ruthful, and her courage as unswerving. She was a wife
in the noblest sense of that sacred name. She had a gift of literary
expression as unique as his; as tender a sympathy with human sorrow and
need; as clear an eye for all conventional hypocrisies and folly; as
vivid powers of description and illustration; and also, it must be
confessed, when the spirit of mockery was strong upon her, as keen an
edge to her flashing wit and humour, and as scornful a disregard of the
conventional proprieties. But she was no literary hermaphrodite. She
never intellectually strode forth before the world upon masculine
stilts; nor, in private life, did she frowardly push to the front, in
the vanity of showing she was as clever and considerable as her
husband. She longed, with a true woman's longing heart, to be
appreciated by him, and by those she loved; and, for her, all extraneous
applause might whistle with the wind. But if her husband was a king in
literature, so might she have been a queen. Her influence with him for
good cannot be questioned by any one having eyes to discern. And if she
sacrificed her own vanity for personal distinction, in order to make his
work possible for him, who shall say she did not choose the nobler and
better part?'[36]

On the other hand, Carlyle was too exacting, and when domestic
differences arose he abstained from paying those little attentions which
a delicate and sensitive woman might naturally expect from a husband who
was so lavish of terms of endearment in the letters he wrote to her when
away from her side. 'Even with that mother whom he so dearly loved,'
observes Mrs Ireland, 'the intercourse was mainly composed of a silent
sitting by the fireside of an evening in the old "houseplace," with a
tranquillising pipe of tobacco, or of his returning from his long
rambles to a simple meal, partaken of in comparative silence; and now
and then, at meeting or parting, some pious and earnest words from the
good soul to her son.'[37] And it never occurred to Carlyle to act
differently with his wife, who was pining for his society. In addition
to all that, we have Froude's brief but accurate diagnosis of Carlyle's
character. 'If,' he wrote, 'matters went well with himself, it never
occurred to him that they could be going ill with any one else; and, on
the other hand, if he was uncomfortable, he required everybody to be
uncomfortable along with him.'

There was a strong element of selfishness in that phase