ship true to
her course; and ever proud to see the skipper crowned with all the
glory. Carlyle's debt to his wife is one of the most tragic stories in
the history of letters. 'In the ruined nave of the old Abbey Kirk,'
the sage tells us, 'with the skies looking down on her, there sleeps my
little Jeannie, and the light of her face will never shine on me more.
I say deliberately her part in the stern battle (and except myself none
knows how stern) was brighter and braver than my own.'

And in Stevenson's case the obligation is even more marked. 'What a
debt he owed to women!' one of his biographers exclaims. 'In his puny,
ailing infancy, his mother and his nurse Cummie had soothed and tended
him; in his troubled hour of youth he had found an inspirer, consoler,
and guide in Mrs. Sitwell to teach him belief in himself; in his moment
of failure, and struggle with poverty and death itself, he had married
a wife capable of being his comrade, his critic, and his nurse.' We
owe all the best part of Stevenson's work to the presence by his side
of a wife who possessed, as Sir Sidney Colvin testifies, 'a character
as strong, interesting, and romantic as his own. She was the
inseparable sharer of all his thoughts; the staunch companion of all
his adventures; the most open-hearted of friends to all who loved him;
the most shrewd and stimulating critic of his work; and in sickness,
despite her own precarious health, the most devoted and most efficient
of nurses.'

Dorothy Wordsworth, Jane Carlyle, and Fanny Stevenson are
representatives of a great host of brave and brilliant women without
whom our literature would have been poor indeed. Some day we shall
open a Pantheon in which we shall place splendid monuments to our first
mates. At present we fill our Westminster Abbeys with the statues of
skippers. But, depend upon it, injustice cannot last for ever. Some
day the world will ask, not only, 'Was this man great?' but also, 'Who
made this man so great?' And when this old world of ours takes it into
its head to ask such questions, the day of the first mate will at last
have dawned.

One other word ought to be said, although it seems a cruel kindness to
say it. It is this. There are people who succeed brilliantly as first
mates, but who fail ignominiously as skippers. Aaron is, of course,
the classical example. As long as Moses was skipper, and Aaron first
mate, everything went well. But Moses withdrew for awhile,