mering, scolding, and the jingle of the piano. A grave without rest, death without the privileges of the departed, who have no longer any need to spend money, or to write letters, or to compose books. What a melancholy situation!”

particular." He thus delighted to take some butt, and aim the shafts of his ridicule at him. "A few months before his death," Stigand tells us, "there occurred one of the strangest and most touching incidents of his life. To the solitude of His niece thus describes a visit she his bedside there came a fair and brightpaid him in 1854: "He received me with spirited young lady, who from earliest the greatest delight. 'Come close to me, youth had been an enthusiast for Heine's my child,' he said, 'that I may see you songs. What her name was," the biogbetter,' and he raised his eyelids with his rapher goes on to say, "we know not. A beautiful white hand to observe more mystery enshrouded her early life, which plainly if I were like my mother. I was Heine himself was not able to dissipate." made to sit down by his pillow, and the His niece, although not revealing her first thing he asked me about was his sis- name, tells us a few more details of her ter. 'Lottchen! my Lottchen!' he ex- history than we have yet been able to disclaimed, 'when shall I see her again?' cover. Margot," or "Mouche," as the He incessantly recurred to the same sub-poet used to call her, was a beautiful ject during our conversation. I found creature, twenty-two years of age, refined him very much changed, almost unrecog- and highly educated, writing French, Ger nizable; the tears rushed to my eyes with man, and English with equal facility. sorrow. Fortunately his blindness pre- Heine had advertised in the papers for a vented his seeing my agitation, but, hear- reader, and she presented herself, offering ing the trembling of my voice, he said: her services in that capacity. They were 'Why do you grieve? Have I not had accepted, and she entered on the duties as much happiness as a man can expect? of reader and amanuensis. She inspired I live on the memory of my youth, and I the poet's last songs; and she still keeps can assure you I did not waste my time.' many letters, written to her, begging her The evening before my departure I was to come, or sending some little present sitting beside his bed, and he was going for her acceptance. Princess della Rocca back over his past life, his joys and his tells us that her history was a most resorrows. Wearied out at last, he lay per-markable one. She was German by birth, fectly silent and motionless; the room was half lit by the shaded light of one lamp, and the only sound audible was the monotonous ticking of the clock. I did not dare move for fear of disturbing him; suddenly he endeavored to change his position, but being incapable of involuntary movement could not do so, and was seized with violent spasms, and moaned and shrieked in the most piteous way. I thought his last hour was come, and, weeping bitterly, implored God to put an end to his torment. Paolina, his faithful nurse, endeavored to calm me, telling me she had often seen him thus before; but I, completely overcome, had to leave the room. I only saw him once more, and then it was farewell forever."

but had married, at eighteen, a Frenchman. After a few years of matrimony, her husband wished to regain his freedom, and pretending to have business in London, begged his wife to accompany him thither. As soon as they arrived he declared she was mad, and he had her shut up in a madhouse. To such a degree did terror and mental suffering act on the nervous organization of this delicate creature, that she became seriously ill, and some time elapsed ere she could either think or speak coherently. When she recovered she was able to prove the falseness of her husband's declaration, and was removed to a hospital, where, under the care of an intelligent doctor, she became convalescent. Shortly afterTo the last his keen wit remained ready wards, aided by her friends, she sued for and sarcastic as ever. "If you calm my and obtained a divorce; only returning miserable sciatic nerve," he said to Schle- again to Paris to nurse her mother in her singer, "all the others begin a torment of last moments. The princess relates a hell. I am sure my nerves would obtain story of Béranger, wanting to see this a gold medal at the Great Exhibition for "Mouche" of whom he had heard so over-sensitiveness." "Pouvez-vous sif- much, coming to call on Heine, and, in fler? asked his doctor. "Non; pas the half-darkness of the room, mistaking même les comédies de Scribe." "Is her mother, who was then a lady adthere anything you would particularly vanced in years, for the lovely "lotus fancy?" inquired one of his attendants. flower." He discovered his error after a "No, I am like Scribe, I have no taste in time; but the whole affair delighted

ment.

