tions, been independent in
their circumstances.

In the year 1826, at the age of thirty-one, Carlyle married Jane Welsh,
the only child of a deceased physician of Haddington, who had some
little property in expectancy from the profits of a farm in the
moorlands of Scotland. She was beautiful, intellectual, and nervously
intense. She had been a pupil of Edward Irving, who had introduced his
friend Carlyle to her. On the whole, it was a fortunate marriage for
Carlyle, although it would have been impossible for him to have or to
give happiness in constant and intimate companionship with any woman. He
was very fond of his wife, but in an undemonstrative sort of
way,--except in his letters to her, which are genuine love-letters,
tender and considerate. As in the case of most superior women, clouds at
times gathered over her, which her husband did not or could not
dissipate. But she was very proud of him, and faithful to him, and
careful of his interest and fame. Nor is there evidence from her
letters, or from the late biography which Froude has written, that she
was, on the whole, unhappy. She was very frank, very sharp with her
tongue, and sometimes did not spare her husband. She had a good deal to
put up with from his irritable temper; but she also was irritable,
nervous, and sickly, although in her loyalty she rarely complained,
while she had many privations to endure,--for Carlyle until he was
nearly fifty was a poor man. During the first two years of their
residence in London they were obliged to live on L100 a year. He was
never in even moderately easy circumstances until after his "Oliver
Cromwell" was published.

After his marriage, Carlyle lived eighteen months near Edinburgh; but
there was no opening for him in the exclusive society there. His merits
were not then recognized as a man of genius in that cultivated capital,
as it pre-eminently was at that time; but he made the acquaintance of
Jeffrey, who acknowledged his merit, admired his wife, and continued to
be as good a friend as that worldly but accomplished man could be to one
so far beneath him in social rank.

The next seven years of Carlyle's life were spent at the Scotch moorland
farm of Craigenputtock, belonging to his wife's mother, which must have
contributed to his support. How any brilliant woman, fond of society as
Mrs. Carlyle was, could have lived contentedly in that dreary solitude,
fifteen miles from any visiting neighbor or town, is a mystery