which we are all guilty, but such as has been seldom recorded with such fulness of after-comprehension and remorseful sorrow : Her courage, patience, silent heroism meanwhile must often have been immense. Within the last two years or so she has told me about my talk to her of the Battle of Mollwitz on those occasions [i.e. the half-hour he spent with her on returning from his walk] while that was on the anvil. She was lying on the sofa weak-but I knew little how weak -and patient, kind, quiet, and good as ever. After tugging and wriggling through what inextricable labyrinth and slough of despond I still remember, it appears I had at last conquered Mollwitz, saw it all clear ahead and round me, and took to telling her about it, in my poor bit of joy, night after night. I recollect she answered little, though kindly always. Privately at that time she felt convinced she was dying; dark winter, and such the weight of misery and utter decay of strength, and, night after night, my theme to her, Mollwitz! This she owned to me within the last year or two, which how could I listen to without shame and abasement? Never in my pretended superior kind of life have I done for love of any creature so supreme a kind of thing. It touches me at this moment with penitence and humiliation, yet with a kind of soft religious blessedness too. This and a hundred other endurances of a similar kind had been her daily use and wont for years, while she too toiled through the valley of the shadow of Frederick," her mind never free of some pre-occupation on his account, some expedient to soften to him those thorns of fate with which all creation was bristling. She showed me one day a skilful arrangement of curtains, made on some long-studied scientific principle by which "at last" she had succeeded in shutting out the noises, yet letting in the air. Thus she stood between him and the world, between him and all the nameless frets and inconveniences of life, and handed on to us the record of her endurance, with a humorous turn of each incident as if these were the amusements of her life. There was always a comic possibility in them in her hands. While we are about it we must quote 66 one short description more, one of those details which only he could have given us, and which makes the tenderest picture of this half-hour of fireside fellow ship. Carlyle has been describing his way of working, his long wrestling thirteen years and more' with the "Friedrich affair," his disgusts and difficulties. After his morning's work and afternoon ride he had an hour's sleep before dinner: "but first always came up for half an hour to the drawing-room and her; where a bright kindly fire was sure to be burning, candles hardly lit, all in trustful chiaroscuro and a spoonful of brandy in water with a pipe of tobacco (which I had learned to take sitting on the rug with my back to the jamb, and door never so little open, so that all the smoke, if I was careful, went up the chimney) this was the one bright portion of my black day. those evening half-hours, how beautiful and blessed they were, not awaiting me now on my home coming! She was oftenest reclining on the sofa, wearied enough she, too, with her day's doings and endurings. But her history even of what was bad had such grace and truth, and spontaneous tinkling melody of a naturally cheerful and loving heart that I never anywhere enjoyed the like." Oh It was always This explains how there used to be sometimes visible reposing in the corner of the fireplace, in that simple, refined, and gracious little drawing-room so free of any vulgar detail, a long white clay pipe, of the kind I believe which is called church-warden. clean and white, and I remember thinking it rather pretty than otherwise with its long curved stem, and bowl unstained by any "color." There was no profanation in its presence, a thing which could not perhaps be said for the daintiest of cigarettes; and the rugged philosopher upon the hearthrug pouring out his record of labors and troubles, his battles of Mollwitz, his Dryasdust researches-yet making sure if I was careful" that the smoke should go up the chimney and not disturb the sweetness of her dwelling-place-makes a very delightful picture. He admired the room, and all her little decorations and every sign of the perfect lady she was, with an almost awe of pleasure and pride, in which it was impossible not to 64 feel his profound sense of the difference which his wife, who was a gentlewoman, had made in the surroundings of the farmer's son of Scotsbrig. My first interview with Mrs. Carlyle was on the subject of Irving, her first tutor, her early lover, and always her devoted admirer and friend. To have been beloved by two such men was no small glory to a woman. She took to me most kindly, something on the score of a half imaginary East Lothianism which she thought she had detected, and which indeed came from no personal knowledge of mine, but from an inherited memory of things and words familiar there. And I shall not easily forget the stream of delightful talk upon which we were instantly set afloat, she with all the skill and ease and natural unteachable grace of a born minstrel and improvisatore, flowing forth in story after story, till there stood before me as clear as if I saw it, her own delightful childhood in quiet old-fashioned Haddington long ago, and the big grand boyish gigantic figure of her early tutor