Heine, who lay listening to Béranger's | renowned German. "Henri Eine," said gallant speeches with the utmost amuse- one, looking at the stone; "no, I do not know who he was." With the exception of the weather-worn and leafless remains of the laurel crown which the German venerators of Heine placed upon the tomb on All Souls' Day, 1879, no symbol of respect or love now marks the grave of this brilliant though erratic genius. We are astounded, considering the enthusiastic love of Germans for their Heine, to find his grave thus neglected.

"The tears which will flow for us will not be so warm as those we shed for our loved ones. The new generation know neither what we wanted nor what we have suffered, and how could they know us? The deepest secrets of our hearts we have never spoken out; we descend into the grave with closed lips."

NINA H. KENNARD.

One of the poet's friends, anxious for his conversion, asked him shortly before his death if he were at peace with God. "Set your mind at rest," answered Heine, "le bon Dieu me pardonnera, c'est son métier." "Do you believe in the existence of a supreme being?" the same person asked on another occasion. "If a supreme being, perfectly omnipotent and all-seeing, exists, do you think he will care whether a wretched little mouse, living in the Rue d'Amsterdam, believes in him or not?" "What good does it do me," he laments, "that at banquets my health is drunk out of golden goblets, and in the best of wine, if I myself, separated from all the joys of the world, can only wet my lips with an insipid tisane? What good does it do me that enthusiastic youths and damsels crown my marble bust with laurels, when on my real head a blister is being clapped behind my ears by an old sick-nurse? What lists it to me if all the roses of Shiraz glow and smell for me so sweetly? Alas! Shiraz is two thousand THE love-makings of men of genius, miles from the Rue d'Amsterdam, where before and after marriage, with or without I get nothing to smell, in the melancholy it, are tempting subjects of inquiry, and solitude of my sick-room, but the perfume of warm napkins." "It is time," he sings, "to bury the old, unhappy ditties, and all the sad dreams, so fetch me a coffin vast. It must be vaster than Heidelberg's vat, and longer than the bridge over the Main. And then fetch a dozen giants - they must be stronger than St. Christopher, in the cathedral of Cologne, on the Rhine. They must take up that coffin and sink it deep in the ocean wave, for such a mighty coffin must be laid in a mighty grave. Would you know why my coffin must be so vast and stout and wide? I shall lay all my sorrows and love and anguish there, side by side."

Heine was buried in the cemetery at Montmartre, and his niece tells us that his widow would not allow the family to put up a suitable monument over the remains of the poet. Nothing, therefore, marks his resting place but a marble slab, on which is inscribed his name, "Heinrich Heine," without even the words, "Rest in peace.' We saw the other day in the columns of a newspaper, that a Swiss admirer of Heine took a pilgrimage to his grave on the late anniversary of his death. He found it in the most forlorn and neglected state; he was curious to learn if any of the French visitors to the cemetery knew anything of the world

From The Gentleman's Magazine. CARLYLE AND HIS WIFE.

all the information of this sort we can get, if it sometimes does no more than amuse an idle curiosity, may be, and generally is, as instructive as it is entertaining. With fuller information than we have about the private relationships be tween Socrates and Xanthippe, we should understand better than we do the public work of the great father of Greek philosophy. A flood of light, which would otherwise be wanting, is thrown on the mystic scholasticism of Abelard by the extant records of his dealings with Eloïse. If as much were known, from their points of view, of Beatrice and Laura as we know of Dante's and Petrarch's written praises of them, perhaps our estimate of the men's manhood would be somewhat different from what it is, though our admiration for the poets' poetry might remain the same; and for an authentic biography of Anne Hathaway, all but the more pedantic Shakespearians would be willing to sur render two or three of his less memorable plays. Coming down to our own century, it will suffice to hint at the scientific value of the little that has been disclosed respecting Clotilde de Vaux in elucidating the position of Auguste Comte as a great teacher. Everywhere and always a man's worth must be gauged to some ex-. tent, though only in part, by his domes-

