[Illustration:  MRS. CARLYLE.]

Unfortunately, his early privations had caused him to have chronic indigestion.  He thought that the worst punishment he could suggest for Satan would be to compel him to “try to digest for all eternity with my stomach.”  This disorder rendered Carlyle peculiarly irascible and explosive.  His wife’s quick temper sometimes took fire at his querulousness; but her many actions, which spoke much louder than her words, showed how deeply she loved him and how proud she was of his genius.  After their removal to London, she would quietly buy the neighbors’ crowing roosters, which kept him awake, and she prepared food that would best suit his disordered digestion.  She complained of his seeming lack of appreciation.  “You don’t want to be praised for doing your duty,” he said.  “I did, though,” she wrote.

Carlyle’s lack of restraint was most evident in little things.  A German who came from Weimar to see him was unfortunately admitted during a period of stress in writing.  A minute later the German was seen rapidly descending the stairs and leaving the house.  Carlyle immediately hurried to the room where his wife was receiving a visitor, and tragically asked what he had done to cause the Almighty to send a German all the way from Weimar to wrench off the handles of his cupboard doors.  Carlyle did not then appear to realize that the frightened German had mistaken the locked cupboard doors for the exit from the room.  On the other hand, when the great political economist, John Stuart Mill, was responsible for the loss of the borrowed manuscript of the first volume of The French Revolution, Carlyle said to his wife:  “Well, Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up; we must endeavor to hide from him how very serious the business is to us.”  To rewrite this volume cost Carlyle a year’s exhausting labor.

In 1834 Carlyle went to London, where he lived for the rest of his life in Cheyne Row, Chelsea.  The publication of The French Revolution in 1837 made him famous.  Other works of his soon appeared, to add to his fame.  His essays, collected and published in 1839 under the title, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, contained his sympathetic Essay on Burns, which no subsequent writer has surpassed. Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, with Elucidations (1845) permanently raised England’s estimation of that warrior statesman.

Carlyle’s writings, his lectures on such subjects as Heroes and Hero Worship (1841), and his oracular criticism on government and life made him as conspicuous a figure as Dr. Samuel Johnson had been in the previous century.  Carlyle’s last great work, History of Friedrich II., was fortunately finished in 1865, the year before his great misfortune.