Portrait of Mrs Carlyle.

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Then Carlyle would talk like no other mortal that ever was made. "Meanwhile his wife, quiet and silent, assiduously renewed his cup of tea, or by an occasional word, or judicious note, struck just at the right moment, kept him going, as if she wielded the mighty imagination at her pleasure, and evoked the thunder and the sunshine at her will. When she was alone, and herself the entertainer, one became aware of all the self-abnegation she practised, for she was herself a remarkably brilliant talker, and the stories of quaint wit and wisdom which she poured forth, the marvellous memory which she displayed, were, in the minds of many, quite as remarkable and even more entertaining than the majestic utterances of her gifted husband. It was said that those who came to sit at his feet remained at hers." Some good stories are told of the clever way in which she would prevent her husband, when absorbed in the labours he had assigned to himself, from being intruded upon by bores and lion-hunters. She had an excellent judgment in literary matters; Charles Dickens held her critical faculty in the highest esteem, and was in the habit of frequently asking her advice. She also possessed considerable artistic skill as well as taste; when her husband conceived the notion of sending to Goethe a birthday present as a token of gratitude and affection on the part of himself and a few other British disciples of the master at Weimar, it was Mrs Carlyle who designed the seal chosen for the memento. Occasionally she did a little writing on her own account; in her husband's Life of John Sterling, there is a reference to a piece from her pen, entitled, "Watch and Canary Bird," and we learn, from one of Dickens's letters to John Forster, dated immediately after

her death, that she was engaged upon a novel, of the philosophico-analytic sort, when that event happened.*

The gratitude felt by Carlyle for the precious gift he had received in such a wife was expressed in many indirect and touching ways. The thought of his mother might have sufficed to make him, what he always was, full of a knightly courtesy to all women; but this was no doubt deepened by his happy experience as a husband, in which he had seen realised the ideal that he sketched with so much of tender grace and beauty in one of his letters written after his helpmate was gone. "I have never doubted the true and noble function of a woman in this world was, is, and forever will be, that of being Wife and Helpmate to a worthy man; and discharging well the duties that devolve on her in consequence, as mother of children and mistress of a Household, duties high, noble, silently important as any that can fall to a human creature: duties which, if well discharged, constitute woman, in a soft, beautiful, and almost sacred way, the Queen of the World, and, by her natural faculties, graces, strengths, and weaknesses, are every way indicated as specifically hers. The true destiny of a Woman, therefore, is to wed a man she can love and esteem; and to lead noiselessly, under his protection, with all the wisdom, grace, and heroism that is in her, the life prescribed in consequence." The sentiment so charmingly expressed

* "Those of her school companions who still survive say, that she was the only girl in the Latin class of the burgh school, that she was very clever, and was generally at the head of it. One school companion who still lives, remembers that he and his class fellows were continually reproached by the Rector for letting a lassie beat them.""-Standard Newspaper, Feb. 7, 1881.

+ The letter (of date 9th Feb. 1871) from which this is excerpted

His Views on Female Physicians.

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in this passage found utterance on some other occasions in forms that were quaintly humorous-as, for example,

was addressed to Mr Robert Lawson, a medical student at Edinburgh, in answer to a request that Mr Carlyle would state his opinion on the subject of the admission of female medical students to the classes in the University and the clinical teaching in the Infirmary-a question which had raised a furious controversy, then at its height. "It is with reluctance," replied Carlyle, "that I write anything to you on this subject of Female Emancipation, which is now rising to such a height; and I do it only on the strict condition that whatever I say shall be private, and nothing of it get into the Newspapers. The truth is, the topic for five-and-twenty years past, especially for the last three or four, has been a mere sorrow to me; one of the most afflicting proofs of the miserable anarchy that prevails in human society; and I have avoided thinking of it, except when fairly compelled; what little has become clear to me on it I will now endeavour to tell you." After laying down the principle that woman's true function is that of wifehood, he continues :-"It seems furthermore indubitable that if a woman miss this destiny, or have renounced it, she has every right, before God and man, to take up whatever honest employment she can find open to her in the world; probably there are several or many employments, now exclusively in the hands of men, for which women might be more or less fit;-printing, tailoring, weaving, clerking, etc., etc. That Medicine is intrinsically not unfit for them is proved from the fact that in much more sound and earnest ages than ours, before the Medical Profession rose into being, they were virtually the Physicians and Surgeons as well as Sick-nurses, all that the world had. Their form of intellect, their sympathy, their wonderful acuteness of observation, etc., seem to indicate in them peculiar qualities for dealing with disease; and evidently in certain departments (that of female diseases) they have quite peculiar opportunities of being useful. My answer to your question, then, may be that two things are not doubtful to me in this matter. Ist, That Women, any Woman who deliberately so determines, have a right to study Medicine; and that it might be profitable and serviceable to have facilities, or at least possibilities, offered them for so doing. 2d, That, for obvious reasons, Female Students of Medicine ought to have, if possible, Female Teachers, or else an extremely select kind of men ; and in particular that to haye young women present among young men in Anatomical Classes, Clinical Lectures, or

But,

in that chivalrous defence of what all other biographers had considered the crowning blunder of Dr Johnson's life. Carlyle could see no matter for ridicule in the marriage with the good Widow Porter, even though she was old enough to be the Doctor's mother. Rather in her love and pity for Johnson, and in his love and gratitude, he saw something that was most pathetic and sacred: "Johnson's deathless affection for his Tetty was," he declares, "always venerable and noble." Well might the husband of Jane Welsh regard as sacred that institute of marriage which had worked so well for him!

generally studying Medicine in concert, is an incongruity of the first magnitude, and shocking to think of to every pure and modest mind. This is all I have to say, and I send it to you, under the condition above mentioned, as a Friend for the use of Friends."

IN HIS MOORLAND HOME-THE LIFE AT CRAIGENPUTTOCH -LETTERS TO GOETHE, DE QUINCEY, AND CHRISTOPHER NORTH-PROPOSED BOG SCHOOL" OF PHILOSOPHERS EARLY PILGRIMS-WRITES THE MISCELLANIES -HIS DEMOLITION OF JEFFREY—THE ESSAY ON BURNS.

THERE is a story of Carlyle's boy-days, told us by a friend who spent his youthful years in the same neighbourhood, which may be mythical, but ought to be true, since it certainly answers to all that we know of the character and circumstances of the persons concerned. According to this local tradition, little Thomas had built in a retired nook of his father's farm a kind of hut for himself to study in; but as his father preferred that he should go to work instead of devoting himself exclusively to his "buiks," he sent the Laird (Mr Sharpe of Hoddam),* who happened to be calling, to order the boy to remove his hut off the ground. But the boy rose to the occasion, slammed the door on the Laird's face, and took himself to his literary studies, careless of the consequences. The

* Of the same line to which Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, called by Scott "the Scottish Horace Walpole," belonged, and which is now extinct. Matthew Sharpe of Hoddam was the friend and correspondent of David Hume; perhaps it was he who went to evict " oor Tam" from the Hut. If not, it must have been his successor.