—­ * McCulloch, the editor of Adam Smith, was meant —­

In 1861, when Froude had been settled in London about a year, he received a visit from the great author himself.  Carlyle did not take to many people, but he took to Froude.  Perhaps he was touched by the younger man’s devotion.  Perhaps he saw that Froude was no ordinary disciple, and would be able to carry on the torch when he relinquished it himself.  At all events he expressed a wish to see him oftener in his walks, in his rides, in his home.  Nothing could be more flattering than such an invitation from such a man.  Froude responded cordially, and became an habitual visitor.  Like all really good talkers, Carlyle was at his best with a single companion, and there could be no more sympathetic companion than Froude.  But there was another object of interest at Cheyne Row, and Froude felt for Mrs. Carlyle sincere compassion.  She was often left to herself while her husband wrote upstairs, and she suffered tortures from neuralgia.  It seemed to Froude that Carlyle, who never had a day’s serious illness, felt more for his own dyspepsia and hypochondria than for his wife’s far graver ailments.  In this he was very likely unjust, for Carlyle was tenderly attached to his “Jeanie,” and would have done anything for her if he had thought of it.  But he was absorbed in Friederich, whose battles he would fight over again with the tired invalid on sofa.  If woman be the name of frailty, the name of vanity is man.  Carlyle was fond of his wife, but he was thinking of himself.  His “Niagaras of scorn and vituperation” were a vent for his own feelings, a sort of moral gout.  The apostle of silence recked not his own rede, nor did he think of the impression which his purely destructive preaching might make upon other people.  He himself found in the eternities and immensities some kind of substitute for the Calvinistic Presbyterianism of his childhood.  To her it was idle rhetoric and verbiage.  He had taken away her dogmatic beliefs, and had nothing to put in their place.  Her “pale, drawn, suffering face” haunted Froude in his dreams.  In 1862 Mrs. Carlyle’s health broke down, and for a year her case seemed desperate.  Her doctor sent her away to St. Leonard’s, and in no long time she apparently recovered.  After that her husband took more care of her, and provided her with a carriage.  But her constitution had been shattered, and she died suddenly as she drove through Hyde Park on the 21st of April, 1866, while Carlyle was at Dumfries, resting after the delivery of his Rectorial Address to the University of Edinburgh.

Carlyle’s bereavement drove him into more complete dependence upon Froude’s sympathy and support.  The lonely old man brooded over his loss, and over his own short-comings.  He shut himself up in the house to read his wife’s diaries and papers.  He found that without meaning it he had often made her miserable.  In her journal for the 21st of June, 1856, he read, “The chief interest of to-day