expressed in blue marks on my wrists!"* He realised that he had almost driven her to suicide, he the great preacher of duty and self-abnegation.  “For the next few years,” says Froude, “I never walked with him without his recurring to a subject which was never absent from his mind.”  Doubtless his remorse was exaggerated.  His letters, and his wife’s, show that he was a most affectionate husband when nothing had occurred to deprive him of his self-command.  But he had at times been cruelly inconsiderate, and he wished to do penance for his misdeeds.  A practical Christian would have asked God to pardon him, and made amends by active kindness to his surviving fellow-creatures.  Carlyle took another course.  In 1871, five years after his wife’s death, he suddenly brought Froude a large bundle of papers, containing a memoir of Mrs. Carlyle by himself, a number of her letters, and some other biographical fragments.  Froude was to read them, to keep them, and to publish them or not, as he pleased, after Carlyle was dead.+

—­ * This passage was suppressed by Froude when he published Mrs. Carlyle’s Diary and Letters.  But he kept the copy made by Carlyle’s niece under his superintendence, which still exists; and as an incorrect version has appeared since his death, I give the correct one now. + “I long much, with a tremulous, deep, and almost painful feeling, about that other Manuscript which you were kind enough to read at the very first.  Be prepared to tell me, with all your candour, the pros and contras there.”—­Carlyle to Froude, 26th of September, 1871.  From The Hill, Dumfries. —­

Well would it have been for Froude’s peace of mind if he had handed the parcel back again, and refused to look at it.  The tree of the knowledge of good and evil scarcely yielded more fatal fruit.  He read the papers, however, and “for the first time realised what a tragedy the life in Cheyne Row had been.”  That he exaggerated the purport of what he read is likely enough.  When there are quarrels between husband and wife, a man naturally inclines to take the woman’s side.  Froude, as he says himself, was haunted by Mrs. Carlyle’s look of suffering, physical rather than mental, and it would necessarily colour his judgment of the facts.  At all events his conclusion was that Carlyle had just ground for remorse, and that in collecting the letters he had partially expiated his offence.  When Mrs. Carlyle’s Correspondence came to be published it was seen that there were two sides to the question, and that, if he had leisure to think of what he was doing, Carlyle could be the most considerate of husbands.  Irritable and selfish he might be.  Deliberately cruel he never was.  Froude, with his accustomed frankness, told Carlyle at once what he thought.  Mrs. Carlyle’s letters should be published, not alone, but with the memoir composed by himself.