3 good or from bad motives, does not choose | wrote. "I could like to see her sur Out of sympathy with Edward Irving, Jane Welsh did, fortunately for her, in time escape; and her sympathy with Thomas Carlyle grew. When, after a few months' acquaintance, Carlyle began to make love to her, she forbade him to continue in that strain; but she accepted him as a staunch, close friend, and their friendship continued and increased. Her heart had been given long ago to Irving, and even after his marriage she seems to have been little inclined or able to feel for any one else such strong affection as she had wasted on him. Many years afterwards, indeed, when her old teacher's head had been turned by his success as a popular preacher and he had given himself up to delusions and vanities, she had a lingering regret, on his account if not on hers, that she had not been near to him to keep him from falling. "There would have been no tongues," she once said, "if Irving had married me!" Irving was so far generous, however, that he allowed Carlyle to share in the friendship of the bright little lady whom he would have liked to marry. The two friends were living in Edinburgh in the summer of 1821, and one day they walked down to Haddington on a visit to Miss Welsh and her widowed mother. They stayed in the neighborhood for a few days, and each evening Carlyle went to the house. "The beautiful, bright, and earnest young lady," he wrote, was intent on literature as the highest aim in life, and felt imprisoned in the dull element which yielded her no commerce in that kind, and would not even yield her books to read. I obtained permission to send at least books from Edinburgh. Book parcels naturally included bits of writing to and from, and thus an acquaintance and correspondence was begun, which had hardly any interruption and no break at all while life lasted. She was often in Edinburgh with her mother, and I had leave to call on these Meanwhile, wishing to marry no one but occasions, which I zealously enough, if Irving, she had, during the two or three not too zealously sometimes, in my awk-years following her acquaintance with ward way, took advantage of. I was not her declared lover, nor could she admit me as such in my waste and uncertain posture of affairs and prospects; but we were becoming thoroughly acquainted with each other, and her tacit, hidden, but to me visible, friendship for me was the happy island in my otherwise dreary, vacant, and forlorn existence in those years." That concise statement is wonderfully explicit. Carlyle, who did not then know that there was anything more than ordinary friendship on Irving's part, was soon installed as Miss Welsh's trusted friend and literary counsellor, and Irving's only objection to this arrangement was that Carlyle's lessons in German poetry and philosophy might do no good to a young lady who, in his judgment, was "already unhinged from many of the enjoyments her condition might afford her." "There is too much of that furniture about the elegant drawing-room of Jane Welsh," he Carlyle, the choice of many husbands. Young and beautiful, with winning ways of speech and action that were more charming even than her beauty, an heiress, too, in a small way, she was never in want of admirers in Haddington, Edinburgh, or wherever she might be. The surroundings of her life were merry, and she made such honest use of them as a quick-witted, large-souled young woman has a right to make. She was none the less sprightly and vivacious because her heart was still somewhat wrenched by the unkindness of her first lover, and because she was being slowly fascinated by a second lover, whose brilliant intellect made her forget his uncouth manners. Without accepting him as a lover, it pleased her that Carlyle should find his highest enjoyment in guiding her philosophical studies and in correcting her literary exercises in prose and verse, in confiding to her his ambitions and his sorrows, his schemes for propounding doctrines of overwhelm- This was filial and business-like. In all ing importance to the world, and his her love-making Miss Welsh was thor. afflictions from the "rat gnawing at the pit oughly business-like, though not in any of his stomach" which, long before that unworthy way. She had by degrees time, had begun to tyrannize over him. come, as she said, to love Carlyle truly Carlyle, it must be remembered, was and devotedly; perhaps she had come to still, and for many years to come, a rough find his society indispensable to her; but peasant scholar, who had ruined his health it was not with the romantic first love in studies for which he got small credit of a girl, and she refused to look upon from the public-a student in whom a marriage, early or at any time, as the infew friends saw the promise of great evitable issue of their friendship. She things, and whose yet undeveloped genius understood his temperament better than poured forth eloquent discourse through any one else, a great deal better than he his clumsy Annandale brogue; and Miss himself did. She was as anxious as he was Welsh was perhaps the most appreciative that he should do good work for the world of his friends. Her intercourse with him with his pen, and do it with unflinching was the greatest pleasure of her life, and honesty; that is, that he should never sink she was willing that it should be playful to the level of the hack-writers whom in as well as serious; but it was a long time Edinburgh, and afterwards in London, before she consented to think of becom- both he and she scorned, though with ing his wife. In one letter, written after more pity