all her literary work was thoroughly well done, and her edition of her husband’s Province of Jurisprudence deserves the very highest praise.  Two people more unlike than herself and her husband it would have been difficult to find.  He was habitually grave and despondent; she was brilliantly handsome, fond of society, in which she shone, and ’with an almost superabundance of energy and animal spirits,’ Mrs. Ross tells us.  She married him because she thought him perfect, but he never produced the work of which he was worthy, and of which she knew him to be worthy.  Her estimate of him in the preface to the Jurisprudence is wonderfully striking and simple.  ’He was never sanguine.  He was intolerant of any imperfection.  He was always under the control of severe love of truth.  He lived and died a poor man.’  She was terribly disappointed in him, but she loved him.  Some years after his death, she wrote to M. Guizot: 

In the intervals of my study of his works I read his letters to me—­forty-five years of love-letters, the last as tender and passionate as the first.  And how full of noble sentiments!  The midday of our lives was clouded and stormy, full of cares and disappointments; but the sunset was bright and serene—­as bright as the morning, and more serene.  Now it is night with me, and must remain so till the dawn of another day.  I am always alone—­that is, I live with him.

The most interesting letters in the book are certainly those to M. Guizot, with whom she maintained the closest intellectual friendship; but there is hardly one of them that does not contain something clever, or thoughtful, or witty, while those addressed to her, in turn, are very interesting.  Carlyle writes her letters full of lamentations, the wail of a Titan in pain, superbly exaggerated for literary effect.

Literature, one’s sole craft and staff of life, lies broken in abeyance; what room for music amid the braying of innumerable jackasses, the howling of innumerable hyaenas whetting the tooth to eat them up?  Alas for it! it is a sick disjointed time; neither shall we ever mend it; at best let us hope to mend ourselves.  I declare I sometimes think of throwing down the Pen altogether as a worthless weapon; and leading out a colony of these poor starving Drudges to the waste places of their old Mother Earth, when for sweat of their brow bread will rise for them; it were perhaps the worthiest service that at this moment could be rendered our old world to throw open for it the doors of the New.  Thither must they come at last, ’bursts of eloquence’ will do nothing; men are starving and will try many things before they die.  But poor I, ach Gott!  I am no Hengist or Alaric; only a writer of Articles in bad prose; stick to thy last, O Tutor; the Pen is not worthless, it is omnipotent to those who have Faith.

Henri Beyle (Stendhal), the great, I am often tempted