teaching the fairy creature Latin and logic, and already learning of her something more. penetrating than either. There were some points about which she was naturally and gracefully reticent-about her own love, and the preference which gradually swept Irving out of her girlish fancy if he had ever been fully established there, a point on which she left her hearer in doubt.. But there was another sentiment gradually developed in the tale which gave the said hearer a gleam of amusement unintended by the narrator, one of those side-lights of selfrevelation which even the keenest and clearest intelligence lets slip-which was her perfectly genuine feminine dislike of the woman who replaced her in Irving's life, his wife to whom he had been engaged before he met for the second time with the beautiful girl grown up to womanhood, who had been his baby pupil and adoration, and to whom-with escapades of wild passion for Jane, and wild proposals to fly with her to Greece, if that could be, or anywhere-he yet was willingly or unwillingly faithful. This dislike looked to me nothing more than the very natural and almost universal feminine objection to the woman who has consoled even a rejected lover. The only wonder was that she did not herself, so keen and clear as her sight was, so penetrating and impartial, see the humor of it, as one does so often even while fully indulging a sentiment so natural, yet so whimsically absurd. But the extraordinary sequence of this, the proof which Carlyle gives of his boundless sympathy with the companion of his life, by taking up and even exaggerating this excusable aversion of hers, is one of the strangest of mental phenomena. But for the marriage to which Irving had been so long pledged, it is probable that the philosopher would. never have had that brightest “beautifullest" of companions; and yet he could not forgive the woman who healed the heart which his Jeanie had broken! glorious folly from one point of view, strangest, sharp, painful prejudice on the other. All that Carlyle says about his friend's marriage and wife is disagreeable, painful, and fundamentally untrue. He goes out of the way even to suggest that her father's family "came to no good" (an utter mistake in fact), and that the excellent man who married Mrs. Irving's sister was "not over well" married, an insinuation as completely and cruelly baseless as ever insinuation was. It is no excuse perhaps to allege a prejudice so whimsical as the ground of imputations so serious, and yet there is a kind of mortal foolishness about it, which, in such a pair is half ludicrous, half pitiful, and which may make the offended more readily forgive. Other instances of his curious loyal yet almost prosaic adoption of suggestions, taken evidently from his wife, will readily be noticed by the judicious reader. There is a remark about a lady's dress, which must have required daily the fastening of sixty or eighty pins," unquestionably a bit of harmless satire upon the exquisite arrangement of the garment in question flashed forth in rapid talk, and meaning little; but fastening somehow with its keen little pinpoint in the philosopher's serious memory, to be brought out half a lifetime after, alack! and give its wound. most strange and pitiful to see those straws and chips which she dropped unawares thus carefully gathered and preserved in his memory, to be reproduced It is with a kind of pious foolishness in honor of her who would have swept them all away had she been here to guard his good name as she did all her life. I must say something here about the tone of remark offensive to so many personally, and painful above measure to all who loved or reverenced Carlyle, which is the most astonishing peculiarity of this book. The reader must endeavor to call before himself the circumstances under which all of it, except the sketch of his father, was written. He had lost the beloved companion whom, as we all do, yet perhaps with more remorse and a little more reason than most, he for the first time fully perceived himself never to have done full justice to: he had been left desolate with every circumstance of misery added which it is possible to imagine, for she had died while he was absent, while he was in the midst of one of the few triumphs of his life, surrounded by uncongenial noise of applause which he had schooled himself to take pleasure in, and which he liked too, though he hated it. It was when he found himself thus for the first time in the midst of acclamations which gratified him as signs of appreciation and esteem long withheld, scarcely looked for in this life, but which in every nerve of his tingling frame he shrank from-at that moment of all others, while he bravely endured and enjoyed his climax of fame, that he was struck to the heart by the one blow which life had in reserve for him, the only blow which could strike him to the heart! How strange, how over-appropriate this end to all the remaining possibilities of existence! He was a man in whose mind a morbid tendency to irritation mingled with everything; and there is no state of mind in which we are so easily irritated as in grief. If there is indeed " a far-off interest of tears," which we may gather when pain has been deadened, this is seldom felt at the moment save in the gentlest nature. He was not prostrated as some are. On the contrary, it is evident that he was roused to that feverish energy of pain