blent with the scorn than ap they had known one another more than peared in some of his lately printed refertwo years, she expressed so much grati-ences to Hazlitt, De Quincey, and others. tude for his kindness to her, that he ven- She knew too, that, as his own mother tured again to make something like an had said, he was gey ill to live wi'," at offer of marriage. My friend," she the best of times; that he suffered grievwrote back, "I love you. I repeat it, ously from dyspepsia, which rendered him though I find the expression a rash one. irritable and heedless of other people's All the best feelings of my nature are enjoyment when he could get no enjoy. concerned in loving you; but were you ment for himself. She was also well my brother, I should love you the same. aware that her own bringing up and way No. Your friend I will be your truest, of life had been so different from his that most devoted friend while I breathe the she could not expect to be a happy or, breath of life; but your wife, never consequently, a good wife, unless she had never, not though you were as rich as Cro- many comforts which he, as a bachelor, sus, as honored and renowned as you yet would hardly care for. All this she told shall be." Carlyle's answer was as char-him frankly, and she insisted that, before acteristic as that frank statement of Miss she could marry him, he must see his way Welsh's scheme of friendship between to being able to provide a decent home them. "My heart is too old by almost half a score of years, and is made of sterner stuff than to break in junctures of this kind. I have no idea of dying in the Arcadian shepherd's style for the disappointment of hopes which I never seriously entertained, or had no right to entertain seriously." 66 for her and for himself, in London or Edinburgh, or some other place where a decent home could be kept up with a moderate amount of money. The letters in which she expressed these eminently sensible opinions - such of them, at least, as Mr. Froude has printed are model love-letters in their An informal sort of engagement, how-way, and, besides all their other interest, ever, grew out of that interchange of con- are especially valuable for their clear infidences. Though Miss Welsh vowed dication of her own temperament and of that neither the wealth of Croesus nor her the full knowledge she had of the charac friend's honor and renown could tempt ter of her lover. If, as Mr. Froude urges, her to marry him, she let him understand Carlyle was selfish in wishing her to that she would not offer much objection | marry him before he had a comfortable as soon as he was in a position to keep a home to offer her, he at any rate hid nothwife. In anticipation of that, and in or-ing from her, and made no pretence of der that no contingency, chargeable to being better than he was. From London, her, might lessen the income of her moth-whither he had gone to look out for profiter, she assigned to Mrs. Welsh a life able and honest work, and where he had interest in the little fortune she had re- found little but disappointment, he wrote, ceived from her father, and which, since in January, 1825, to propose that they his death, they had spent in common. I should marry and settle on her little prop erty at Craigenputtock, in the hope of there making money by farming as well as by literature. This she refused to do, "frankly and explicitly," to use her own adverbs, giving good reasons against the project, the best being that she did not love him enough to expect happiness with him in such a lonely and forlorn life. "I love you, and I should be the most ungrateful and injudicious of mortals if I did not. But I am not in love with you; that is to say, my love for you is not a passion which overclouds my judgment and absorbs all my regards for myself and others. It is a simple, honest, sincere affection, made up of admiration and sympathy, and better perhaps to found domestic enjoyment on than any other. In short, it is a love which influences, does not make, the destiny of a life. Such temperate sentiments lend no false coloring, no rosy light' to your project. I see it such as it is, with all the arguments for and against it. I see that my consent under existing circumstances would indeed secure to me the only fellowship and support I have found in the world, and perhaps shed some sunshine of joy on your existence, which has hitherto been sullen and cheerless; but, on the other hand, that it would involve you and myself in numberless cares and difficulties, and expose me to petty tribulations which I want fortitude to despise, and which, not despised, would embitter the peace of us both." There was much else to the same effect; and, in a last paragraph: "It would be more agreeable to etiquette, and perhaps also to prudence, that I should adopt no middle course in an affair such as this, that I should not for another instant encourage an affection which I may never reward, and a hope I may never fulfil, but cast your heart away from me at once, since I cannot embrace the resolution which would give me a right to it forever. This I would do assuredly if you were like the generality of lovers, or if it were still in my power to be happy, independent of your affection. But, as it is, neither etiquette nor prudence can obtain this of me. If there is any change to be made in the terms on which we have so long lived with one another, it must be made by you, not by me." Carlyle protested a little, and drew from this honest and clear-headed women a yet more "frank and explicit" statement of her "sentiments about him. "I am not sure that they