,"
or the "Characteristics," it would stand aloof in wonder, in admiration,
almost in awe. But when with his own hand--for he was primarily the
cause of all--he stripped away the privacy which he had guarded so
jealously through life, and through the "Reminiscences" and his wife's
letters, which he prepared for publication, took, as we may say, the
roof off from the house, that all the world might look in, then indeed
he fell from his lofty pedestal and became like one of us. Hero-worship
was no longer possible, but loud abuse and recrimination, or apology and
a cry for charitable construction, became the order of the day. We may
say that he had only himself to thank for it; but who can help
regretting that the man in his old age should so have destroyed the fair
fabric of his own fame? We are not so rich in heroes that we can afford
to lose even the least of the kingly band; and we have felt that we have
sustained an irreparable loss ever since the luckless day when we took
up the first of the intensely interesting but most painful books
relating to this great life.

Let us look a little at this hero's domestic life. What was its
foundation, what its outcome? That there was something wrong at the
foundation seems to be clear. And it was not so much the fact that
neither party married the first choice of the heart,--though it is true
that Jane Welsh loved with all the ardor of her nature Edward Irving
first, and that Carlyle undoubtedly would have married his first love,
the fair and amiable Margaret Gordon, the original of Blumine in "Sartor
Resartus," had not poverty prevented,--but rather was it their
unsuitability to each other. She was a lady, delicately reared, and with
a taste for society and the refinements of life; with a love for
admiration, too, and a wish to shine in her little sphere. He was a
peasant, coarsely bred, and scorning the amenities of life to which he
was unaccustomed,--scorning, too, the chivalric feeling with which
better bred men look upon women and treat their wives. He told her this,
bluntly and brutally, before marriage. They two were to be one, and he
that one. He had the peasant idea of being master, and to the end of his
days held fast to it. They were never, to his mind, equals, but he was
the chief and she the subject. This was what put her down
intellectually. In her youth she had literary tastes and ambitions, and
doubtless much ability; but after marriage we hear no more of that. E