us described:--

"In this mansion we have had a battle like that of Saint George and
the dragon. Neither are we yet conquerors. Smoke, and wet, and
chaos! May the good Lord keep all Christian men from moving."

If it seemed as bad as this to him, what did it seem to her, delicately
reared and hating the disagreeables of life? Still she did not complain,
but wrote to his mother about this time: "I could wish him a little less
yellow, and a little more peaceable; otherwise he is perfect." And she
soon learned, compelled to it possibly by dire necessity, to take upon
herself all of the practical and prosaic part of the management of their
affairs.

It is painful, although it is also comical, to read of her domestic
battles and defeats. She put infinite wit and talent into her
descriptions of them in her letters to her friends, and the whole world
has read them with smiles and tears; but they were not light troubles to
her, as they would have been to many commonplace women. Probably upon a
majority of wives, even if they have not men of genius for husbands,
fall nearly as great a part of the domestic duties and cares as upon
Mrs. Carlyle; yet few consider this a great hardship, and the sympathies
of the world are not invoked in their behalf. It was not this so much in
Mrs. Carlyle's case as it was the moodiness and fault-finding and
general irascibility of the husband which aggravated everything, and
made little things seem great.

That her spirits were entirely gone and her whole vivacious nature
changed at the end of the Craigenputtoch period is proved by sentences
from her letters, To his mother she writes:--

"It is my husband's worst fault with me that I will not or cannot
speak. Often when he has talked to me for an hour without answer,
he will beg for some sign of life on my part, and all that I can
give him is a little kiss."

And she was a woman who loved to talk, and he the best and most
brilliant talker of his day. Surely, this is pitiful. But after they
went up to London this aspect of things was improved for her, and had it
not been that thereafter she suffered from constant ill-health she would
doubtless have been quite comfortable. But her health was bad, and in
the ignorance of the day the dosing was bad; and when we read of the
medicine which she took as she took her daily bread, we only wonder that
she lived to tell the tale. It speaks a great deal for her Scotch
c