ticity. Some of the best work done in than a third of the "Reminiscences the world has, of course, been done by which Mr. Froude somewhat indiscreetly men of small private worth. A man of gave to the world last year. Whatever genius is not to be judged by ordinary indiscretion there was in the publication standards. Genius is eccentricity. The of those volumes, it was important, Carduties it imposes on its possessors may lyle's own crabbed and incomplete recolmake it their duty to neglect duties im-lections of his early life and some of its posed by custom, or something more au- connections having been put on record, thoritative than custom, on common folk; and their highest virtue may consist of, or not be inharmonious with, disregard of conventional virtues. But for all that, men are men before they are anything else, whether poets or philosophers, warriors or statesmen; and among the fundamental conditions of human life the instincts that lead to love-making and marrying are hardly less fundamental than those that oblige statesmen, warriors, philosophers, poets, and all such prodigies, to eat and sleep pretty much as ploughboys do. If the common laws of human life are varied from, there must be reason for the variation, and reverting to men of genius - it is useful to know, not merely what variation there is, if there is any notable variation at all, but yet more how it affects their standing and influence in the world.

that they should be supplemented by a fuller, and therefore truer, record; and, if Mr. Froude erred in printing the "Reminiscences," he has made as much atonement as was in his power by printing the letters and extracts from journals which constitute the bulk of the "Thomas Carlyle." The later volumes convey, on the whole, a much kindlier and more accurate impression of Carlyle's character than the otherwise uninformed reader could have derived from the earlier volumes. Therefore Mr. Froude has acted rightly in publishing them, and in doing so he has made one of the most interesting and instructive contributions to biographical literature that has appeared for many a year.

With the general contents of this book, however, its revelations of Carlyle's hometraining and self-education, his beautiful For such a study, in the case of one of relations with his parents and brothers, the most remarkable men of genius living his struggles and his victories, and all else in our own century, very precise and wel- external and internal that conduced to come material is afforded by the volumes make him the great, though in some reentitled, "Thomas Carlyle, a History of spects crooked, man of genius that he the First Forty Years of his Life," which was, I do not here concern myself. Nor Mr. J. A. Froude has lately issued. Mr. should I propose to step between the Froude was quite justified in issuing these book and the reader of its most attractive volumes, though he admits that in doing and really most important passages, those so he has not strictly adhered to the for- in which are very minutely detailed the mal instructions given to him as Carlyle's intimate friendship and rare affection that literary executor. Both in his will and existed between Carlyle and his wife, bein his journal, Carlyle expressly desired fore and after their marriage, were it not that no biography of him should be writ- that Mr. Froude appears to have strangely ten, and in order to supersede such a misunderstood the significance of the work, he himself, after his wife's death, story he had to tell, and that a large seccollected and annotated her correspond- tion of the public has been grievously ence with a view to its being published in misled, as it seems to me, by the asserdue time. "He intended it," says Mr. tions and insinuations with which he has Froude, "as a monument to a character freely interspersed the documents it has of extreme beauty, while it would tell the been his good fortune to handle. If my public as much about himself as it could reading of those documents is correct reasonably expect to learn." This col- and it is a reading which I believe to be lection, however, which Mr. Froude prom- amply supported by them, as well as by ises to issue soon, begins only with the other evidence- - Mr. Froude, in chival date of Carlyle's settlement in London, rous bias towards the heroine whom, perand will throw little or no light on the haps rightly, he places on a yet higher history of their married life during its pedestal than the hero to whom he is loyal first eight years, or of their relations with in most other respects, has wronged the one another during the five previous memory of both. More than that: if Mr. years; and it was partly to supply this Froude is mistaken, his mistake touches deficiency that Carlyle himself wrote the a broader question than that of Carlyle's fragmentary memoir that occupies more | dealings with his wife. The world is too

