h Lady Ashburton. Nothing can be
more plaintive and sadly beautiful than the letters he wrote to her on
the occasion of her starting off in a fit of spleen, after a stormy
scene, to visit friends at a distance; and what is singular is that we
do not find in those letters, when his soul was moved to its very
depths, any of his peculiarities of style. They are remarkably simple as
well as serious.

Carlyle's friendship for one of the most brilliant and cultivated women
of England, which the breath of scandal never for a moment assailed, was
reasonable and natural, and was a great comfort to him. He persisted in
enjoying it, knowing that his wife disliked it. In this matter, which
was a cloud upon his married life, and saddened the family hearth for
years, Mrs. Carlyle was doubtless exacting and unreasonable; though some
men would have yielded the point for the sake of a faithful wife,--or
even for peace. There are those who think that Carlyle was selfish in
keeping up an intercourse which was hateful to his wife; but the
Ashburtons were the best friends that Carlyle ever had, after he became
famous,--and in their various country seats he enjoyed a hospitality
rarely extended to poor literary men. There he met in enjoyable and
helpful intercourse, when he could not have seen them in his own house,
some of the most distinguished men of the day,--men of rank and
influence as well as those of literary fame.

Until this intimacy with the Ashburtons, no domestic disturbances of
note had taken place in the Carlyle household. The wife may occasionally
have been sad and lonely when her husband was preoccupied with his
studies; but this she ought to have anticipated in marrying a literary
man whose only support was from his pen. Carlyle, too, was an inveterate
smoker, and she detested tobacco, so that he did not spend as much time
in the parlor as he did in his library, where he could smoke to his
heart's content. On the whole, however, their letters show genuine
mutual affection, and as much connubial happiness as is common to most
men and women, with far more of intimate intellectual and spiritual
congeniality. Carlyle, certainly, in all his letters, ever speaks of his
wife with admiration and gratitude. He regarded her as not only the most
talented woman that he had ever known, but as the one without whom he
was miserable. They were the best of comrades and companions from first
to last, when at home together.

For a consider