—­ * The Greville Memoirs, vol. iii. pp. 109, 110. —­

But Lady Ashburton and Mrs. Carlyle did not get on.  As Carlyle’s wife the latter would doubtless have been welcome enough at the Grange.  Being much cleverer than Lady Ashburton, she seemed to dispute a supremacy which had not hitherto been challenged, and the relations of the two women were strained.  Carlyle, on the other hand, had become, so Froude discovered from his wife’s journal, romantically, though quite innocently, attached to Lady Ashburton, and this was one cause of dissension at Cheyne Row.  There was nothing very dreadful in the disclosure.  Carlyle was a much safer acquaintance for the other sex than Robert Burns, whose conversation carried the Duchess of Gordon off her feet, and Mrs. Carlyle’s jealousy was not of the ordinary kind.  Still, the incident was not one of those which lighten a biographer’s responsibility.  Froude has himself explained, in a paper not intended for publication, the light in which it appeared to him.  “Intellectual and spiritual affection being all which he had to give, Mrs. Carlyle naturally looked on these at least as exclusively her own.  She had once been his idol, she was now a household drudge, and the imaginative homage which had been once hers was given to another.”  Froude’s posthumous championship of Mrs. Carlyle may have led him to magnify unduly the importance of domestic disagreements.  But however that may be, the opinions which he formed, and which Carlyle gave him the means of forming, did not increase the attractions of the duty he had undertaken to discharge.

Froude’s own admiration of Carlyle was, it must always be remembered, not in the least diminished by what he read.  He still thought him the greatest man of his age, and believed that his good influence would expand with time.  That there should be spots on the sun did not disturb him, especially as moral perfection was the last thing he had ever attributed to Carlyle.  Meanwhile his position was altered, and altered, as it seems, without his knowledge.  Carlyle’s original executors were his brother, Dr. Carlyle, and John Forster.  Forster died in 1876, and by a codicil dated the 8th of November, 1878, Froude’s name was put in the place of his, Sir James Stephen, the eminent jurist, afterwards a judge of the High Court, being added as a third.  At that time Froude was engaged, to Carlyle’s knowledge, upon the first volume of the Life.  At Carlyle’s request he had given up the editorship of Fraser’s Magazine, which brought him in a comfortable income of four hundred a year, and he had wholly devoted himself to the service of his master.  Carlyle expected that he would soon follow his wife.  He survived her fifteen years, during which he wrote little, for his right hand was partly paralysed, and continually meditated upon the future destiny of the memorials entrusted to Froude.