rare as good poets, and that Jane Carlyle is one of the very best, the general reader might have been simply grateful, as perhaps he was.  But for purposes of scandal the value of the book was the light it threw upon the matrimonial squabbles, actual or imaginary, of two remarkable persons.  Mrs. Carlyle had long been dead, and her relations with her husband were of no importance to any one.  But the trivial mind grasps at trivialities, and will not be satisfied without them.  Thousands who were quite incapable of appreciating the letters as literature could read between the lines, and apply the immortal principle that a warming-pan is a cover for hidden fire.  Unfortunately, Carlyle’s heart-broken ejaculations over his dead wife’s words leant themselves to theories and surmises.  He thought that he had not made enough of her when she was alive, and apparently he wanted the world to know that he thought so.  Yet the bulk of the letters are not those of an unhappy, oppressed, down-trodden woman, nor of a woman unable to take care of herself.  Some few are intensely miserable, almost like the cries of a wounded animal, and these, even in extracts, might well have been omitted.  Mrs. Carlyle would not have written them if she had been herself, and in a collection of more than three hundred they would not have been missed.  Some thought also that there were too many household details.* On the whole, however, these letters, with the others published in the Life, are a rich store-house, and they retain their permanent value, untouched by ephemeral rumour.

—­ * “A good woman,” I remember Lord Bowen saying of Mrs. Carlyle, “with perhaps an excessive passion for insecticide.” —­

I doubt if he bathed before he dressed. 
A brasier? the pagan, he burned perfumes! 
You see, it is proved, what the neighbours guessed: 
His wife and himself had separate rooms.

Carlyle had been dead more than twenty years before the controversies about all that was unimportant in him flickered out and died an unsavoury death.  The vital fact about him and his wife is that they contributed, if not equally, at least in an unparalleled degree, to the common stock of genius.  But for Froude we might never have known that Mrs. Carlyle had genius at all.  Through him we have a series of letters not surpassed by Lady Mary Wortley’s, or by any woman’s except Madame de Sevigne’s.

Then in 1884 Froude completed his task with Carlyle’ s Life in London, a biographical masterpiece if ever there was one.  It is written on the same principle of telling the truth, painting the warts.  But it brings out even more clearely than its predecessor the essential qualities of Carlyle.  In one way this was easier.  The period of fruitless struggle was almost over when Carlyle left Craigenputtock in 1834.  After the appearance of The French Revolution in 1838 he was famous, and every one who read anything read that book.  Southey read it six times.