However this may be, the Carlyles, man and wife, lived an existence that was full of unhappiness and rancor.  Jane Carlyle became an invalid, and sought to allay her nervous sufferings with strong tea and tobacco and morphin.  When a nervous woman takes to morphin, it almost always means that she becomes intensely jealous; and so it was with Jane Carlyle.

A shivering, palpitating, fiercely loyal bit of humanity, she took it into her head that her husband was infatuated with Lady Ashburton, or that Lady Ashburton was infatuated with him.  She took to spying on them, and at times, when her nerves were all a jangle, she would lie back in her armchair and yell with paroxysms of anger.  On the other hand, Carlyle, eager to enjoy the world, sought relief from his household cares, and sometimes stole away after a fashion that was hardly guileless.  He would leave false addresses at his house, and would dine at other places than he had announced.

In 1866 Jane Carlyle suddenly died; and somehow, then, the conscience of Thomas Carlyle became convinced that he had wronged the woman whom he had really loved.  His last fifteen years were spent in wretchedness and despair.  He felt that he had committed the unpardonable sin.  He recalled with anguish every moment of their early life at Craigenputtock—­how she had toiled for him, and waited upon him, and made herself a slave; and how, later, she had given herself up entirely to him, while he had thoughtlessly received the sacrifice, and trampled on it as on a bed of flowers.

Of course, in all this he was intensely morbid, and the diary which he wrote was no more sane and wholesome than the screamings with which his wife had horrified her friends.  But when he had grown to be a very old man, he came to feel that this was all a sort of penance, and that the selfishness of his past must be expiated in the future.  Therefore, he gave his diary to his friend, the historian, Froude, and urged him to publish the letters and memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle.  Mr. Froude, with an eye to the reading world, readily did so, furnishing them with abundant footnotes, which made Carlyle appear to the world as more or less of a monster.

First, there was set forth the almost continual unhappiness of the pair.  In the second place, by hint, by innuendo, and sometimes by explicit statement, there were given reasons to show why Carlyle made his wife unhappy.  Of course, his gnawing dyspepsia, which she strove with all her might to drive away, was one of the first and greatest causes.  But again another cause of discontent was stated in the implication that Carlyle, in his bursts of temper, actually abused his wife.  In one passage there is a hint that certain blue marks upon her arm were bruises, the result of blows.

Most remarkable of all these accusations is that which has to do with the relations of Carlyle and Lady Ashburton.  There is no doubt that Jane Carlyle disliked this brilliant woman, and came to have dark suspicions concerning her.  At first, it was only a sort of social jealousy.  Lady Ashburton was quite as clever a talker as Mrs. Carlyle, and she had a prestige which brought her more admiration.