment on the bores that troubled her, and keenly characterize in a few contemptuous, amusing words even the old friends for whom she had at bottom a kind of regard, places at once before us the paradox of the woman, full of intolerance and patience, of kindness, irritability, quick anger, love, enthusiasm, cynicism all the most opposed and antagonistic qualities. It was this that made her so full of interest, so amusing and delightful, if sometimes also a puzzle and pain to her hearers, who could not see in this infinite variety of moods the very essence of her being, and concluded her to be permanently possessed by the last variation of feeling in which she had written and spoken. Here we have her in all the variety of these changing dispositions, making everything brilliant, lifelike, interesting, that her hand touches, feeling intensely whatever that mood dictated, yet changing in the twinkling of an eye from one to another. Haddington is hateful to hera place to be abandoned at all hazards: yet with what exquisite pathos and tenderness does she tell the story of her return incognita to visit the old home of her youth! Her heart melts. altogether when she is taken into the kind arms of her old friends there yet even with the tear in her eyes, she is caught by a sudden sense of the ludicrous, and shoots forth her sharp-pointed arrow of laughter in the midst of her weeping. She describes it as a

mark of her heavenly temper on one occasion that her mother and she had been a few days together without quarrelling, then deifies that mother, and weeps her loss with almost tragic passion. Thus she goes on through all her life at Cheyne Row; by times the tenderest mother-mistress to her servants; by times an indignant fury, sweeping them forth before her. Monotony, one would say, was the sole thing she could not endure. Her house-cleanings, even, are a drama; her nervous illnesses run through every note of the gamut, from keen self-ridicule to lyrical strains of despair. And to come to the central interest of her life-that one in which she has been most severely judged, and, we think, most cruelly belied—she is at one moment never so happy as when her husband is out of the house, at the next overwhelmed with anguish because the post has not brought her the longed-for letter, and filled with all the exasperation of a disappointed lover, when a newspaper arrives as a sign of his welfare, instead of the communication for which she thirsts; at one moment making us the most amusing semi-bitter (if not altogether bitter) sketch of him, the restless and never satisfied, stalking about the house all night long because the cocks will crow and the dogs bark, always in the valley of the shadow of some piece of terrible work or other. But when we turn the page we find her chattering to her Good (masculine of Goody, her pet name, one of the love-titles of that little language which we all in our foolish days resort to) of everything in heaven and earth, with a hundred little phrases which he has to explain, and of which he and she alone knew the meaning-idioms of Italian Mazzini, fussy speeches of brother John, the proverbs of the house-supplying what he evidently desires before all things, her own intimate brilliant comment upon all that happened, with now and then a word of love, reticent, delicate, worth volumes of endearments. We confess for our own part that the manner of mind which can deduce from this long autobiography an idea injurious to the perfect union of these two kindred souls is to us incomprehensible. They tormented each other, but not half so much as each tormented him and herself; they were too like each other, suffering in the same way from nerves disordered and digestion impaired, and excessive self-consciousness, and the absence of all other objects in their life. They were, in the fullest sense of the word, everything to each other-both good and evil, sole comforters, chief tormentors. "I to hae but waur to want," says the proverb, which must have been framed in view of some such exaggerated pair; perhaps since the proverb is Scotch the condition of mind may be a national one. Sometimes Carlyle was " ill to have," but it is abundantly evident that he was "waur to want,"-i.e., to be withoutto his wife. To him, though he wounded her in a hundred small matters, there is no evidence that she was ever anything else than the

most desirable of women, understood and acknowledged as the setter-right of all things, the providence and first authority of life.