which is the result in some natures of a shock which makes the whole being reel. And after the first terrible months at home, kind friends, as tender of him as if they had been his children, would not let him alone to sit forlorn in the middle of her room, as I found him when I saw him first after her death, talking of her, telling little broken anecdotes of her, reaching far back into the forgotten years. They insisted on applying to him the usual remedies which in our day are always suggested when life becomes intolerable. Not to take away that life itself for a time, which would be the real assuagement, could it be accomplished, but to take the mourner away into new scenes, to "a thorough change," to beautiful and unfamiliar places, where it is supposed the ghosts of what has been cannot follow him, nor associations wound him. He was taken to Mentone, of all places in the world, to the deadlyliveliness and quiet, the soft air, and invalid surroundings of that shelter of the suffering. When he came back he described it to me one day with that sort of impatient contempt of the place which was natural to a Borderer, as “a shelf" between the hills and the sea. He had no air to breathe, no space to move in. All the width and breadth of his own moorland landscape was involved in the description of that lovely spot, in its stagnant mildness and monotonous beauty. He told me how he had roamed under the greenness of the unnatural trees, perhaps the saddest," he said, with the lingering vowels of his native speech, "of all the sons of Adam." And, at first alone in his desolate house, and then stranded there upon that alien shore where everything was so soft and unlike him in his gaunt and selfdevouring misery, he seized upon the familiar pen, the instrument of his power, which he had laid aside after the prolonged effort of "Frederick," with more or less idea that it was done with, and rest to be his henceforth, and poured forth his troubled agony of soul, his restless quickened life, the heart which had no longer a natural outlet close at hand. 66 66 Perhaps the saddest of all the sons of Adam!" In this short period, momentary as compared with the time which he took to his other works, fretted by solitude and by the novelty of surroundings which were so uncongenial, he poured forth, scarcely knowing what he did, almost the entire bulk of these two volumes, work which would have taken him three or four times as long to produce had he not been wild with grief, distraught, and full of sombre excitement, seeking in that way a relief to his corroding thoughts. Let any one who is offended by these Reminiscences" think of this. He never looked at the disturbed and unhappy record of this passion again; "did not know to what I was alluding," when his friend and literary executor spoke to him, two years later, of the Irving sketch. Miserable in body and mind, his nerves all twisted the wrong way, his heart rent and torn, full of sorrow, irritation, remorseful feeling, and all the impotent longings of grief, no doubt the sharpness of those discordant notes, the strokes dealt blindly all about him, were a kind of bitter relief to the restless misery of his soul. This is no excuse; there is no excuse to offer for sharp words, often so petty, always so painful, in many cases entirely unfounded or mistaken; but what can be a more evident proof that they were never meant for the public eye than Mr. Froude's "did not know to what I alluded ?" He who would spend an anxious week sometimes (as Mrs. Carlyle often told) to make sure whether a certain incident happened on the 21st or 22d of a month in the Sixteen or Seventeen Hundreds, it is not credible that he should wittingly dash forth dozens of unverified statements-statements which, if true, it would be impossible to verify, which, if untrue, would give boundless painupon the world. And there is nothing of the deliberate posthumous malice of Miss Martineau in the book; there is nothing deliberate in it at all. It is a long and painful musing, self-recollection, self-relief, which should have been buried with sacred pity, or burned with sacred fire, all that was unkind of it— and the rest read with reverence and tears. The first sight I had of him after his wife's death was in her drawing-room, where while she lived he was little visible, except in the evening, to chance visitors. The pretty room, a little faded, what we call old-fashioned, in subdued color which was certainly not "the fashion" at the time it was furnished, with the great picture of little Frederick and his sister Wilhelmine filling up one end, was in deadly good order, without any of her little arrangements of chair or table, and yet was full of her still. He was seated, not in any familiar corner, but with the forlornest unaccustomedness, in the middle of it, as if to show by harsh symbol how entirely all customs were broken for him. He began to talk of her, as of the one subject of which his mind was full, with a sort of subdued, half-bitter brag of satisfaction in the fact that her choice of him, so troublesome a partner, so poor, had been justified before all men, and herself proved right after all in her opinion of him which she had upheld against all objections; from which, curiously enough, his mind passed to the "mythical," as he calls it, to those early legends of childhood which had been told by herself and jotted down by Geraldine Jewsbury, our