If

apt to think that men of genius cannot be to others, as well as to himself. This good husbands, and that the wives of men was the condition on which he married. of genius must inevitably be martyrs. If his wife understood that condition bethe world would be honest enough, not fore she married him, and recognized it only to recognize the fact that most wives as binding on herself no less than on him are martyrs, whether their husbands are all through their married years, the blame, geniuses or not, but also to save wives or the responsibility without blame, was from much risk of martyrdom by allowing hers as much as his. That Mrs. Carlyle women to be in all respects as free as endured many hardships through marrymen are to make the best they can of their ing the man she liked before marriage, lives, and by putting no artificial restraint and loved afterwards, is true enough; but on the intellectual and social indepen- if she preferred her life with him to any dence of either sex which is not imposed life she could have had without him, the by nature, men of genius, as well as men world has no right to accuse him of deof no genius, would be less likely than fects that she did not recognize, or, recogthey now are to have unhappy wives, or nizing them, accepted as portions of a to be themselves made either happy or whole with which, as a whole, she was unhappy by their wives' unhappiness. and had good reason to be content. That But until that is done, allegations against it was so, seems to be clearly shown even men of genius, as such, are out of place. by the volumes in which Mr. Froude In Carlyle's case, at any rate, any such makes his charges against her husband. allegations are inappropriate.

On his wife's tombstone Carlyle recorded that "for forty years she was the true and loving helpmate of her husband, and by act and word unweariedly for warded him as no one else could in all of worthy that he did or attempted." Mr. Froude says it was remorse which prompted that and the other reverent sentences in the epitaph. "There broke on him in his late years," we are told, "like a flashing of lightning from heaven, the terrible revelation that he had sacrificed his wife's health and happiness in his absorption in his work; that he had been oblivious of his most obvious obligations, and had been negligent, inconsiderate, and selfish." That Carlyle did thus reproach himself, in and out of Mr. Froude's hearing, is certain, and that, like every other husband in the world, thinking over his dead wife, he had more or less reason for so doing, may be taken for granted. What loyal widower, or widow either, recalling the experiences of a long married life, would not wish that many things had been different, and different through his or her having shown to the lost one more care, consideration, and unselfishness? But such reproaches are not to be taken as certificates of facts. In so far as they prove anything, they generally prove rather that the mourner had avoided, than that he had exhibited, the faults for which he blames himself.

Carlyle, however, was, in a way, a selfish man all through his life. He started with a "mission." His pride and his humility joined in urging him to pursue certain aims, which he deemed to be of paramount importance, at any inconvenience

He

Carlyle was in his twenty-sixth year when he first met the lady who was, five years afterwards, to become his wife. He had struggled bravely up from the rough peasant life into which he had been born, and, carrying with him a lively affection for his early surroundings, and tender devotion to his plebeian but noble-hearted parents, had gone through much, though by no means all, of the hard drudgery that was preliminary to his entrance on the career of eminence as a writer and teacher for which he was destined. had had a smali love-affair when, plodding as a schoolmaster in Kirkcaldy, and being then twenty-one or twenty-two years old, he "made some acquaintance," as he said in his " Reminiscences," which "might easily have been more, had she and her aunt, and our economics and other circumstances liked," with the pretty and sprightly Margaret Gordon, who was the original of Blumine in "Sartor Resartus." "She was of the fair-complexioned, softly elegant, softly grave, witty, and comely type, and had a good deal of gracefulness, intelligence, and other talent. who had only known her for a few months, and who within a twelve or fifteen months saw the last of her, she continued, for perhaps three years, a figure hanging more or less in my fancy, on the usual romantic, or latterly quite elegiac and silent terms." A more memorable friendship than the one thus quaintly summed up, however, was with Edward Irving, the great preacher and founder of the religious sect that bears his name, who was then also a struggling schoolmaster, five years older than Carlyle, and in frequent and affectionate companionship with him