are proper sentiments for a husband. They are proper for a brother, a father, a guardian spirit; but a husband, it seems to me, should be dearer still. At the same time, from the change which my sentiments towards you have already undergone during the period of our acquaintance, I have little doubt but that in time I shall be perfectly satisfied. with them. One loves you, as Madame de Staël said, in proportion to the ideas and sentiments which are in oneself. According as my mind enlarges and my heart improves, I become capable of comprehending the goodness and greatness which are in you, and my affection for you increases. Not many months ago I would have said it was impossible that I should ever be your wife. At present, I consider this the most probable destiny for me, and in a year or two, perhaps, I shall consider it the only one." The "destiny" was made manifest in less than a year or two, within a very few months. Miss Welsh would probably have married Carlyle in any case, without waiting for him to be rich enough to keep her in comfort; but the marriage was hastened, or at any rate formally decided upon, through her first lover's disloyalty and a well-meaning woman's officiousness. Irving, apparently more proud than ashamed of having trifled with Miss Welsh's affections, had, soon after settling in London, betrayed her secret to Mrs. Basil Montagu, and Mrs. Basil Montagu imagining that the young lady was, if not broken-hearted, still pining for her lost lover, not only addressed impertinent condolences and warnings to her, but also wrote about her to Carlyle, whose acquaintance she had made when he was in London, and whom she supposed to be only an ordinary friend of Miss Welsh's. Carlyle had hitherto heard nothing of the old love-affair, and even now, in his next letter to his Jane, did no more than tell her that Mrs. Basil Montagu was "under some strange delusion" about "her heart being with Irving in London." To his amazement he received for answer a full confession of the facts that had been kept from him, accompanied by self-reproaches far heavier than there was any occasion for. All that Miss Welsh really had reason to regret was, that she had not cared to open a healed wound by telling her lover of an old "passion which was honest on her part, and which had long since given place to pity, if not contempt, for its object. There was little occasion for penitence; but she felt herself disgraced in the eyes of a man who, as in her self-humiliation she acknowledged both to herself and to him more plainly | been sealed by a formal marriage engagethan ever before, now had all her affec- ment, Carlyle more than once offered to tion. She could not accuse him of injus- release Miss Welsh from her bond. tice if he cast her off, she declared; but In a letter, either querulous, or sportnever before had he been so dear to her.|ive, or both, which she wrote to him early Carlyle, however, had no thought of cast-in 1826, she had reminded him of the ing her off. His answer was a tender rival suitors who were then hanging about self-depreciatory love-letter, which led to her-"a certain handsome, stammering a formal engagement of marriage, and to Englishman," a second cousin with "a marriage itself after very little further fine establishment," and "an interesting delay. young widower." "But what am I talkMr. Froude puts on record Mrs. Car- ing about?" she added "as if we were lyle's statement that, "but for the uncon- not already married, married past redempscious action of a comparative stranger, tion. God knows in that case what is to her engagement with Carlyle would prob- become of us. At times I am so disably never have been carried out," but he heartened that I sit down and weep." has apparently failed to see the great im- "Oh, Jane, Jane!" Carlyle wrote back, portance of this episode which he only your half-jesting enumeration of your reports very briefly, and of which there is wooers does anything but make me laugh.” no other record in the life-history of Car- And he went on to say that, if the proslyle and his wife. They had been friends, pect of marriage with him made her weep, and very real lovers after a fashion, for she was free to break it off. "It is reanow more than four years; but they might sonable and right that you should be connever have been more than friends and cerned for your future establishment. lovers had not Mrs. Basil Montagu Look round with calm eyes on the persons brought matters to a crisis. During four you mention, and if there is any one years Carlyle had been hoping to make among them whose wife you had rather Jane Welsh his wife; while she had held be- I do not mean whom you love better back, partly because she was not sure than me, but whose wife, all things conhow strong and deep were her own feel-sidered, you had rather be than mine ings about him, but mainly because she then I call upon you-I, your brother shrank from giving up the comfortable and friend through every fortune surroundings of her maiden life and entering on a new career which, knowing herself and her lover as she did, she more than suspected would have as many pains as pleasures in it. There was nothing blameworthy in her fears and her caution; but, on the other hand, surely Carlyle is not to be blamed for pressing one who had accepted his love during so long a time to share with him the whole battle of life, even under such hard conditions as his genius and its embarrassments, his poverty and his dyspepsia, imposed on him, and would impose on them both after their marriage. The prudence that made her shrink from becoming a poor man's