If these two remarkable people had been, like others, allowed without any theory to tell their own story, and express their own sentiments, what we should now do would be to give our readers a glimpse, tranquilly, of the domestic economy of that little house, of which its mistress was justly proud, as a triumph of her own exertions, and its master somewhat grandiloquent upon, as something in itself more beautiful and remarkable than any house in Cheyne Row could ever be. We would tell them of her tea-parties, her evening visitors, of the little Peasweep of a maid who insisted upon bringing up four teacups every evening, while Mrs. Carlyle and her mother were alone in the house, with a conviction, never disappointed, that "the gentlemen" would drop in to use them; of how she bought her sofa, and adapted an old mattress to it, and made a cover for it, and so procured this comfort, at the small cost of one pound, out of her own private pocket; of how the cocks and hens next door, and the dog that would bark, and even the piano on the other side of the party-wall, were "written down" by appeals to the magnanimity of the owners, on behalf of the unfortunate man of genius who could not get his books written, or even by bribes cleverly administered when persuasion and reason both failed. The pages teem with domestic incidents in every kind of ornamental setting, all told with such an unfailing life and grace, that, had the facts themselves been of the first importance, they could not have charmed us more; and we do not grudge the three big volumes so filled, in which there is not from beginning to end an event more important than new painting and papering, new maid-servants, an illness or an expedition. But as circumstances stand, the reader is not sufficiently easy in his mind to be content with these, but has been so fretted and troubled by Mr. Froude and his theories, and the determination which moulds all that gentleman's thoughts to make out that Carlyle was a sort of ploughman-despot, and his wife an unwilling and resentful slave, that we must proceed first to find foundations for the house, of which we know more in all its details than perhaps of any house that has been built and furnished in this century. Was it founded on the rock of love and true union, or was it a mere four walls, no home at all, in which the rude master made his thrall labour for him, and crushed her delicate nature in return?

The only way to come to any conclusion on this point is to see what she herself says-" God keep you, my own dear husband,” she says (the first absence we find recorded), “and bring you safe back to me. The house looks very empty without you, and my mind feels empty too." "I expect with impatience the letter that is to fix your return." "Your letter has just come," she says another

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time; "I thank you for never neglecting me. Dearest, the postman, presented me with your letter to-night in Cheyne Walk, with a bow extraordinary. He is a jewel of a postman; whenever he has put a letter from you into the box, he both knocks and rings, that not a moment may be lost in taking possession of it." "Thanks for your constant little letters: when you come back I do not know how I shall learn to do without them; they have come to be as necessary as any part of my daily bread." On her part she is distressed beyond measure when by accident of posts or importunity of visitors there is any breach in the constant succession of her letters to him, fearing he will be "vaixed" (Scoticè, distressed, not angered), and will write him a scrap, to "keep your mind easy by telling you that I have a headache," lest he should think there was something worse that she did not tell. How provoked is she when brother John (untidy, fussy person, turning her orderly rooms into chaos, "born in creaking boots") announces his arrival before her husband's return. I had set my heart on your hanselling the clean house yourself, and that there would have been a few days in peace to inspect its curiosities and niceties before he came plunging in. . . . Howsomdever! only when you come I shall insist on going into some room with you, and locking the door till we have had a quiet, comfortable talk about Time and Space,' untormented by his blether." Then there is a little matter of a birthday recollection, which runs lightly through many pages, and culminates in such a letter as is in itself enough for our purpose. Carlyle had known nothing about birthdays, the large rustic family to which he belonged being altogether out of the way of such delicacies; which, indeed, were little enough thought of in the somewhat sternly-mannered Scotland of his time. But with the instinct of the heart he had divined (the ill-tempered tyrant!) that the first birthday after her mother's death his Jane would miss one tender habitual greeting. He "who dislikes nothing in the world so much as going into a shop to buy anything," "actually risked himself" on this occasion in uncouth tenderness. "I cannot tell how wae his little gift made me as well as glad," she writes to another correspondent; "it was the first thing of the kind he ever gave me in his life. In great matters he is always kind and considerate, but these little attentions, which we women attach so much importance to, he was never in the habit of rendering to any one. And now the desire he has to replace the irreplaceable makes him as good in little things as he used to be in great." There is a great deal more about this, which throws much light upon their relations. On one occasion, she being absent on a succession of visits, he asks where she is to be on this anniversary. "My dear, in what view do you ask," she says; "to send me something? Now, I positively forbid you to send me anything but a letter, with your blessing. It is a positive worry for