To me,

at Kirkcaldy and elsewhere, as well as off in a plunge of tears an epitome of in Edinburgh where they were fellow- most of one's heroic sacrifices,' it strikes students. Irving had been betrothed in me, magnanimously resolved on, ostentahis youth to the young lady whom he af- tiously gone about, repented of at the last terwards, on her refusing to release him, moment, and bewailed with an outcry." unwillingly married; but, like other men A woman from first to last, and always a and ministers, he was given to flirting, tender-hearted woman, there was a heroic and Margaret Gordon was one of his spirit in her which she attributed in part flames. Another, and a more scorching to her Latin studies. These, she said, one, was Jane Baillie Welsh, and, as fate tended "to change her religion, and make had it, Carlyle, after inheriting from Irv her into a sort of pagan." "It was not ing the reversion of Margaret Gordon's religion alone that these studies influfavor, succeeded also to a much more im-enced, but my whole being was imbued portant inheritance, the honest and devoted love of Jane Baillie Welsh.

That was a treasure worth acquiring, even at second hand. Everything that is recorded about this lady's early life is as charming as all the sequel is pathetic and beautiful. Miss Geraldine Jewsbury set down some pretty stories about her, and Carlyle corrected them and added many others in the "Reminiscences." Her father, Dr. Welsh, of Haddington, was a physician of great local repute, who died, when the daughter who worshipped him as she never worshipped any other man was about seventeen years old, and both before and after his death she experienced no lack of the simple comforts of this life. A bright little girl who danced like a fairy, yet learnt Latin and did other unusual things in her efforts "to be a boy," wayward, as we are told, with all but her father, yet as graceful in her bearing as she was masculine in her intellectual tendencies, she showed, while in her teens, that she was fit to take and to adorn any station in life that came in her way. In a characteristic passage of her diary, which Mr. Froude prints, she tells how, having been advised when she began to read Virgil that she was too old to go on playing with a doll, she prepared gorgeous holocaust, resolving that the doll, if it was to be made an end of, should perish as Dido perished, “with her dresses, which were many and sumptuous, her four-post bed, a faggot or two of cedar allumettes, a few sticks of cinnamon, a few cloves, and a nutmeg! I, non ignara futuri, constructed her funeral pyre sub auras, of course;" and everything else was done in classic style. "How ever, in the moment of seeing my poor doll blaze up-for, being stuffed with bran, she took fire and was all over in no time in that supreme moment my affection for her blazed up also. I shrieked, and would have saved her but could not, and went on shrieking till everybody within hearing flew to me and bore me

with them. Would I prevent myself from doing a selfish or cowardly thing, I didn't say to myself, 'You mustn't, or if you do you will go to hell hereafter;' nor yet, 'If you do you will be whipt here; but I said to myself simply and grandly, A Roman would not have done it,' and that sufficed under ordinary temptations."

On the position of Carlyle's wife much light is thrown by such illustrations as those of her girlish state of mind. It was Edward Irving, then the Haddington schoolmaster, who taught her Latin, and mathematics as well; and his influence on her was great during many years, and long after he had ceased to reside in Haddington. When or how the relations of teacher and pupil were exchanged for those of lovers we are not told; but they were lovers, on a footing that is happily not very common, during several years. Irving, as has been already mentioned, was betrothed to another young lady, a Miss Isabella Martin; but the question of marriage was deferred till he was in a position to keep a wife, and meanwhile he evidently felt himself free to love where he liked. Let Mr. Froude, who knows more than his readers do, describe the situation: "Irving, who was a frequent visitor at Haddington, discovered, when he looked into his heart, that his real love was for his old pupil, and the feeling on her part was the word is her own-'passionately 'returned. The mischief was done before they became aware of their danger. Irving's situation being explained, Miss Welsh refused to listen to any language but that of friendship from him until Miss Martin had set him free. Irving, too, was equally highprincipled, and was resolved to keep his word. But there was an unexpressed hope on both sides that he would not be held to it, and on these dangerous terms Irving continued to visit at Haddington when he could be spared from his duties."

66

High-principled "seems hardly the right word to apply to a man who, whether from