wife may have been as commendable as was the unselfish wisdom that always urged him to prefer poverty, and such independence as would leave him free to give the fullest scope to his peculiar genius, to lucrative but less honorable work, which would have made it easy for him to provide himself and her with a comfortable home. But no woman ever married, or promised to marry, with her eyes more open to the prospect before her; and if either is to be blamed for their marriage, the blame is at least as much hers as his. Even after their long friendship had - to accept that man, and leave me to my destiny. But if, on the contrary, my heart and my hand, with the barren and perplexed destiny which promises to attend them, shall, after all, appear the best that this poor world can offer you, then take me and be content with me, and do not vex yourself with struggling to alter what is unalterable to make a man who is poor and sick suddenly become rich and healthy." After more to the same effect, he added: "I am reconciled to my fate as it stands, or promises to stand ere long. I have pronounced the word 'unpraised' in all its cases and numbers, and find nothing terrific in it, even when it means unmoneyed, and even, by the mass of his Majesty's subjects, neglected and even partially contemned. I thank heaven I have other objects in my eye than either their pudding or their breath... Consider this as a true glimpse into my heart, which it is good you contemplate with the gentleness and tolerance you have often shown me. If you judge it fit, I will take you to my heart as my wedded wife this very week. If you judge it fit, I will this very week forswear yours forever. More I cannot do; but all this, when I compare myself with you, it is my duty to do." แ here be said beyond the remark that Carlyle may perhaps, as Mr. Froude says, have acted unwisely and ungraciously in refusing to live with his mother-in-law as well as with his wife, seeing that Mrs. Welsh's income joined to his would have saved the young and not very domesti cated wife from many discomforts. It is Here are Mr. Froude's sneers at this beautiful letter: "That Carlyle could contemplate with equanimity being unpraised, unmoneyed, and neglected all his life; that he required neither the world's pudding nor its breath, and could be happy without them, was pardonable, and perhaps commendable. That he should expect another person to share this un-impossible at this distance of time, howmoneyed, puddingless, and rather forlorn ever, to decide whether Carlyle's holding condition, was scarcely consistent with of the traditional prejudice against mothsuch lofty principles. Men may sacrifice themselves, if they please, to imagined duties and high ambitions, but they have no right to marry wives and sacrifice them." Those last words express an excellent rule which a good many married and mar. rying men nowadays might very properly take to heart. But what is their force as regards Carlyle and his wife? ers-in-law was not in his case justified. In the first place, as I have attempted to show as fully as space would allow in the foregoing pages, Carlyle did not As it was, they began their married "marry" his wife as most husbands, good course as brightly as was possible, and or bad, marry theirs. Miss Welsh was considering Carlyle's dyspepsia and nervnot a silly girl who rushed into matrimony ousness, and their somewhat straitened in blind devotion to her lover, or in igno- means, eighteen months were passed rance of his temperament and condition. pleasantly enough in their first abode at She was a shrewd woman of five-and- Comley Bank, Edinburgh. "The house twenty, who had long since come safely, is a perfect model," he wrote to his mothif a little wounded, out of her first great er, "furnished with every accommodation love-affair, and had spent nearly five years that heart could desire, and for my wife I in analyzing the character of her second may say in my heart that she is far better lover, and in prudently balancing the ad- than any wife, and loves me with a devotvantages and disadvantages of marrying edness which it is a mystery to me how I him. The very visible exteriors of his have ever deserved. She is gay and haplife-his poverty, his uncouthness, his py as a lark, and looks with such soft irritability of body and mind. were not cheerfulness into my gloomy countenance, more manifest to her than were his inner that new hope passes into me every time qualities, the impulsive nature of his gen- I meet her eye." "On the whole," he jus, and his all-absorbing earnestness to wrote to his brother, "this wife of mine do the work he felt himself, out-of-date surpasses my hopes. She is so tolerant, Puritan as he was, called upon to do. so kind, so cheerful, so devoted to me. Carlyle had never attempted to deceive Oh, that I were worthy of her! Why am her, and it was not possible for him to de- I not happy then? Alas, Jack, I am bilceive her by a tithe as much as he invol-ious. I have to swallow salts and oil; the untarily deceived himself. She knew perfectly well that he was "gey ill to live wi';" and of her own free choice and deliberate purpose she risked all perils in deciding to live wi'" him. In the second place, as a few more paragraphs must suffice to show, Carlyle and his wife being married, he did not "sacrifice" her. Before the marriage took place in October, 1826, there was a good deal more pathetic, and sometimes amusing, correspondence and debate as to when and how it should come about, and what should be done afterwards; but of this nothing need 44 physic leaves me pensive, yet quiet in |