had a personal interview with Mrs. Alexander Carlyle, in the presence of her husband, and of Mr. Ouvry, who was acting as solicitor for all parties.  On this occasion Mrs. Carlyle said that Froude had promised her the whole profits of the Reminiscences, that her uncle had approved of this arrangement, and that she would not take less.  Thus the first difference between Froude and the Carlyle family related to money.  Mrs. Carlyle did not know that the memoirs of her aunt would be among the reminiscences, and the sum which had promised her was the speculative value of an American edition, which was never in fact realised.

In lieu of this he offered half the English profits, and brought out the Reminiscences, “Jane Welsh Carlyle” being among them.  They were eagerly read, not merely by all lovers of good literature, but by all lovers of gossip, good or bad.  Carlyle’s pen, like Dante’s, “bit into the live man’s flesh for parchment.”  He had a Tacitean power of drawing a portrait with a phrase which haunted the memory.  James Carlyle, the Annandale mason, was as vivid as Jonathan Oldbuck himself.  But it was upon Mrs. Carlyle that public interest fastened.  The delineation of her was most beautiful, and most pathetic.  There were few expressions of actual remorse, and Carlyle was not the first man to feel that the value of a blessing is enhanced by loss.  But there was an undertone of something more than regret, a suspicion or suggestion of penitence, which set people talking.  It is always pleasant to discover that a preacher of righteousness has not been a good example himself, and “poor Mrs. Carlyle” received much posthumous sympathy, as cheap as it was useless.  Whether Froude should have published the memoir is a question which may be discussed till the end of time.  He conceived himself to be under a pledge.  He had given his word to a dead man, who could not release him.  It seems, however, clear that he should have taken the course least injurious to Carlyle’s memory, and in such a very delicate matter he might well have asked advice.  From the purely literary point of view there could be no doubt at all.  Not even Frederick the Great, that storehouse of “jewels five words long,” contains more sparkling gems than these two precious little volumes.  Froude speaks in his preface of having made “requisite omissions.”  A few more omissions might have been made with advantage, especially a brutal passage about Charles Lamb and his sister, which Elia’s countless admirers find it hard to forgive.  Mrs. Procter, widow of Barry Cornwall, the poet, and herself a most remarkable woman, was so much annoyed by the description of her mother, Mrs. Basil Montagu, and her step-father, the editor of Bacon,* that she published some early and rather obsequious letters written to them by Carlyle himself.  But the chief outcry was raised by the revelation of Carlyle’s most intimate feelings about his wife, and about his own behaviour to her.  There was nothing very bad.  He was driven to accuse himself of the crime that, when he was writing Frederick and she lay ill on the sofa, he used to talk to her about the battle of Mollwitz.  Froude was naturally astonished at the effect produced, but then Froude knew Carlyle, and the public did not.