dear and vivacious friend, now, like both of them, departed. He told me thereupon, the story of the "Dancing-School Ball," which the reader will find in the second volumewithout rhyme or reason; nothing had occurred to lead his mind to a trifle so far away. With that pathetic broken laugh, and the gleam of restless, feverish pain in his eyes, he began to tell me of this childish incident; how she had been carried to the ball in a clothesbasket, "perhaps the loveliest little fairy that was on this earth at the time." The contrast of the old man's already tottering and feeble frame, his weather-beaten and worn countenance agitated by that restless grief, and the suggestion of this "loveliest little fairy," was as pathetic as can be conceived, especially as I had so clearly in my mind the image of her too-her palest, worn, yet resolute face, her feeble, nervous frame, past sixty, and sorely broken with all the assaults of life. Nothing that he could have said of her last days, no record of sorrow, could have been so heart-rending as that description and the laugh of emotion that accompanied it. His old wife was still so fair to him, even across the straits of death had returned indeed into everlasting youth, as all the record he has since made of her shows. When there was reference to the circumstances of her death, so tragical and sudden, it was with bitter wrath, yet wondering awe, of such a contemptible reason for so great an event-that he spoke of "the little vermin of a dogue" which caused the shock that killed her, and which was not even her own, but left in her charge by a friend; terrible littleness and haphazard employed to bring about the greatest individual determinations of Providence--as he himself so often traced them out. My brief visits to Carlyle after this are almost all marked in my memory by some little word of individual and most characteristic utterance, which may convey very little indeed to those who did not know him, but which those who did will readily recognize. I had been very anxious that he should come to Eton, at first while he was stronger, that he should make some little address to the boys-and later that he might at least be seen by all this world of lively young souls, the men of the future. His wife had encouraged the idea, saying that it was really pleasant to him to receive any proof of human appreciation, to know that he was cared for and thought of; but it was not till several years after her loss that, one bright summer morning, I had the boldness to suggest it. By this time he seemned to have made a great downward step and changed into his later aspect of extreme weakness, a change for which I had not been prepared. He shook his head, but yet hesitated. Yes, he would like, he said, to see the boys and if he could have stepped into a boat at the nearest pier and been carried quietly up the river : But he was not able for the jar of little railway journeys and changes; and then he told me of the weakness that had come over him, the failing of age in all his limbs and faculties, and quoted the psalm (in that version which we Scots are born to) Threescore and ten years do sum up Neither he nor I could remember the when another should gird him and carry him-often where he would not. Had it but been possible to have a mother to care for that final childhood! The last time I saw him leaves a pleasant picture on my memory. In the height of summer I had gone a little too late one afternoon, and found him in the carriage just setting out for his usual drive, weary and irritated by the fatigue of the movement down stairs, encumbered with wraps though the sun was blazing; and it was then he had said, "It is death I want-all I want is to die." Though there was nothing really inappropriate in this utterance, after more than eighty years of labor and sorrow, it is one which can never be heard by mortal ears without a pang and sense of misery. Human nature resents it, as a slight to the life which it prizes above all things. I could not bear that this should be my last sight of Carlyle, and went back sooner than usual in hopes of carrying away a happier impression. I found him alone, seated in that room, which to him, as to me, was still her room, and full of suggestions of her -a place in which he was still a superfluous figure, never entirely domiciled and at home. Few people are entirely unacquainted with that characteristic figure, so worn and feeble, yet never losing its marked identity; his shaggy hair falling rather wildly about his forehead, his vigorous grizzly beard, his keen eyes gleaming from below that overhanging ridge of forehead, from under the shaggy caverns of his eyebrows; his deep-toned complexion almost of an orange-red, like that of an out-door laborer, a man exposed to wind and storm and much “knitting of his brows under the glaring sun;" his gaunt, tall, tottering figure always wrapped in a long, dark grey coat or dressing gown, the cloth of which, carefully and with difficulty sought out for him, had cost doubly dear both in money and trouble, in that he insisted upon its being entirely genuine cloth, without a suspicion of shoddy; his large, bony, tremulous hands, long useless for any exertion-scarcely, with a great effort, capable of carrying a cup to his lips. There he sat, as he had sat for all these years, since her departure left him stranded, a helpless man amid the wrecks of life. Ever |